So the CIA has tools to snoop on you via your TV and your Echo is testifying in a murder case and yet people are still buying connected devices with microphones in and why are they doing that the world is on fire surely this is terrible?

You're right that the world is terrible, but this isn't really a contributing factor to it. There's a few reasons why. The first is that there's really not any indication that the CIA and MI5 ever turned this into an actual deployable exploit. The development reports[1] describe a project that still didn't know what would happen to their exploit over firmware updates and a "fake off" mode that left a lit LED which wouldn't be there if the TV were actually off, so there's a potential for failed updates and people noticing that there's something wrong. It's certainly possible that development continued and it was turned into a polished and usable exploit, but it really just comes across as a bunch of nerds wanting to show off a neat demo.

But let's say it did get to the stage of being deployable - there's still not a great deal to worry about. No remote infection mechanism is described, so they'd need to do it locally. If someone is in a position to reflash your TV without you noticing, they're also in a position to, uh, just leave an internet connected microphone of their own. So how would they infect you remotely? TVs don't actually consume a huge amount of untrusted content from arbitrary sources[2], so that's much harder than it sounds and probably not worth it because:

YOU ARE CARRYING AN INTERNET CONNECTED MICROPHONE THAT CONSUMES VAST QUANTITIES OF UNTRUSTED CONTENT FROM ARBITRARY SOURCES

Seriously your phone is like eleven billion times easier to infect than your TV is and you carry it everywhere. If the CIA want to spy on you, they'll do it via your phone. If you're paranoid enough to take the battery out of your phone before certain conversations, don't have those conversations in front of a TV with a microphone in it. But, uh, it's actually worse than that.

These days audio hardware usually consists of a very generic codec containing a bunch of digital analogue converters, some analogue digital converters and a bunch of io pins that can basically be wired up in arbitrary ways. Hardcoding the roles of these pins makes board layout more annoying and some people want more inputs than outputs and some people vice versa, so it's not uncommon for it to be possible to reconfigure an input as an output or vice versa. From software.

Anyone who's ever plugged a microphone into a speaker jack probably knows where I'm going with this. An attacker can "turn off" your TV, reconfigure the internal speaker output as an input and listen to you on your "microphoneless" TV. Have a nice day, and stop telling people that putting glue in their laptop microphone is any use unless you're telling them to disconnect the internal speakers as well.

If you're in a situation where you have to worry about an intelligence agency monitoring you, your TV is the least of your concerns - any device with speakers is just as bad. So what about Alexa? The summary here is, again, it's probably easier and more practical to just break your phone - it's probably near you whenever you're using an Echo anyway, and they also get to record you the rest of the time. The Echo platform is very restricted in terms of where it gets data[3], so it'd be incredibly hard to compromise without Amazon's cooperation. Amazon's not going to give their cooperation unless someone turns up with a warrant, and then we're back to you already being screwed enough that you should have got rid of all your electronics way earlier in this process. There are reasons to be worried about always listening devices, but intelligence agencies monitoring you shouldn't generally be one of them.

tl;dr: The CIA probably isn't listening to you through your TV, and if they are then you're almost certainly going to have a bad time anyway.

[1] Which I have obviously not read
[2] I look forward to the first person demonstrating code execution through malformed MPEG over terrestrial broadcast TV
[3] You'd need a vulnerability in its compressed audio codecs, and you'd need to convince the target to install a skill that played content from your servers

comments

It's time once again for the 7-day Roguelike challenge. This years attempt is entitled "Casket of Deplorables". Further updates will be posted here.

For people who are visually differently-abled, the above reads To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize Voltaire wrote this either in late 16th century or early 17th century and those words were as apt in those times, as it is in these turbulent times as well. Update 05/03 According to @bla these words are attributable to a neo-nazi and apparently a child abuser. While I don t know the context in which it was shared, it describes the environment in which we are perfectly. Please see his comment for a link and better understanding. The below topic requires a bit of maturity, so if you are easily offended, feel free not to read further. While this week-end I was supposed to share about the recent Science Day celebrations that we did last week Would explore it probably next week. This week the attempt is to share thoughts which had been simmering at the back of my mind for more than 2 weeks or more and whose answers are not clear to me. My buttons were pressed when Martin f. Kraft shared about a CoC violation and the steps taken therein. While it is easy to say with 20:20 hind-sight to say that the gentleman acted foolishly, I don t really know the circumstances to pass the judgement so quickly. In reality, while I didn t understand the joke in itself, I have to share some background by way of anecdotes as to why it isn t so easy for me to give a judgement call. a. I don t know the topics chosen by stand-up comedians in other countries, in India, most of the stand-up acts are either about dating or sex or somewhere in-between, which is lovingly given the name Leela (dance of life) in Indian mythology. I have been to several such acts over the years at different events, different occasions and 99.99% of the time I would see them dealing with pedophilia, necrophilia and all sorts of deviants in sexuality and people laughing wildly, but couple of times when the comedian shared the term sex with people, educated, probably more than a few world-travelled middle to higher-middle class people were shocked into silence. I had seen this not in once but 2-3 times in different environments and was left wondering just couple of years back Is sex such a bad word that people get easily shocked ? Then how is it that we have 1.25 billion + people in India. There had to be some people having sex. I don t think that all 1.25 billion people are test-tube babies. b. This actually was what lead to my quandary last year when my sharing of My Experience with Debian which I had carefully prepared for newbies, seeing seasoned debian people, I knew my lame observations wouldn t cut ice with them and hence had to share my actual story which involved a bit of porn. I was in two minds whether or not to say it till my eyes caught a t-shirt on which it was said We make porn or something to that effect. That helped me share my point. c. Which brings me to another point, it seems it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about anything either before apologizing to everyone and not really knowing who will take offence at what and what the repercussions might be. In local sharings, I always start with a blanket apology that if I say something that offends you, please let me know afterwards so I can work on it. As the term goes You can t please everyone and that is what happens. Somebody sooner or later would take offence at something and re-interpret it in ways which I had not thought of. From the little sharings and interactions I have been part of, I find people take offence at the most innocuous things. For instance, one of the easy routes of not offending anyone is to use self-deprecating humour (or so I thought) either of my race, caste, class or even my issues with weight and each of the above would offend somebody. Charlie Chaplin didn t have those problems. If somebody is from my caste, I m portraying the caste in a certain light, a certain slant. If I m talking about weight issues, then anybody who is like me (fat) feels that the world is laughing at them rather than at me or they will be discriminated against. While I find the last point a bit valid, it leaves with me no tools and no humour. I neither have the observational powers or the skills that Kapil Sharma has and have to be me. While I have no clue what to do next, I feel the need to also share why humour is important in any sharing.- a. Break When any speaker uses humour, the idea is to take a break from a serious topic. It helps to break the monotony of the talk especially if the topic is full of jargon talk and new concepts. A small comedic relief brings the attendees attention back to the topic as it tends to wander in a long monotonous talk. b. Bridge Some of the better speakers use one or more humourous anecdote to explain and/or bridge the chasm between two different concepts. Some are able to produce humour on the fly while others like me have to rely on tried and tested methods. There is one another thing as well, humour is seems to be a mixture of social, cultural and political context and its very easy to have it back-fired upon you. For instance, I attempted humour on refugees, probably not the best topic to try humour in the current political climate, and predictably, it didn t go down well. I had to share and explain about Robin Williams slightly dark yet humorous tale in Moscow on the Hudson The film provides comedy and pathos in equal measure. You are left identifying with Vladimir Ivanoff (Robin Williams character) especially in the last scene where he learns of his grand-mother dying and he remembers her and his motherland, Russia and plays a piece on his saxophone as a tribute both to his grand-mother and the motherland. Apparently, in the height of the cold war, if a Russian defected to United States (land of Satan and other such terms used) you couldn t return to Russia. The movie, seen some years back left a deep impact on me. For all the shortcomings and ills that India has, even if I could, would and could I be happy anywhere else ? The answers are not so easy. With most NRI s (Non-Resident Indians) who emigrated for good did it not so much for themselves but for their children. So the children would hopefully have a better upbringing, better facilities, better opportunities than they would have got here. I talked to more than a few NRI s and while most of them give standardized answers, talking awhile and couple of beers or their favourite alcohol later, you come across deeply conflicted human beings whose heart is in India and their job, profession and money interests compel them to be in the country where they are serving. And Indian movies further don t make it easy for the Indian populace when trying to integrate into a new place. Some of the biggest hits of yesteryear s were about having the distinct Indian culture in their new country while the message of most countries is integration. I know of friends who are living in Germany who have to struggle through their German in order to be counted as a citizen, the same I guess is true of other countries as well, not just the language but the customs as well. They also probably struggle with learning more than one language and having an amalgamation of values which somehow they and their children have to make sense of. I was mildly shocked last week to learn that Mishi Choudary had to train people in the U.S. to differentiate between Afghan turban styles of wearing and the Punjabi style of wearing the turban. A simple search on Afghani turban and Punjabi turban reveals that there are a lot of differences between the two cultures. In fact, the way they talk, the way they walk, there are lots that differentiate the two cultures. The second shocking video was of an African-American man racially abusing an Indian-American girl. At first, I didn t believe it till I saw the video on facebook. My point through all that is it seems humour, that clean, simple exercise which brings a smile to you and uplifts the spirit doesn t seem to be as easy as it once was. Comments, suggestions, criticisms all are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Elusive, #Fear, #hind-sight, #Humour, #immigrant, #integration, #Mishi Choudary, #refugee, #Robin Williams, #self-deprecating, #SFLC, #two-minds

