Search Results: "reg"

27 November 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.1.1: More robust

CRAN just accepted the newest release 0.1.1 of anytime, following the previous five releases since September. anytime is a very focussed package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to POSIXct (or Date) objects -- and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples, or just consider the following illustration: 
R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("20161107 202122")   ## all digits
[1] "2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST"
R> utctime("2016Nov07 202122")  ## UTC parse example
[1] "2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST"
R>
Release 0.1.1 robustifies two aspects. The 'digits only' input above extends what Boost Date_Time can parse and relies on simple-enough pre-processing. This operation is now more robust. We also ensure that input already of class Date is simply passed through by anydate() or utcdate(). Last but not least we added code coverage support, which oh-so-predictably lead us to game this metric to reach the elusive 100% coverage. The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.1 (2016-11-27)
  • Both anydate() and utcdate() no longer attempt to convert an input value that is already of type Date.
  • The string splitter (needed for the 'all-digits' formats extending Boost Date_time) is now more defensive about the input argument and more robust. Thanks to Bob Jansen for the heads-up (PR #30 closing issue #29).
  • Code coverage reporting has been added (PR #31).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

24 November 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppExamples 0.1.8

A new version of the RcppExamples package is now on CRAN. The RcppExamples package provides a handful of short examples detailing by concrete working examples how to set up basic R data structures in C++. This version takes advantage of the updated date and datetime classes in Rcpp 0.12.8 (which are optional for now and being phased in while we deprecate the old ones). A NEWS extract follows:

Changes in RcppExamples version 0.1.8 (2016-11-24)
  • Updated DateExample to show vector addition available under Rcpp 0.12.8 when the (currently still phased in and optional) new Date(time) classes are used via the define in src/Makevars,.win; with fallback code for older versions
  • Other minor edits to DESCRIPTION and README.md

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

23 November 2016

Joachim Breitner: microG on Jolla

I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to use the OpenMoko FreeRunner, but eventually gave up because of hardware glitches and reverted to my good old Siemens S35. It was not that I would not be willing to put up with inconveniences, but as soon as it makes live more difficult for the people I communicate with, it becomes hard to sustain. Two years ago I tried again, and got myself a Jolla phone, running Sailfish OS. Things are much nicer now: The hardware is mature, battery live is good, and the Android compatibility layer enables me to run many important apps that are hard to replace, especially the Deutsche Bahn Navigator and various messengers, namely Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Threema and GroupMe. Some apps that require Google Play Services, which provides a bunch of common tasks and usually comes with the Google Play store would not run on my phone, as Google Play is not supported on Sailfish OS. So far, the most annoying ones of that sort were Uber and Lyft, making me pay for expensive taxis when others would ride cheaper, but I can live with that. I tried to install Google Play Services from shady sources, but it would regularly crash.

Signal on Jolla Now in Philadelphia, people urged me to use the Signal messenger, and I was convinced by its support for good end-to-end crypto, while still supporting offline messages and allowing me to switch from my phone to my desktop and back during a conversation. The official Signal app uses Google Cloud Messaging (GCM, part of Google Play Services) to get push updates about new posts, and while I do not oppose this use of Google services (it really is just a ping without any metadata), this is a problem on Sailfish OS. Luckily, the Signal client is open source, and someone created a LibreSignal edition that replaced the use of GCM with websockets, and indeed, this worked on my phone, and I could communicate. Things were not ideal, though: I would often have to restart the app to get newly received messages; messages that I send via Signal Desktop would often not show up on the phone and, most severe, basically after every three messages, sending more messages from Desktop would stop working for my correspondents, which freaked them out. (Strangely it continued working from their phone app, so we coped for a while.) So again, my choice of non-standard devices causes inconveniences to others. This, and the fact that the original authors of Signal and the maintainers of LibreSignal got into a fight that ended LibreSignal discontinued, meant that I have to change something about this situation. I was almost ready to give in and get myself a Samsung S7 or something boring of the sort, but then I decided to tackle this issue once more, following some of the more obscure instructions out there, trying to get vanilla Signal working on my phone. About a day later, I got it, and this is how I did it.

microG So I need Google Play Services somehow, but installing the real thing did not seem to be very promising (I tried, and regularly got pop-ups telling me that Play Services has crashed.) But I found some references to a project called microG , which is an independent re-implementation of (some of) of the play services, in particular including GCM. Installing microG itself was easy, as you can add their repository to F-Droid. I installed the core services, the services framework and the fake store apps. If this had been all that was to do, things would be easy!

Play Store detection work arounds But Signal would still complain about the lack of Google Play Services. It asks Android if an app with a certain name is installed, and would refuse to work if this app does not exist. For some reason, the microG apps cannot just have the names of the real Google apps. There seem to be two ways of working around this: Patching Signal, or enabling Signature Spoofing. The initially most promising instructions (which are in a README in a tarball on a fishy file hoster linked from an answer on the Jolla support forum ) suggested patching Signal, and actually came both with a version of an app called Lucky Patcher as well as a patched Android package, but both about two years old. I tried a recent version of the Lucky Patcher, but it failed to patch the current version of Signal.

