It should be no news that PayPal have made an habit of opposing to projects that fight for the respect of freedom and democracy by cutting their funds. Anyway, they have just provided us another example of such an abuse, against the ProtonMail project.ProtonMail is a secure email service project, similar to the defunct Lavabit service, with characteristics that should allow it a greater resistance to external pressure: it is based in Switzerland (which has specific privacy laws and with a strong democratic control) and developed by CERN and MIT researchers. Well, it seems that this project was not appreciated by some organization, for which PayPal is just a puppet. Long story short, PayPal cut ProtonMail's funds without prior warning nor real explanation. When pressed to explain themselves, they eventually asked them if their email encryption project was approved by the government (which one, by the way?)! As I said in introduction, this is not really a surprise, but it remind us that PayPal's major position is a threat to freedom and democracy as they still behave as enemies of these values (or as collaborator to known harmful organization, which is close enough) and that no project should rely on them. Fortunately, ProtonMail does not.,

Folks from Collabora and Red Hat have been working on making Firefox on Gtk+ 3 a thing. See Emilio s blog post for some recent update. But getting Firefox to build and run locally is unfortunately not the whole story. I ve been working on getting Gtk+ 3 Firefox builds going on Mozilla build infrastructure, and I m proud to announce today that those builds are now going through Mozilla continuous integration on a project branch: Elm, and receive the same automated testing as mozilla-central. And when I said getting Firefox to build and run was unfortunately not the whole story, I meant it: if you click on the Elm link above, you ll notice that there s a lot of orange, when it should be all green. So, yes, Firefox on Gtk+ 3 is a thing, and it now has continuous integration. But there s still a whole bunch of things to fix. So if you re interested in making those builds work better, you can hop in, there are many things you can do:

check the Gtk+ 3 tracking bug and its dependencies for a list of known issues or improvements to be made.
download one of the builds from the elm branch, test it, and file bugs if you find some that aren t currently tracked. There aren t nightlies, but you can get the latest builds for 32-bits and 64-bits systems.
and if you have level 1 commit access, you can test patches on the Try server, provided you pull from the elm branch or apply this patch on top of the tree you push there.

Review: Lockstep, by Karl Schroeder

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	March 2014
ISBN:	0-7653-3726-6
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	351