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. We have reached the end of Stretch s development cycle, a phase called full freeze. That means packages may only migrate to Testing aka Stretch after approval by the release team. Changes must be minimal and only address important or release critical bugs. This is usually the time when I stop uploading new upstream releases to unstable to avoid any disruptions. Of course there are exceptions but if you are unsure best practice is to use experimental instead. A lot of RC bugs are still open and affect the next release. In February I could close five one and triage two more. Debian Games

• I packaged new upstream releases of Bullet (2.86 and 2.86.1), a 3D physics engine, after I was informed by Debian s OpenMW maintainer (who is also one of the upstream developers) that this would fix a couple of issues for them.
• Debian Bug #848063 ri-li: FTBFS randomly (Impossible d initialiser SDL:Couldn t open X11 display): I usually note bug fixes very briefly but this one deserves some extra information. Apparently ri-li randomly failed to build from source on the bug reporter s build system. The error message indicated that an X11 display could not be opened. For those who wonder why an X11 display is required to build a package from source; ri-li is a game and comes with a small development program, MakeDat, to build the data files from source. The program is only needed at build time but it requires some SDL functions to work properly. During the compilation step MakeDat tries to initialize SDL and it requires an X11 display for doing that. Ri-Li uses the xvfb-run wrapper to create a virtual X server environment and then executes MakeDat. I didn t need to touch the package for more than two years and needless to say ri-li has always worked so far. I agreed that this was probably a regression in one of ri-li s dependencies. I immediately suspected xvfb and the xvfb-run script being the most likely cause for the build failures and after some investigation on the Internet I uploaded a new revision using the -a switch for xvfb-run. Unfortunately that didn t work as expected. On the other hand I noticed that the package built fine on the official buildd network for all release architectures, not to mention on my own system. I decided that severity important would be the appropriate severity level for this issue because the majority of users was unaffected and the claim the package failed to build 99 % of the time was just wrong. So much for the prologue. The bug reporter disagreed with the bug severity and insisted to make #848063 release critical again. Since nobody of the Games Team wanted to do that and there were more people in a similar situation who disagreed with such a move, a thread was started on the debian-devel mailing list. I stayed away from it mainly because I already participated in the same discussions before where I got the impression that concerns were simply ignored. Also other people made a good response and expressed my views, for instance here , here and here. In my opinion Debian is more than just an operating system and not an academic exercise . I really do think that a package which fails to build from source is a bug and should be fixed but not every FTBFS is release critical, that s why we have for example release architectures and ports. We already make distinctions and we don t support every possible hardware configuration. If a package FTBFS on my laptops because 64 MB RAM or a 6 GB hard disk don t cut it anymore I m not going to file RC bugs against the package in question, I ll try with a slightly more powerful machine again. RC bugs are a big hammer and we should be really considerate when we file them because as a consequence, if we can t fix them in time the package will not be part of the next stable release or even removed from Debian. We certainly don t have a shortage of bugs and if there is disagreement we should make case-by-case decisions and not blindly act by the book . Threatening people to escalate bugs to Debian s Technical Committee isn t helpful either. I am not saying that random build failures should be ignored. There are tests which are designed to fail 50 % of the time. Obviously they are not very useful for Debian. But we have also many tests that check for real life situations, which require a specific amount of memory and disk space. I think it is a shame that we have to disable those tests or even the whole test suite if they work locally and on the official buildd network but not in a custom build environment. I fear we don t make Debian better but instead we verschlimmbessern (to improve sth. for the worse) it. Last but not least bug #848063 was never about a single vs. multi-core CPU issue, even the bug reporter agreed with this statement but apparently a lot of people who commented on debian-devel never fully read the bug report or followed closely enough.

Debian Java

• I fixed RC bug #852930 in libxml-security-java.
• I triaged RC bug #852253, kryo-serializers and #855324 in pdfsam. Unfortunately I haven t found a solution for the latter yet but I prepared the initial packaging for the latest release, so maybe we will see a more modern and better version of pdfsam in the post Stretch future.
• I prepared security updates for Tomcat 7 (#854551) and Tomcat8 (#851304) in Jessie.

Debian LTS This was my twelfth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 06. February until 13. February I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged security issues in mp3splt, spice, gnome-keyring, irssi, gtk-vnc, php5, openpyxl, postfixadmin, sleekxmpp, mcabber, psi-plus, vim, mupdf, netpbm-free and libplist.
• DLA-820-1. Issued a security update for viewvc fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-823-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-825-1. Issued a security update for spice fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-823-2. Issued a regression update for tomcat7.
• DLA-834-1. Issued a security update for phpmyadmin fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-835-1. Issued a security update for cakephp fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-840-1. Issued a security update for libplist fixing 2 CVE.

Non-maintainer uploads

• I uploaded four NMUs to fix RC bugs in libphp-phpmailer (#853232), mcabber (#854738), slixmpp (#854740) and spice (#854336) for which I also prepared the security update for Jessie.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

The Internet saw Github's new TOS yesterday and collectively shrugged. That's weird.. I don't have any lawyers, but the way Github's new TOS is written, I feel I'd need to consult with lawyers to understand how it might affect the license of my software if I hosted it on Github. And the license of my software is important to me, because it is the legal framework within which my software lives or dies. If I didn't care about my software, I'd be able to shrug this off, but since I do it seems very important indeed, and not worth taking risks with. If I were looking over the TOS with my lawyers, I'd ask these questions...

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4 License Grant to Us

This seems to be saying that I'm granting an additional license to my software to Github. Is that right or does "license grant" have some other legal meaning? If the Free Software license I've already licensed my software under allows for everything in this "License Grant to Us", would that be sufficient, or would my software still be licenced under two different licences? There are violations of the GPL that can revoke someone's access to software under that license. Suppose that Github took such an action with my software, and their GPL license was revoked. Would they still have a license to my software under this "License Grant to Us" or not? "Us" is actually defined earlier as "GitHub, Inc., as well as our affiliates, directors, subsidiaries, contractors, licensors, officers, agents, and employees". Does this mean that if someone say, does some brief contracting with Github, that they get my software under this license? Would they still have access to it under that license when the contract work was over? What does "affiliates" mean? Might it include other companies? Is it even legal for a TOS to require a license grant? Don't license grants normally involve an intentional action on the licensor's part, like signing a contract or writing a license down? All I did was loaded a webpage in a browser and saw on the page that by loading it, they say I've accepted the TOS. (I then set about removing everything from Github.) Github's old TOS was not structured as a license grant. What reasons might they have for structuring this TOS in such a way? Am I asking too many questions only 4 words into this thing? Or not enough?

Your Content belongs to you, and you are responsible for Content you post even if it does not belong to you. However, we need the legal right to do things like host it, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store and display your Content and make incidental copies as necessary to render the Website and provide the Service.

If this is a software license, the wording seems rather vague compared with other software licenses I've read. How much wiggle room is built into that wording? What are the chances that, if we had a dispute and this came before a judge, that Github's laywers would be able to find a creative reading of this that makes "do things like" include whatever they want? Suppose that my software is javascript code or gets compiled to javascript code. Would this let Github serve up the javascript code for their users to run as part of the process of rendering their website?

That means you're giving us the right to do things like reproduce your content (so we can do things like copy it to our database and make backups); display it (so we can do things like show it to you and other users); modify it (so our server can do things like parse it into a search index); distribute it (so we can do things like share it with other users); and perform it (in case your content is something like music or video).

Suppose that Github modified my software, does not distribute the modified version, but converts it to javascipt code and distributes that to their users to run as part of the process of rendering their website. If my software is AGPL licensed, they would be in violation of that license, but doesn't this additional license allow them to modify and distribute my software in such a way?

This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell your Content or otherwise distribute it outside of our Service.

I see that "Service" is defined as "the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub". Does that mean at the time I accept the TOS, or at any point in the future? If Github tomorrow starts providing say, an App Store service, that necessarily involves distribution of software to others, and they put my software in it, would that be allowed by this or not? If that hypothetical Github App Store doesn't sell apps, but licenses access to them for money, would that be allowed under this license that they want to my software?

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5 License Grant to Other Users Any Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of your Content in repositories they control).

Let's say that company Foo does something with my software that violates its GPL license and the license is revoked. So they no longer are allowed to copy my software under the GPL, but it's there on Github. Does this "License Grant to Other Users" give them a different license under which they can still copy my software? The word "fork" has a particular meaning on Github, which often includes modification of the software in a repository. Does this mean that other users could modify my software, even if its regular license didn't allow them to modify it or had been revoked? How would this use of a platform-specific term "fork" be interpreted in this license if it was being analized in a courtroom?

If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to access your Content through the GitHub Service, and to use, display and perform your Content, and to reproduce your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality. You may grant further rights if you adopt a license.

This paragraph seems entirely innocious. So, what does your keen lawyer mind see in it that I don't? How sure are you about your answers to all this? We're fairly sure we know how well the GPL holds up in court; how well would your interpretation of all this hold up? What questions have I forgotten to ask?

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And finally, the last question I'd be asking my lawyers: What's your bill come to? That much? Is using Github worth that much to me?

These are notes from my research that led to the publication of the password hashers article. This article is more technical than the previous ones and compares the various cryptographic primitives and algorithms used in the various software I have reviewed. The criteria for inclusion on this list is fairly vague: I mostly included a password hasher if it was significantly different from the previous implementations in some way, and I have included all the major ones I could find as well.

