Some time ago, I wrote how to get GNU on a smartphone. This is going to be a long discussion on why and how we should work on more operating systems for more devices. On Android So, why should we bother if we already have Android, some might ask? If it's just because of some binary blobs, one could just use Replicant, right? Well, one of the problems is that Android development is done in hiding, and pushed downstream when a new version is launched. There is no community behind that anyone can join. Replicant ends up either following it or staying behind. It could do a fork and have its own innovations. And I am all for it. But the lack of manpower for supporting devices and keeping up with the latest versions and security fixes already takes most of the time for the one or two developers involved. Also, Android has a huge modularity problem, that I will discuss further below. But it's hard to replace many components in the system, unless you replace them all. And that also causes the problem that applications can hardly share extra components. I would rather see Debian running on my devices and supporting good environments and frameworks for all kinds of devices, like phones, tablets, TVs, cars, etc. It's developed by a community I can join, it allows a diverse set of frameworks and environments, and it's much easier to replace single components on such a system. On Copyleft Hardware I get it. Hardware is not free or libre. Its design is. I love the concept of copyleft hardware, where one applies the copyleft principles to a hardware design. Also, there is the concept of Hardware that Respects Your Freedom, that is, one that allows you to use it with only free software. Note that RYF hardware is not necessarily copyleft hardware. In fact, most of the time, the original vendor has not helped at all, and it required reverse engineering efforts by other people to be able to run free software on those systems. My point here is that we should not prevent people from running free software on hardware that does not RYF or that is not copyleft. We should continue the efforts of reverse engineering and of pushing hardware vendors to not only ship free software for their hardware, but also release their design under free licenses. But in the meantime, we need to make free software flourish in the plethora of devices on the hands of so many people around the world. On Diversity I won't go into details on this post about two things. One topic I love is retrocomputing and how Linux supported so many devices, and how many free or quasi-free operating systems ran on so many of them in the past. I could mention ucLinux, Familiar, PDAs, Palmtops, Motorolas, etc. But I will leave it to another time and go from Openmoko and Maemo forward. The other topic is application scalability. Even Debian with so many software available does not ship all free software there is available. And it doesn't support all third-party services out there. How can we solve that? It has to do with platforms, protocols, open protocols, etc. I will not go into that today. Because I believe that either way, it's healthy for our society to have diversity. I believe we should have other operating systems available for our devices. Even if application developers will not develop for all of them. That is already the case today. There are other ways to fix that, when that needs fixing. Sometimes, it's sufficient that you can have your own operating system on your device, that you can customize it, enhance it and share it with friends. And also, that would allow for innovation. It would make possible that some other operating system would have enough market share on some other niche. Other than Android and iOS, for example. But that requires that we can support that operating system on different devices. And that is the scalability that I want to talk about. How to support more devices with less effort. Options But before I go into that, let me write more about the alternatives we have out there. And some of the history around it. Openmoko Openmoko developed a set of devices that had some free design. And it has some free operating systems running on top. The community developed a lot of their own as well. Debian could (still can) run on it. There is SHR, which uses FSO, a mobile middleware based on D-Bus. It even spawned other devices to be developed, like GTA04, a successor board, that can be shipped inside a Neo Freerunner case. Maemo, Moblin, Meego and Tizen I remember the announcement of Nokia N770. During FISL in 2005, I even criticized a lot, because it shipped with proprietary drivers. And applications. But it was the first time we heard of Maemo. It was based on Debian and GNOME. The GNOME Mobile initiative was born from that, I believe, but died later on. But with the launch of N900, and later events, like the merge of Moblin with Maemo, to create Meego, we all had an operating system that was based on community developed components, that had some community participation, and was much more like the systems we were used to. You could run gcc on N900. You could install Das U-Boot and have other operating systems running there. But Nokia has gone a different path. Intel has started Tizen with Samsung. There is so much legacy there, that could still be developed upon. I am just sad that Jolla decided to put proprietary layers on top of that, to create SailfishOS. But we still have Mer, Nemo. But it looks like Cordia is gone. At least, (http://cordiahd.org) seems to have been registered by a domain seller. Not to forget, Neo900, a project to upgrade the board, in the same vein as GTA04. FirefoxOS and Ubuntu What can I say about FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone? In summary, I think we need more than Web, and Canonical has a history of not being too community oriented as we'd like. I won't go too much here in what I think about the Web as a platform. But I think we need a system that has more options for platforms. I haven't participated in projects directed by Mozilla either, so I can't say much about that. Ubuntu Phone should be a system more like what we are used to. But Canonical is going to set the directions to the project, it's not a community project. Nonetheless, I think they add to the diversity, and users should be able to try them, or their free parts or versions. But there are challenges there, that I think need to be discussed. So, both of these systems are based on Android. They don't use Dalvik or the application framework. But they use what is below that, which means device drivers in userspaces, like RIL, for the modem drivers, and EGL, for graphics drivers. The reason they do that is to build on top of all the existing vendor support for Android. If a SOC and phone vendor already supports Android, there should be not much needed to do to support FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone. In practice, this has not benefited the users or the projects. Porting should be as simple as getting a generic FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone image and run it on top of your Android or CyanogenMod port. Porting usually requires doing all the same work as porting Android. Even though one should be able to take advantage of existing ports, it still requires doing a lot of integration work and building an entire image, most of the time, including the upper layers, that should be equal in all devices. This process should require at most creating a new image based on other images and loading it on the device. I will discuss more about this below. I can't forget to mention the Matchstick TV project. It is based on FirefoxOS. I think it would have much more changes to succeed if it was easier for testers to have images available for all of their gadgets capable of running some form of Android. Replicant And then we have Replicant. It has a lot of the problems Android has. Even so, it's a tremendously important project. First, it offers a free version of Android, removing all proprietary pieces. This is very good for the community. But more than that, it tries to free the devices beyond that. What the project has been done is reverse engineer some of the pieces, mostly the modem drivers. That allows other projects to build upon that work, and support those modems. Without that, there is no telephony or celullar data available on any of these devices. Not without proprietary software, that is. They also have been working on free bootloaders, which is another important step for a completely free system. Next steps There are many challenges here, but I believe we should work on a set of steps that make it more palatable and produce intermediary results that can be used by users and other projects. One of the goals should be good modularity. The ability to replace some pieces with the least trouble necessary. The update of a single framework library should be just a package install, instead of building the entire framework again. If there is ABI breakage, users should still be able to have access to binaries (and accompanying source code) and only need to update the library and its reverse dependencies. If one layer does not have these properties, at least it should be possible to update this big chunk without interfering with the other layers. One example is FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone. Even if there is a big image with all system userspace and middleware, the porting, install and upgrade process should allow the user to keep the applications and to leverage porting already done by similar projects. Heck, these two projects should be able to share porting efforts without any trouble. So what follows is a quick discussion on Android builds, then suggestions on how to approach some of the challenges. On Android build The big problem with Android build is its non-modularity. You need to build the world and more to get a single image in the end. Instead of packages that could be built independently, that generated modular package images, that could be bundled in a single system image. Better yet would be the ability to pick only those components that matter. Certainly, portability would be just as interesting, being able to build certain components on top a GNU system with GNU libc. At times, it seems like this is done by design, to make it difficult for "fragmentation" and competition. Basically, making it difficult to exercise the freedom to modify the software and share your modifications with others. Imagine the possibilities of being able to:

• Build Dalvik and the framework on a GNU system in order to run Android programs on GNU systems.
• Or build a single framework library that would be useful for your Java project.
• Build only cutils, because you want to use that on your project.
• Build the HAL and be able to use Android drivers on your system.
• Build only RIL and use the modem drivers with ofono.

There are some dangers in promoting the use of Android like this. Since it promotes proprietary drivers, relying on such layers instead of better community oriented layers means giving an advantage to the first. So, the best plan would be to replace those layers, when they are used, for things like ofono and Wayland, for example. But, in the meantime, making it easier for users to experiment with FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Phone, Matchstick TV, Replicant on other devices, without resorting to building the entire Android system, would be a very nice thing. It is possible that there are some challenges with respect to API and ABI. That these layers are too intermingled that some changes present in one port would prevent FirefoxOS to run on top of it without changes in either of the layers. I can't confirm that is the case, but can't deny the possibility. Rooting One of the challenges we have that may have trouble in scaling is rooting devices. Unfortunately, most of the devices are owned by the vendor or carrier, not the user. The user is prevented from replacing software components in the system, by removing its permissions from replacing most of the files in the filesystem, or writing to block devices, or change boot parameters or write to the storage devices. Fortunately, there are many documents, guides, howtos, and whatnots out there instructing on how to root a lot of devices. In some cases, it depends on software bugs that can be patched by the users as instructed by vendors. Certainly, favoring devices that are built to allow rooting, hacking, etc, is a good thing. But we should still help those users out there who do not have such devices, and allow them to run free software on them. Booting Then, comes booting, which is a large discussion on its own, and also related to rooting, or how to allow users to replace their software. First, we have the topic of bootloaders, which are usually not free, and embedded in the chip, not on external storage. So, there are those pieces of the bootloader which we can replace more easily and those that we are not, because they would require changing a piece of ROM, for example. Das U-Boot would be one of the preferred options for a system. It supports a lot of hardware platforms out there, a lot of storage devices and filesystems, network booting, USB and serial booting, and a lot of other things. Porting is not an easy task, but it is possible. Meanwhile, using the bootloaders that ship with the system, when possible, would allow a path where other pieces of the system would be free. One of the challenges here is building single images that could boot everywhere. The lack of a single ARM boot environment is a curse and a blessing. It makes it hard to have this single boot image, but, on the other hand, it has allowed so much of the information for such systems to be free, to be embedded in copyleft software, instead of having blobs executed by our free systems, like ACPI encourages. Device trees have pushed this portability issue from the kernel to the bootloaders. Possibily encouraging vendors to now hide and copyright this information in the form of proprietary device trees. But it has made it easier for single images. In practice, we still need to see a lot of devices out there supporting this single kernel scenario. And this mechanism only brings us the possibility of a single kernel. We still need to ship bootable images that have pieces of bootloaders that are not as portable. This has caused lots of operating systems out there to be built for a single board. Or to support just a small set of boards. I struggle with the concept. Why are we not able to mix device-specific pieces with generic pieces and get a resulting image that will boot on our choice of board? Why does every project need to do all the porting work again, repeating the efforts? Or have one entier ISO image for every supported board? Check how Geexbox does it, for an example. Fortunately, I see Debian going in a good direction. Here, one can see how it instructs the user to combine a system-dependent part with a system-independent part. Installation Which brings us to the installation challenge. We should make this easy and also customizable by the user. Every project might have its own method, and that is part of the diversity that we should allow. The great challenge here is handling rooting and booting for the user. But it's also possible to leave that as separate efforts, as it would be nice to have good installers as we have in the desktop and server environments. Linux Linux is one of the most ported kernels out there. Of course, it would be healthy to the diversity I propose that other kernels and systems out there should work on those mobile devices. NetBSD, for example, has a reputation of being very portable and ported to many platforms. And GNU runs on many of them, either together with the original systems, or as the main system on top of other kernels, as proven by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port, which uses GNU libc. But, though I would love to see HURD running directly on those devices, Linux and its derivatives are already running on them. Easier to tackle is to get Linux-libre running on those systems. But though this looks like one of the easier tasks at hand, it is not. If you run a derivative version from Linux, provided by the vendor, things should go smooth. But most of the time, the vendor does not provide patches upstream, and leave their fork to rot, if you are lucky, in the earlier 3.x series. And some times, there is not even source code available. There are vendors out there who do not respect the GPL and that is one of the reasons why GPL enforcement is important. I take this opportunity to call attention to the work of Software Freedom Conservancy and its current efforts to raise funds to continue their work. Running an existing binary version of Linux on your device with a free userspace is part of the strategy of replacing pieces one at a time while allowing for good diversity and reaching more users. Drivers Then we have the matter of drivers. And in this case, it's not only Linux drivers, but drivers running in userspace. Though others exist, there are two important and common cases, which are modem and graphics drivers, both of which are usually provided by Android frameworks, and that other systems try to leverage, instead of using alternatives that are more community friendly. In the case of modem drivers, Android uses its RIL. Besides not using a Radio or Modem at all, there are two strategies for free versions. One is using free versions of the drivers for RIL. That's what Replicant does, because, well, it uses the other Android subsystems after all. The other one is using a system that is developed by the community. ofono is one that, even though it's an Intel iniative, looks more community governed or open to community participation than any Android subsystem ever was. As for Graphics, Canonical even built its Mir project with the goal of being able to use Android GPU drivers. Luckily, there has been a lot of reverse engineering efforts out there for a lot of those GPUs shipped with ARM SoCs. Then, we can use Mesa, Wayland and X.org. Other option, until then, is just using a framebuffer driver, possibly one that does not need any initialization, depending on one done by the bootloader, for example. Middleware and Shells Plasma Active, that I just found out now is Plasma Mobile, looks like a great system. Built by folks behind KDE, we can expect great freedom to come from it. Unfortunately, it suffers from what we have been discussing here, which is lack of good device support, or shipping images that run on top of single devices, without leveraging the porting that has come before of other systems. Fortunately, that is just what I want to accomplish with this effort. FSO, that I mentioned before, is a good middleware, that we should try to run on top of these devices. Running GNOME or Unity shell, and use rpm or deb based systems, that's all part of the plan on diversity. You could use systemd, or System V init systems, whatever gives you the kicks. It's not an easy task, since there are so many new things on these new kinds of devices. Besides touch, there is telephony, which as I mentioned, would be a good task for ofono. As for TV sets or dongles, I would love to see OpenFlint, created by the Matchstick TV guys, flourish out there and allow me to flint stuff from my mobile phone running Debian into my TV dongle running Debian. Project So, is there a project out there you can start contributing to? Well, I pointed out a lot of them. All of them make part of this plan. Contributing to reverse engineering GPUs, or to Plasma Mobile, ofono, GNOME, Linux-libre, bootloaders, Debian, and so many other projects. My plans are to contribute in the scope of Debian and make sure it works well on top of semi-liberated devices, and make sure there is a nice user interface and good applications when using either GNOME or Plasma. Integrating ofono is a good next step, but I am running ahead of myself. Right now, I don't think there is need for an integrated effort. If you think otherwise, please let me know. If you are doing something in this direction, I would love to know. Paul Wise reminded me to point out to the Debian Mobile, where I will probably contribute any documentation and other relevant results. Thanks There are some many people to thank, but I would like to remember Ian Murdock, who created Debian, one of the projects who inspires me the most. I think the best way to handle his passing is to celebrate what he has helped create, and move forward, taking more free software to more people in an easy and modular way. I have been wanting to write something like this for a long time, so I thank Chris Webber for inspiring me on doing it.