Toby McGonigal's family fled an Earth dominated by trillionaires and vicious class conflict, and attempt, instead, a very risky and precarious settlement on a trans-Neptunian object. It's the last unclaimed but marginally habitable space left in the solar system, and securing their claim requires constant bureaucratic hoop-jumping. That's what sent Toby on a solo mission to a distant moon of their home to claim it and solidify their title. But, while in cold sleep, his craft hits a small chunk of rock, and he wakes up near another world: cold, silent, dead... but apparently with lifeless cities. Another trip through suspended animation in a desperate attempt to conserve resources against the distant hope of rescue has him awakening in a society both utterly foreign and yet strangely familiar. Schroeder is one of the better big idea writers in science fiction, but I found Lockstep to be a mixed bag. He does a surprisingly good job with the core conceit of the novel (more on that in a moment), even though it's a tricky one to make believable. Surrounding that, though, are a lot of less convincing bits that I kept having to not think about too hard, such as Toby crossing the path of another trans-Neptunian object after the accident (space is really, really big and really, really empty), or the implications of later revelations about the time scales involved in parts of the plot. Some parts of the world building, even if scientifically plausible, struck me as sloppy; for example, a religion plays a prominent role in the plot, but the nature of that religion was not particularly believable, nor was its interaction with the plot climax. I won't go into details about the religion, since it's a major plot point, but the short version is that religions tend to mature from the concrete to the abstract, not the other way around. That said, the core conceit is both surprising and considerably better-defended in the book than I thought it could be. The world into which Toby awakes is the world of the locksteps: a society that uses suspended animation in a universal and coordinated way to build a functional society on the far outskirts of the solar system. Humans emerge for some short period of time, like a month, and build, trade, interact, and consume. They welcome ships traveling from other trans-Neptunian worlds and prepare for their own journeys. And then they go into suspended animation for an extended period 15 years and 30 years are common choices while robots slowly gather more resources and energy, and repair and replace what's consumed in the month of active life. Ships travel with passengers in suspended animation, allowing the vast distances between these cold worlds to be reached during the sleep period. And, since all members of the lockstep sleep and wake on the same schedule, there is no wrenching desynchronization with the surrounding society during travel. One may spend thirty years in transit, but no time passes for anyone else in the lockstep while you're traveling either. A world can effectively trade with all other worlds within a thirty year travel radius without noticing the elapsed time. This is a technological system that at first doesn't sound like it would work, but Schroeder does a great job defending it and chasing down implications. The lockstep civilization serves as a sort of anchor and time capsule separate from the more frantic pace of the so-called fast worlds. The trans-Neptunian lockstep worlds are remote enough and poor enough to not attract too much unwanted attention, and are thus tolerated by fast societies that may have more available resources. (Although, to be sure, automated robot defenses have to carry a lot of weight here given how helpless the locksteps are during a sleep cycle.) I'm not sure I completely bought the sociology, but it works well enough to carry the weight of the story, and I've never seen a science fiction construction that uses the common technology of suspended animation in quite this way before. Schroeder sets up some nice stabilizing tensions between resources and time, adds some believable political reasons for this fragile society to survive, and uses some of its obvious political vulnerabilities as story drivers. The plot, unfortunately, isn't as good as the big idea, and particularly suffers at the start of the book. Toby is a teenager without much experience (Lockstep is marketed as young adult), and is immediately thrown into a strange and quickly hostile environment. This means that he spends the first half of the book reacting to a blizzard of new information, and the plot tends to revert to a tour of Schroeder's constructed world. Toby is also a bit of a cipher and a bit of an everyman, without many feelings or opinions beyond the obvious feelings that any teenage boy would go through in this situation. That makes the sense of a world tour even stronger. This flaw does not persist through the whole book. Toby does eventually start making decisions and doing things, some of the supporting characters add additional depth, and I found the unwinding of the plot surprisingly satisfying. The nature of time in this world lets Schroeder have both epic sweep and personal connection at the same time, which lets him pull off some neat contrasts between the personal and the political. I also liked Toby's gradual piecing together of what actually happened while he was asleep, both in the construction of society as a whole and in the personal conflicts between people he knew well. Some of the ease of grand manipulation seemed dubious to me, but, in Schroeder's defense, people do develop a reverence for and stories about things that have lasted a very long time, and Schroeder's setup gives him quite a lot to work with in that department. So, a mixed bag. The core concept is thought-provoking and up to Schroeder's usual standards. The surrounding world-building isn't as much, and I think Schroeder reaches for some too-easy explanations and still underplays just how many disruptive things can happen over the span of time that this book covers. The characterization I found weak and unsatisfying for much of the book, but it gets moderately better in the end. There's a bit too much tour, and a bit too much world exploration instead of plot, but it's a fascinating world and I still enjoyed the tour. With stronger characters and a few fewer dubious supporting pillars in the world background, I think this would have been an excellent book. As is, it's an enjoyable novel set firmly in the big idea and deep future end of science fiction, and I'm always happy to see more stories like that. It's not the best that Schroeder has done, but I still recommend it. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Series:	Imperial Radch #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	0-316-24662-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	416