The first password hashers Nic Wolff claims to be the first to have written such a program, all the way back in 2003. Back then the hashing algorithm was MD5, although Wolff has now updated the algorithm to use SHA-1 and still maintains his webpage for public use. Another ancient but unrelated implementation, is the Standford University Applied Cryptography's pwdhash software. That implementation was published in 2004 and unfortunately, that implementation was not updated and still uses MD5 as an hashing algorithm, but at least it uses HMAC to generate tokens, which makes the use of rainbow tables impractical. Those implementations are the simplest password hashers: the inputs are simply the site URL and a password. So the algorithms are, basically, for Wolff's:

token = base64(SHA1(password + domain))

And for Standford's PwdHash:

token = base64(HMAC(MD5, password, domain)))

SuperGenPass Another unrelated implementation that is still around is supergenpass is a bookmarklet that was created around 2007, originally using MD5 as well but now supports SHA512 now although still limited to 24 characters like MD5 (which needlessly limits the entropy of the resulting password) and still defaults MD5 with not enough rounds (10, when key derivation recommendations are more generally around 10 000, so that it's slower to bruteforce). Note that Chris Zarate, the supergenpass author, actually credits Nic Wolff as the inspiration for his implementation. Supergenpass is still in active development and is available for the browser (as a bookmarklet) or mobile (as an webpage). Supergenpass allows you to modify the password length, but also add an extra profile secret which adds to the password and generates a personalized identicon presumably to prevent phishing but it also introduces the interesting protection, the profile-specific secret only found later in Password Hasher Plus. So the Supergenpass algorithm looks something like this:

token = base64(SHA512(password + profileSecret + ":" + domain, rounds))

The Wijjo Password Hasher Another popular implementation is the Wijjo Password Hasher, created around 2006. It was probably the first shipped as a browser extension which greatly improved the security of the product as users didn't have to continually download the software on the fly. Wijjo's algorithm also improved on the above algorithms, as it uses HMAC-SHA1 instead of plain SHA-1 or HMAC-MD5, which makes it harder to recover the plaintext. Password Hasher allows you to set different password policies (use digits, punctuation, mixed case, special characters and password length) and saves the site names it uses for future reference. It also happens that the Wijjo Password Hasher, in turn, took its inspiration on different project, hashapass.com, created in 2006 and also based on HMAC-SHA-1. Indeed, hashapass "can easily be generated on almost any modern Unix-like system using the following command line pattern":

echo -n parameter \
  openssl dgst -sha1 -binary -hmac password \
  openssl enc -base64 \
  cut -c 1-8

So the algorithm here is obviously:

token = base64(HMAC(SHA1, password, domain + ":" + counter)))[:8]

... although in the case of Password Hasher, there is a special routine that takes the token and inserts random characters in locations determined by the sum of the values of the characters in the token.

Password Hasher Plus Years later, in 2010, Eric Woodruff ported the Wijjo Password Hasher to Chrome and called it Password Hasher Plus. Like the original Password Hasher, the "plus" version also keeps those settings in the extension and uses HMAC-SHA-1 to generate the password, as it is designed to be backwards-compatible with the Wijjo Password Hasher. Woodruff did add one interesting feature: a profile-specific secret key that gets mixed in to create the security token, like what SuperGenPass does now. Stealing the master password is therefore not enough to generate tokens anymore. This solves one security concern with Password Hasher: an hostile page could watch your keystrokes and steal your master password and use it to derive passwords on other sites. Having a profile-specific secret key, not accessible to the site's Javascript works around that issue, but typing the master password directly in the password field, while convenient, is just a bad idea, period. The final algorithm looks something like:

token = base64(HMAC(SHA1, password, base64(HMAC(SHA1, profileSecret, domain + ":" + counter))))

Honestly, that seems rather strange, but it's what I read from the source code, which is available only after decompressing the extension nowadays. I would have expected the simplest version:

token = base64(HMAC(SHA1, HMAC(SHA1, profileSecret, password), domain + ":" + counter))

The idea here would be "hide" the master password from bruteforce attacks as soon as possible... But maybe this is all equivalent. Regardless, Password Hasher Plus then takes the token and applies the same special character insertion routine as the Password Hasher.

LessPass Last year, Guillaume Vincent a french self-described "humanist and scuba diving fan" released the lesspass extension for Chrome, Firefox and Android. Lesspass introduces several interesting features. It is probably the first to include a commandline version. It also uses a more robust key derivation algorithm (PBKDF2) and takes into account the username on the site, allowing multi account support. The original release (version 1) used only 8192 rounds which is now considered too low. In the bug report it was interesting to note that LessPass couldn't do the usual practice of running the key derivation for 1 second to determine the number of rounds needed as the results need to be deterministic. At first glance, the LessPass source code seems clear and easy to read which is always a good sign, but of course, the devil is in the details. One key feature that is missing from Password Hasher Plus is the profile-specific seed, although it should be impossible, for a hostile web page to steal keystrokes from a browser extension, as far as I know. The algorithm then gets a little more interesting:

entropy = PBKDF2(SHA256, masterPassword, domain + username + counter, rounds, length)
where
    rounds=10000
    length=32

entropy is then used to pick characters to match the chosen profile. Regarding code readability, I got quickly confused by the PBKDF2 implementation: SubtleCrypto.ImportKey() doesn't seem to support PBKDF2 in the API, yet it's how it is used there... Is it just something to extract key material? We see later what looks like a more standard AES-based PBKDF2 implementation, but this code looks just strange to me. It could be me unfamilarity with newer Javascript coding patterns, however. There is also a lesspass-specific character picking routing that is also not base64, and different from the original Password Hasher algorithm.

Master Password A review of password hashers would hardly be complete without mentioning the Master Password and its elaborate algorithm. While the applications surrounding the project are not as refined (there is no web browser plugin and the web interface can't be easily turned into a bookmarklet), the algorithm has been well developed. Of all the password managers reviewed here, Master Password uses one of the strongest key derivation algorithms out there, scrypt:

key = scrypt( password, salt, cost, size, parallelization, length )
where
salt = "com.lyndir.masterpassword" + len(username) + name
cost = 32768
size = 8
parallelization = 2
length = 64
entropy = hmac-sha256(key, "com.lyndir.masterpassword" + len(domain) + domain + counter )

Master Password the uses one of 6 sets of "templates" specially crafted to be "easy for a user to read from a screen and type using a keyboard or smartphone" and "compatible with most site's password policies", our "transferable" criteria defined in the first passwords article. For example, the default template mixes vowels, consonants, numbers and symbols, but carefully avoiding possibly visibly similar characters like O and 0 or i and 1 (although it does mix 1 and l, oddly enough). The main strength of Master Password seems to be the clear definition of its algorithm (although Hashpass.com does give out OpenSSL commandline examples...), which led to its reuse in another application called freepass. The Master Password app also doubles as a stateful password manager...

Other implementations I have also considered including easypasswords, which uses PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1, in my list of recommendations. I discovered only recently that the author wrote a detailed review of many more password hashers and scores them according to their relative strength. In the end, I ended up covering more LessPass since the design is very similar and LessPass does seem a bit more usable. Covering LessPass also allowed me to show the contrast and issues regarding the algorithm changes, for example. It is also interesting to note that the EasyPasswords author has criticized the Master Password algorithm quite severely:

[...] scrypt isn t being applied correctly. The initial scrypt hash calculation only depends on the username and master password. The resulting key is combined with the site name via SHA-256 hashing then. This means that a website only needs to break the SHA-256 hashing and deduce the intermediate key as long as the username doesn t change this key can be used to generate passwords for other websites. This makes breaking scrypt unnecessary[...]

During a discussion with the Master Password author, he outlined that "there is nothing "easy" about brute-force deriving a 64-byte key through a SHA-256 algorithm." SHA-256 is used in the last stage because it is "extremely fast". scrypt is used as a key derivation algorithm to generate a large secret and is "intentionnally slow": "we don't want it to be easy to reverse the master password from a site password". "But it' unnecessary for the second phase because the input to the second phase is so large. A master password is tiny, there are only a few thousand or million possibilities to try. A master key is 8^64, the search space is huge. Reversing that doesn't need to be made slower. And it's nice for the password generation to be fast after the key has been prepared in-memory so we can display site passwords easily on a mobile app instead of having to lock the UI a few seconds for every password." Finally, I considered covering Blum's Mental Hash (also covered here and elsewhere). This consists of an algorithm that can basically be ran by the human brain directly. It's not for the faint of heart, however: if I understand it correctly, it will require remembering a password that is basically a string of 26 digits, plus compute modulo arithmetics on the outputs. Needless to say, most people don't do modulo arithmetics every day...

A few days ago I ordered a small batch of the ChaosKey, a small USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds. Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:

% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
     sleep 1; \
  done
300
0+1 oppf ringer inn
0+1 oppf ringer ut
28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
4
8
12
17
21
%

The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second. In such case any application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server) will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with the ChaosKey inserted:

% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
     sleep 1; \
  done
1079
0+1 oppf ringer inn
0+1 oppf ringer ut
104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
433
1028
1031
1035
1038
%

Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case someone want to buy one here in Norway. :) Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might find the talk recording illuminating. It explains exactly what the source of randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog post.