Signature Spoofing So on to Signature Spoofing. This is a feature of some non-standard Android builds that allow apps (such as microG) to fake the existence of other apps (the Play Store), and is recommended by the microG project. Sailfish OS s Android compatibility layer Alien Dalvik does not support it out of the box, but there is a tool tingle that adds this feature to existing Android systems. One just has to get the /system/framework/framework.jar file, put it into the input folder of this project, run python main.py, select 2, and copy the framework.jar from output/ back. Great.

Deodexing Alien Dalvik Only that it only works on deodexed files. I did not know anything about odexed Android Java classes (and did not really want to know), but there was not way around. Following this explanation I gathered that one finds files foo.odex in the Android system folder, runs some tool on them to create a classes.dex file, and adds that to the corresponding foo.jar or foo.apk file, copies this back to the phone and deletes the foo.odex file. The annoying this is that one does not only have to do it for framework.jar in order to please tingle, because if one does it to one odex file, one has to do to all! It seems that for people using Windows, the Universal Deodexer V5 seems to be a convenient tool, but I had to go more manually. So I first fetched smali , compiled it using ./gradlew build. Then I fetched the folders /opt/alien/system/framework and /opt/alien/system/app from the phone (e.g. using scp). Keep a backup of these in case something breaks. Then I ran these commands (disclaimer: I fetched these from my bash history and slightly cleaned them up. This is not a fire-and-forget script! Use it when you know what it and you are doing): 
cd framework
for file in *.odex
do
  java -jar ~/build/smali/baksmali/build/libs/baksmali.jar deodex $file -o out
  java -jar ~/build/smali/smali/build/libs/smali.jar a out -o classes.dex
  zip -u $(basename $file .odex).jar classes.dex
  rm -rf out classes.dex $file
done
cd ..
cd app
for file in *.odex
do
  java -jar ~/build/smali/baksmali/build/libs/baksmali.jar deodex -d ../framework $file -o out
  java -jar ~/build/smali/smali/build/libs/smali.jar a out -o classes.dex
  zip -u $(basename $file .odex).apk classes.dex
  rm -rf out classes.dex $file
done
cd ..
The resulting framework.jar can now be patched with tingle: 
mv framework/framework.jar ~/build/tingle/input
cd ~/build/tingle
./main.py
# select 2
cd -
mv ~/build/tingle/output/framework.jar framework/framework.jar
Now I copy these framework and app folders back on my phone, and restart Dalvik: 
devel-su systemctl restart aliendalvik.service
It might start a bit slower than usually, but eventually, all the Android apps should work as before. The final bit that was missing in my case was that I had to reinstall Signal: If it is installed before microG is installed, it does not get permission to use GCM, and when it tries (while registering: After generating the keys) it just crashes. I copied /data/data/org.thoughtcrime.secretsms/ before removing Signal and moved it back after (with cp -a to preserve permissions) so that I could keep my history. And now, it seems, vanilla Signal is working just fine on my Jolla phone!

What s missing Am I completely happy with Signal? No! An important feature that it is lacking is a way to get out all data (message history including media files) in a file format that can be read without Signal; e.g. YAML files or clean HTML code. I do want to be able to re-read some of the more interesting conversations when I am 74 or 75, and I doubt that there will be a Signal App, or even Android, then. I hope that this becomes available in time, maybe in the Desktop version. I would also hope that pidgin gets support to the Signal protocol, so that I conveniently use one program for all my messaging needs on the desktop. Finally it would be nice if my Signal identity was less tied to one phone number. I have a German and a US phone number, and would want to be reachable under both on all my clients. (If you want to contact me on Signal, use my US phone number.)

Alternatives Could I have avoided this hassle by simply convincing people to use something other than Signal? Tricky, at the moment. Telegram (which works super reliable for me, and has a pidgin plugin) has dubious crypto and does not support crypto while using multiple clients. Threema has no desktop client that I know of. OTR on top of Jabber does not support offline messages. So nothing great seems to exist right now. In the long run, the best bet seems to be OMEMO (which is, in essence, the Signal protocol) on top of Jabber. It is currently supported by one Android Jabber client (Conversations) and one Desktop application (gajim, via a plugin). I should keep an eye on pidgin support for OMEMO and other development around this.

