Search Results: "cas"

22 October 2016

Russell Coker: Another Broken Nexus 5

In late 2013 I bought a Nexus 5 for my wife [1]. It s a good phone and I generally have no complaints about the way it works. In the middle of 2016 I had to make a warranty claim when the original Nexus 5 stopped working [2]. Google s warranty support was ok, the call-back was good but unfortunately there was some confusion which delayed replacement. Once the confusion about the IMEI was resolved the warranty replacement method was to bill my credit card for a replacement phone and reverse the charge if/when they got the original phone back and found it to have a defect covered by warranty. This policy meant that I got a new phone sooner as they didn t need to get the old phone first. This is a huge benefit for defects that don t make the phone unusable as you will never be without a phone. Also if the user determines that the breakage was their fault they can just refrain from sending in the old phone. Today my wife s latest Nexus 5 developed a problem. It turned itself off and went into a reboot loop when connected to the charger. Also one of the clips on the rear case had popped out and other clips popped out when I pushed it back in. It appears (without opening the phone) that the battery may have grown larger (which is a common symptom of battery related problems). The phone is slightly less than 3 years old, so if I had got the extended warranty then I would have got a replacement. Now I m about to buy a Nexus 6P (because the Pixel is ridiculously expensive) which is $700 including postage. Kogan offers me a 3 year warranty for an extra $108. Obviously in retrospect spending an extra $100 would have been a benefit for the Nexus 5. But the first question is whether new phone going to have a probability greater than 1/7 of failing due to something other than user error in years 2 and 3? For an extended warranty to provide any benefit the phone has to have a problem that doesn t occur in the first year (or a problem in a replacement phone after the first phone was replaced). The phone also has to not be lost, stolen, or dropped in a pool by it s owner. While my wife and I have a good record of not losing or breaking phones the probability of it happening isn t zero. The Nexus 5 that just died can be replaced for 2/3 of the original price. The value of the old Nexus 5 to me is less than 2/3 of the original price as buying a newer better phone is the option I want. The value of an old phone to me decreases faster than the replacement cost because I don t want to buy an old phone. For an extended warranty to be a good deal for me I think it would have to cost significantly less than 1/10 of the purchase price due to the low probability of failure in that time period and the decreasing value of a replacement outdated phone. So even though my last choice to skip an extended warranty ended up not paying out I expect that overall I will be financially ahead if I keep self-insuring, and I m sure that I have already saved money by self-insuring all my previous devices.
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21 October 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.0.4: New features and fixes

A brand-new release of anytime is now on CRAN following the three earlier releases since mid-September. 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. With release 0.0.4, we add two nice new features. First, NA, NaN and Inf are now simply skipped (similar to what the corresponding Base R functions do). Second, we now also accept large numeric values so that, _e.g., anytime(as.numeric(Sys.time()) also works, effectively adding another input type. We also have squashed an issue reported by the 'undefined behaviour' sanitizer, and the widened the test for when we try to deploy the gettz package get missing timezone information. A quick example of the new features: 
anydate(c(NA, NaN, Inf, as.numeric(as.POSIXct("2016-09-01 10:11:12"))))
[1] NA           NA           NA           "2016-09-01"
The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.0.4 (2016-10-20)
  • Before converting via lexical_cast, assign to atomic type via template logic to avoid an UBSAN issue (PR #15 closing issue #14)
  • More robust initialization and timezone information gathering.
  • More robust processing of non-finite input also coping with non-finite values such as NA, NaN and Inf which all return NA
  • Allow numeric POSIXt representation on input, also creating proper POSIXct (or, if requested, Date)

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.

20 October 2016

Daniel Pocock: Choosing smartcards, readers and hardware for the Outreachy project

One of the projects proposed for this round of Outreachy is the PGP / PKI Clean Room live image. Interns, and anybody who decides to start using the project (it is already functional for command line users) need to decide about purchasing various pieces of hardware, including a smart card, a smart card reader and a suitably secure computer to run the clean room image. It may also be desirable to purchase some additional accessories, such as a hardware random number generator. If you have any specific suggestions for hardware or can help arrange any donations of hardware for Outreachy interns, please come and join us in the pki-clean-room mailing list or consider adding ideas on the PGP / PKI clean room wiki. Choice of smart card For standard PGP use, the OpenPGP card provides a good choice. For X.509 use cases, such as VPN access, there are a range of choices. I recently obtained one of the SmartCard HSM cards, Card Contact were kind enough to provide me with a free sample. An interesting feature of this card is Elliptic Curve (ECC) support. More potential cards are listed on the OpenSC page here. Choice of card reader The technical factors to consider are most easily explained with a table:
On disk Smartcard reader without PIN-pad Smartcard reader with PIN-pad
Software Free/open Mostly free/open, Proprietary firmware in reader
Key extraction Possible Not generally possible
Passphrase compromise attack vectors Hardware or software keyloggers, phishing, user error (unsophisticated attackers) Exploiting firmware bugs over USB (only sophisticated attackers)
Other factors No hardware Small, USB key form-factor Largest form factor
Some are shortlisted on the GnuPG wiki and there has been recent discussion of that list on the GnuPG-users mailing list. Choice of computer to run the clean room environment There are a wide array of devices to choose from. Here are some principles that come to mind:
  • Prefer devices without any built-in wireless communications interfaces, or where those interfaces can be removed
  • Even better if there is no wired networking either
  • Particularly concerned users may also want to avoid devices with opaque micro-code/firmware
  • Small devices (laptops) that can be stored away easily in a locked cabinet or safe to prevent tampering
  • No hard disks required
  • Having built-in SD card readers or the ability to add them easily
SD cards and SD card readers The SD cards are used to store the master private key, used to sign the certificates/keys on the smart cards. Multiple copies are kept. It is a good idea to use SD cards from different vendors, preferably not manufactured in the same batch, to minimize the risk that they all fail at the same time. For convenience, it would be desirable to use a multi-card reader: although the software experience will be much the same if lots of individual card readers or USB flash drives are used. Other devices One additional idea that comes to mind is a hardware random number generator (TRNG), such as the FST-01. Can you help with ideas or donations? If you have any specific suggestions for hardware or can help arrange any donations of hardware for Outreachy interns, please come and join us in the pki-clean-room mailing list or consider adding ideas on the PGP / PKI clean room wiki.