So, more because I was intrigued than anything else, I've got a pi3 from Mythic Beasts, they're supplied with IPv6 only connectivity and the file storage is NFS over a private v4 network. The proxy will happily redirect requests to either http or https to the Pi, but this results (without turning on the Proxy Protocol) with getting remote addresses in your logs of the proxy servers, which is not entirely useful. I've cheated a bit, because the turning on of ProxyProtocol for the hostedpi.com addresses is currently not exposed to customers (it's on the list!), to do it without access to Mythic's backends use your own domainname (I've also got https://pi3.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ mapped to this Pi). So, first step first, we get our RPi and we make sure that we can login to it via ssh (I'm nearly always on a v6 connection anyways, so this was a simple case of sshing to the v6 address of the Pi). I then installed haproxy and apache2 on the Pi and went about configuring them, with apache2 I changed it to listen to localhost only and on ports 8080 and 4443, I hadn't at this point enabled the ssl module so, really, the change for 4443 didn't kick in. Here's my /etc/apache2/ports.conf file:

# If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also
# have to change the VirtualHost statement in
# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
Listen [::1]:8080
<IfModule ssl_module>
       Listen [::1]:4443
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_gnutls.c>
       Listen [::1]:4443
</IfModule>
# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

I then edited /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf to change the VirtualHost line to [::1]:8080. So, with that in place, now we deploy haproxy infront of it, the basic /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg config is:

global
       log /dev/log    local0
       log /dev/log    local1 notice
       chroot /var/lib/haproxy
       stats socket /run/haproxy/admin.sock mode 660 level admin
       stats timeout 30s
       user haproxy
       group haproxy
       daemon
       # Default SSL material locations
       ca-base /etc/ssl/certs
       crt-base /etc/ssl/private
       # Default ciphers to use on SSL-enabled listening sockets.
       # For more information, see ciphers(1SSL). This list is from:
       #  https://hynek.me/articles/hardening-your-web-servers-ssl-ciphers/
       ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS
       ssl-default-bind-options no-sslv3
defaults
       log     global
       mode    http
       option  httplog
       option  dontlognull
        timeout connect 5000
        timeout client  50000
        timeout server  50000
       errorfile 400 /etc/haproxy/errors/400.http
       errorfile 403 /etc/haproxy/errors/403.http
       errorfile 408 /etc/haproxy/errors/408.http
       errorfile 500 /etc/haproxy/errors/500.http
       errorfile 502 /etc/haproxy/errors/502.http
       errorfile 503 /etc/haproxy/errors/503.http
       errorfile 504 /etc/haproxy/errors/504.http
frontend any_http
        option httplog
        option forwardfor
        acl is_from_proxy src 2a00:1098:0:82:1000:3b:1:1 2a00:1098:0:80:1000:3b:1:1
        tcp-request connection expect-proxy layer4 if is_from_proxy
        bind :::80
        default_backend any_http
backend any_http
        server apache2 ::1:8080

Obviously after that you then do:

systemctl restart apache2
systemctl restart haproxy

Now you have a proxy protocol'd setup from the proxy servers, and you can still talk directly to the Pi over ipv6, you're not yet logging the right remote ips, but we're a step closer. Next enable mod_remoteip in apache2:

a2enmod remoteip

And add a file, /etc/apache2/conf-available/remoteip-logformats.conf containing:

LogFormat "%v:%p %a %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"% Referer i\" \"% User-Agent i\"" remoteip_vhost_combined

And edit the /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf to change the CustomLog line to use remoteip_vhost_combined rather than combined as the LogFormat and add the relevant RemoteIP settings:

RemoteIPHeader X-Forwarded-For
RemoteIPTrustedProxy ::1
CustomLog $ APACHE_LOG_DIR /access.log remoteip_vhost_combined

Now, enable the config and restart apache2:

a2enconf remoteip-logformats
systemctl restart apache2

Now you'll get the right remote ip in the logs (cool, huh!), and, better still, the environment that gets pushed through to cgi scripts/php/whatever is now also correct. So, you can now happily visit http://www.<your-pi-name>.hostedpi.com/, e.g. http://www.srwpi.hostedpi.com/. Next up, you'll want something like dehydrated - I grabbed the packaged version from debian's jessie-backports repository - so that you can make yourself some nice shiny SSL certificates (why wouldn't you, after all!), once you've got dehydrated installed, you'll probably want to tweak it a bit, I have some magic extra files that I use, I also suggest getting the dehydrated-apache2 package, which just makes it all much easier too. /etc/dehydrated/conf.d/mail.sh:

CONTACT_EMAIL="my@email.address"

/etc/dehydrated/conf.d/domainconfig.sh:

DOMAINS_D="/etc/dehydrated/domains.d"

/etc/dehydrated/domains.d/srwpi.hostedpi.com:

HOOK="/etc/dehydrated/hooks/srwpi"

/etc/dehydrated/hooks/srwpi:

#!/bin/sh
action="$1"
domain="$2"
case $action in
  deploy_cert)
    privkey="$3"
    cert="$4"
    fullchain="$5"
    chain="$6"
    cat "$privkey" "$fullchain" > /etc/ssl/private/srwpi.pem
    chmod 640 /etc/ssl/private/srwpi.pem
    ;;
  *)
    ;;
esac

/etc/dehydrated/hooks/srwpi has the execute bit set (chmod +x /etc/dehydrated/hooks/srwpi), and is really only there so that the certificate can be used easily in haproxy. And finally the file /etc/dehydrated/domains.txt:

www.srwpi.hostedpi.com srwpi.hostedpi.com

Obviously, use your own pi name in there, or better yet, one of your own domain names that you've mapped to the proxies. Run dehydrated in cron mode (it's noisy, but meh...):

dehydrated -c

That s then generated you some shiny certificates (hopefully). For now, I'll just tell you how to do it through the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf file, just edit that file and change the SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile to point to /var/lib/dehydrated/certs/www.srwpi.hostedpi.com/fullchain.pem and /var/llib/dehydrated/certs/ww.srwpi.hostedpi.com/privkey.pem files, do the edit for the CustomLog as you did for the other default site, and change the VirtualHost to be [::1]:443 and enable the site:

a2ensite default-ssl
a2enmod ssl

And restart apache2:

systemctl restart apache2

Now time to add some bits to haproxy.cfg, usefully this is only a tiny tiny bit of extra config:

frontend any_https
        option httplog
        option forwardfor
        acl is_from_proxy src 2a00:1098:0:82:1000:3b:1:1 2a00:1098:0:80:1000:3b:1:1
        tcp-request connection expect-proxy layer4 if is_from_proxy
        bind :::443 ssl crt /etc/ssl/private/srwpi.pem
        default_backend any_https
backend any_https
        server apache2 ::1:4443 ssl ca-file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

Restart haproxy:

systemctl restart haproxy

And we're all done! REMOTE_ADDR will appear as the correct remote address in the logs, and in the environment.

Changes

• gplenforced.org: mention copyleft.org, FSF and gpl-violations.org
• https-everywhere: fix & merge Debian updates
• Spelling:
  • iotop: alignement
  • codespell: pacakge, intregral, droppend, enforcmement, bood, everythin, temporarly, claaes, depricated, pluign(s), paramater(s), minimun, differrent, dekstop, impresive, mangementt, pusehd, pres, embdedded, captable, verifty(ing), alignement
  • lintian: droppend, enforcmement, bood, everythin, temporarly, claaes, pluign(s), differrent, debiab, dekstop, impresive, mangementt, pusehd, pres, embdedded, captable, verifty(ing), alignement
• Debian wiki: AutomateBackports, binNMU, CopyrightReview (Tools), CristianGreco, DebianArt (RequestArtwork), DebianGeoMirror, DebianLocations, DebianLogo, DebianSecurity/AdvisoryCreation/SecFull, Derivatives/Census (Armbian, Matriux), Exploits, gsoc, GSoC, LTS/Team, Mentors/Review (1, 2), PaulWise/InterestingSoftware, PlanetDebian, qa.debian.org, Services/MentorsDebianNet, Statistics, Teams/Publicity (Identica, micronews, Release), Teams/Webmaster (TODO), Year
• DebConf wiki: Timeline (DebConf16, DebConf17)
• Wikipedia: BugSat_1, Message-ID, PaulWise
• Debian website: Unix line endings, merged release team patches for stretch/buster, update links to removed pages (1 2 3 4)
• Debian QA: clang build logs (merged PTS patch, re-enabled & fixed in tracker)
• Debian security tracker: CVE updates (1, 2), update mirror, fix domain typo, avoid hard-coding years
• Debian nagios: update mirror-isc.d.o upstream
• Debian DNS: fix snapshot backup issue
• Debian package uploads: nvme-cli 1.0-3~bpo8+1, libesedb 20170121-2~bpo8+1

Issues

• Release-critical bugs in needrestart-session, dnssec-trigger
• Fix exit status in ipmievd
• TLS for links in bugs.debian.org emails, planet.gnome.org
• Password length in AbiSource Bugzilla
• Disabling ReportPage in apt-cacher-ng: wrong comment and breaks the cron job
• Features in adequate and git/github (light-weight pull requests)

Review

• Spam: reported 5 Debian bug reports and 158 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian packages: reviewed and sponsored gtranscribe 0.7.1-2
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved fbreader unity openlp wadc bosixnet-webui (2) ardour arc-theme terminix kget okular sl synergy musique screenfetch mercurial-crecord git-crecord libglpk-java rolo streamtuner2 muon limesuite endless-sky spectrwm
  • approved deletion of sshpass (website screenshot)
  • rejected reaver/pixiewps/golang (just a picture of the help output), git (Android browser screenshot with rude confused title), marble (not a screenshot), libcanberra0-dbg (no screenshot present)