22 November 2016

Steve Langasek: A new chapter

I don't often write on this blog, and when I do, it's either tech related, or light life stuff. Over the next few weeks, it's going to get a lot more political. If you currently follow this blog for its technical content, you may be tempted to tune out. I would encourage you to stay and listen. I'm passionate about the technology that I work on; but the greatest problems facing our world today are not ones that will be solved with software. American democracy is in bad shape, and it's because of what we're doing to it. This is not a problem of the Right or of the Left; it is not a problem that began with the election of Donald Trump, and it's not a problem that will go away at the end of his term. It is partly a structural problem with the way our elections work, but more than that it's a problem of how we're splitting into separate tribes, isolating ourselves from those who don't agree with us. As Russ Allbery wrote the morning after the election, everything about how we organize ourselves online today - and how we let Facebook and Twitter organize us - leads us to surround ourselves with people who already think the same way we do. That leaves all of us with huge blind spots for other people in our country, and it stifles the free exchange of ideas that is so essential for a healthy democracy. We need leaders who will work to make America a better and more just place for all our neighbors, not just a two-party system that plays tug-of-war using two different sets of voters that feel shut out. And the way we organize ourselves today (online and off) does not let us recognize those leaders. There's a lot of talk now about Facebook changing how it decides what to show people; and maybe they can manage to help everyone's online experience be a little less of a bubble. But part of the change needs to come from us. We need to be willing to engage, civilly, with people whose perspective is different from ours, and make the effort to understand where the other is coming from. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to talk. And I'm going to listen. I have no unique qualifications to speak about the country's issues. But I do have a perspective of my own, which might be different enough from yours to be useful. I was born and raised in Iowa, and graduated from college there. This election cycle, I learned that Iowa holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest percentage of college-educated whites. I'm part of that statistic, because a few years after graduating I moved to Portland, Oregon - a place that's notoriously so far to the left of what we think of as the middle, that it actually has anarchists who would shamefully use a peaceful protest as cover to commit property crime. So I know a few things about the people in each state, that I think the other should hear. I'm also that rarest of creatures, a Portlander who goes to church (Catholic). But I still choose as my neighbors the weird, wonderful, and welcoming community that we have here, whatever Glenn Beck might think. I have a son, and I worry about what kind of world he'll grow up to live in. I work in software, which means I'm doing a lot better than a lot of people in the country right now; it also means that from where I sit, I see trends already in progress that will have an effect on the working class and the middle class that makes NAFTA look like a gnat's fart in comparison. And so I worry for what kind of world we will all live in, if we don't make some changes fast. Let's have a conversation. No comments enabled on this blog, but you can find me on G+ or on Facebook.

21 November 2016

Mike Gabriel: Please Welcome D0n1elT to the FLOSS World

TL;DR; If you run a FLOSS development project and you notice D0n1elT appearing on your IRC channel, please give him a warm welcome. D0n1elT is a young man highy talented in various FLOSS related topics already. He probably needs some guidance at the beginning and I hope he won't be too shy to ask for it. But you can be sure: your channel has been joined by someone you should consider as a future resource. The Long Story During the last two weeks I had the great pleasure of supervising a fine young man (very young, still, indeed) in all sorts of IT topics. This young man turned out to be so skilled and interested in various FLOSS related areas, I really want to introduce him to all of you. The young man's real name is Daniel Teichmann. On IRC he may appear under his nick: D0n1elT. His GnuPG Fingerprint is: 6C6E 7F8F F7E8 B22E FC76 E9F7 8A79 028F DA56 7C6C. Daniel goes to a local school here in Nothern Germany, near where I live. He attends the 9th grade at his school, and as common for students of his age and grade, practical training was scheduled for the last two weeks. Daniel had originally applied for practical training at some other business near his place of living (which is quite far off from the school, actually). However, that company cancelled his training position two work days before the training was supposed to start. Daniel's teacher rang me up and asked for help. He advertised Daniel as someone who is far advanced in IT topics compared to his co-students. "He even writes his own programs (in Java and C++)." Spontaneously, Andreas Buchholz (CEO of LOGO EDV-Systeme GmbH) and I decided to accept Daniel as a trainee. Without having met him, with no application interview beforehand. The deal was: Daniel comes to Andreas business location in Kiel (40-50km away from Daniel's place of living) and I (working as freelancer for LOGO on a regular basis) do the supervising part. On day one and two, as a warm-up, Daniel installed a Debian Edu Main Server, worked himself through GOsa, LDAP, SSH, GnuPG, Jabber and IRC and configured two routers. All topics were new to him and I could hardly think of new tasks to give to him. As means of communication we set up a Jabber account, then an IRC account (as backup). However, it turned out that Daniel really got a hang of IRC over the next couple of days, so we used that as primary communication channel. Daniel had already programmed various projects in Java (whereas I have never touched Java, so far :-( ). He has written plugins for Minecraft servers. He knows well how to implement object oriented coding models. His coding style looks very good and clean (esp. for someone who has never head a nitpicking code reviewer). He started coding at the age of 9. Instead of diving into Java (where I would not have been of much help, anyway) I decided to provide him with some really basic and Unix-like knowledge: Bash scripting. I wanted to see how he handles another "language" and how he applies his Java knowledge to a lower level, syntactically weaker language. Guess what, he managed that assignment very well. Working on Impressive Display At Daniel's school we run substitute teacher info screens based on a fancy Bash script, named impressive-display, and the impressive PDF viewer. The Impressive Display tool is available in Debian testing/unstable under the same name. So over the next couple of days we worked on Impressive Display. Daniel contributed so many new code passages, conceptual ideas and security concerns, that I decided to make him co-copyright holder. Every change contributed by him received intensive testing before committing to Git. While working on Impressive Display, collaborating with Daniel via Git was a mere pleasure. In his spare time Daniel likes watching Github tutorials. Quite extraordinary. The result is a new major release of Impressive Display: Version 0.3.1 (bumped up from 0.2.3). We added the feature of handling info screen farms based on PXE boot images. It is now possible to configure as many different info screens as needed within the same PXE bootable chroot. Furthermore, Impressive Display now has a PDF presentation (written in LaTeX Beamer) that documents how to setup your own info screens. The PDF presentation is the default PDF that comes up when you start Impressive Display directly after installation. Investigating other Realms We also took a deeper look at remote desktop stuff, one of my most favourite topics. By that impulse Daniel set up his first Vserver machine at some hosting provider. He figured out how to run X2Go Server on that machine with an XFCE desktop. Next step was to run the irssi instance from his notebook inside a screen session on the Vserver. Some days later, Daniel PM'ed me: "I have an IRC bouncer now...". Quintessence It was a great pleasure meeting this young, highly curious and already highly skilled young man over the past two weeks. Daniel, it was an asset to me working with you. You are such a fast learner when it comes to getting accustomed to new working environments, it is amazing. I cannot deny having observed the tendency of preferring rather geeky tools. I was highly delighted, that What's-That and Facebook are nothing that rocks you so much. Unfortunately, all of the above makes you quite unique and non-mainstream among people of your age. My wish for you (and the FLOSS world) is that you start getting in touch with other (FLOSS) developers, maybe of your age, maybe older, and that you (if this is what you want) become an asset to the world of Free Software. The Free Software world can be a world where technical, political and spiritual work become one with friendship among people. Take care and farewell! I am sure, we will meet again. light+love Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver on IRC and debian.org)