19 October 2016

Pau Garcia i Quiles: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2017 all for Participation

FOSDEM is one of the largest (5,000+ hackers!) gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). Once again, one of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of distributing a desktop application with snap vs flatpak, or as general as using HTML5 technologies to develop native applications. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2016 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17 To submit your talk, click on Create Event , then make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 5th 2016. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4 & 5 February 2017 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 5th 2017. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 11th 2016. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. In the Submission notes field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-By-SA-4.0 or CC-By-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example:
If my presentation is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, <NAME>.
If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2017 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops: If you want to join the team, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Gammu 1.37.90

Yesterday Gammu 1.37.90 has been released. This release brings quite a lot of changes and it's for testing purposes. Hopefully stable 1.38.0 will follow soon as soon as I won't get negative feedback on the changes. Besides code changes, there is one news for Windows users - there is Windows binary coming with the release. This was possible to automate thanks to AppVeyor, who does provide CI service where you can download built artifacts. Without this, I'd not be able to do make this as I don't have single Windows computer :-). Full list of changes: Would you like to see more features in Gammu? You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt or by direct donation.

Filed under: Debian English Gammu 0 comments

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 77 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux: Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

17 October 2016

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: nftables in Debian Stretch

Debian - Netfilter The next Debian stable release is codenamed Stretch, which I would expect to be released in less than a year. The Netfilter Project has been developing nftables for years now, and the status of the framework has been improved to a good point: it s ready for wide usage and adoption, even in high-demand production environments. The last released version of nft was 0.6, and the Debian package was updated just a day after Netfilter announced it. With the 0.6 version the software framework reached a good state of maturity, and I myself encourage users to migrate from iptables to nftables. In case you don t know about nftables yet, here is a quick reference: To run nftables in Debian Stretch you need several components:
  1. nft: the command line interface
  2. libnftnl: the nftables-netlink library
  3. linux kernel: a least 4.7 is recommended
A simple aptitude run will put your system ready to go, out of the box, with nftables: 
root@debian:~# aptitude install nftables
Once installed, you can start using the nft command: 
root@debian:~# nft list ruleset
A good starting point is to copy a simple workstation firewall configuration: 
root@debian:~# cp /usr/share/doc/nftables/examples/syntax/workstation /etc/nftables.conf
And load it: 
root@debian:~# nft -f /etc/nftables.conf
Your nftables ruleset is now firewalling your network: 
root@debian:~# nft list ruleset
table inet filter  
        chain input  
                type filter hook input priority 0;
                iif lo accept
                ct state established,related accept
                ip6 nexthdr icmpv6 icmpv6 type   nd-neighbor-solicit,  nd-router-advert, nd-neighbor-advert   accept
                counter drop
Several examples can be found at /usr/share/doc/nftables/examples/. A simple systemd service is included to load your ruleset at boot time, which is disabled by default. If you are running Debian Jessie and want to give a try, you can use nftables from jessie-backports. If you want to migrate your ruleset from iptables to nftables, good news. There are some tools in place to help in the task of translating from iptables to nftables, but that doesn t belong to this post :-) nft The nano editor includes nft syntax highlighting. What are you waiting for to use nftables?

Russell Coker: Improving Memory

I ve just attended a lecture about improving memory, mostly about mnemonic techniques. I m not against learning techniques to improve memory and I think it s good to teach kids a variety of things many of which won t be needed when they are younger as you never know which kids will need various skills. But I disagree with the assertion that we are losing valuable skills due to digital amnesia . Nowadays we have programs to check spelling so we can avoid the effort of remembering to spell difficult words like mnemonic, calendar apps on our phones that link to addresses and phone numbers, and the ability to Google the world s knowledge from the bathroom. So the question is, what do we need to remember? For remembering phone numbers it seems that all we need is to remember numbers that we might call in the event of a mobile phone being lost or running out of battery charge. That would be a close friend or relative and maybe a taxi company (and 13CABS isn t difficult to remember). Remembering addresses (street numbers etc) doesn t seem very useful in any situation. Remembering the way to get to a place is useful and it seems to me that the way the navigation programs operate works against this. To remember a route you would want to travel the same way on multiple occasions and use a relatively simple route. The way that Google maps tends to give the more confusing routes (IE routes varying by the day and routes which take all shortcuts) works against this. I think that spending time improving memory skills is useful, but it will either take time away from learning other skills that are more useful to most people nowadays or take time away from leisure activities. If improving memory skills is fun for you then it s probably better than most hobbies (it s cheap and provides some minor benefits in life). When I was in primary school it was considered important to make kids memorise their times tables . I m sure that memorising the multiplication of all numbers less than 13 is useful to some people, but I never felt a need to do it. When I was young I could multiply any pair of 2 digit numbers as quickly as most kids could remember the result. The big difference was that most kids needed a calculator to multiply any number by 13 which is a significant disadvantage. What We Must Memorise Nowadays the biggest memory issue is with passwords (the Correct Horse Battery Staple XKCD comic is worth reading [1]). Teaching mnemonic techniques for the purpose of memorising passwords would probably be a good idea and would probably get more interest from the audience. One interesting corner-case of passwords is ATM PIN numbers. The Wikipedia page about PIN numbers states that 4-12 digits can be used for PINs [2]. The 4 digit PIN was initially chosen because John Adrian Shepherd-Barron (who is credited with inventing the ATM) was convinced by his wife that 6 digits would be too difficult to memorise. The fact that hardly any banks outside Switzerland use more than 4 digits suggests that Mrs Shepherd-Barron had a point. The fact that this was decided in the 60 s proves that it s not digital amnesia . We also have to memorise how to use various supposedly user-friendly programs. If you observe an iPhone or Mac being used by someone who hasn t used one before it becomes obvious that they really aren t so user friendly and users need to memorise many operations. This is not a criticism of Apple, some tasks are inherently complex and require some complexity of the user interface. The limitations of the basic UI facilities become more obvious when there are operations like palm-swiping the screen for a screen-shot and a double-tap plus drag for a 1 finger zoom on Android. What else do we need to memorise?
Related posts:
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14 October 2016

Antoine Beaupr : Managing good bug reports

Bug reporting is an art form that is too often neglected in software projects. Bug reports allow contributors to participate without deep technical knowledge and at the same time provide a crucial space for developers to be made aware of issues with their software that they could not have foreseen or found themselves, for lack of resources, variety or imagination.