Administration

• Debian: do the samhain dance, ask for new local contacts at one site, ask local admins to reset one machine, powercycle 2 dead machines, redirect 1 user to the support channels, redirect 1 user to a service admin, redirect 1 spam reporter to the right mechanisms, investigate mail logs for a missing bug report, ping bugs-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka and remove data, poke cdimage-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka, update a cron job on denis.d.o for the rename of letsencrypt.sh to dehydrated, debug planet.d.o issue and remove stray cron job lock file, check if ftp is used on a couple of security.d.o mirrors, discuss storage upgrade for LeaseWeb for snapshot.d.o/deriv.d.n/etc, investigate SSD SMART error and ignore the unknown attribute, ask 9 users to restart their processes, investigate apt-get update failure in nagios, swapoff/swapon a swap file to drain it, restart/disable some failed services, help restore the backup server, debug stretch /dev/log issue,
• Debian QA: deploy merged PTS/tracker patches,
• Debian wiki: answer 1 IP-blocked VPN user, pinged 1 user on IRC about their bouncing mail, disabled 4 accounts due to bouncing mail, redirect 1 person to documentation/lists, whitelist 5 email addresses, forward 1 password reset token, killed 1 spammer account, reverted 1 spammer edit,
• Debian mentors: security upgrades, check which email a user signed up with
• Openmoko: security upgrades, daemon restarts, reboot

Debian derivatives

• Turned off the census cron job because it ran out of disk space
• Update Armbian sources.list
• Ping siduction folks about updating their sources.list
• Start a discussion about DebConf17
• Notify the derivatives based on jessie or older that stretch is frozen
• Invite Rebellin Linux (again)

Sponsors The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Please use the correct (perma)link to bookmark this article, not the page listing all wlog entries of the last decade. Thank you.</update> Some updates inline and at the bottom. The new Terms of Service of GitHub became effective today, which is quite problematic there was a review phase, but my reviews pointing out the problems were not answered, and, while the language is somewhat changed from the draft, they became effective immediately. Now, the new ToS are not so bad that one immediately must stop using their service for disagreement, but it s important that certain content may no longer legally be pushed to GitHub. I ll try to explain which is affected, and why. I m mostly working my way backwards through section D, as that s where the problems I identified lie, and because this is from easier to harder. Note that using a private repository does not help, as the same terms apply. Anything requiring attribution (e.g. CC-BY, but also BSD, ) Section D.7 requires the person uploading content to waive any and all attribution rights. Ostensibly to allow basic functions like search to work , which I can even believe, but, for a work the uploader did not create completely by themselves, they can t grant this licence. The CC licences are notably bad because they don t permit sublicencing, but even so, anything requiring attribution can, in almost all cases, not written or otherwise, created or uploaded by our Users . This is fact, and the exceptions are few. Anything putting conditions on the right to use, display and perform the work and, worse, reproduce (all Copyleft) Section D.5 requires the uploader to grant all other GitHub users

• the right to use, display and perform the work (with no further restrictions attached to it) while this (likely I didn t check) does not exclude the GPL, many others (I believe CC-*-SA) are affected, and
• the right to reproduce your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality , with no further restructions attached; this is a killer for, I believe, any and all licences falling into the copyleft category.

Note that section D.4 is similar, but granting the licence to GitHub (and their successors); while this is worded much more friendly than in the draft, this fact only makes it harder to see if it affects works in a similar way. But that doesn t matter since D.5 is clear enough. (This doesn t mean it s not a problem, just that I don t want to go there and analyse D.4 as D.5 points out the same problems but is easier.) This means that any and all content under copyleft licences is also no longer welcome on GitHub. Anything requiring integrity of the author s source (e.g. LPPL) Some licences are famous for requiring people to keep the original intact while permitting patches to be piled on top; this is actually permissible for Open Source, even though annoying, and the most common LaTeX licence is rather close to that. Section D.3 says any (partial) content can be removed though keeping a PKZIP archive of the original is a likely workaround. Affected licences Anything copyleft (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, CC-*-SA) or requiring attribution (CC-BY-*, but also 4-clause BSD, Apache 2 with NOTICE text file, ) are affected. BSD-style licences without advertising clause (MIT/Expat, MirOS, etc.) are probably not affected if GitHub doesn t go too far and dissociates excerpts from their context and legal info, but then nobody would be able to distribute it, so that d be useless. But what if I just fork something under such a licence? Only continuing to use GitHub constitutes accepting the new terms. This means that repositories from people who last used GitHub before March 2017 are excluded. Even then, the new terms likely only apply to content uploaded in March 2017 or later (note that git commit dates are unreliable, you have to actually check whether the contribution dates March 2017 or later). And then, most people are likely unaware of the new terms. If they upload content they themselves don t have the appropriate rights (waivers to attribution and copyleft/share-alike clauses), it s plain illegal and also makes your upload of them or a derivate thereof no more legal. Granted, people who, in full knowledge of the new ToS, share any User-Generated Content with GitHub on or after 1 March, 2017, and actually have the appropriate rights to do that, can do that; and if you encounter such a repository, you can fork, modify and upload that iff you also waive attribution and copyleft/share-alike rights for your portion of the upload. But especially in the beginning these will be few and far between (even more so taking into account that GitHub is, legally spoken, a mess, and they don t even care about hosting only OSS / Free works). Conclusion (Fazit) I ll be starting to remove any such content of mine, such as the source code mirrors of jupp, which is under the GNU GPLv1, now and will be requesting people who forked such repositories on GitHub to also remove them. This is not something I like to do but something I am required to do in order to comply with the licence granted to me by my upstream. Anything you ve found contributed by me in the meantime is up for review; ping me if I forgot something. (mksh is likely safe, even if I hereby remind you that the attribution requirement of the BSD-style licences still applies outside of GitHub.) (Pet peeve: why can t I adopt a licence with British spelling? They seem to require oversea barbarian spelling.) The others Atlassian Bitbucket has similar terms (even worse actually; I looked at them to see whether I could mirror mksh there, and turns out, I can t if I don t want to lose most of what few rights I retain when publishing under a permissive licence). Gitlab seems to not have such, but requires you to indemnify them YMMV. I think I ll self-host the removed content. And now? I m in contact with someone from GitHub Legal (not explicitly in the official capacity though) and will try to explain the sheer magnitude of the problem and ways to solve this (leaving the technical issues to technical solutions and requiring legal solutions only where strictly necessary), but for now, the ToS are enacted (another point of my criticism of this move) and thus, the aforementioned works must go off GitHub right now. That s not to say they may not come back later once this all has been addressed, if it will be addressed to allow that. The new ToS do have some good; for example, the old ToS said you allow every GitHub user to fork your repositories without ever specifying what that means. It s just that the people over at GitHub need to understand that, both legally and technically , any and all OSS licences grant enough to run a hosting platform already , and separate explicit grants are only needed if a repository contains content not under an OSI/OKFN/Copyfree/FSF/DFSG-free licence. I have been told that these are important issues and been thanked for my feedback; we ll see what comes from this. maybe with a little more effort on the coders side All licences on one of those lists or conformant to the DFSG, OSD or OKD should do . e.g. when displaying search results, add a note this is an excerpt, click HERE to get to the original work in its context, with licence and attribution where HERE is a backlink to the file in the repository It is understood those organisations never un-approve any licence that rightfully conforms to those definitions (also in cases like a grant saying just use any OSS licence which is occasionally used) Update: In the meantime, joeyh has written not one but two insightful articles (although I disagree in some details; the new licence is only to GitHub users (D.5) and GitHub (D.4) and only within their system, so, while uploaders would violate the ToS (they cannot grant the licence) and (probably) the upstream-granted copyleft licence, this would not mean that everyone else wasn t bound by the copyleft licence in, well, enough cases to count (yes it s possible to construct situations in which this hurts the copyleft fraction, but no, they re nowhere near 100%).

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

• Submitted a number of pull requests to the Django web development framework:
  • Add a --mode=unified option to the "diffsettings" management command. (#8113)
  • Fix a crash in setup_test_environment() if ALLOWED_HOSTS is a tuple. (#8101)
  • Use Python 3 "shebangs" now that the master branch is Python 3 only. (#8105)
  • URL namespacing warning should consider nested namespaces. (#8102)
• Created an experimental patch against the Python interpreter in order to find reproducibility-related assumptions in dict handling in arbitrary Python code. (#29431)
• Filed two issues against dh-virtualenv, a tool to package Python virtualenv environments in Debian packages:
  • Fix "upgrage-pip" typo in usage documentation. (#195)
  • Missing DH_UPGRADE_SETUPTOOLS equivalent for dh_virtualenv (#196)
• Fixed a large number of spelling corrections in Samba, a free-software re-implementation of the Windows networking protocols.
• Reviewed and merged a pull request by @jheld for django-slack (my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility) to support per-message backends and channels. (#63)
• Created a pull request for django-two-factor-auth, a complete Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) framework for projects using the Django web development framework to drop use of the @lazy_property decorator to ensure compatibility with Django 1.11. (#195)
• Filed, triaged and eventually merged a change from @evgeni to fix an autopkgtest-related issue in travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds on every code change) travis.debian.net. (#41)
• Submitted a pull request against social-core a library to allow Python applications to authenticate against third-party web services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. to use the more-readable X if Y else Z construction over Y and X or Z. (#44)
• Filed an issue against freezegun (a tool to make it easier to write Python tests involving times) to report that dateutils was missing from requirements.txt. (#173)
• Submitted a pull request against the Hypothesis "QuickCheck"-like testing framework to make the build reproducible. (#440)
• Fixed an issue reported by @davidak in trydiffoscope (a web-based version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility) where the maximum upload size was incorrectly calculated. (#22)
• Created a pull request for the Mars Simulation Project to remove some embedded timestamps from the changelog.gz and mars-sim.1.gz files in order to make the build reproducible. (#24)
• Filed a bug against the cpio archiving utility to report that the testsuite fails when run in the UTC +1300 timezone. (Thread)
• Submitted a pull request against the "pnmixer" system-tray volume mixer in order to make the build reproducible. (#153)
• Sent a patch to Testfixtures (a collection of helpers and mock objects that are useful when writing Python unit tests or doctests) to make the build reproducible. (#56)
• Created a pull request for the "Cloud" Sphinx documentation theme in order to make the output reproducible. (#22)

---

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 19 and Saturday February 25 2017: Reproducible work in other projects

• Christos Zaulas wrote a blog post entitled "NetBSD fully reproducible builds" which generated some discussion on Hacker News and was mentioned on DistroWatch.
• Christos also reported that that NetBSD's base system is now 100.0% reproducible in our current test framework. Whilst we do less variations than in Debian here, this is highly commendable.
• Microsoft requires reproducible binaries for signing shim code for secure boot.
• Thanks to Ed Maste, FreeBSD base system reached 99.6% too, after he'd seen the news about NetBSD. This too has been achieved using non-default settings and is to be considered merely as a "hey we can do that too" (though Ed is slightly sad they missed 100%). The real plan is still to achieve 100% reproducibility with default settings.