As Ancillary Justice opens, Breq is on an icy planet trying to track down a person who has gone rather thoroughly to ground. As her search continues, the reader slowly learns the context of that search, which is only the latest step of a long and quixotic exercise in private determination. She was set on her path by events twenty years previous, told in interleaved flashbacks, that have left her greatly diminished and thrust outside of any of the context of her over thousand years of life. Breq was Justice of Toren, a starship and AI that possessed thousands of ancillaries, human bodies slaved to her mind. Now only this one remains, and nothing exists of her former life other than this goal. It's always hard to write a review of a book that I loved this much. I want to find some way to grab the reader and shake them and say "you have to read this!" without giving away any of the delicious details. That's particularly difficult with Ancillary Justice, since one of the delights of this book is the slow unfolding of not only the plot but the background and motivations behind the plot. There is so much beneath the surface of Breq's methodical intent, and discovering all the nuances is utterly delightful. This is also a book that is very deeply concerned with identity, and which does one of the best jobs I've seen in science fiction of showing a non-human first-person protagonist: close enough to human to permit identification and comprehension, but far enough away for delightful sparks of unexpected insight or thought-provoking difference. Breq is a ship, and AIs are central to this story, so the comparison that comes immediately to mind is with Iain M. Banks. Leckie's role for ship AIs is much different than the structure of Banks's Culture, but I think this is still an apt comparison. Like Banks, Leckie is writing large-scale space opera dominated by a meddling empire that follows some familiar human patterns but not others. Banks's Culture takes a less direct approach with its meddling; the Radch has a more Roman attitude towards preventative conquest and citizenship. But both deal with large-scale issues of politics, culture, and conquest. Both also write excellent AIs, but I think Leckie is more successful than Banks at giving her AIs inhuman properties and creating a sense of eerie alienness that sometimes fades almost entirely and sometimes comes sharply to the surface. The first-person perspective helps considerably there. But where Ancillary Justice truly shined for me is in the interpersonal relationships, and in the insight they provided into character and motive. At the start of the book, Breq finds a drug addict dying in the cold and rescues her, bringing her along on her search for lack of a better option. Breq's relationship with Seivarden is complex, difficult for both of them, badly asymmetric at the start, and develops into something brilliant. At the start of the book, Seivarden is easy to dislike, and Breq's tone is refreshingly bracing and forthright. But through the course of the book Seivarden grows into something much more, in a way that I found both believable and incredibly compelling. And Leckie does this without falling into any of the typical relationship patterns, without introducing artificial romance (or, indeed, any romance at all, which is an excellent choice here), and without compromising the personalities of either character. It's masterfully done. One of the most amazing things about this book to me is that it's a first novel. I never would have guessed that from reading it. It's beautifully paced, the characterization is deep and compelling, and Leckie avoids any sign of the typical first-novel problem of stuffing the book with too much Stuff. Ancillary Justice is a capable and confident novel that builds a compelling world and even more compelling characters. I liked it more than I like most of the Culture novels, which is saying quite a lot, but Leckie offers much of the same scope with deeper and more personal characterization and a tighter plot. I haven't yet remarked on one aspect of this book that every other review seems to remark on: its treatment of gender. The Radch do not recognize or care about gender distinctions, and therefore Breq struggles throughout the book with proper gender labeling in much the same way that a native English speaker tends to struggle with grammatical gender when learning a Romance language, except with more social consequences. Leckie has chosen to represent this in the novel by having Breq refer to everyone uniformly as "she." This has its pluses and minuses: it still supports a binary gender concept where a gender-neutral pronoun might not, but given all the negative reaction this book got just for using "she," a gender-neutral pronoun might be a bridge too far for a lot of readers. I thought it created a nice bit of alienation, a way of forcing the reader to look at gender markers from the outside and a way to point out how arbitrary many of them are. It was also interesting to see how surprised I was at various points in the book when it became obvious that some person Breq had been calling "she" in the first-person narration turned out, from story context, to probably be male. That said, I think this part of the book is overblown in reviews. It's often the first thing people mention, but while it was a nice side bit of world-building, I don't think it's that central to the story. I'm particularly baffled by the handful of people who complained about it, since it's not intrusive and it quickly fades into the background apart from occasional necessary shifts of mental image. (It does create the impression of a world containing only women, but I found that a nice change from the more common impression in space opera of a world containing only men.) Ancillary Justice has already won the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards and tied for the BSFA award for best novel, and I'm happy to report that it deserves all of those. I haven't yet read all of the other Hugo nominees, but it's hard to imagine a world in which it won't top my ballot. This is a fantastic novel, by far the best thing I've read so far this year. I'm delighted that it's the first book of a trilogy, since I'm not done with either the world or the characters yet, but it stands well on its own and reaches a satisfying conclusion. I recommend it to everyone, but particularly to anyone who likes Banks, intelligent ships, or who is looking for thoughtful and complex space opera. Followed by Ancillary Sword. Rating: 10 out of 10