19 November 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.62.0-1

The BH package on CRAN was updated to version 1.62.0. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R, possibly with Rcpp as well as other packages. This release upgrades the version of Boost to the upstream version Boost 1.62.0, and adds three new libraries as shown in the brief summary of changes from the NEWS file which follows below. Special thanks to Kurt Hornik and Duncan Murdoch for help tracking down one abort() call which was seeping into R package builds, and then (re-)testing the proposed fix. We are now modifying one more file ever so slightly to use ::Rf_error(...) instead.

Changes in version 1.62.0-1 (2016-11-15)
  • Upgraded to Boost 1.62 installed directly from upstream source
  • Added Boost property_tree as requested in #29 by Aydin Demircioglu
  • Added Boost scope_exit as requested in #30 by Kirill Mueller
  • Added Boost atomic which we had informally added since 1.58.0

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or the issue tracker at the GitHubGitHub repo.

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

18 November 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.8: And more goodies

Yesterday the eighth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R where the Windows binary has by now been generated too; the Debian package is on its way as well. This 0.12.8 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, and the 0.12.7 release in September --- making it the twelveth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. While we are keeping with the pattern, we have managed to include quite a lot of nice stuff in this release. None of it is a major feauture, though, and so we have not increased the middle number. Among the changes this release are (once again) much improved exception handling (thanks chiefly to Jim Hester), better large vector support (by Qiang), a number of Sugar extensions (mostly Nathan, Qiang and Dan) and beginnings of new DateVector and DatetimeVectors classes, and other changes detailed below. We plan to properly phase in the new date(time) classes. For now, you have to use a #define such as this one in Rcpp.h which remains commented-out for now. We plan to switch this on as the new default no earlier than twelve months from now. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 843 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by eightyfour packages, or a full ten percent, just since the last release in early September! Again, we are lucky to have such a large group of contributors. Among them, we have invited Nathan Russell to the Rcpp Core team given his consistently excellent pull requests (as well as many outstanding Stackoverflow answers for Rcpp). More details on changes are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.8 (2016-11-16)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • String and vector elements now use extended R_xlen_t indices (Qiang in PR #560)
    • Hashing functions now return unsigned int (Qiang in PR #561)
    • Added static methods eye(), ones(), and zeros() for select matrix types (Nathan Russell in PR #569)
    • The exception call stack is again correctly reported; print methods and tests added too (Jim Hester in PR #582 fixing #579)
    • Variatic macros no longer use a GNU extensions (Nathan in PR #575)
    • Hash index functions were standardized on returning unsigned integers (Also PR #575)
  • Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
    • Added new Sugar functions rowSums(), colSums(), rowMeans(), colMeans() (PR #551 by Nathan Russell fixing #549)
    • Range Sugar now used R_xlen_t type for start/end (PR #568 by Qiang Kou)
    • Defining RCPP_NO_SUGAR no longer breaks the build. (PR #585 by Daniel C. Dillon)
  • Changes in Rcpp unit tests
    • A test for expression vectors was corrected.
    • The constructor test for datetime vectors reflects the new classes which treats Inf correctly (and still as a non-finite value)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes
    • An 'empty' return was corrected (PR #589 fixing issue #588, and with thanks to Duncan Murdoch for the heads-up)
  • Updated Date and Datetime vector classes:
    • The DateVector and DatetimeVector classes were renamed with a prefix old; they are currently typedef'ed to the existing name (#557)
    • New variants newDateVector and newDatetimeVector were added based on NumericVector (also #557, #577, #581, #587)
    • By defining RCPP_NEW_DATE_DATETIME_VECTORS the new classes can activated. We intend to make the new classes the default no sooner than twelve months from this release.
    • The capabilities() function can also be used for presence of this feature