Upcoming Events Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th. On March 23rd Holger Levsen will give a talk at the German Unix User Group's "Fr hjahrsfachgespr ch" about Reproducible Builds everywhere. Verifying Software Freedom with Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Libreplanet2017 in Boston, March 25th-26th. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #855674 filed against sugar-physics-activity.
• #855909 filed against publicsuffix.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 9 package reviews have been added, 3 have been updated and 1 has been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (4)

diffoscope development diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

• diffoscope 77 was unblocked by the release team for stretch.
• Mattia Rizzolo uploaded 77~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports.

buildinfo.debian.net development buildinfo.debian.net is our experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them.

• Chris Lamb:
  • Drop orphaned binary package instances.
  • Install to /usr/share with dh-virtualenv 1.0
  • Drop Installed-Build-Depends to recover diskspace.

Website development

• Holger Levsen:
  • Add link to https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_fully_reproducible_builds

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Ed Maste made the upcoming FreeBSD release almost 100% reproducible (see above).
• Holger Levsen added the number of configured and running builder jobs to the performance stats page.
• Holger Levsen improved the scheduler, so that untested packages and versions are tried sooner.
• Holger added logging for submitting .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net and added notification about this failure.
• Holger also made some minor improvements to the generated HTML.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Ed Maste & Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Previously: v4.9. Here s a quick summary of some of the interesting security things in last week s v4.10 release of the Linux kernel: PAN emulation on arm64 Catalin Marinas introduced ARM64_SW_TTBR0_PAN, which is functionally the arm64 equivalent of arm s CONFIG_CPU_SW_DOMAIN_PAN. While Privileged eXecute Never (PXN) has been available in ARM hardware for a while now, Privileged Access Never (PAN) will only be available in hardware once vendors start manufacturing ARMv8.1 or later CPUs. Right now, everything is still ARMv8.0, which left a bit of a gap in security flaw mitigations on ARM since CONFIG_CPU_SW_DOMAIN_PAN can only provide PAN coverage on ARMv7 systems, but nothing existed on ARMv8.0. This solves that problem and closes a common exploitation method for arm64 systems. thread_info relocation on arm64 As done earlier for x86, Mark Rutland has moved thread_info off the kernel stack on arm64. With thread_info no longer on the stack, it s more difficult for attackers to find it, which makes it harder to subvert the very sensitive addr_limit field. linked list hardening
I added CONFIG_BUG_ON_DATA_CORRUPTION to restore the original CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST behavior that existed prior to v2.6.27 (9 years ago): if list metadata corruption is detected, the kernel refuses to perform the operation, rather than just WARNing and continuing with the corrupted operation anyway. Since linked list corruption (usually via heap overflows) are a common method for attackers to gain a write-what-where primitive, it s important to stop the list add/del operation if the metadata is obviously corrupted. seeding kernel RNG from UEFI A problem for many architectures is finding a viable source of early boot entropy to initialize the kernel Random Number Generator. For x86, this is mainly solved with the RDRAND instruction. On ARM, however, the solutions continue to be very vendor-specific. As it turns out, UEFI is supposed to hide various vendor-specific things behind a common set of APIs. The EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL call is designed to provide entropy, but it can t be called when the kernel is running. To get entropy into the kernel, Ard Biesheuvel created a UEFI config table (LINUX_EFI_RANDOM_SEED_TABLE_GUID) that is populated during the UEFI boot stub and fed into the kernel entropy pool during early boot. arm64 W^X detection As done earlier for x86, Laura Abbott implemented CONFIG_DEBUG_WX on arm64. Now any dangerous arm64 kernel memory protections will be loudly reported at boot time. 64-bit get_user() zeroing fix on arm
While the fix itself is pretty minor, I like that this bug was found through a combined improvement to the usercopy test code in lib/test_user_copy.c. Hoeun Ryu added zeroing-on-failure testing, and I expanded the get_user()/put_user() tests to include all sizes. Neither improvement alone would have found the ARM bug, but together they uncovered a typo in a corner case. no-new-privs visible in /proc/$pid/status
This is a tiny change, but I like being able to introspect processes externally. Prior to this, I wasn t able to trivially answer the question is that process setting the no-new-privs flag? To address this, I exposed the flag in /proc/$pid/status, as NoNewPrivs. That s all for now! Please let me know if you saw anything else you think needs to be called out. :) I m already excited about the v4.11 merge window opening

2017, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Fantasyland Institute of Learning is the organisation behind Lambdaconf, a functional programming conference perhaps best known for standing behind a racist they had invited as a speaker. The fallout of that has resulted in them trying to band together events in order to reduce disruption caused by sponsors or speakers declining to be associated with conferences that think inviting racists is more important than the comfort of non-racists, which is weird in all sorts of ways but not what I'm talking about here because they've also written a "Code of Professionalism" which is like a Code of Conduct except it protects abusers rather than minorities and no really it is genuinely as bad as it sounds.

The first thing you need to know is that the document uses its own jargon. Important here are the concepts of active and inactive participation - active participation is anything that you do within the community covered by a specific instance of the Code, inactive participation is anything that happens anywhere ever (ie, active participation is a subset of inactive participation). The restrictions based around active participation are broadly those that you'd expect in a very weak code of conduct - it's basically "Don't be mean", but with some quirks. The most significant is that there's a "Don't moralise" provision, which as written means saying "I think people who support slavery are bad" in a community setting is a violation of the code, but the description of discrimination means saying "I volunteer to mentor anybody from a minority background" could also result in any community member not from a minority background complaining that you've discriminated against them. It's just not very good.

Inactive participation is where things go badly wrong. If you engage in community or professional sabotage, or if you shame a member based on their behaviour inside the community, that's a violation. Community sabotage isn't defined and so basically allows a community to throw out whoever they want to. Professional sabotage means doing anything that can hurt a member's professional career. Shaming is saying anything negative about a member to a non-member if that information was obtained from within the community.

So, what does that mean? Here are some things that you are forbidden from doing:

• If a member says something racist at a conference, you are not permitted to tell anyone who is not a community member that this happened (shaming)
  
• If a member tries to assault you, you are not allowed to tell the police (shaming)
  
• If a member gives a horribly racist speech at another conference, you are not allowed to suggest that they shouldn't be allowed to speak at your event (professional sabotage)
  
• If a member of your community reports a violation and no action is taken, you are not allowed to warn other people outside the community that this is considered acceptable behaviour (community sabotage)

Now, clearly, some of these are unintentional - I don't think the authors of this policy would want to defend the idea that you can't report something to the police, and I'm sure they'd be willing to modify the document to permit this. But it's indicative of the mindset behind it. This policy has been written to protect people who are accused of doing something bad, not to protect people who have something bad done to them.

There are other examples of this. For instance, violations are not publicised unless the verdict is that they deserve banishment. If a member harasses another member but is merely given a warning, the victim is still not permitted to tell anyone else that this happened. The perpetrator is then free to repeat their behaviour in other communities, and the victim has to choose between either staying silent or warning them and risk being banished from the community for shaming.

If you're an abuser then this is perfect. You're in a position where your victims have to choose between their career (which will be harmed if they're unable to function in the community) and preventing the same thing from happening to others. Many will choose the former, which gives you far more freedom to continue abusing others. Which means that communities adopting the Fantasyland code will be more attractive to abusers, and become disproportionately populated by them.

I don't believe this is the intent, but it's an inevitable consequence of the priorities inherent in this code. No matter how many corner cases are cleaned up, if a code prevents you from saying bad things about people or communities it prevents people from being able to make informed choices about whether that community and its members are people they wish to associate with. When there are greater consequences to saying someone's racist than them being racist, you're fucking up badly.

comments

If you have the fortune to need to follow some silly Login button for some wifi, regularly, the following little script may help you avoid this idiotic (and useless) task. This example uses the WIFIonICE, the free wifi on german ICE trains, simply as I have it twice a day, and got annoyed by the pointless Login button. A friend pointed me at just wget-ting the login page, so I made Network-Manager do this for me. Should work for anything similar that doesn t need some elaborate webform filled out.