Prior art Unfortunately, there are rarely good guidelines for submitting bug reports. Historically, people have pointed towards How to report bugs effectively or How to ask questions the smart way. While those guides can be useful for motivated people and may seem attractive references for project managers, they suffer from serious issues:
  • they are written by technical people, for non-technical people
  • as a result, they have a deeply condescending attitude such as calling people "stupid" or various animal names like "mongoose"
  • they are also very technical themselves: one starts with a copyright notice and a changelog, the other uses magic words like "Core dumps" and $Id$
  • they are too long: sgtatham's is about 3600 words long, esr's is even longer at about 11800 words. those texts will take about 20 to 60 minutes to read by an average reader, according to research
Individual projects have their own guides as well. Linux has the REPORTING_BUGS file that is a much shorter 1200 that can be read under 5 minutes, provided that you can understand the topic at hand. Interestingly, that guide refers to both esr's and sgtatham's guidelines, which means, in the degenerate case where the user hasn't had the "privilege" of reading esr's prose already, they will have an extra hour and a half of reading to do to have honestly followed the guidelines before reporting the bug. I often find good documentation in the Tails project. Their bug reporting guidelines are easily accessible and quick to read, although they still might be too technical. It could be argued that you need to get technical at some point to get that information out, of course. In the Monkeysign project, I have started a bug reporting guide that doesn't yet address all those issues. I am considering writing a new guide, but I figured I would look at other people's work and get feedback before writing my own standard.

What's the point? Why have those documents been written? Are people really expected to read them before seeking help? It seems to me unlikely that someone would:
  1. be motivated enough to do something about a broken part of their computer
  2. figure out they can do something about it
  3. read a fifteen thousand words novel about how to report a bug...
  4. just to finally write a 20-line bug report that has no warranty of support attached to it
And if I would be a paying customer, I wouldn't want to be forced to waste my time reading that prose either: it's your job to help me fix your broken things, not the reverse. As someone doing consulting these days: I totally understand: it's not you, the user, it's us, the developers, that have a problem. We have been socialized through computers, and it makes us weird and obtuse, but that's no excuse, and we need to clean up our act. Furthermore, it's surprising how often we get (and make!) bug reports that can be difficult to use. The Monkeysign project is very "technical" and I have expected that the bug reports I would get would be well written, with ways to reproduce and so on, but it happened that I received bug reports that were all over the place, didn't have any ways of reproducing or were simply incomplete. Those three bug reports were filed by people that I know to be very technically capable: one is a fellow Debian developer, the second had filed a good bug report 5 days before, and the third one is a contributor that sent good patches before. In all three cases, they knew what they were doing. Those three people probably read the guidelines mentioned in the past. They may have even read the Monkeysign bug reporting guidelines as well. I can only explain those bug reports by the lack of time: people thought the issue was obvious, that it would get fixed rapidly because, obviously, something is broken. We need a better way.

The takeaway What are those guides trying to tell us?
  1. ask questions in the right place
  2. search for similar questions and issues before reporting the bug
  3. try to make the developers reproduce the issues
  4. failing that, try to describe the issue as well as you can
  5. write clearly, be specific and verbose yet concise
There are obviously contradictions in there, like sgtatham telling us to be verbose and esr tells us to, basically, not be verbose. There is definitely a tension in there, and there are many, many more details about how great bug reports can be if done properly. I tend towards the side of terseness in our descriptions: people that will know how to be concise will be, people that don't will most likely not learn by reading a 12 000 words novel that, in itself, didn't manage to be parsimonious. But I am willing to allow for verbosity in bug reports: I prefer too many details instead of missing a key bit of information.

Issue trackers Step 1 is our job: we should send people in the right place, and give them the right tools. Monkeysign used to manage bugs with bugs-everywhere and this turned out to be a terrible idea: you had to understand git and bugs-everywhere to file any bug reports. As a result, there were exactly zero bug reports filed by non-developers during the whole time BE was used, although some bugs were filed in the Debian Bugtracker. So have a good bug tracker. A mailing list or email address is not a good bug tracker: you lose track of old issues, and it's hard for newcomers to search the archives. It does have the advantage of having a unified interface for the support forum and bug tracking, however. Redmine, Gitlab, Github and others are all decent-enough bug trackers. The key point is that the issue tracker should be publicly available, and users should be able to register easily to file new issues. You should also be able to mass-edit tickets and users should be able to discover the tracker's features easily. I am sorry to say that the Debian BTS somewhat falls short on those two features. Step 2 is a shared responsibility: there should be an easy way to search for issues, and we should help the user looking for similar issues. Stackexchange sites do an excellent job at this, by automatically searching for similar questions while you write your question, suggesting similar ones in an attempt to weed out duplicates. Duplicates still happen, but they can then clearly be marked and linked with a distinct mechanism. Most bug trackers do not offer such high level functionality, but should, so I feel the fault lies more on "our" end than at the user's end.

Reproducing the environment Step 3 and 4 are more or less the user's responsibility. We can detail in our documentation how to clearly share the environment where we reproduced the bug, for example, but in the end, the user decides if they want to share that information or not. In Monkeysign, I have finally implemented joeyh's suggestion of shipping the test suite with the program. I can now tell people to run the test suite in their environment to see if this is a regression that is specific to their environment - so a known bug, in a way - or a novel bug for which I can look at writing a new unit test. I also include way more information about the environment in the --version output, an idea I brought forward in the borg project to ease debugging. That way, people can just send the output of monkeysign --test and monkeysign --version, and I have a very good overview of what is happening on their end. Of course, Monkeysign also supports the usual --verbose and --debug flag that users should enable when reproducing issues. Another idea is to report bugs directly from the application. We have all seen Firefox or other software have automatic bug reporting tools, but somehow those seem unsatisfactory for a user: we have no feedback of where the report goes, if it's followed up on. It is useful for larger project to get statistical data, but not so useful for users in the short term. Monkeysign tries to handle exceptions in the code in a graceful way, but could do better. We use a small library to handle exceptions, but that library has since then been improved to directly file bugs against the Github project. This assumes the user is logged into Github, but it is nice to pre-populate bug reports with the relevant information up front.