They are filling old bottles with new wine! This is what the physicist Werner Heisenberg heard exclaiming by his friend and colleague Wolfgang Pauli who, criticizing the approach of the scientists of the time, believed that they had been forcibly glued the notion of quantum on the old theory of the planetary-model of Bohr s atom. Faced with the huge questions introduced by quantum physics, Pauli instead began to observe the new findings from a different point of view, from a new level of reality without the constraints imposed by previous theories.

Newton himself, once he theorized the law of the gravitational field, failing to place it in any of the physical realities of the time, he merely

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The third update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R earlier today, and has been pushed to Debian. It follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, and the 0.12.2 release in November making it the seventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. This release is somewhat more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs and nuisances without adding any new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 553 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than fourty packages from the last release in November. Once again, we have new first-time contributors. Kazuki Fukui corrected an issue he encountered when having CLion re-formatted some code for him. Joshua Pritikin corrected a constructor initialization. Of course, we also had several pull reports from regular contributors -- see below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.3 (2016-01-10)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Const iterators now CharacterVector now behave like regular iterators (PR #404 by Dan fixing #362).
  • Math operators between matrix and scalars type have been added (PR #406 by Qiang fixing #365).
  • A missing std::hash function interface for Rcpp::String has been addded (PR #408 by Qiang fixing #84).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Avoid invalid function names when generating C++ interfaces (PR #403 by JJ fixing #402).
  • Insert additional space around & in function interface (PR #400 by Kazuki Fukui fixing #278).
• Changes in Rcpp Modules:
  • The copy constructor now initialized the base class (PR #411 by Joshua Pritikin fixing #410)
• Changes in Rcpp Repository:
  • Added a file Contributing.md providing some points to potential contributors (PR #414 closing issue #413)

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

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

List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles is a WordPress Plugin I wrote to fix a menu issue I had during a complex website development. It has been included in the official WordPress Plugin repository. The Plugin is particularly suitable to all multi-nested categories and multi-authors websites handling a large number of posts and complex nested category layout (i.e.: academic papers, newpapers articles, etc). This plugin allows the user to place a shortcode into any page and get rid of a long and nested menu/submenu to show all site s posts. A selector in the page will allow the reader to select grouping by Category/Author/Title. You can also manage to install a tab plugin (i.e.: Tabby Responsive Tabs) and arrange each group on its specific tab. Output grouped by Category will look like:

CAT1
    post1                       AUTHOR
    SUBCAT1
        post2                   AUTHOR
        post3                   AUTHOR
        SUBCAT2
            post4               AUTHOR
            ...
            ...

while in the Author grouping mode, it is:

AUTHOR1
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
AUTHOR2
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
.....