#!/bin/bash
# (Some) docs at
# https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/NetworkManager/Dispatcher/
IFACE=$ 1:-"none" 
ACTION=$ 2:-"up" 
case $ ACTION  in
    up)
        CONID=$ CONNECTION_ID:-$(iwconfig $IFACE   grep ESSID   cut -d":" -f2   sed 's/^[^"]*"\ "[^"]*$//g') 
        if [[ $ CONID  == WIFIonICE ]]; then
            /usr/bin/timeout -k 20 15 /usr/bin/wget -q -O - http://www.wifionice.de/?login > /dev/null
        fi
        ;;
    *)
        # We are not interested in this
        :
        ;;
esac

This script needs to be put into /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d and made executable, owned by the root user. It will run on every connection change, thats why the ACTION is checked. The case may be a bit much here, but it could be easily extended to do a lot more. Yay, no more silly Open this webpage and press login crap.

France passed a law about right to disconnect (more info here or here). The idea of not sending professional emails when people are not supposed to read them in order to protect their private lifes, is a pretty good one, especially when hierarchy is involved. However, I tend to do email at random times, and I would rather continue doing that, but just delay the actual sending of the email to the appropriate time (e.g., when I do email in the evening, it would actually be sent the following morning at 9am). I wonder how I could make this fit into my email workflow. I write email using mutt on my laptop, then push it locally to nullmailer, that then relays it, over an SSH tunnel, to a remote server (running Exim4). Of course the fallback solution would be to use mutt s postponing feature. Or to draft the email in a text editor. But that s not really nice, because it requires going back to the email at the appropriate time. I would like a solution where I would write the email, add a header (or maybe manually add a Date: header in all cases that header should reflect the time the mail was sent, not the time it was written), send the email, and have nullmailer or the remote server queue it until the appropriate time is reached (e.g., delaying while current_time < Date header in email ). I don t want to do that for all emails: e.g. personal emails can go out immediately. Any ideas on how to implement that? I m attached to mutt and relaying using SSH, but not attached to nullmailer or exim4. Ideally the delaying would happen on my remote server, so that my laptop doesn t need to be online at the appropriate time. Update: mutt does not allow to set the Date: field manually (if you enable the edit_headers option and edit it manually, its value gets overwritten). I did not find the relevant code yet, but that behaviour is mentioned in that bug. Update 2: ah, it s this code in sendlib.c (and there s no way to configure that behaviour):

 /* mutt_write_rfc822_header() only writes out a Date: header with
 * mode == 0, i.e. _not_ postponment; so write out one ourself */
 if (post)
   fprintf (msg->fp, "%s", mutt_make_date (buf, sizeof (buf)));

In previous articles, we have looked at how to generate passwords and did a review of various password managers. There is, however, a third way of managing passwords other than remembering them or encrypting them in a "vault", which is what I call "password hashing". A password hasher generates site-specific passwords from a single master password using a cryptographic hash function. It thus allows a user to have a unique and secure password for every site they use while requiring no storage; they need only to remember a single password. You may know these as "deterministic or stateless password managers" but I find the "password manager" phrase to be confusing because a hasher doesn't actually store any passwords. I do not think password hashers represent a good security tradeoff so I generally do not recommend their use, unless you really do not have access to reliable storage that you can access readily. In this article, I use the word "password" for a random string used to unlock things, but "token" to represent a generated random string that the user doesn't need to remember. The input to a password hasher is a password with some site-specific context and the output from a password hasher is a token.

What is a password hasher? A password hasher uses the master password and a label (generally the host name) to generate the site-specific password. To change the generated password, the user can modify the label, for example by appending a number. Some password hashers also have different settings to generate tokens of different lengths or compositions (symbols or not, etc.) to accommodate different site-specific password policies. The whole concept of password hashers relies on the concept of one-way cryptographic hash functions or key derivation functions that take an arbitrary input string (say a password) and generate a unique token, from which it is impossible to guess the original input string. Password hashers are generally written as JavaScript bookmarklets or browser plugins and have been around for over a decade. The biggest advantage of password hashers is that you only need to remember a single password. You do not need to carry around a password manager vault: there's no "state" (other than site-specific settings, which can be easily guessed). A password hasher named Master Password makes a compelling case against traditional password managers in its documentation:

It's as though the implicit assumptions are that everybody backs all of their stuff up to at least two different devices and backups in the cloud in at least two separate countries. Well, people don't always have perfect backups. In fact, they usually don't have any.

It goes on to argue that, when you lose your password: "You lose everything. You lose your own identity." The stateless nature of password hashers also means you do not need to use cloud services to synchronize your passwords, as there is (generally, more on that later) no state to carry around. This means, for example, that the list of accounts that you have access to is only stored in your head, and not in some online database that could be hacked without your knowledge. The downside of this is, of course, that attackers do not actually need to have access to your password hasher to start cracking it: they can try to guess your master key without ever stealing anything from you other than a single token you used to log into some random web site. Password hashers also necessarily generate unique passwords for every site you use them on. While you can also do this with password managers, it is not an enforced decision. With hashers, you get distinct and strong passwords for every site with no effort.

The problem with password hashers If hashers are so great, why would you use a password manager? Programs like LessPass and Master Password seem to have strong crypto that is well implemented, so why isn't everyone using those tools? Password hashing, as a general concept, actually has serious problems: since the hashing outputs are constantly compromised (they are sent in password forms to various possibly hostile sites), it's theoretically possible to derive the master password and then break all the generated tokens in one shot. The use of stronger key derivation functions (like PBKDF2, scrypt, or HMAC) or seeds (like a profile-specific secret) makes those attacks much harder, especially if the seed is long enough to make brute-force attacks infeasible. (Unfortunately, in the case of Password Hasher Plus, the seed is derived from Math.random() calls, which are not considered cryptographically secure.) Basically, as stated by Julian Morrison in this discussion:

A password is now ciphertext, not a block of line noise. Every time you transmit it, you are giving away potential clues of use to an attacker. [...] You only have one password for all the sites, really, underneath, and it's your secret key. If it's broken, it's now a skeleton-key [...]

Newer implementations like LessPass and Master Password fix this by using reasonable key derivation algorithms (PBKDF2 and scrypt, respectively) that are more resistant to offline cracking attacks, but who knows how long those will hold? To give a concrete example, if you would like to use the new winner of the password hashing competition (Argon2) in your password manager, you can patch the program (or wait for an update) and re-encrypt your database. With a password hasher, it's not so easy: changing the algorithm means logging in to every site you visited and changing the password. As someone who used a password hasher for a few years, I can tell you this is really impractical: you quickly end up with hundreds of passwords. The LessPass developers tried to facilitate this, but they ended up mostly giving up. Which brings us to the question of state. A lot of those tools claim to work "without a server" or as being "stateless" and while those claims are partly true, hashers are way more usable (and more secure, with profile secrets) when they do keep some sort of state. For example, Password Hasher Plus records, in your browser profile, which site you visited and which settings were used on each site, which makes it easier to comply with weird password policies. But then that state needs to be backed up and synchronized across multiple devices, which led LessPass to offer a service (which you can also self-host) to keep those settings online. At this point, a key benefit of the password hasher approach (not keeping state) just disappears and you might as well use a password manager. Another issue with password hashers is choosing the right one from the start, because changing software generally means changing the algorithm, and therefore changing passwords everywhere. If there was a well-established program that was be recognized as a solid cryptographic solution by the community, I would feel more confident. But what I have seen is that there are a lot of different implementations each with its own warts and flaws; because changing is so painful, I can't actually use any of those alternatives. All of the password hashers I have reviewed have severe security versus usability tradeoffs. For example, LessPass has what seems to be a sound cryptographic implementation, but using it requires you to click on the icon, fill in the fields, click generate, and then copy the password into the field, which means at least four or five actions per password. The venerable Password Hasher is much easier to use, but it makes you type the master password directly in the site's password form, so hostile sites can simply use JavaScript to sniff the master password while it is typed. While there are workarounds implemented in Password Hasher Plus (the profile-specific secret), both tools are more or less abandoned now. The Password Hasher homepage, linked from the extension page, is now a 404. Password Hasher Plus hasn't seen a release in over a year and there is no space for collaborating on the software the homepage is simply the author's Google+ page with no information on the project. I couldn't actually find the source online and had to download the Chrome extension by hand to review the source code. Software abandonment is a serious issue for every project out there, but I would argue that it is especially severe for password hashers. Furthermore, I have had difficulty using password hashers in unified login environments like Wikipedia's or StackExchange's single-sign-on systems. Because they allow you to log in with the same password on multiple sites, you need to choose (and remember) what label you used when signing in. Did I sign in on stackoverflow.com? Or was it stackexchange.com? Also, as mentioned in the previous article about password managers, web-based password managers have serious security flaws. Since more than a few password hashers are implemented using bookmarklets, they bring all of those serious vulnerabilities with them, which can range from account name to master password disclosures. Finally, some of the password hashers use dubious crypto primitives that were valid and interesting a decade ago, but are really showing their age now. Stanford's pwdhash uses MD5, which is considered "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use". We have seen partial key recovery attacks against MD5 already and while those do not allow an attacker to recover the full master password yet (especially not with HMAC-MD5), I would not recommend anyone use MD5 in anything at this point, especially if changing that algorithm later is hard. Some hashers (like Password Hasher and Password Plus) use a a single round of SHA-1 to derive a token from a password; WPA2 (standardized in 2004) uses 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1. A recent US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report also recommends "at least 10,000 iterations of the hash function".

Conclusion Forced to suggest a password hasher, I would probably point to LessPass or Master Password, depending on the platform of the person asking. But, for now, I have determined that the security drawbacks of password hashers are not acceptable and I do not recommend them. It makes my password management recommendation shorter anyway: "remember a few carefully generated passwords and shove everything else in a password manager". [Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor for the thorough reviews provided for the password articles.]

Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News. Also, details of my research into password hashers are available in the password hashers history article.