Issue templates In the meantime, to make sure people provide enough information, I have now moved a lot of the bug reporting guidelines to a separate issue template. That issue template is available through the issue creation form now, although it is not enabled by default, a weird limitation of Gitlab. Issue templates are available in Gitlab and Github. Issue templates somewhat force users in a straight jacket: there is already something to structure their bug report. Those could be distinct form elements that had to be filled in, but I like the flexibility of the template, and the possibility for users to just escape the formalism and just plead for help in their own way.

Issue guidelines In the end, I opted for a short few paragraphs in the style of the Tails documentation, including a reference to sgtatham, as an optional future reference:
  • Before you report a new bug, review the existing issues in the online issue tracker and the Debian BTS for Monkeysign to make sure the bug has not already been reported elsewhere.
  • The first aim of a bug report is to tell the developers exactly how to reproduce the failure, so try to reproduce the issue yourself and describe how you did that.
  • If that is not possible, try to describe what went wrong in detail. Write down the error messages, especially if they have numbers.
  • Take the necessary time to write clearly and precisely. Say what you mean, and make sure it cannot be misinterpreted.
  • Include the output of monkeysign --test, monkeysign --version and monkeysign --debug in your bug reports. See the issue template for more details about what to include in bug reports.
If you wish to read more about issues regarding communication in bug reports, you can read How to Report Bugs Effectively, which takes around 20 to 30 minutes.
Unfortunately, short of rewriting sgtatham's guide, I do not feel there is much more we can do as a general guide. I find esr's guide to be too verbose and commanding, so sgtatham it will be for now.

The prose and literacy In the end, there is a fundamental issue with reporting bugs: it assumes our users are literate and capable of writing amazing prose that we will enjoy reading as the last J.K. Rowling novel (if you're into that kind of thing). It's just an unreasonable expectation: some of your users don't even speak the same language as you, let alone read or write it. This makes for challenging collaboration, to say the least. This is where automated reporting makes sense: it doesn't require user's intervention, and the communication is mediated by machines without human intervention and their pesky culture. But we should, as maintainers, "be liberal in what we accept and conservative in what we send". Be tolerant, and help your users in fixing their issues. It's what you are there for, after all. And in the end, we all fail the same way. In an attempt to improve the situation on bug reporting guides, I seem to have myself written a 2000 short story that will have taken up a hopefully pleasant 10 minutes of your time at minimum. Hopefully I will have succeeded at being clear, specific, verbose and concise all at once and look forward to your feedback on how to improve our bug reporting culture.

Jonathan Dowland: Hi-Fi Furniture

sadly obsolete sadly obsolete
For the last four years or so, I've had my Hi-Fi and the vast majority of my vinyl collection stored in a self-contained, mildly-customized Ikea unit. Since moving house this has been in my dining room which we have always referred to as the "play room", since we have a second dining room in which we actually dine. The intention for the play room was for it to be the room within which all our future children would have their toys kept, in an attempt to keep the living room from being overrun with plastic. The time has thus come for my Hi-Fi to come out of there, so we've moved it to our living room. Unfortunately, there's not enough room in the living room for the Ikea unit: I need something narrower for the space available.
via IkeaHackers.net via IkeaHackers.net
In the spirit of my original hack, I started looking at what others might have achieved with Ikea components. There are some great examples of open-style units built out of the (extremely cheap) Lack coffee tables, such as this ikeahackers article, but I'd prefer something more enclosed. One problem I've had with the Expedit unit was my cat trying to scratch the records. I ended up putting framed records at the front to cover the spines of the records within. If I were keeping the unit, I'd look at fitting hinges (another ikeahackers article) Asides from hacked Ikea stuff, there are a few companies offering traditional enclosed Hi Fi cabinets. I'm going to struggle to fit both the equipment and a subset of records into these, so I might have to look at storing them separately. In some ways that makes life easier: the records could go into a 1x4 Ikea KALLAX unit, leaving the amp and deck to home somewhere. Perhaps I could look at a bigger unit for under the TV. My parents have a nice Hi-Fi unit that pretends to be a chest of drawers. I'm fairly sure my Dad custom-built it, as it has a hinged top to provide access to the turntable and I haven't seen anything like that on the market. That brings me onto thinking about other AV things I'd like to achieve in the living room. I've always been interested in exploring surround sound, but my initial attempt in my prior flat did not go well, either because the room was not terribly suited accoustically, or because the Pioneer unit I bought was rubbish, or both. It seems that there aren't really AV receivers which are designed to satisfy both people wanting to use them in a Hi-Fi and a home cinema setting. I could stick to stereo and run the TV into my existing (or a new) amplifier, subject to some logistics around wiring. A previous house owner ran some phono cables under the hard-wood flooring from the TV alcove to the opposite side of the fire place, which might give me some options. There's also the world of wireless audio, Sonos etcetera. Realistically the majority of my music is digital nowadays, and it would be good to be able to listen to it conveniently in the house. I've heard good reports on the entry level Sonos stuff, but they seem to be Mono, and even the more high-end ones with lots of drivers have very small separation. I did buy a Chromecast Audio on a whim recently, but I haven't looked at it much yet: perhaps that's part of the solution. So, lots of stuff in the melting pot to figure out here!

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: motranslator 2.0

Yesterday, the motranslator 2.0 has been released. As the version change suggests there are some important changes under the hood. Full list of changes: As you can see, yesterday announced SimpleMath is not used in the end and I've moved to use existing library. Somehow I misunderstood library description and I thought that it works as PHP, what would be problem for us (or would bring need to add parenthesis around ternary operator as we did with eval()). But this is not the case and ternary operator behaves sane in ExpressionLanguage, so we're good too use it. Anyway if you were using MoTranslator, it might be good idea to upgrade and check if API changes affect you.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin 0 comments

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: motranslator 2.0

Yesterday, the motranslator 2.0 has been released. As the version change suggests there are some important changes under the hood. Full list of changes: As you can see, yesterday announced SimpleMath is not used in the end and I've moved to use existing library. Somehow I misunderstood library description and I thought that it works as PHP, what would be problem for us (or would bring need to add parenthesis around ternary operator as we did with eval()). But this is not the case and ternary operator behaves sane in ExpressionLanguage, so we're good too use it. Anyway if you were using MoTranslator, it might be good idea to upgrade and check if API changes affect you.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin 0 comments