The plugin installs a new menu ACT List Shortcodes in Admin->Tools. The tool is a helper to automatically generate the required shortcode. It will parse the options and display the string to be copied and pasted into any page. The Plugin is holding a GPL2 license and it can be downloaded from its page on WP Plugins.

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I'm not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I'd like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It's likely we will never know what has brought us here. I live in Scotland, a country that is a part of the United Kingdom and a member of the European Union. We have a Scottish Government, although certain matters are still handled by the UK Government. The European Government also handles some matters and these can take effect across the entire European Union. I do not feel that I can hold trust in any of these bodies anymore. The European Convention on Human Rights was, for me at least, a beacon of hope. A series of fundamental rights guaranteed to be upheld for every person within the European Union. A series of fundamental rights that has been ignored by governments repeatedly:

• 1999: it was held the UK had violated the human rights of several homosexual soldiers who had been dismissed from the armed forces because of their sexuality
• 2002: it was held the UK had violated the human rights of a widower regarding entitlement to receive bereavement benefits who had been discriminated against on account of his gender
• 2005: it was held that the UK violated the human rights of prisoners by denying them the ability to vote
• 2010: the stop and search procedures used by the UK police pursuant to the Terrorism Act 2000 were considered illegal under the ECHR because they did not require the police to have grounds for suspicion before using them

This is not an exhaustive list, just select cross-sections of our recent history. It is important to remember that in each of these cases, it took a citizen to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. These rights were violated by the UK government until the actions were challenged, the legislation that allowed them was currently enacted into UK law without regard for the ECHR. It should also be noted that the ban on prisoners voting is still in effect in the UK. We've learnt that the ECHR is not an effective safeguard against the abuse of powers by government. The UK government also sees the Human Rights Act as a problem, although at least scrapping it has been delayed for now. Much of these breaches of human rights are justified by the government as in the interest of the runaway train known as "national security". I have recently had direct contact with one aspect of this during my journey home from 32c3. You can read about my experiences with airport security here and here. My experiences at these airports angered me for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I was asked to expose my genitals as part of the routine screening, which I do not believe to be proportionate at all. At Luton, I was at the point where I was intending to leave the airport and take the train instead before I was allowed to excercise my right to opt-out of the nude body scanner. Since these incidents, I have conducted some research into these scanners and started an article on the Open Rights Group wiki. While the security officer at Luton had tried to tell me that the radio waves used could not penetrate clothing, they in fact can and this is the entire purpose of them. While the security officer at Luton told me that the machines did not generate an image, they are in fact doing exactly that, even if that image is processed by computer vision algorithms as opposed to being viewed by a human reviewer. A leaflet by the Department for Transport, made available on the Aberdeen Airport website, also states that no image is created, and yet this is exactly how the scanners work. I have never seen this leaflet printed and available in the airport itself, although I admit I do not fly regularly and may have missed it. That said, it does not provide a true representation of the scan process and I would go as far to say it contains an outright lie. In a document published by the UK Government titled "Response to the consultation on the use of security scanners in an aviation security environment", they state:

"nearly all passengers, if they fully understand the procedures, would be unlikely to opt for [the alternative of a private search]"

Even with this display of confidence that they believe the public are happy with the invasion of privacy brought by the security scanners, they have still chosen to not fully inform the public in the way in which the scanner operates. It is the lies that anger me the most. We claim to live in a democracy and you cannot have a democracy without transparency. It is not too late for the Government to earn back my trust, but for now, they haven't given me good reason to believe anything they produce. If you have read this article and you would like to support efforts for change in the United Kingdom, please consider joining the Open Rights Group and perhaps getting involved in their work.

A new release, now at version number 0.6.9, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload. This release is very large part the work of Thierry Onkelinx who added stable sha1 support in a new function sha1(). Here, stable means that numerically equivalent numbers (in the sense of the semi-famous R FAQ entry 7.31) result in identical hashes. This is useful for hashing results from numerical analysis---where the representation may differ bitwise between, say, 32 and 64-bit platforms. We started to write a little more about this in a (at this very point still rather unfinished) little vignette. We also had a nice pull request from fellow Rcpp hacker Qiang Kou who updated the code to use XLENGTH so that large vectors can be supported. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

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

I was quite busy in December 2015, especially with my new Python projects related to automatize Twitter actions. Have a look at my Github home for more information ! 1. Personal projects

• db2twitter 0.5 released (Github stars appreciated :) )- new option to circle through a ring of the last N tweets in order to resend them on a regular basis
• new project Twitterwatch (Github stars appreciated :) )- find how old is the last sent tweet and triggers an alert if the user-defined duration is exceeded, allowing to know that an automated toolchain of sending tweets is broken
• new project Feed2tweet (Github stars appreciated :) ) send tweets from a RSS feed. It s a fork from rss2twitter, improving hashtag management, configuration options and documentation.

2. Journal du hacker

• setting up the Journal du hacker blog (PluXML)
• feedDiasp allowing RSS feeds to Diaspora* was fixed. The issue was from the diaspy dependency. I could not wait for the upstream (16 days is way too long) and fixed the issue by myself.

That s all folks! See you next month!

The elections for the new OpenStack board are coming closer
and this time the Open Source community has a great
opportunity of representation: Giuseppe Patern is standing as a candidate for the board.
Although Giuseppe is considered by HP and Forrester Research
among the top talented consultants in the world,
Gippa (as he s largely known in the industry) is still one of us ,
a nerd that grew up with a keyboard on his hands.
As he s one of the candidates of the OpenStack board,
Fabio Marzocca wishing to know more has interviewed him.