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

16 November 2016

Carl Chenet: Retweet 0.10: Automatically retweet now using regex

Retweet 0.10, a self-hosted Python app to automatically retweet and like tweets from another user-defined Twitter account, was released this November, 17th. With this release Retweet is now able to retweet only if a tweet matches a user-provided regular expression (regex) pattern. This feature was fully provided by Vanekjar, lots of thanks to him! Retweet 0.10 is already in production for Le Journal du hacker, a French-speaking Hacker News-like website, LinuxJobs.fr, a French-speaking job board and this very blog. fiesta What s the purpose of Retweet? Let s face it, it s more and more difficult to communicate about our projects. Even writing an awesome app is not enough any more. If you don t appear on a regular basis on social networks, everybody thinks you quit or that the project is stalled. But what if you already have built an audience on Twitter for, let s say, your personal account. Now you want to automatically retweet and like all tweets from the account of your new project, to push it forward. Sure, you can do it manually, like in the old good 90 s or you can use Retweet! Twitter Out Of The Browser Have a look at my Github account for my other Twitter automation tools: What about you? Do you use tools to automate the management of your Twitter account? Feel free to give me feedback in the comments below.

Bits from Debian: Debian Contributors Survey 2016

The Debian Contributor Survey launched last week! In order to better understand and document who contributes to Debian, we (Mathieu ONeil, Molly de Blanc, and Stefano Zacchiroli) have created this survey to capture the current state of participation in the Debian Project through the lense of common demographics. We hope a general survey will become an annual effort, and that each year there will also be a focus on a specific aspect of the project or community. The 2016 edition contains sections concerning work, employment, and labour issues in order to learn about who is getting paid to work on and with Debian, and how those relationships affect contributions. We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible whether you've submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintain packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-30 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project and employment status. In an effort to reflect our own ideals as well as those of the Debian project, we are using LimeSurvey, an entirely free software survey tool, in an instance of it hosted by the LimeSurvey developers. Survey responses are anonymous, IP and HTTP information are not logged, and all questions are optional. As it is still likely possible to determine who a respondent is based on their answers, results will only be distributed in aggregate form, in a way that does not allow deanonymization. The results of the survey will be analyzed as part of ongoing research work by the organizers. A report discussing the results will be published under a DFSG-free license and distributed to the Debian community as soon as it's ready. The raw, disaggregated answers will not be distributed and will be kept under the responsibility of the organizers. We hope you will fill out the Debian Contributor Survey. The deadline for participation is: 4 December 2016, at 23:59 UTC. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us via email at:

15 November 2016

Antoine Beaupr : The Turris Omnia router: help for the IoT mess?

The Turris Omnia router is not the first FLOSS router out there, but it could well be one of the first open hardware routers to be available. As the crowdfunding campaign is coming to a close, it is worth reflecting on the place of the project in the ecosystem. Beyond that, I got my hardware recently, so I was able to give it a try.

A short introduction to the Omnia project The Turris Omnia Router The Omnia router is a followup project on CZ.NIC's original research project, the Turris. The goal of the project was to identify hostile traffic on end-user networks and develop global responses to those attacks across every monitored device. The Omnia is an extension of the original project: more features were added and data collection is now opt-in. Whereas the original Turris was simply a home router, the new Omnia router includes:
  • 1.6GHz ARM CPU
  • 1-2GB RAM
  • 8GB flash storage
  • 6 Gbit Ethernet ports
  • SFP fiber port
  • 2 Mini-PCI express ports
  • mSATA port
  • 3 MIMO 802.11ac and 2 MIMO 802.11bgn radios and antennas
  • SIM card support for backup connectivity
Some models sold had a larger case to accommodate extra hard drives, turning the Omnia router into a NAS device that could actually serve as a multi-purpose home server. Indeed, it is one of the objectives of the project to make "more than just a router". The NAS model is not currently on sale anymore, but there are plans to bring it back along with LTE modem options and new accessories "to expand Omnia towards home automation". Omnia runs a fork of the OpenWRT distribution called TurrisOS that has been customized to support automated live updates, a simpler web interface, and other extra features. The fork also has patches to the Linux kernel, which is based on Linux 4.4.13 (according to uname -a). It is unclear why those patches are necessary since the ARMv7 Armada 385 CPU has been supported in Linux since at least 4.2-rc1, but it is common for OpenWRT ports to ship patches to the kernel, either to backport missing functionality or perform some optimization. There has been some pressure from backers to petition Turris to "speedup the process of upstreaming Omnia support to OpenWrt". It could be that the team is too busy with delivering the devices already ordered to complete that process at this point. The software is available on the CZ-NIC GitHub repository and the actual Linux patches can be found here and here. CZ.NIC also operates a private GitLab instance where more software is available. There is technically no reason why you wouldn't be able to run your own distribution on the Omnia router: OpenWRT development snapshots should be able to run on the Omnia hardware and some people have installed Debian on Omnia. It may require some customization (e.g. the kernel) to make sure the Omnia hardware is correctly supported. Most people seem to prefer to run TurrisOS because of the extra features. The hardware itself is also free and open for the most part. There is a binary blob needed for the 5GHz wireless card, which seems to be the only proprietary component on the board. The schematics of the device are available through the Omnia wiki, but oddly not in the GitHub repository like the rest of the software.

