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

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

Debian Java

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

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

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

Non-maintainer uploads

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

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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

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

token = base64(SHA1(password + domain))

And for Standford's PwdHash:

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

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

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

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

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

So the algorithm here is obviously:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously after that you then do:

systemctl restart apache2
systemctl restart haproxy

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

a2enmod remoteip

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

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

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

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

Now, enable the config and restart apache2:

a2enconf remoteip-logformats
systemctl restart apache2

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

CONTACT_EMAIL="my@email.address"

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

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

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

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

/etc/dehydrated/hooks/srwpi:

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

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

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

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

dehydrated -c

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

a2ensite default-ssl
a2enmod ssl

And restart apache2:

systemctl restart apache2

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

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

Restart haproxy:

systemctl restart haproxy

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

Changes

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

Issues

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

Review

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

Administration

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

Debian derivatives

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

• Chris Lamb (4)

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

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

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

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

Website development

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

tests.reproducible-builds.org

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

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

Once again, I'm making an announcement mainly for my local circle of friends and (gasp!) followers. For those of you over 100Km away from Mexico City, please disregard this message. Back in July 2015, and after two years of hard work, my university finished the publishing step of my second book. This is a textbook for the subject I teach at Computer Engineering: Operating Systems Fundamentals. The book is, from its inception, fully available online under a permissive (CC-BY) license. One of the books aimed contributions is to present a text natively written in Spanish. Besides, our goal (I coordinated a team of authors, working with two colleagues from Rosario, Argentina, and one from Cauca, Colombia) was to provide a book students can easily and legally share with no legal issues. I have got many good reviews so far, and after teaching based on it for four years (while working on it and after its publication), I can attest the material is light enough to fit in a Bachelors level degree, while it's deep enough to make our students sweat healthily ;-) Anyway: I have been scheduled to present the book at my university's main book show, 38 Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Miner a this Saturday, 2017.03.04 16:00; Sal n Manuel Tols . What's even better: This time, I won't be preparing a speech! The book will be presented by my two very good friends, Jos Mar a Serralde and Rolando Cedillo. Both of them are clever, witty, fun, and a real honor to work with. Of course, having them present our book is more than a double honor. So, everybody who can make it: FIL Miner a is always great and fun. Come share the love! Come have a book! Or, at least, have a good time and a nice chat with us!

Working with 9-Patch Images, Adapter Classes, Layouts in Android. Before starting this new task I never wondered .. How does that bubble around our chat messages wraps around the width of the text written by us?? . The image being used as the background of our messages are called 9-Patch images. They stretch themselves according to the text length and font size! Android will automatically resize to accommodate the contents , like

How great it would be if the clothes we wear could also work the same way.
Fit according to the body-size. I could then still wear my childhood cute nostalgic dresses.. Below, are the 9-Patch image I edited. There are two set of bubble images which are different for incoming and outgoing SIP messages. These images have to be designed a certain way and should be stored as the smallest size and leave 1px to all sides. Details are clearly explained in Android Documentation https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/2d-graphics.html#nine-patch Then, save the image by concatenating .9 between the file name and extension. For example if your image name is bubble.png. Rename it to bubble.9.png They should be stored like any other image file in res/drawable folder. Using 9-patch images these problems are taken care of

1. The image proportions are set according to different screen sizes automatically.
   You don t have to create multiple PNGs of different pixels for multiple screen sizes.
2. The image resizes itself accroding to the Text size set in the user s phone.

I had to modify the existing Lumicall SIP Message screen which had simple ListView as the chat message holder and replace it with 9-patch bubble images to make it more interactive
Voila! What a simple way to provide a simple yet valuable usability feature.

Very strange. Verrrry strange. Yesterday I wrote a blog post on spam stuff that has been hitting my mailbox. Nothing too deep, just me scratching my head. Coincidentally (I guess/hope), I have been getting messages via my Bitlbee to one of my Jabber accounts, offering me ransomware services. I am reproducing it here, omitting of course everything I can recognize as their brand names related URLs (as I'm not going to promote the 3vi1-doers). I'm reproducing this whole as I'm sure the information will be interesting for some.

*BRAND* Ransomware - The Most Advanced and Customisable you've Ever Seen
Conquer your Independence with *BRAND* Ransomware Full Lifetime License!
* UNIQUE FEATURES
* NO DEPENDENCIES (.net or whatever)!!!
* Edit file Icon and UAC - Works on All Windows Versions
* Set Folders and Extensions to Encrypt, Deadline and Russian Roulette
* Edit the Text, speak with voice (multilang) and Colors for Ransom Window
* Enable/disable USB infect, network spread & file melt
* Set Process Name, sleep time, update ransom amount, Give mercy button
* Full-featured headquarter (for Windows) with unlimited builds, PDF reports, charts and maps, totally autonomous operation
* PHP Bridges instead of expensive C&C servers!
* Automatic Bitcoin payment detection (impossible to bypass/crack - we challege who says the contrary to prove what they say!)
* Totally/Mathematically IMPOSSIBLE to DECRYPT! Period.
* Award-Winning Five-Stars support and constant updates!
* We Have lot vouchs in *BRAND* Market, can check!
Watch the promo video: *URL*
Screenshots: *URL*
Website: *URL*
Price: $389
Promo: just $309 - 20% OFF! until 25th Feb 2017
Jabber: *JID*

I think I can comment on this with my students. Hopefully, this is interesting to others.
Now... I had never received Jabber-spam before. This message has been sent to me 14 times in the last 24 hours (all from different JIDs, all unknown to me). I hope this does not last forever :-/ Otherwise, I will have to learn more on how to configure Bitlbee to ignore contacts not known to me. Grrr...