13 October 2016

Wouter Verhelst: Webserver certificate authentication with intermediate CAs

Authenticating HTTPS clients using TLS certificates has long been very easy to do. The hardest part, in fact, is to create a PKI infrastructure robust enough so that compromised (or otherwise no longer desirable) certificates cannot be used anymore. While setting that up can be fairly involved, it's all pretty standard practice these days. But authentication using a private CA is laughably easy. With apache, you just do something like: 
SSLCACertificateFile /path/to/ca-certificate.pem
SSLVerifyClient require
...and you're done. With the above two lines, apache will send a CertificateRequest message to the client, prompting the client to search its local certificate store for certificates signed by the CA(s) in the ca-certificate.pem file, and using the certificate thus found to authenticate against the server. This works perfectly fine for setting up authentication for a handful of users. It will even work fine for a few thousands of users. But what if you're trying to set up website certificate authentication for millions of users? Well, in that case, storing everything in a single CA just doesn't work, and you'll need intermediate CAs to make things not fall flat on their face. Unfortunately, the standard does not state what should happen when a client certificate is signed by an intermediate certificate, and the distinguished name(s) in the CertificateRequest message are those of the certificate(s) at the top of the chain rather than the intermediates. Previously, browsers would not just send out the client certificate, but also send along the certificate that it knew to have signed that client certificate, and so on until it found a self-signed certificate. With that, the server would see a chain of certificates that it could verify against the root certificates in its local trust store, and certificate verification would succeed. It would appear that browsers are currently changing this behaviour, however. With the switch to BoringSSL, Google Chrome on the GNU/Linux platform no longer sent the signing certificates, and instead only sends the leaf certificate that it wants to use for certificate authentication. In the bug report, Ryan Sleevi explains that while the change was premature, the long term plans are for this to be the behaviour not just on GNU/Linux, but on Windows and macOS too. Meanwhile, the issue has been resolved for Chrome 54 (due to be released), but there's no saying for how long. As if that was not enough, the new version of Safari as shipped with macOS 10.12 has also stopped sending intermediate certificates, and expects the web server to be happy with just receiving the leaf certificates. So, I guess it's safe to say that when you want to authenticate a client in a multi-level hierarchical CA environment, you cannot just hand the webserver a list of root certificates and expect things to work anymore; you'll have to hand it the intermediary certificates as well. To do so, you need to modify the SSLCACertificateFile parameter in apache configuration so that it not only contains the root certificate, but all the intermediate certificates as well. If your list of intermediate certificates is rather long, it may improve performance to use SSLCACertificatePath and the c_rehash tool to create a hashed directory with certificates rather than a PEM file, but in essense, that should work. While this works, the problem with doing so is that now the DNs of all the intermediate certificates are sent along with the CertificateRequest message to the client, which (again, if your list of intermediate certificates is rather long) may result in performance issues. The fix for that is fairly easy: add a line like 
SSLCADNRequestFile /path/to/root-certificates.pem
where the file root-certificates.pem contains the root certificates only. This file will tell the webserver which certificates should be announced in the CertificateRequest message, but the SSLCACertificateFile (or SSLCACertificatePath) configuration item will still be used for actual verification of the certificates in question. Note though that the root certificates apparently also seem to need to be available in the SSLCACertificatePath or SSLCACertificateFile configuration; if you do not do so, then authentication seems to fail, although I haven't yet found why. I've set up a test page for all of those "millions" of certificates, and it seems to work for me. I've you're trying to use one of those millions of certificates against your own webserver or have a similar situation with a different set of certificates, you might want to make the above changes, too.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Announcing SimpleMath

For quite some time we've been relying on using eval() function in phpMyAdmin in two places. One of them is gettext library, where we have to evaluate plural forms and second of them is MySQL configuration advisor, which does it's suggestions based on text file (the original idea was to make this file shared with other tools, but it never really worked out). Using eval() in PHP is something what is better to avoid, but we were using it on data we ship, so it was considered safe. On the other side, there are hostings which deny using eval() altogether (as many of exploits are using this function), so it's better to avoid that. I've been looking for options for replacing eval() in motranslator (library we use for handling Gettext MO files) for quite some time, but never found library which would support all operators needed in Gettext plural formulas. Yesterday I finally came to conclusion that writing own library to do this is best approach. This way it can in future extended to work with Advisor as well. Also we can make it pretty lightweight without additional dependencies (what was problem in some existing libraries I've found). To make the story short, this is how SimpleMath was born. As of now, it has grown to version 0.2 (you can use Packagist to install it). For now it's really simple and it can be probably confused by various strange inputs, but it seems for work pretty well for our case. Currently supported features: Maybe it will be usable for somebody else as well, but even if not, it's the way for us to get rid of using eval() in our codebase. Update It seems that Symfony ExpressionLanguage Component is doing pretty much same, but more flexible and faster, so SimpleMath will be probably dead soon and we will switch to using Symphony component.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin 4 comments

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Announcing SimpleMath

For quite some time we've been relying on using eval() function in phpMyAdmin in two places. One of them is gettext library, where we have to evaluate plural forms and second of them is MySQL configuration advisor, which does it's suggestions based on text file (the original idea was to make this file shared with other tools, but it never really worked out). Using eval() in PHP is something what is better to avoid, but we were using it on data we ship, so it was considered safe. On the other side, there are hostings which deny using eval() altogether (as many of exploits are using this function), so it's better to avoid that. I've been looking for options for replacing eval() in motranslator (library we use for handling Gettext MO files) for quite some time, but never found library which would support all operators needed in Gettext plural formulas. Yesterday I finally came to conclusion that writing own library to do this is best approach. This way it can in future extended to work with Advisor as well. Also we can make it pretty lightweight without additional dependencies (what was problem in some existing libraries I've found). To make the story short, this is how SimpleMath was born. As of now, it has grown to version 0.2 (you can use Packagist to install it). For now it's really simple and it can be probably confused by various strange inputs, but it seems for work pretty well for our case. Currently supported features: Maybe it will be usable for somebody else as well, but even if not, it's the way for us to get rid of using eval() in our codebase. Update It seems that Symfony ExpressionLanguage Component is doing pretty much same, but more flexible and faster, so SimpleMath will be probably dead soon and we will switch to using Symphony component.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin 4 comments