[FM] The hard question. You re a techie. Why the hell are you running for the board?

[GP] This is indeed a good question It all started as a challenge from some clients and friends that are working in the OpenStack project. The truth is that the board and most of the management of the foundation are from vendors. I m not questioning here if they do a good job or not, it is very likely that they tend to protect their own interests. In my opinion it lacks some community spirit that have fostered Linux development such as Debian and Ubuntu. That s why I m running for it, to bring the community where it should be.

[FM] Back to Debian and Ubuntu, could you tell us your story with Linux?

[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.

[FM] Another hard question. We know you re somehow involved in the rebellion of Devuan.org. What is your opinion about systemd?

[GP] Let me tell you that it s not totally black/white and let s see the two sides here. Something like systemd was indeed needed. Each distro has its own way of init ing the system and for a package maintainer or commercial software maker, maintaining different init behaviour is insane. And as an init replacement it totally makes sense. However, IMHO systemd went too far away, incorporating into its code something that should not happen. A DHCP client into an init system, seriously? I doubt it was in the spirit of the Unix and Linux system
However, in the real world of pets vs cattle , where application matters more than systems, having a systemd as it is, doesn t change that much.

[FM] OpenStack was incubated in Ubuntu and the roots are quite clear. Is there something else that you would like to see from Debian and Ubuntu in OpenStack?

[GP] Stability, if I can name just one. Currently OpenStack is released every 6 months, which was probably the best choice to speed up the development. However, this is now becoming a weakness, as enterprise customers can t upgrade their critical infrastructures every 6 months. Traditionally Debian is maniacally focused on given a bullet-proof distribution, this is something that in my opinion is missing from OpenStack.

[FM] Gippa, tell us just 2 or 3 topics you will bring to action in case of election

[GP] I d like to introduce an OpenStack LTS process, following the Ubuntu approach: while releasing every 6 months is fair enough for development and testing environments, having a stable release every 2-3 years can give enterprise customers the peace of mind they need while running production environments.
I d also love to see a consolidation of the core (Nova/Neutron/Cinder/Swift): vendors and developers are introducing new features and projects while I d love to see for example- a more stable and scalable Neutron and a more stable connection to Oslo (in particular rabbitmq).
In general, I would encourage more attention to who is actually deploying, integrating and using OpenStack every day. I would also try to foster the ecosystem of ISVs in order to release and certify their software for OpenStack. And last but not least- to see interoperation between regional datacenters: I dream of a world where companies in a given territory can work together , and this is only possible through standards. I hope that OpenStack can represent this standard.

[FM] When are the elections and how can we vote?

[GP] Individual Member Director elections for the 2016 Board will be held online from Monday January 11, 2016 to Friday January 15, 2016. More informations on the website.

Making it easier to use C++ in R has been a really nice and rewarding side effect of the work on Rcpp. One really good idea came from something Jay Emerson, Michael Kane and had I kicked about for way too long: shipping Boost headers for easier use by R and CRAN packages (such as their family of packages around bigmemory). The key idea here is headers: Experienced C++ authors such as library writers can organise C++ code in such a way that one can (almost always) get by without any linking. Which makes deployment so much easier in most use cases, and surely also with R which knows how to set an include path. So after years of "yes we really should", Jay deserves the credit for actually sitting down almost three years ago and creating the first version. So at the end of January 2013, we released BH version 1.51.0-0. By now the package is used fifty-four other CRAN packages --- clearly a much stronger uptake then we ever expected. I took over maintenance at some point, and we are currently in-line with the most recent Boost release 1.60.0. But some people were always lusting after (some) parts of Boost which also require linking. For some libraries (such as Boost.Date_Time in my RcppBDT package) you can set a #define to not require linking (and forego some string formatting or parsing we get from R anyway). Some others are trickier; Boost Regex is one example. I do not think you can use it without linking (but then C++11 helps and finally brings regular expression in the default library). Another library which the systems / network programmers at work would frequently rely upon is Boost.Asio, a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It was already used on CRAN by the iptools package by Bob Rudis and Oliver Keyes which shied away from building on Windoze (while 'doze and Boost do get along, but the CRAN system makes it a little more involved). A couple of days ago, I somehow learned that the Asio library actually comes in two flavours: the well-known Boost.Asio (requiring linking), and also as a header-only standalone library! Well, well, well -- so I ran that by Bob and Oliver asking if that would be useful. And the response was a resounding and pretty much immediate Hell, Yes!. So I wrapped it in a package, told Bob about it, who tested it and gave the thumbs up. And after a slightly longer-than-usual on-boarding, the package is now on CRAN. As network (and systems) programming is not entirely uncommon even at CRAN, I hope that this package may find a few more use cases. A new version of iptools should be forthcoming "shortly", including for the first time a Windows build thanks to this package. The indefatigable Martin Morgan already spotted our GitHub repo and scored the first fork. Comments and suggestions about AsioHeaders are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub 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.

I just published the first version of git find on gh/mirabilos/git-find for easy collaboration. The repository deliberately only contains the script and the manual page so it can easily be merged into git.git with complete history later, should they accept it. git find is MirOS licenced. It does require a recent mksh (Update: I did start it in POSIX sh first, but it eventually turned out to require arrays, and I don t know perl(1) and am not going to rewrite it in C) and some common utility extensions to deal with NUL-separated lines (sort -z, grep -z, git ls-tree -z); also, support for '\0' in tr(1) and a comm(1) that does not choke on embedded NULs in lines.