translucent red pressing

Vangelis' soundtrack for the movie Blade Runner is one of my favourite film soundtracks. Its troubled history is reasonably well documented on Wikipedia . At the time of writing, that article doesn't mention the recent 2013 reissue which was remastered and released on Vinyl, and possibly SACD too. Last year I spotted this record and bought it for a friend's birthday. In the year since I've eventually gave into temptation and bought another copy for myself. This was a little unfortunate in terms of timing as my record player has been packed away for two months pending a house move. I did manage to test it out on a Numark PT-01 but it really needs a proper setup to do it justice. In the mean time, one can watch a video of someone else's copy playing: In related news, I've recently enjoyed the BBC's adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as part of their "Dangerous Visions" series. Much like the film, the play elides a lot of material from the book; including Deckard's wife and (more sadly) the entire Buster Friendly / Mercer side-story. However it retains the second police station, which (to me) was the key, classic Dick "What-the..." moment in the novel.

DNSSEC is one of those things that have been on the I should poke at that sometime list, but today I decided to actually get in and play around with it. Turns out it s pretty trivially easy to setup, but I got bitten by a few gotchas during testing, that I thought worthwhile to document. Since I like to explain things, a lot of this article isn t how to so much as how does .

Configuring The Resolver First off, you need a resolver¹ that you can trust, and which implements DNSSEC validation. In theory, you could use your ISP s resolvers (if they re DNSSEC-enabled), or even Google s public resolvers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), but it s really not recommended how much do you trust those, really? More importantly, how much do you trust the network path between them and you? Frankly, running a local on-host caching resolver is trivial, consumes next-to-no resources, and is highly recommended. It s what I did. I used unbound, finally casting free the venerable dnscache, which has served me well for many years. I chose unbound because it fits the do one small thing, and do it well philosophy that I cherish (unlike BIND), and because it s what all the cool kids appear to be using these days. Installing it was as simple as apt-get install unbound it s available in pretty much every distro, I believe. Out of the box, unbound in Debian wheezy comes configured for DNSSEC validation. Other methods of installation might not be so amenable, so just make sure your unbound.conf liiks like this, so that DNSSEC is enabled:

server:
    auto-trust-anchor-file: "/var/lib/unbound/root.key"
    val-log-level: 2

The val-log-level line isn t strictly required, but I found it useful to have unbound log info on validation failures to syslog. Season to taste. You also have to configure your system to actually use your new, shiny local resolver. Editing /etc/resolv.conf would, in an ideal world, work Just Fine, but between Magical Unhelpful Pixies (I m looking at you, NetworkManager) and DHCP, it often isn t that easy. Ultimately, though, you should configure your system so that the only resolver in /etc/resolv.conf is always 127.0.0.1. Anything else is a security hole waiting to happen. If you re using DHCP and a recent version of ISC dhclient, adding supersede domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; to dhclient.conf should do the needful.