Hands on I received my own router last week, which is about six months late from the original April 2016 delivery date; it allowed me to do some hands-on testing of the device. The first thing I noticed was a known problem with the antenna connectors: I had to open up the case to screw the fittings tight, otherwise the antennas wouldn't screw in correctly. Once that was done, I simply had to go through the usual process of setting up the router, which consisted of connecting the Omnia to my laptop with an Ethernet cable, connecting the Omnia to an uplink (I hooked it into my existing network), and go through a web wizard. I was pleasantly surprised with the interface: it was smooth and easy to use, but at the same time imposed good security practices on the user. Install wizard performing automatic updates For example, the wizard, once connected to the network, goes through a full system upgrade and will, by default, automatically upgrade itself (including reboots) when new updates become available. Users have to opt-in to the automatic updates, and can chose to automate only the downloading and installation of the updates without having the device reboot on its own. Reboots are also performed during user-specified time frames (by default, Omnia applies kernel updates during the night). I also liked the "skip" button that allowed me to completely bypass the wizard and configure the device myself, through the regular OpenWRT systems (like LuCI or SSH) if I needed to. The Omnia router about to rollback to latest snapshot Notwithstanding the antenna connectors themselves, the hardware is nice. I ordered the black metal case, and I must admit I love the many LED lights in the front. It is especially useful to have color changes in the reset procedure: no more guessing what state the device is in or if I pressed the reset button long enough. The LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce the glare that our electronic devices produce. All this comes at a price, however: at \$250 USD, it is a much higher price tag than common home routers, which typically go for around \$50. Furthermore, it may be difficult to actually get the device, because no orders are being accepted on the Indiegogo site after October 31. The Turris team doesn't actually want to deal with retail sales and has now delegated retail sales to other stores, which are currently limited to European deliveries.

A nice device to help fight off the IoT apocalypse It seems there isn't a week that goes by these days without a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Those attacks are more and more caused by home routers, webcams, and "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices. In that context, the Omnia sets a high bar for how devices should be built but also how they should be operated. Omnia routers are automatically upgraded on a nightly basis and, by default, do not provide telnet or SSH ports to run arbitrary code. There is the password-less wizard that starts up on install, but it forces the user to chose a password in order to complete the configuration. Both the hardware and software of the Omnia are free and open. The automatic update's EULA explicitly states that the software provided by CZ.NIC "will be released under a free software licence" (and it has been, as mentioned earlier). This makes the machine much easier to audit by someone looking for possible flaws, say for example a customs official looking to approve the import in the eventual case where IoT devices end up being regulated. But it also makes the device itself more secure. One of the problems with these kinds of devices is "bit rot": they have known vulnerabilities that are not fixed in a timely manner, if at all. While it would be trivial for an attacker to disable the Omnia's auto-update mechanisms, the point is not to counterattack, but to prevent attacks on known vulnerabilities. The CZ.NIC folks take it a step further and encourage users to actively participate in a monitoring effort to document such attacks. For example, the Omnia can run a honeypot to lure attackers into divulging their presence. The Omnia also runs an elaborate data collection program, where routers report malicious activity to a central server that collects information about traffic flows, blocked packets, bandwidth usage, and activity from a predefined list of malicious addresses. The exact data collected is specified in another EULA that is currently only available to users logged in at the Turris web site. That data can then be turned into tweaked firewall rules to protect the overall network, which the Turris project calls a distributed adaptive firewall. Users need to explicitly opt-in to the monitoring system by registering on a portal using their email address. Turris devices also feature the Majordomo software (not to be confused with the venerable mailing list software) that can also monitor devices in your home and identify hostile traffic, potentially leading users to take responsibility over the actions of their own devices. This, in turn, could lead users to trickle complaints back up to the manufacturers that could change their behavior. It turns out that some companies do care about their reputations and will issue recalls if their devices have significant enough issues. It remains to be seen how effective the latter approach will be, however. In the meantime, the Omnia seems to be an excellent all-around server and router for even the most demanding home or small-office environments that is a great example for future competitors.
Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

13 November 2016

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2016/40-45

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

Dirk Eddelbuettel: pkgKitten 0.1.4: Creating R Packages that purr

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Jackson - dgit in two slides with attitude :)

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

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

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






Andrew Cater: Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge, 13/11/12 - Day 4 post 2

Just watching Lars Wirzenius talking about Qvarn - identity and data protection management on large scale. Compliant with EC data/identity management regulations and concerns.

The room fell silent at 1100 for two minutes - as we did on Friday 11/11/12.
This is remembering the dead, wounded and those affected by the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Inevitably, it also reminded me of friends and colleagues in Debian that are no longer with us: for Espy and so many others before and since, thanks from me - you are well remembered here.

Andrew Cater: Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 1

Just got here, partway into Guus Sliepen's talk about issues with sourceless packages and the DFSG. Lots of problems with, for example, music for games and imagery and also areas where packages autobuild / use generated blobs which are not supplied or are not able to be regenerated.

Checked in by front desk - thanks again to Lisa, to Jo McIntyre and Lucy Wayland who have been very patient waiting for us, very helpful as ever, chasing us at the end of each day to reconcile badges and people and doing all the useful stuff that no one sees.