I've begun to listen to BBC4's "More Or Less" Podcast. They recently had an episode covering the life and work of Hans Rosling, the inspirational swedish statistician, who has sadly died of pancreatic cancer. It was very moving. Some of Professor Rosling's videos are available to view online. I've heard that they are very much worth watching. Over the last few months I have also been listening to regular updates by BBC broadcaster Steve Hewlett on his own journey as a cancer sufferer. These were remarkably frank discussions of the ins and outs of his diagnosis, treatment, and the practical consequences on his everyday life. I was very sad to tune in on Monday evening and hear a series of repeated clips from his previous appearances on the PM show, as the implications were clear. And indeed, Steve Hewlett died from oesophagal cancer on Monday. Here's an obituary in the Guardian.

Before I start, I would like to point out #855549 . This is a normal/wishlist bug I have filed against apt, the command-line package manager. I sincerely believe having a history command to know what packages were installed, which were upgraded, which were purged should be easily accessible, easily understood and if the output looks pretty, so much the better. Of particular interest to me is having a list of new packages I have installed in last couple of years after jessie became the stable release. It probably would make for some interesting reading. I dunno how much efforts would be to code something like that, but if it works, it would be the greatest. Apt would have finally arrived. Not that it s a bad tool, it s just that it would then make for a heck of a useful tool. Coming back to the topic on hand, Now for the last couple of weeks we don t have water or rather pressure of water. Water crisis has been hitting Pune every year since 2014 with no end in sight. This has been reported in newspapers addendum but it seems it has been felling on deaf ears. The end result of it is that I have to bring buckets of water from around 50 odd metres. It s not a big thing, it s not like some women in some villages in Rajasthan who have to walk in between 200 metres to 5 odd kilometres to get potable water or Darfur, Western Sudan where women are often kidnapped and sold as sexual slaves when they get to fetch water. The situation in Darfur has been shown quite vividly in Darfur is Dying . It is possible that I may have mentioned about Darfur before. While unfortunately the game is in flash as a web resource, the most disturbing part is that the game is extremely depressing, there is a no-win scenario. So knowing and seeing both those scenarios, I can t complain about 50 metres. BUT .but when you extrapolate the same data over some more or less 3.3-3.4 million citizens, 3.1 million during 2011 census with a conservative 2.3-2.4 percent population growth rate according to scroll.in. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pune Municipal Corporation elections were held today. Fortunately or unfortunately, this time all the political parties bought majorly unknown faces in these elections. For e.g. I belong to ward 14 which is spread over quite a bit of area and has around 10k of registered voters. Now the unfortunate part of having new faces in elections, you don t know anything about them. Apart from the affidavits filed, the only thing I come to know is whether there are criminal cases filed against them and what they have shown as their wealth. While I am and should be thankful to ADR which actually is the force behind having the collated data made public. There is a lot of untold story about political push-back by all the major national and regional political parties even when this bit of news were to be made public. It took major part of a decade for such information to come into public domain. But for my purpose of getting clean air and water supply 24 7 to each household seems a very distant dream. I tried to connect with the corporators about a week before the contest and almost all of the lower party functionaries hid behind their political parties manifestos stating they would do the best without any viable plan. For those not knowing, India has been blessed with 6 odd national parties and about 36 odd regional parties and every election some 20-25 new parties try their luck every time. The problem is we, the public, don t trust them or their manifestos. First of all the political parties themselves engage in mud-slinging as to who s copying whom with the manifesto.Even if a political party wins the elections, there is no *real* pressure for them to follow their own manifesto. This has been going for many a year. OF course, we the citizens are to also blame as most citizens for one reason or other chose to remain aloof of the process. I scanned/leafed through all the manifestos and all of them have the vague-wording we will make Pune tanker-free without any implementation details. While I was unable to meet the soon-to-be-Corporators, I did manage to meet a few of the assistants but all the meetings were entirely fruitless. I asked why can t the city follow the Chennai model. Chennai, not so long ago was at the same place where Pune is, especially in relation to water. What happened next, in 2001 has been beautifully chronicled in Hindustan Times . What has not been shared in that story is that the idea was actually fielded by one of Chennai Mayor s assistants, an IAS Officer, I have forgotten her name, Thankfully, her advise/idea was taken to heart by the political establishment and they drove RWH. Saying why we can t do something similar in Pune, I heard all kinds of excuses. The worst and most used being Marathas can never unite which I think is pure bullshit. For people unfamiliar to the term, Marathas was a warrior clan in Shivaji s army. Shivaji, the king of Marathas were/are an expert tactician and master of guerilla warfare. It is due to the valor of Marathas, that we still have the Maratha Light Infantry a proud member of the Indian army. Why I said bullshit was the composition of people living in Maharashtra has changed over the decades. While at one time both the Brahmins and the Marathas had considerable political and population numbers, that has changed drastically. Maharashtra and more pointedly, Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur have become immigrant centres. Why just a decade back, Shiv Sena, an ultra right-wing political party used to play the Maratha card at each and every election and heckle people coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this has been documented as the 2008 immigrants attacks and 9 years later we see Shiv Sena trying to field its candidates in Uttar Pradesh. So, obviously they cannot use the same tactics which they could at one point of time. One more reason I call it bullshit, is it s a very lame excuse. When the Prime Minister of the country calls for demonetization which affects 1.25 billion people, people die, people stand in queues and is largely peaceful, I do not see people resisting if they bring a good scheme. I almost forgot, as an added sweetener, the Chennai municipality said that if you do RWH and show photos and certificates of the job, you won t have to pay as much property tax as otherwise you would, that also boosted people s participation. And that is not the only solution, one more solution has been outlined in Aaj Bhi Khade hain talaab written by just-deceased Gandhian environmental activist Anupam Mishra. His Book can be downloaded for free at India Water Portal . Unfortunately, the said book doesn t have a good English translation till date. Interestingly, all of his content is licensed under public domain (CC-0) so people can continue to enjoy and learn from his life-work. Another lesson or understanding could be taken from Israel, the father of the modern micro-drip irrigation for crops. One of the things on my bucket lists is to visit Israel and if possible learn how they went from a water-deficient country to a water-surplus one. Which brings me to my second conundrum, most of the people believe that it s the Government s job to provide jobs to its people. India has been experiencing jobless growth for around a decade now, since the 2008 meltdown. While India was lucky to escape that, most of its trading partners weren t hence it slowed down International trade which slowed down creation of new enterprises etc. Laws such as the Bankruptcy law and the upcoming Goods and Services Tax . As everybody else, am a bit excited and a bit apprehensive about how the actual implementation will take place. Even International businesses has been found wanting. The latest example has been Uber and Ola. There have been protests against the two cab/taxi aggregators operating in India. For the millions of jobless students coming out of schools and Universities, there aren t simply enough jobs for them, nor are most (okay 50%) of them qualified for the jobs, these 50 percent are also untrainable, so what to do ? In reality, this is what keeps me awake at night. India is sitting on this ticking bomb-shell. It is really, a miracle that the youths have not rebelled yet. While all the conditions, proposals and counter-proposals have been shared before, I wanted/needed to highlight it. While the issue seems to be local, I would assert that they are all glocal in nature. The questions we are facing, I m sure both developing and to some extent even developed countries have probably been affected by it. I look forward to know what I can learn from them. Update 23/02/17 I had wanted to share about Debian s Voting system a bit, but that got derailed. Hence in order not to do, I ll just point towards 2015 platforms where 3 people vied for DPL post. I *think* I shared about DPL voting process earlier but if not, would do in detail in some future blog post.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Anupam Mishra, #Bankruptcy law, #Chennai model, #clean air, #clean water, #elections, #GST, #immigrant, #immigrants, #Maratha, #Maratha Light Infantry, #migration, #national parties, #Political party manifesto, #regional parties, #ride-sharing, #water availability, Rain Water Harvesting

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 12 and Saturday February 18 2017: Upcoming Events The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd. Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th. Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo posted a preliminary spec for BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP, bringing together work and research from previous weeks. Ximin refactored and consolidated much of our existing documentation on both SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP into one unified page, Standard Environment Variables, with extended discussion on related solutions and how these all fit into people's ideas of what reproducible builds should look like in the long term. The specific pages for each variable still remain, at Timestamps Proposal and Build Path Proposal, only without content that was previously duplicated on both pages. Ximin filed #855282 against devscripts for debsign(1) to support buildinfo files, and wrote an initial series of patches for it with some further additions from Guillem Jover. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #854999 filed against moin, and forwarded upstream.
• #855002 filed against samplv1, and forwarded upstream.
• #855426 filed against fritzing-parts.
• #855480 filed against examl.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 35 package reviews have been added, 1 have been updated and 17 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been added:

• nondeterminism_in_java_classes_generated_by_jxc

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (2)

diffoscope development diffoscope 77 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Some fixes to tests and testing config
  • Don't track archive directory locations, a better fix for CVE-2017-0359.
  • Add --exclude option. Closes: #854783
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add my key to debian/upstream/signing-key.asc
  • Add CVE-2017-0359 to the changelog of v76
• Ximin Luo:
  • When extracting archives, try to keep directory sizes small

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.031-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Make the tests less brittle, by not testing for stat(2) blksize and blocks. #854937

strip-nondeterminism 0.031-1~bpo8+1 was uploaded to jessie-backports by Mattia. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Vagrant Cascadian and Holger Levsen set up two new armhf nodes, p64b and p64c running on pine64 boards with an arm64 kernel and armhf userland. This introduces kernel variations to armhf. New setup & maintenance jobs were set up too, plus 6 new builder jobs for armhf.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.