Weighing the (Trust) Anchor Whatever local resolver you choose, you need to tell it about trust anchors . This is a key (or keys) which are trusted to sign all the other data that the resolver will find. Like the rest of the DNS, DNSSEC is hierarchical, and you need to know who to start with before you can start. To resolve a name using DNS, you ask the root servers for the answer to a question (say, what is the address of `www.example.com`? ). The root server doesn t know the answer, but it knows who to ask, and it tells you where to go (typically, go ask the DNS servers for `.com`, which are X, Y, and Z ). Then you ask those servers, and they probably don t know, but they know who to ask, and they tell you to go ask those servers. This continues until you finally get a server which says, oh, yes, I know the answer to that! and hands over the information you re after. In DNSSEC, you get digital signatures that prove that the answers you get from each DNS server you ask are legit, and not forged. So when you ask the root servers, what is the address of `www.example.com`? , they answer, I don t know, but go ask DNS servers at addresses X, Y, and Z and by the way, you can trust this answer is legit because here s this signature you can check . To verify a signature is legit, you need to know that the key used to make the signature is trustworthy, and it wasn t just any ol key that made it similar to how an ink scribble on a page doesn t mean anything unless you know what the signature you re looking at should look like. DNSSEC has two ways to make sure you know who to trust. Firstly, those trust anchors I mentioned three paragraphs ago. These are the keys that the root servers use to sign the responses they send out. You tell unbound (or your local DNSSEC-enabled resolver of choice), if you see a signature provided by this trust anchor key, you can trust it to be legit . The second way to trust is key is to have someone you already trust say, oh, you can trust this key, too . This is done by providing more data in the answer that you get from the root servers. So the full answer you get from the root servers when you ask, what is the address of `www.example.com`? looks like this:
I don t know, but you should ask the DNS servers at addresses X, Y, and Z. You can trust their answers because they ll sign their responses with key K. Finally, you can trust that I m legit because of this signature I m providing you, generated from key T.
Assuming that T is the trust-anchor key you ve already told unbound to trust, it can then trust all of the information it got from that first question. When it then goes to DNS server X and asks, Hey, do you know the address of `www.example.com`? , that server can send back its own response saying:
Gee, shucks, I don t know, but DNS servers at P and Q can help you. You can trust them because they ll sign responses with key S. And just to show you I m on the level, check out this nifty signature I made, signed with key K.
Since a server we trust told us to trust key K, and then we got a response signed by key K that told us to trust key S, when we then go and ask server P and get a response signed by S, we re still demonstrably secure. Neat setup, right? Anyway, now you know all about trust anchors. How do you set it up? For unbound, it s capable of priming the trust anchor itself. It does this by retrieving a copy of the trust anchor from [a well-known HTTPS URL]((https://data.iana.org/root-anchors/root-anchors.xml), which provides a reasonable measure of security the trust anchor file should be safe as long as that HTTPS server is trustworthy. For the properly paranoid, you should determine an alternate means of verifying that you have the correct root key (a web search for DNSSEC root key attestation would probably be a good start).

Testing It s always handy to know that something s working as you expect. For something that s important for security, that goes double. So, how do you test that your DNSSEC-capable resolver is, indeed, working as designed? Well, firstly, you can test that the resolver, by itself, is working. This is simple: do a query for a zone known to have broken DNSSEC. Thankfully, some nice people (Comcast, specifically) have already set this up. You can test a resolver for DNSSEC-correctness with this command:

dig @127.0.0.1 www.dnssec-failed.org

If dig gives you back an IP address, something is broken. The correct, my DNSSEC works! response should be a status: SERVFAIL response. That s all well and good, but having a resolver that works isn t much good if nothing s actually using it. Your system configuration has probably got some other resolvers configured into it (such as those provided by a DHCP server), and you ll want to make sure those aren t getting used². The trivial test is to visit http://www.dnssec-failed.org in your browser. If that comes back with a page, then something s still wrong. A more user-friendly test of your DNSSEC configuration is provided by http://dnssectest.sidnlabs.nl/test.php, which will display a page either way, and give you a tick or a cross depending on whether you re DNSSEC-enabled or not. One thing to be wary of when you re doing browser tests is caching. I spent far too long trying to work out why unbound wasn t working , when in actual fact it was working fine, it s just that both my browser and local caching proxy (squid) were caching DNS requests³. So, even after I d correctly setup unbound, visiting the test sites was providing me with erroneous results. Fixing up the browser was simple enough. In Chromium, visiting chrome://net-internals#dns will show you what s being cached, what resolv.conf settings are being used, and allow you to clear the browser s resolver cache. Squid was similarly simple, although it took me a while to figure out that it was causing me grief (software that just works , being so rare, tends to slip your mind, and so I often forget that squid is actually doing me good). Restarting squid has the appropriate result (clears the DNS cache), but in the end I decided that having another layer of caching wasn t going to help significantly when I ve got an on-host DNS cache already, in unbound. So, I just turned the knobs for DNS caching in squid right down:

negative_dns_ttl 1 second
positive_dns_ttl 1 second

And voila! All was well.

In summary DNSSEC is cool. It s easy to get going with, and over time it will provide more and more practical benefits (I am a DANE fanboi). Get started with it now, and you ll be ahead of the curve.

A resolver is a program which takes a name, does all the DNS queries required to get the data associated with that name, and return it to whoever wanted to know. This can be a library which links to a client application, or it can be a separate program which receives DNS requests itself. There are usually both types of resolvers in use for a typical Linux system to resolve names. On every machine, in every program, there is the so-called stub resolver , which is part of libc, and does nothing except create DNS requests and send them to the addresses listed in resolv.conf. Also present, although not always running on every machine (typically your ISP or network admin has some running for everyone to share) are one or more recursive resolvers , which are separate programs which take DNS requests, do all of the queries themselves, and return the result to the stub resolver for presentation to the client program which made the request in the first place. You will see this material again.
You can configure dhclient to use your local resolver instead of the DHCP-provided ones by simply setting:
```
supersede domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
```
in your dhclient.conf file.
It also didn t help that I hadn t correctly knobbled dhclient the first time around, and so even when I thought I was only resolving against my local unbound server, it was still actually using the DHCP-provided resolvers

One which ends in tears, I m afraid. A week or so ago, I got an MacBook Air 13 (MacBook Air 6-2), to take with me when I head out to local hack sessions, and when I travel out of state for short lengths of time. My current Thinkpad T520i is an amazing machine, and will remain my daily driver for a while to come. After getting it, I unboxed the machine, and put in a Debian install USB key. I wiped OSX (without even booting into it) and put Debian on the drive. To my dismay, it didn t boot up after install. Using the recovery mode of the disk, I chrooted in and attempted an upgrade (to ensure I had an up-to-date GRUB). I couldn t dist-upgrade, the terminal went white. After C-c ing the terminal, I saw something about systemd s sysvinit shim, so I manually did a purge of sysvinit and install of systemd. I hear this has been resolved now. Thanks :) My machine still wasn t booting, so I checked around. Turns out I needed to copy over the GRUB EFI blob to a different location to allow it to boot. After doing that, I could boot Debian whilst holding Alt. After booting, things went great! Until I shut my lid. After that point, my screen was either 0% bright (absolutely dark) or 100% (facemeltingly bright). I saw mba6x_bl, which claims to fix it, and has many happy users. If you re in a similar suggestion, I highly suggest looking at it. Unfortunately, this caused my machine to black out on boot and I couldn t see the screen at all anymore. A rescue disk later, and I was back. Annoyingly, the bootup noise s volume is stored in NVRAM, which gets written out by OSX when it shuts down. After consulting the inimitableMatthew Garrett, I was told the NVRAM can be hacked about with by mounting efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs. Win! After hitting enter, I got a kernel panic and some notes about hardware assertions failing. That s when I returned my MacBook and got a Dell XPS 13.
This is a problem, folks. If I can t figure out how to make this work, how can we expect our users? Such a shame the most hardware on the planet gets no support, locking it s users into even less freedom.