ARM security folk are still here, obviously, and the building work has stopped for the weekend so we can get in and out of the building more readily. Thanks once again to the ARM staffers who are also Debian-ites and to the ARM management who have to authorise all of this and allow us to use their facilities, buildings and guest WiFi. It's testament to a whole lot of hard work behind the scenes that this all seems seamless and (generally) works so well

12 November 2016

Wouter Verhelst: New Toy: Nikon D7200

Last month, I was abroad with my trusty old camera, but without its SD cards. Since the old camera has an SD only slot, which does not accept SDHC (let alone SDXC) cards, I cannot use it with cards larger than 2GiB. Today, such cards are not being manufactured anymore. So, I found myself with a few options:
  1. Forget about the camera, just don't take any photos. Given the nature of the trip, I did not fancy this option.
  2. Go on eBay or some such, and find a second-hand 2GiB card.
  3. Find a local shop, and buy a new camera body.
While option 2 would have worked, the lack of certain features on my old camera had meant that I'd been wanting to buy a new camera body for a while, but it just hadn't happened yet; so I decided to go with option 3. The Nikon D7200 is the latest model in the Nikon D7xxx series of cameras, a DX-format ("APS-C") camera that is still fairly advanced. Slightly cheaper than the D610, the cheapest full-frame Nikon camera (which I considered for a moment until I realized that two of my three lenses are DX-only lenses), it is packed with a similar amount of features. It can shoot photos at shutter speeds of 1/8000th of a second (twice as fast as my old camera), and its sensor can be set to ISO speeds of up to 102400 (64 times as much as the old one) -- although for the two modes beyond 25600, the sensor is switched to black-and-white only, since the amount of color available in such lighting conditions is very very low already. A camera which is not only ten years more recent than the older one, but also is targeted at a more advanced user profile, took some getting used to at first. For instance, it took a few days until I had tamed the camera's autofocus system, which is much more advanced than the older one, so that it would focus on the things I wanted it to focus on, rather than just whatever object happens to be closest. The camera shoots photos at up to twice the resolution in both dimensions (which combines to it having four times the amount of megapixels as the old body), which is not something I'm unhappy about. Also, it does turn out that a DX camera with a 24 megapixel sensor ends up taking photos with a digital resolution that is much higher than the optical resolution of my lenses, so I don't think more than 24 megapixels is going to be all that useful. The builtin WiFi and NFC communication options are a nice touch, allowing me to use Nikon's app to take photos remotely, and see what's going through the lens while doing so. Additionally, the time-lapse functionality is something I've used already, and which I'm sure I'll be using again in the future. The new camera is definitely a huge step forward from the old one, and while the price over there was a few hundred euros higher than it would have been here, I don't regret buying the new camera. The result is nice, too: DSC_1012 All in all, I'm definitely happy with it.

10 November 2016

Matthew Garrett: Tor, TPMs and service integrity attestation

One of the most powerful (and most scary) features of TPM-based measured boot is the ability for remote systems to request that clients attest to their boot state, allowing the remote system to determine whether the client has booted in the correct state. This involves each component in the boot process writing a hash of the next component into the TPM and logging it. When attestation is requested, the remote site gives the client a nonce and asks for an attestation, the client OS passes the nonce to the TPM and asks it to provide a signed copy of the hashes and the nonce and sends them (and the log) to the remote site. The remoteW site then replays the log to ensure it matches the signed hash values, and can examine the log to determine whether the system is trustworthy (whatever trustworthy means in this context).

When this was first proposed people were (justifiably!) scared that remote services would start refusing to work for users who weren't running (for instance) an approved version of Windows with a verifiable DRM stack. Various practical matters made this impossible. The first was that, until fairly recently, there was no way to demonstrate that the key used to sign the hashes actually came from a TPM[1], so anyone could simply generate a set of valid hashes, sign them with a random key and provide that. The second is that even if you have a signature from a TPM, you have no way of proving that it's from the TPM that the client booted with (you can MITM the request and either pass it to a client that did boot the appropriate OS or to an external TPM that you've plugged into your system after boot and then programmed appropriately). The third is that, well, systems and configurations vary so much that outside very controlled circumstances it's impossible to know what a "legitimate" set of hashes even is.

As a result, so far remote attestation has tended to be restricted to internal deployments. Some enterprises use it as part of their VPN login process, and we've been working on it at CoreOS to enable Kubernetes clusters to verify that workers are in a trustworthy state before running jobs on them. While useful, this isn't terribly exciting for most people. Can we do better?

Remote attestation has generally been thought of in terms of remote systems requiring that clients attest. But there's nothing that requires things to be done in that direction. There's nothing stopping clients from being able to request that a server attest to its state, allowing clients to make informed decisions about whether they should provide confidential data. But the problems that apply to clients apply equally well to servers. Let's work through them in reverse order.We have no idea what expected "good" values areYes, and this is a problem. CoreOS ships with an expected set of good values, and we had general agreement at the Linux Plumbers Conference that other distributions would start looking at what it would take to do the same. But how do we know that those values are themselves trustworthy? In an ideal world this would involve reproducible builds, allowing anybody to grab the source code for the OS, build it locally and verify that they have the same hashes.