To install or uninstall it, run

then you can call it as git find and look at the documentation with git help find , as is customary. The idea behind this utility is to have a tool like git grep that acts on the list of files known to git (and not e.g. ignored files) to quickly search for, say, all PNG files in the repository (but not the generated ones). git find acts on the index for the HEAD, i.e. whatever commit is currently checked-out (unlike git grep which also knows about git add ed files; fix welcome) and then offers a filter syntax similar to find(1) to follow up: parenthes s, ! for negation, -a and -o for boolean are supported, as well as -name, -regex and -wholename and their case-insensitive variants, although regex uses grep(1) without (or, if the global option -E is given, with) -E, and the pattern matches use mksh(1) s, which ignores the locale and doesn t do [[:alpha:]] character classes yet. On the plus side, the output is guaranteed to be sorted; on the minus side, it is rather wastefully using temporary files (under $TMPDIR of course, so use of tmpfs is recommended). -print0 is the only output option (-print being the default). Another mode forwards the file list to the system find; since it doesn t support DOS-style response files, this only works if the amount of files is smaller than the operating system s limit; this mode supports the full range (except -maxdepth) of the system find(1) filters, e.g. -mmin -1 and -ls, but it occurs filesystem access penalty for the entire tree and doesn t sort the output, but can do -ls or even -exec. The idea here is that it can collaboratively be improved, reviewed, fixed, etc. and then, should they agree, with the entire history, subtree-merged into git.git and shipped to the world. Part of the development was sponsored by tarent solutions GmbH, the rest and the entire manual page were done in my vacation.

With the world passing 10% IPv6 penetration over the weekend, we see the same old debates coming up again; people claiming IPv6 will never happen (despite several years now of exponential growth!), and that if they had only designed it differently, it would have been all over by now. In particular, people like to point to a 2002 3 article by D. J. Bernstein, complete with rants about how Google would never set up useless IPv6 addresses (and then they did that in 2007 I was involved). It's difficult to understand exactly what the article proposes since it's heavy on calling people idiots and light on actual implementation details (as opposed to when DJB's gotten involved in other fields; e.g. thanks to him we now have elliptical curve crypto that doesn't suck, even if the reference implementation was sort of a pain to build), but I will try to go through it nevertheless and show how I cannot find any way it would work well in practice. One thing first, though: Sorry, guys, the ship has sailed. Whatever genius solution DJB may have thought up that I'm missing, and whatever IPv6's shortcomings (they're certainly there), IPv6 is what we have. By now, you can not expect anything else to arise and take over the momentum; we will either live with IPv6 or die with IPv4. So, let's see what DJB says. As far as I can see, his primary call is for a version of IPv6 where the address space is an extension of the IPv4 space. For sake of discussion, let's call that IPv4+ , although it would share a number of properties with IPv6. In particular, his proposal requires changing the OS and other software on every single end host out there, just as IPv6; he readily admits that and outlines how it's done in rough terms (change all structs, change all configuration files, change all databases, change all OS APIs, etc.). From what I can see, he also readily admits that IPv4 and IPv4+ hosts cannot talk to each other, or more clearly, we cannot start using the extended address space before almost everybody has IPv4+ capable software. (E.g., quote: Once these software upgrades have been done on practically every Internet computer, we'll have reached the magic moment: people can start relying on public IPv6 addresses as replacements for public IPv4 addresses. ) So, exactly how does the IPv4 address space fit into the IPv4+ address space? The article doesn't really say anything about this, but I can imagine only two strategies: Build the IPv4+ space around the IPv4 space (ie., the IPv4 space occupies a little corner of the IPv4+ space, similar to how v4-mapped addresses are used within software but not on the wire today, to let applications do unified treatment of IPv4 addresses as a sort of special IPv6 address), or build it as a hierarchical extension. Let's look at the former first; one IPv4 address gives you one IPv4+ addresses. Somehow this seems to give you all the disadvantages of IPv4 and all the disadvantages of IPv6. The ISP is not supposed to give you any more IPv4+ addresses (or at least DJB doesn't want to contact his ISP about more also saying that the fact that automatic address distribution does not change his argument), so if you have one, you're stuck with one. So you still need NAT. (DJB talks about proxies , but I guess that the way things evolved, this either actually means NAT, or it talks about the practice of application-level proxies such as Squid or SOCKS proxies to reach the Internet, which really isn't commonplace anymore, so I'll assume for the sake of discussion it means NAT.) However, we already do NAT. The IPv4 crunch happened despite ubiquitous NAT everywhere; we're actually pretty empty. So we will need to hand out IPv4+ addresses at the very least to new deployments, and also probably reconfigure every site that wants to expand and is out of IPv4 addresses. ( Site here could mean any organizational unit, such as if your neighborhood gets too many new subscribers for your ISP's local addressing scheme to have enough addresses for you.) A much more difficult problem is that we now need to route these addresses on the wire. Ironically, the least clear part of DJB's plan is step 1, saying we will extend the format of IP packets to allow 16-byte addresses ; how exactly will this happen? For this scheme, I can only assume some sort of IPv4 option that says the stuff in the dstaddr field is just the start and doesn't make sense as an IPv4 address on its