Norbert Preining: John Oliver and news in Japan

Yesterday evening I was enjoying several features by John Oliver, mostly about the upcoming election in the US (Scandals), but also one of the best features I have heard from him on Guant namo. It sadly reminded me of the completely different landscape in Japan.
news-around-the-world Not only since the unprecedented warning to close down biased broadcasters by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, but ever since Abe is building up his more and more totalitarian control over the country, the freedom of press has been on shaky grounds. Even worse, newspapers and TV outlets restrict themselves to save topics, which means: stupid talk shows, food, and above all praise of Japan and how good, how lovely, how great it is (Make Japan great again!). All this despite the fact that there would be a lot to rumble upon: covering up the truth around Fukushima, mountains of scandals around Olympia 2020, police brutality in Okinawa, the list is long. Only thinking about having something remotely similar to John Oliver on TV in Japan is as unthinkable as Trump donating all his money to a charity for immigrants. Sure enough, John Oliver is one great example out of tons of rubbish in the US, sure enough, but this one example is missing in Japan. What remains are Japanese media stations that crawl into the *** of the government, what a sad state. (Photo credit partially due to ber Arschkriecher)

11 October 2016

Vincent Sanders: The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

In December 2015 I saw the kickstarter for the Pine64. The project seemed to have a viable hardware design and after my experience with the hikey I decided it could not be a great deal worse.

Pine64 board in my case design
The system I acquired comprises of:
Hardware based kickstarter projects are susceptible to several issues and the usual suspects occurred causing delays:
My personal view is that PINE 64 inc. handled it pretty well, much better than several other projects I have backed and as my Norman Douglas quotation suggests I think they have gained some wisdom from this.

I received my hardware at the beginning of April only a couple of months after their initial estimated shipping date which as these things go is not a huge delay. I understand some people who had slightly more complex orders were just receiving their orders in late June which is perhaps unfortunate but still well within kickstarter project norms.

As an aside: I fear that many people simply misunderstand the crowdfunding model for hardware projects and fail to understand that they are not buying a finished product, on the other side of the debate I think many projects need to learn expectation management much better than they do. Hyping the product to get interest is obviously the point of the crowdfunding platform, but over promising and under delivering always causes unhappy customers.

Pine64 board dimensions
Despite the delays in production and shipping the information available for the board was (and sadly remains) inadequate. As usual I wanted to case my board and there were no useful dimension drawings so I had to make my own from direct measurements together with a STL 3D model.

Also a mental sigh for "yet another poor form factor decision" so another special case size and design. After putting together a design and fabricating with the laser cutter I moved on to the software.

Once more this is where, once again, the story turns bleak. We find a very pretty website but no obvious link to the software (hint scroll to the bottom and find the "support" wiki link) once you find the wiki you will eventually discover that the provided software is either an Android 5.1.1 image (which failed to start on my board) or relies on some random guy from the forums who has put together his own OS images using a hacked up Allwinner Board Support Package (BSP) kernel.

Now please do not misunderstand me, I think the work by Simon Eisenmann (longsleep) to get a working kernel and Lenny Raposo to get viable OS images is outstanding and useful. I just feel that Allwinner and vendors like Pine64 Inc. should have provided something much, much better than they have. Even the efforts to get mainline support for this hardware are all completely volunteer community efforts and are are making slow progress as a result.

Assuming I wanted to run a useful OS on this hardware and not just use it as a modern work of art I installed a basic Debian arm64 using Lenny Raposo's pine64 pro site downloads. I was going to use the system for compiling and builds so used the "Debian Base" image to get a minimal setup. After generating unique ssh keys, renaming the default user and checking all the passwords and permissions I convinced myself the system was reasonably trustworthy.

The standard Debian Jessie OS runs as expected with few surprises. The main concern I have is that there are a number of unpackaged scripts installed (prefixed with pine64_) which perform several operations from reporting system health (using sysfs entries) to upgrading the kernel and bootloader.

While I understand these scripts have been provided for the novice users to reduce support burden, doing even more of the vendors job, I would much rather have had proper packages for these scripts, kernel and bootloader which apt could manage. This would have reduced image creation to a simple debootstrap giving much greater confidence in the images provenance.

The 3.10 based kernel is three years old at the time of writing and lacks a great number of features for the aarch64 ARM processors introduced since release. However I was pleasantly surprised at kvm apparently being available.

# dmesg grep -i kvm
[    7.592896] kvm [1]: Using HYP init bounce page @b87c4000
[    7.593361] kvm [1]: interrupt-controller@1c84000 IRQ25
[    7.593778] kvm [1]: timer IRQ27
[    7.593801] kvm [1]: Hyp mode initialized successfully

I installed the libvirt packages (and hence all their dependencies like qemu) and created a bridge ready for the virtual machines.

I needed access to storage for the host disc images and while I could have gone the route of using USB attached SATA as with the hikey I decided to try and use network attached storage instead. Initially I investigated iSCSI but it seems the Linux target (iSCSI uses initiator for client and target for server) support is either old, broken or unpackaged.

I turned to network block device (nbd) which is packaged and seems to have reasonable stability out of the box on modern distributions. This appeared to work well, indeed over the gigabit Ethernet interface I managed to get a sustained 40 megabytes a second read and write rate in basic testing. This is better performance than a USB 2.0 attached SSD on the hikey

I fired up the guest and perhaps I should have known better than to expect a 3.10 vendor kernel to cope. The immediate hard crashes despite tuning many variables convinced me that virtualisation was not viable with this kernel.

So abandoning that approach I attempted to run the CI workload directly on the system. To my dismay this also proved problematic. The processor has the bad habit of throttling due to thermal issues (despite a substantial heatsink) and because the storage is network attached throttling the CPU also massively impacts I/O.

The limitations meant that the workload caused the system to move between high performance and almost no progress on a roughly ten second cycle. This caused a simple NetSurf recompile CI job to take over fifteen minutes. For comparison the same task takes the armhf builder (CubieTruck) four minutes and a 64 bit x86 build which takes around a minute.

If the workload is tuned to a single core which does not trip thermal throttling the build took seven minutes. which is almost identical to the existing single core virtual machine instance running on the hikey.

In conclusion the Pine64 is an interesting bit of hardware with fatally flawed software offering. Without Simon and Lenny providing their builds to the community the device would be practically useless rather than just performing poorly. There appears to have been no progress whatsoever on the software offering from Pine64 in the six months since I received the device and no prospect of mainline Allwinner support for the SoC either.