Ok. So we're able to verify that the booted OS was good. But how about the services? The rkt container runtime supports measuring each container into the TPM, which means we can verify which container images were started. If container images are also built in such a way that they're reproducible, users can grab the source code, rebuild the container locally and again verify that it has the same hashes. Users can then be sure that the remote site is running the code they're looking at.

Or can they? Not really - a general purpose OS has all kinds of ways to inject code into containers, so an admin could simply replace the binaries inside the container after it's been measured, or ptrace() the server, or modify rkt so it generates correct measurements regardless of the image or, well, there's lots they could do. So a general purpose OS is probably a bad idea here. Instead, let's imagine an immutable OS that does nothing other than bring up networking and then reads a config file that tells it which container images to download and run. This reduces the amount of code that needs to support reproducible builds, making it easier for a client to verify that the source corresponds to the code the remote system is actually running.

Is this sufficient? Eh sadly no. Even if we know the valid values for the entire OS and every container, we don't know the legitimate values for the system firmware. Any modified firmware could tamper with the rest of the trust chain, making it possible for you to get valid OS values even if the OS has been subverted. This isn't a solved problem yet, and really requires hardware vendor support. Let's handwave this for now, or assert that we'll have some sidechannel for distributing valid firmware values.Avoiding TPM MITMingThis one's more interesting. If I ask the server to attest to its state, it can simply pass that through to a TPM running on another system that's running a trusted stack and happily serve me content from a compromised stack. Suboptimal. We need some way to tie the TPM identity and the service identity to each other.

Thankfully, we have one. Tor supports running services in the .onion TLD. The key used to identify the service to the Tor network is also used to create the "hostname" of the system. I wrote a pretty hacky implementation that generates that key on the TPM, tying the service identity to the TPM. You can ask the TPM to prove that it generated a key, and that allows you to tie both the key used to run the Tor service and the key used to sign the attestation hashes to the same TPM. You now know that the attestation values came from the same system that's running the service, and that means you know the TPM hasn't been MITMed.How do you know it's a TPM at all?This is much easier. See [1].


There's still various problems around this, including the fact that we don't have this immutable minimal container OS, that we don't have the infrastructure to ensure that container builds are reproducible, that we don't have any known good firmware values and that we don't have a mechanism for allowing a user to perform any of this validation. But these are all solvable, and it seems like an interesting project.

"Interesting" isn't necessarily the right metric, though. "Useful" is. And I think this is very useful. If I'm about to upload documents to a SecureDrop instance, it seems pretty important that I be able to verify that it is a SecureDrop instance rather than something pretending to be one. This gives us a mechanism.

The next few years seem likely to raise interest in ensuring that people have secure mechanisms to communicate. I'm not emotionally invested in this one, but if people have better ideas about how to solve this problem then this seems like a good time to talk about them.

[1] More modern TPMs have a certificate that chains from the TPM's root key back to the TPM manufacturer, so as long as you trust the TPM manufacturer to have kept control of that you can prove that the signature came from a real TPM

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9 November 2016

Russ Allbery: Some thoughts on the US elections

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

8 November 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.1.0: New features, some fixes

A new release of anytime is now on CRAN following the four releases in September and October. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to POSIXct (or Date) objects -- and does so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page for a few examples. Release 0.1.0 adds several new features. New functions utctime() and utcdate() parse to coordinated universal time (UTC). Several new formats were added. Digit-only formats like 'YYYYMMDD' with or without 'HHMMSS' (or even with fractional secodns 'HHMMSS.ffffff') are supported more thoroughly. Some examples: 
R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("20161107 202122")   ## all digits
[1] "2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST"
R> utctime("2016Nov07 202122")  ## UTC parse example
[1] "2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST"
R>
The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.0 (2016-11-06)
  • New functions utctime() and utcdate() were added to parse input as coordinated universal time; the functionality is also available in anytime() and anydate() via a new argument asUTC (PR #22)
  • New (date)time format for RFC822-alike dates, and expanded existing datetime formats to all support fractional seconds (PR #21)
  • Extended functionality to support not only YYYYMMDD (without a separator, and not covered by Boost) but also with HHMM , HHMMSS and HHMMSS.ffffff (PR #30 fixing issue #29)
  • Extended functionality to support HHMMSS[.ffffff] following other date formats.
  • Documentation and tests have been expanded; typos corrected
  • New (unexported) helper functions setTZ, testOutput, setDebug
  • The testFormat (and testOutput) functions cannot be called under RStudio (PR #27 fixing issue #25).
  • More robust support for non-finite values such as NA, NaN or Inf (Fixing issue #16)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Dirk Eddelbuettel: gettz 0.0.3

A minor release 0.0.3 of gettz arrived on CRAN two days ago. gettz provides a possible fallback in situations where Sys.timezone() fails to determine the system timezone. That can happen when e.g. the file /etc/localtime somehow is not a link into the corresponding file with zoneinfo data in, say, /usr/share/zoneinfo. This release adds a second #ifdef to permit builds on Windows for the previous R release (ie r-oldrel-windows). No new code, or new features. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the gettz page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

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