own; here are the remaining 12 bytes to complete the IPv4+ address . But now your routers need to understand that format, so you cannot do with only upgrading the end hosts; you also need to upgrade every single router out there, not just the end hosts. (Note that many of these do routing in hardware, so you can't just upgrade the software and call it a day.) And until that's done, you're exactly in the same situation as with IPv4/IPv6 today; it's incompatible. I do believe this option is what DJB talks about. However, I fail to see exactly how it is much better than the IPv6 we got ourselves into; you still need to upgrade all software on the planet and all routers on the planet. The benefit is supposedly that a company or user that doesn't care can just keep doing nothing, but they do need to care, since they need to upgrade 100% of their stuff to understand IPv4+ before we can start even deploying it alongside IPv4 (in contrast with IPv6, where we now have lots of experience in running production networks). The single benefit is that they won't have to renumber until they need to grow, at which point they need to anyway. However, let me also discuss the other possible interpretation, namely that of the IPv4+ address space being an extension of IPv4, ie. if you have 1.2.3.4 in IPv4, you have 1.2.3.4.x.x.x.x or similar in IPv4+. (DJB's article mentions 128-bit addresses and not 64-bit, though; we'll get to that in a moment.) People keep bringing this up, too; it's occasionally been called BangIP (probably jokingly, as in this April Fool's joke) due to the similarity with how explicit mail routing would work before SMTP became commonplace. I'll use that name, even though others have been proposed. The main advantage of BangIP is that you can keep your Internet core routing infrastructure. One way or the other, they will keep seeing IPv4 addresses and IPv4 packets; you need no new peering arrangements etc.. The exact details are unclear, though; I've seen people suggest GRE tunneling, ignoring problems they have through NAT, and I've seen suggestions of IPv4 options for source/destination addresses, also ignoring that someting as innocious as setting the ECN bits has been known to break middleboxes left and right. But let's assume you can pull that off, because your middlebox will almost certainly need to be the point that decapsulates BangIP anyway and converts it to IPv4 on the inside, presumably with a 10.0.0.0/8 address space so that your internal routing can keep using IPv4 without an IPv4+ forklift upgrade. (Note that you now lose the supposed security benefit of NAT, by the way, although you could probably encrypt the address.) Of course, your hosts will need to support IPv4+ still, and you will need some way of communicating that you are on the inside of the BangIP boundary. And you will need to know what the inside is, so that when you communicate on this side, you'll send IPv4 and not IPv4+. (For a home network with no routing, you could probably even just do IPv4+ on the inside, although I can imagine complications.) But like I wrote above, experience has shown us that 32 extra bits isn't enough. One layer of NAT isn't doing it, we need two. You could imagine the inter-block routability of BangIP helping a fair bit here (e.g., a company with too many machines for 10.0.0.0/8 could probably easily get more addresses for more external IPv4 addresses, yielding 10.0.0.0/8 blocks), but ultimately, it is a problem that you chop the Internet off in two distinct halves that work very differently. My ISP will probably want to use BangIP for itself, meaning I'm on the outside of the core; how many of those extra bits will they allocate for me? Any at all? Having multiple levels of bang sounds like pain; effectively we're creating a variable-length address. Does anyone ever want that? From experience, when we're creating protocols with variable-length addresses, people just tend to use the maximum level anyway, so why not design it with 128-bit to begin with? (The original IP protocol proposals actually had variable-length addresses, by the way.) So we can create our 32/96 BangIP , where the first 32 bits are for the existing public Internet, and then every IPv4 address gives you a 2^96 addresses to play with. (In a sense, it reminds me of 6to4, which never worked very well and is now thankfully dead.) However, this makes the inside/outside-core problem even worse. I now need two very different wire protocols coexisting on the Internet; IPv4+ (which looks like regular IPv4 to the core) for the core, and a sort of IPv4+-for-the-outside (similar to IPv6) outside it. If I build a company network, I need to make sure all of my routers are IPv4+-for-the-outside and talk that, while if I build the Internet core, I need to make sure all of my connections are IPv4 since I have no guarantee that I will be routable on the Internet otherwise. Furthermore, I have a fixed prefix that I cannot really get out of, defined by my IPv4 address(es). This is called hierarchical routing , and the IPv6 world gave it up relatively early despite it sounding like a great idea at first, because it makes multihoming a complete pain: If I have an address 1.2.3.4 from ISP A and 5.6.7.8 from ISP B, which one do I use as the first 32 bits of my IPv4+ network if I want it routable on the public Internet? You could argue that the solution for me is to get an IPv4 PI netblock (supposedly a /24, since we're not changing the Internet core), but we're already out of those, which is why we started this thing to begin with. Furthermore, if the IPv4/IPv4+ boundary is above my immediate connection to the Internet (say, ISP A doesn't have an IPv4 address, just IPv4+), I'm pretty hosed; I cannot announce an IPv4 netblock in BGP. The fact that the Internet runs on largely the same protocol everywhere is a very nice thing; in contrast, what is described here really would be a mess! So, well. I honestly don't think it's as easy to just do extension instead of alternative when it comes to the address spaces. We'll just need to deal with the pain and realize that upgrading the equipment and software is the larger part of the job anyway, and we'll need to do that no matter what solution we go with. Congrats on reaching 10%! Now get to work with the remaining 90%.