Review: The Wilding, by C.S. Friedman

Series:	In Conquest Born #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2004
Printing:	July 2005
ISBN:	0-7564-0202-6
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	551

In Conquest Born is a rather odd space opera, featuring an interstellar war between two great empires that culminates in an intensely personal struggle between leaders of the two sides. It has one of the most intensely misogynistic societies in science fiction (the villains, yes, but weirdly ambiguous villains), genetic breeding programs for telepaths, and a host of unlikable but oddly fascinating characters. I thought it was weaker on re-read than I remembered it being originally, but it's still singular enough in memory that I wanted to read the sequel. The Wilding picks up in the same universe a century and a half later. I expected more of a direct connection to the plot of In Conquest Born, but I think this book could be read on its own. (This is good, given how the plot of In Conquest Born tends to slip out of my memory, despite how unique the book is.) The Azeans and the Braxins are, of course, still at war, an on-again, off-again affair that neither side seems likely to ever win. But the Azeans have forbidden psychic powers and driven all psychics underground, if they still exist at all. They are supposedly too unstable to be allowed in the carefully constructed Azean society. Tathas is Braxin, but not from the ruling Braxan tribe. He is caught practicing old rituals of his native tribe and escapes sentence of death by going on the Wilding, an ancient practice of leaving Braxin culture to find new genetic material and bring it back to strengthen their species. Or, put in less euphemistic terms, to find and rape a woman and bring back the resulting child, although apparently retrieving a genetic sample would also work. Did I mention the misogynistic society part? Still there. Zara, the other primary protagonist, is an Azean mediator who, as the book is opening, starts developing psychic powers. This is a rather serious problem that gets her suspended from her job. Her check of her own genetic records (the old-school SF obsession with eugenics is also still there) leads to the discovery that she's an identical twin, whose sister was kidnapped as an infant under mysterious circumstances and apparently by underground psychics. Zara decides to go in search of her. As with In Conquest Born, this book is full of deeply unpleasant societies and world views. Also as with In Conquest Born, I don't think Friedman intends any of them to be held up as examples of correct politics or behavior. What makes both of these books unusual is that neither she nor the characters seem to be making any attempt to construct a third alternative that would be better. The secret society of psychics has a different appeal, but it's not clear the characters would want to be part of it either, and it's quite possible that they're still responsible for a lot of the crap that's going on in the galaxy. The book feels like it ought to be political, as these societies are clearly broken and deeply abusive (the Braxins more obviously than the Azeans, but they're both creepy), but it mostly isn't. Instead, The Wilding is focused on individual people trying to make their way in this world. Those people come from varying strata of these societies. Zara and Tathas are there throughout; other characters crop up briefly with their own viewpoints and then often go away again or are killed. I think Friedman is going for a story of raw emotion and a tight focus on individual actions, with little in the way of clean morality or broader morals. And yet... the final act of the protagonists in the book is a political act that seems aimed at making the universe a better place. In a way, this is a very cynical book: there is a tremendous amount of manipulation and political maneuvering, and it's hard to see any cause here that one can fully support. This is all rather similar to In Conquest Born, but what held the previous book together was its backbone of obsessive vengeance and the spectacle of two intelligent people from utterly different societies locked in all-out emotional and physical combat. The Wilding doesn't have that. It has characters with strong motives and strong emotions, but none of them are the sort of epic, transcendent emotions that propel mythic heroes at each other. This is a more prosaic and personal book, which means the drama isn't strong and sweeping enough to make the reader forget the deep unpleasantness that's going on around them. The Wilding feels less like a clash of titans and more like personal quests for identity against a universe full of awful people and worse systems. It also retains, in the Braxin, aggressive male-dominant sexuality just this side of a Gor novel, but here that feels seedier and even more squirm-inducing than it did in In Conquest Born. The Wilding is even more ambiguous about the ethics of that sexual and misogynistic abusiveness; Tathas partly gives it up, but this is presented more as an accommodation to another culture than as a real engagement with the inherent abusiveness of Braxin society. I still have no idea whether and to whom I would recommend In Conquest Born. I'm less torn about The Wilding: don't bother. It's a lesser work in all respects, it shares some of the problems with too many characters and an occasionally incoherent plot, and I had even more trouble with the horrible societies Friedman creates than I did in the previous book. And it doesn't have the same counterbalance of epic, uncontrolled emotions and characters who seem to transcend the story they're in. Instead, it feels more like a story of damaged people in an awful universe who are meddling through as best they can while being manipulated by the people with real power. It got more depressing the more I thought about it, and the ending doesn't salvage the story. Rating: 4 out of 10