Effectively I have spent around 50usd (40 for the board and 10 for the enclosure) on a failed experiment. Perhaps in the future the software will improve sufficiently for it to become useful but I do not hold out much hope that this will come from Pine64 themselves.

10 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 76 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 2 and Saturday October 8 2016: Media coverage Events Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 31 package reviews have been added, 27 have been updated and over 20 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been addded: 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen & Vagrant Cascadian and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone

In July I wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working without the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup. The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my setup, identity and keys. The reason behind this major mess was running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have started storing everything in userdata/ in git, to be able to roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare time. I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send. I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and thus try to keep the number of support requests down. Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly, making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going now. I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly. So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:
  1. First, install required packages to get the source code and the browser you need. Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I know, so you need to install it. 
    apt install git tor chromium
git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
  2. Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch block below.
  3. Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using pwd /run-signal-app).
  4. Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the verification code and enter it into the form field and press 'Register'. Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.
  5. You can now use Signal to contact others. Note, new contacts do not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is no way to assign names to Contacts. There is also no way to create or update chat groups. I suspect this is because the web app do not have a associated contact database.
I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon). See for example the LibreSignal issue tracker for a thread documenting the authors view on these issues. But the network effect is strong in this case, and several of the people I want to communicate with already use Signal. Perhaps we can all move to Ring once it work on my laptop? It already work on Windows and Android, and is included in Debian and Ubuntu, but not working on Debian Stable. Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it working. It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout, make registration easier and add the shell wrapper: 
cd Signal-Desktop; cat <<EOF   patch -p1
diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
--- a/js/background.js
+++ b/js/background.js
@@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
          );
      );
 
-    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
+    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
     var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
-    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
+    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
     var messageReceiver;
     window.getSocketStatus = function()  
         if (messageReceiver)  
diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
--- a/js/expire.js
+++ b/js/expire.js
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ;(function()  
     'use strict';
-    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
+    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
 
     window.extension = window.extension    ;
 
diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
--- a/js/views/install_view.js
+++ b/js/views/install_view.js
@@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
             return  
                 'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
                 'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
-                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
+                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
+                'click .callreg': function()   extension.install('standalone')  ,
              ;
          ,
         clearQR: function()  
diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
--- a/options.html
+++ b/options.html
@@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
         <div class='nav'>
           <h1>  installWelcome  </h1>
           <p>  installTagline  </p>
-          <div> <a class='button step2'>  installGetStartedButton  </a> </div>
+          <div> <a class='button step2'>  installGetStartedButton  </a>
+	    <br> <a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone</a>
+
+	  </div>
           <span class='dot step1 selected'></span>
           <span class='dot step2'></span>
           <span class='dot step3'></span>
--- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
+++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+#!/bin/sh
+set -e
+cd $(dirname $0)
+mkdir -p userdata
+userdata=" pwd /userdata"
+if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
+    (cd $userdata && git init)
+fi
+(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status."   true)
+exec chromium \
+  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
+  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app= pwd 
EOF
chmod a+rx run-signal-app
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