I m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron s death and the release of a new book of Swartz s writing that I contributed to. The event is free and open the public and details are below:

WHEN: Wednesday, January 13 at 6:30-9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Communications Building (CMU) 120, University of Washington

We invite you to celebrate the life and activism efforts of Aaron Swartz, hosted by UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill. The event is next week and will consist of a short book reading, a screening of a documentary about Aaron s life, and a Q&A with Mako who knew Aaron well details are below. No RSVP required; we hope you can join us.

Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy, entrepreneur, and information activist who contributed to the core Internet protocol RSS and co-founded Reddit, among other groundbreaking work. However, it was his efforts in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to promoting increased access to information that entangled him in a two-year legal nightmare that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

January 11, 2016 marks the third anniversary of his death. Join us two days later for a reading from a new posthumous collection of Swartz s writing published by New Press, a showing of The Internet s Own Boy (a documentary about his life), and a Q&A with UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill a former roommate and friend of Swartz and a contributor to and co-editor of the first section of the new book. If you re not in Seattle, there are events with similar programs being organized in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. All of these other events will be on Monday January 11 and registration is required for all of them. I will be speaking at the event in San Francisco.

December 2015 was a month mainly dedicated to work for local contractors (local schools mainly) and my employer (University of Kiel, Git server migration). At the end of the month I had the privilege of attending the 32c3 ([1]) where we had a little sprint for the Arctica Project. Thanks to my family and esp. to my wonderful wife for letting me attend this always fascinating event at the end of each year. Horde Hacking One of my local customers is really interested in using a non-gated-community mail provider, so he asked me to host his company's mail addresses on my mail company's server. Something I regularly don't offer (anymore) except for dear friends and very patient customers. This customer sponsored several more work hours on hacking on the Kolab_Storage code in Horde and proposing bug fixes upstream [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Thanks for supporting my work on the Horde Groupware Framework. Thanks to Horde upstream maintainers (esp. Michael Rubinsky) for reacting on my bug submissions so promptly. Debian and Debian LTS Locally, I did a lot of work for our Debian Edu / Skolelinux customers again this months. read more

Recent article by professors Karim Lakhani and Marco Iansiti on the Harvard Business Review, Digital Ubiquity: How Connection, Sensors and Data are Revolutionizing Business , gave me the opportunity for interesting insights and considerations.

Digital technology evolution and the development of modern Internet of Things devices are introducing huge transformative effects within social inter-relationships and its business models. These effects can not be ignored if we want to perceive with the right clarity and meaning the innovation process that inevitably comes with it.

The three fundamental properties of digital technology

<Read More >

& another round of RC bug fixes, still related to the perl 5.22 transition (& yay, 5.22 is in testing since some days!):

• #808209 amanda-common: "amanda-common: Depends on virtual package "perl5" which will is gone with perl/5.22"
  replace perl5 dependencies, NMU with maintainer's approval
• #808321 votca-csg-scripts: "votca-csg-scripts: Depends on virtual package "perl5" which will is gone with perl/5.22"
  fix dependency, upload to DELAYED/3
• #809192 src:libterm-termkey-perl: "libterm-termkey-perl: FTBFS: 05flags.t: Non-zero wait status: 11"
  set TERM for tests (pkg-perl)
• #809198 maildirsync: "maildirsync broken with perl 5.22"
  add upstream patch, upload to DELAYED/3
• #809583 src:libgenome-model-tools-music-perl: "libgenome-model-tools-music-perl: FTBFS: use Genome::Model::Tools::Music::Survival': Can't use 'defined(@array)"
  fix 'defined(@array)' error (pkg-perl)

As I posted earlier, I have migrated to use tor on my machine. Though I had a couple of unsolved issues back then. One of them being my Mail Transport Agent (MTA) did not support tor. A regular user might not have a lot of use for a MTA on their laptop. However, it is needed for a lot of Debian development scripts (bts, mass-bug, nmudiff), if they are to file/manipulate bugs for you. I have some requirements for my MTA

• tor support (or at least torsocks -able)
• support end-to-end encryption with my provider (STARTTLS)
• verify that it is talking to my provider.
• rewrite my From if it is not correct (otherwise the mail will just be rejected)
• support the auth mechanisms of my provider
• it should be simple to configure

I also have some non-requirements:

• Local mail delivery is not required
• The MTA will not be used as a general mail relay.
  • One target relay
  • No relaying from other hosts
• Mail delivery queue is nice to have but not a strict requirement.

Originally, I used postfix, which supported most of these requirements. Except:

• My attempt to make it use tor failed. The best suggestion I found was to divert its smtp handler and then replace it with a torsocks call to the original handler. Sadly, it just seg. faulted.
• While postfix is almost certainly able to verify it is talking with my provider, I never got it configured to do that. In the end, postfix was to complicated for what I was ready to put up with.

Per suggestion of Jakub Wilk, I tried msmtp, which turned out do what I wanted.

• There is a trivial config file example to start with. I did not need to read any manuals or extended documentation to figure out what they were doing.
• You probably also want to specify tls_priorities (assuming msmtp is linked against gnutls)
  • A code dive suggests it defaults to NORMAL:-VERS-SSL3.0 if not set. It is probably not too bad, but could be better. :)
    
  • From a quick look at the gnutls manual PFS:%PROFILE_<name> seems like decent value (requires gnutls >= 3.2.4 and that your provider has decent/modern SSL setup).
  • You probably want to have a look at the values for the %PROFILE_<name> before deciding on one.
• The msmtp program supports connecting through SOCKS proxies and even has a sample config snippet for using it with tor.
  • Of course, by the time I had discovered that I had already been using torsocks /usr/sbin/sendmail a couple of times. :)

The only feature I will probably miss is having a local queue, which can be rate limited. But all in all, I am quite happy with it so far. :)
Filed under: Debian

At LibrePlanet 2015 (the FSF s annual conference), I gave a talk called Access Without Empowerment as one of the conference keynote addresses. As I did for my 2013 LibrePlanet talk, I ve edited together a version that includes the slides and I ve posted it online in WebM and on YouTube. Here s the summary written up in the LibrePlanet program:

The free software movement has twin goals: promoting access to software through users freedom to share, and empowering users by giving them control over their technology. For all our movement s success, we have been much more successful at the former. I will use data from free software and from several related movements to explain why promoting empowerment is systematically more difficult than promoting access and I will explore how our movement might address the second challenge in the future.

In related news, registration is open for LibrePlanet 2016 and that it s free for FSF members. If you re not an FSF member, the FSF annual fundraiser is currently going on so now would be a great time to join.

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Released try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content aware diff utility. Thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.
• Announced travis.debian.net, a hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on Travis CI.
• Wrote an Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface that reminds you if you neglect to attach a file if you mention one in the body. (Repo)
• Added graphical image comparison using to diffoscope using libcaca. (commit)
• Did further work on a free-software healthcare project.
• Added the ability to hide Zwift activities in my Strava Enhancement Suite Chrome extension. (#40)
• Updated the Django web framework documentation to discourage the use of filenames in /tmp with predictable names. (#5864)
• Corrected a Python 3.5-ism and a double-encoding issue in django-slack.
• Increased the size of the search form on codesearch.debian.net. (#59)
• Added support for filenames alongside the existing URL support for book cover images in my media database. (code)
• Corrected a trivial typo in FreeBSD's pkg package management tool. (#1353)
• Attended the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress.

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