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• General

Keywords:

• hinduism
• shiv
• shiva
• shivratri

Like:

Looks like it is time to change all the passwords again. There s a tiny little flaw in a CDN used everywhere, it seems. Here s a quick hack for users of the pass password manager to qickly find the domains affected. It is not perfect, but it is fast. :) Update: The previous example used parallel. Actually, I didn t need that. Turns out, using grep correctly is much faster than using grep the wrong way. Lession: Read the manual. :)

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

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

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

I know spam is spam is spam, and I know trying to figure out any logic underneath it is a lost cause. However... I am curious. Many spam subjects are seemingly random, designed to convey whatever "information" they contain and fool spam filters. I understand that. Many spam subjects are time-related. As an example, in the last months there has been a surge of spam mentioning Donald Trump. I am thankful: Very easy to filter out, even before it reaches spamassassin. Of course, spam will find thousands of ways to talk about sex; cialis/viagra sellers, escort services, and a long list of WTF. However... Tactical flashlights. Bright enough to blind a bear. WTF I mean... Truly. Really. WTF What does that mean? Why is that even a topic? Who is interested in anything like that? How often does the average person go camping in the woods? Why do we need to worry about stupid bears attacking us? Why would a bear attack me? The list of WTF questions could go on forever. What am I missing? What does "tactical flashlight" mean that I just fail to grasp? Has this appeared in your spam?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm currently developing an nRF51822-based embedded device. Being one the Qt/Qt Creator maintainers in Debian I would of course try to use it for the development. Turns out it works pretty good... with some caveats.

There are already two quite interesting blog posts about using Qt Creator on MAC and on Windows, so I will not repeat the basics, as they are there. Both use qbs, but I managed to use CMake.

Instead I'll add some tips on the stuff that I needed to solve in order to make this happen on current Debian Sid.

• The required toolchain is already in Debian, just install binutils-arm-none-eabi, gcc-arm-none-eabi and gdb-arm-none-eabi.
• You will not find arm-none-eabi-gdb-py on the gdb-arm-none-eabi package. Fear not, the provided gdb binary is compiled against python so it will work.
• To enable proper debugging be sure to follow this flag setup. If you are using CMake like in this example be sure to modify CMake/toolchain_gcc.cmake as necessary.
• In Qt Creator you might find that, while try to run or debug your app, you are greated with a message box that says "Cannot debug: Local executable is not set." Just go to Projects Run and change "Run configuration" until you get a valid path (ie, a path to the .elf or .out file) in the "Executable" field.

GitHub mode Tobias Gruetzmacher implemented GitHub mode for staticsite. Although GitHub now has a similar site rendering mode, it doesn't give you a live preview: if you run ssite serve on a GitHub project you will get a live preview of README.md and the project documentation. Post series I have added support for post series, that allow you to easily interlink posts with previous/next links. You can see it in action on links and on An Italian song a day, an ongoing series that is currently each day posting a link to an Italian song.

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

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• Computing
• Tools

Keywords:

• fitbit
• pip
• python
• linux containers
• systemd-nspawn

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I've been tweaking my blog a little over the past few days, getting ready for a new release of the chronicle blog compiler (github). During the course of that I rewrote all the posts to have 100% lower-case file-paths. Redirection-pages have been auto-generated for each page which was previously mixed-case, but unfortunately that will have meant that the RSS feed updated unnecessarily:

• If it used to contain:
  • https://example.com/Some_Page.html
• It would have been updated to contain
  • https://example.com/some_page.html

That triggered a lot of spamming, as the URLs would have shown up as being new/unread/distinct.

A new release 0.3.1 of the RPushbullet package, following the recent 0.3.0 release is now on CRAN. RPushbullet is interfacing the neat Pushbullet service for inter-device messaging, communication, and more. It lets you easily send alerts like the one to the to your browser, phone, tablet, ... -- or all at once. This release owes once again a lot to Seth Wenchel who helped to update and extend a number of features. We fixed one more small bug stemming from the RJSONIO to jsonlite transition, and added a few more helpers. We also enabled Travis testing and with it covr-based coverage analysis using pretty much the same setup I described in this recent blog post.

Changes in version 0.3.1 (2017-02-17)

• The target device designation was corrected (#39).
• Three new (unexported) helper functions test the validity of the api key, device and channel (Seth in #41).
• The summary method for the pbDevices class was corrected (Seth in #43).
• New helper functions pbValidateConf, pbGetUser, pbGetChannelInfo were added (Seth in #44 closing #40).
• New classes pbUser and pbChannelInfo were added (Seth in #44).
• Travis CI tests (and covr coverage analysis) are now enabled via an encrypted config file (#45).

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