9 October 2016

Laura Arjona Reina: New phone: Samsung Galaxy S III phone with Replicant

Thanks to the Bazaar effort of The Guardian Project, I ve been offered a phone to test F-Droid and other free software apps for Android. I accepted the offer, and chose a Samsung Galaxy S III phone with Replicant 4.2.2, installed and shipped by Tehnoetic.
I m using it now as my main phone, and since it uses Android 4.x I m able to install more modern apps than in my old Galaxy Ace (which remains usable with CyanongenMod 7.2 (Android 2.3.7)).
My plans with this new phone are:
  • Test Replicant and free software for Android on it
  • Get more involved in translations of Android apps
  • Get more involved in the F-Droid community
  • Keep an eye on Android tools in Debian
  • Post here in my blog articles about what I ve been doing (and of course report issues and contributions upstream)
Migration to the new phone
I ve migrated my stuff from the old phone to this one. Some notes:
  • Wrote down my list of apps
  • Used Slight Backup for contacts, call logs and messages
  • Periodical has its own backup tool
  • Whatsapp has its own backup tool
  • Exported settings in K-9 Mail
  • Exported Kontalk GPG key
  • Simply Do has its own backup tool
  • I don t use calendars in the phone so I didn t migrate any events (I have Offline Calendar to ad temporary notes/reminders, but that s all)
I moved the SIM card and the SD Card to the new phone and tried the restore tool for each app.
I found out that several apps could not find the backups because they were not looking at the SD Card for the files (seems that they were using internal memory locations). So for recovering my backups, I made new backups in the new phone with the empty apps, then found out where those backups were created (in the internal memory, /storage/emulated/0), and then copied the authentic backup files there (overwriting teh dummy ones), and then used the app to restore the backup.
For some apps (K-9) I had to set again the folder for attachments, since the SD was not anymore in /media/sdcard, now it was in /storage/sdcard1.
Apart from that, everything went well.
I was a bit upset that I could not migrate Kontalk conversations (there is no backup/export tool, and I am not sure where are the files/database stored).
I noticed that although Kontalk is registered using the phone number, and it uses the phone numbers for contacts, it kept working in the old phone (Whatsapp detects when you change to a new phone and kind of deactivates itself in the old one, but that s not the case for Kontalk: it works as any XMPP client (if it s open, it can send/receive messages)).
Replicant 4.2 in a Galaxy S III (i9300)
Here I write some particularities that I found in the phone, mostly bugs or problems. But don t get me wrong: overall I m very happy with it!
I experienced a problem when using the phone to make/receive calls, it seemed that the proximity sensor was not working well. I thought it was a Replicant issue, but later I realized that there was a Tehnoetic sticker that was partially covering the sensor. I removed the sticker and everything worked well.
The phone came with F-Droid installed which is nice. I upgraded to the latest alpha and I m testing the alpha releases since then
I found that I cannot choose where to install apps nor move apps from internal memory to the SD Card: there is no such option in Settings > Apps > Manage Apps (there is such setting in my CyanogenMod 7.2 phone, though). Since my phone is rooted and I have full access to both internal memory and SDCard, and I have plenty of room in the internal memory, I didn t bother too much. I m not sure if this is a bug, a feature, something related to Android 4 or specific to Replicant, o specific to this phone model. Pending to investigate, but low priority.
Replicant is almost fully translated to Spanish, yay!. I only found one untranslated string: You go to Settings > Wireless > Cell Broadcasts, and in the settings page, Cell Broadcasts is untranslated (but the settings themselves are). I still need to find where/how to send a patch for this (not sure if it comes from Android, CyanogenMod, or it s something specific for Replicant. Also, being Android 4.x, I m not sure about the usefulness of reporting such a minimal and unimportant patch upstream ).
When I turn on the phone, I get the Samsung S III splash screen, later the Replicant Splash screen, later the numeric pad to unlock the SIM card. After that, I see the screen lock but when I press the lock to enter the pattern, the screen turns off and on, screen lock appearing again (and I have to press the lock again to enter the pattern). If after unlocking the SIM card I wait a bit, I see the screen lock and again black screen and screen lock, so it s not my tap causing it. Doing like this (waiting a bit for the phone to show the screen lock for 2nd time) is less annoying, but I wonder why this happen and I cannot unlock the screen directly in the first attempt. This is also pending for research, but low priority.
When the phone boots, I find the splash screens too bright (the Samsung Galaxy S III splash, and later the red Replicant one). I don t know if I can change that. I know that other people have created different Replicant splash screens, so maybe I can create one almost black and only the Replicant text in very dark grey. But this is obviously a workaround, not a fix. OTOH, it s an annoying thing just some seconds: when the unlock screen is shown, the phone shows the brightness level that I ve set (usually, the lowest one).
From time to time, I suffer soft reboots:
  1. the phone hangs for 2-3 seconds
  2. then the red Replicant splash screen is shown (the phone is not totally rebooted, because I don t see the Samsung Galaxy S III splash screen and and the SIM card unlock PIN is not requested)
  3. after unlocking the screen, I see a normal desktop (similar to what I see after rebooting the phone: no apps running, and no last used apps history. Time and date are ok, wireless or 3G starts correctly etc).
I ve tried to track the causes of these soft reboots, but I couldn t find anything specific. They are not frequent at all, and when I decide to launch CatLog to try to catch any hint, the phone works perfectly for hours or days :s
Replicant is currently using the fallback Android EGL implementation, which is incomplete. The missing features of this implementation cause multiple issues, which are described in #705. These are the ones that I experience (or I miss):
  • The phone comes with a video editor preinstalled: Movie Studio. I got excited about it, because I was jealous of the small built-in video editor that comes with Whatsapp, but I became sad because Movie Studio does not work
  • The camera does not record video.
  • When I long-press the central button of my phone to see the list of recent apps, I don t see their thumbnails (only the name, and their icons). This is quite unimportant for me, names and icons are enough.
  • The stock Gallery app does not work well: I cannot see thumbnails of the albums. This is not very important, because I installed Gallery.
  • I cannot use Firefox, Orfox and other derivative web browsers (I usually use the stock browser, and I installed Lightning too).
  • I cannot use barcode or QR scanners.
  • My son cannot play Shattered Pixel Dungeon (nor Pixel Dungeon). Fortunately he uses now my old Android 2.x devide for that.
I installed the non-free firmware to be able to use Wifi and tethering, GPS and some other things. This does not fix the graphics problems listed above.
New apps, and translations
Note: when I write about Android apps, I usually link to their pages in the F-Droid website. Here I talk about translations (contributions), so I ll link to their original website or souce code repos. But you can find all those apps in F-Droid too.
As I told before, I installed another gallery app called Gallery and submitted an update to it Spanish translation.
I installed Red Moon to reduce (even more) the screen brightness. At night it s a relieve. Maybe the brightness of the splash screen is not so much, and I perceive them annoying because I got accostumed to Red Moon! I contributed some strings to the Spanish translation.
I liked RadioDroid very much, and I translated the app to Spanish.
I translated Wifi Privacy Police, and I used for some time, but I became tired that it keeps asking all the time that I walk across my workplace (multiple buildings within the same Wifi network, but quite a lot access points ).
I keep on contributing to K-9 Mail to make it 100% translated to Spanish. Now with a modern Android I can move to the development branch (5.1xx releases), and just did it.
I submitted a Spanish translation to DAVDroid, although I m not using it yet (I have to see if my University s Owncloud instance allows to sync contacts and calendar).
I updated the Spanish translation of PassAndroid, although I don t use it yet (I tend to print my train/airplane tickets ). I keep it installed in my phone, just in case.
Other apps that I use
I m testing OwnCloud, NextCloud and NexCloud Beta clients with my University s Owncloud and with Davros in my Sandstorm box (with Davros, I could only make it work installing an old version of Owncloud/Nexcloud client, and then upgrading. See #65).
I didn t get accostumed to Conversations. Not sure why, though. Maybe it s just that I got accostumed to Xabber-Classic, so I upgraded to Xabber. It works like a charm, dark theme, and I can close it easily when I don t want to chat.
I got in love with KDE Connect. Later I realized that I could have been using it in my Android 2.x phone since long
Sometimes I have fun activating Voice Notification and entering the redeslibres XMPP multi user chat at salas.mijabber.es, for example while I m cooking in the kitchen (in that room people talk in Spanish and make many wordplays, mixing Spanish and English, and use tech slang, etc so it s really fun to hear the Spanish-TTS deal with the conversation there!).
More to come
As I told at the beginning of this long post, my plan is to keep on tinkering with the phone, testing and translating apps, and becoming more involved. So expect some more posts about Android in this blog, in the future.
For now, some big things in my TODO:
  • Watching again some videos: DebConf16 videos about Android tools in Debian, FOSDEM talks about Replicant, and some other talks about free software in Android.
  • I track the #fdroid and #fdroid-dev channels in IRC, but I m not very talkative there. I guess I could do more user support.
  • Participate more in the F-Droid (client, server, data) issue trackers (I send reports when the alpha version crashes, and comment on few issues, but I don t triage the issue tracker to find issues that I could reproduce or help to diagnose or contribute to fix).
  • Long time ago I learned to setup an Android development environment and build apps. I would like to re-learn and maybe do some small fixes in unmaintained or near unmaintained apps, and maybe adopt them or join their development teams (I m thinking, for example, in Puma, an Android client for pump.io network, the MediaGoblin app, or the DebianDroid app). And ship new versions of unmaintained apss, including Spanish translations.
We ll see how far I can go!
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Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Tools Tagged: Android, Debian, English, F-Droid

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