When I took over maintenance of the nbd userland utilities, I decided not to do a full rewrite, even though that might have been a good idea. I've managed to keep things running, but the code isn't very pretty. Unfortunately I've also made a few mistakes. Yes, I know. No, I can't say it won't happen again. Still, the "design", for lack of a better word, of the nbd-server code was problematic, to the extent that some needed performance improvements could not be done, or would require so much work that it would be better to just throw everything out and start over. The unfortunate result of this has been that those who did want to try to do something new with NBD did just that, rather than contributing back to the reference implementation. Over the years, I've sometimes tried to come up with ways to improve the way in which things work. Most of these efforts haven't gone very far, either because they turned out to be dead ends, or because I just didn't have the time to finish it, and that by the time I could finally work on the branch again, the main branch had diverged so much that the branch was so outdated that I would almost have to start over if I was ever going to make it useful again. The most recent of those efforts is the io_transaction branch. This branch has two main goals:

Make nbd-server somewhat more modular, so that it would be possible to a different backend per export, if necessary
Improve upon the way we handle select() and friends, so that the server can deal with requests more efficiently.

Today, I've reached the (fairly significant) milestone with that branch that on my machine, it seems to pass the "read" part of the test suite. What's more, the second part of the above two means it actually did so at a much higher speed than it does, on average, on the main branch. Of course, reading is only half of the story, and no, write doesn't seem to work yet. After that, there's also a lot of work still to be done if I want to get this branch "on par" with the main branch, feature-wise. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Finally.

Review: A People's History of the Supreme Court, by Peter Irons

Publisher:	Penguin
Copyright:	1999, 2006
Printing:	2006
ISBN:	0-14-303738-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	553

I first encountered Peter Irons via his Teaching Company course, The History of the Supreme Court. I listened to that and enjoyed it, and would recommend it as an excellent overview. When I later ran across this book, I was excited: I usually prefer books to lectures on topics that can benefit from greater depth, and A People's History of the United States is one of my favorite history books. A book that talked about the Supreme Court from a similar bottom-up approach was appealing. Unfortunately, I think the title oversells this book. It is a history of the Supreme Court, and, as with Zinn's book, it carries its bias openly (if not as forcefully or compellingly as Zinn). It is a legal history concerned with individual rights, and Irons openly expresses his opinions of the merits of certain decisions. But it's not the full-throated cry for justice and for the voice of the general population that Zinn's book was, nor did I think it entirely delivered on the introductory promise to look at the people and situations underlying the case. It does provide more background and biographical sketch of the litigants in famous cases than some other histories, but those sketches are generally brief and focused on the background and relevant facts for the case. This is, in short, a history of the Supreme Court, with some attention paid to the people involved and open comfort with an authorial viewpoint, but without the eye-opening and convention-defying freshness of Zinn's refusal to point the camera at the usual suspects. It also largely duplicates Irons's course for the Teaching Company. That's only really a problem for those, like me, who listened to that course already and came to this book looking for additional material. If you haven't listened to the course, this is a reasonable medium in which to provide the same content, although you do miss the audio recordings of actual Supreme Court argument in some of the most famous cases. But after having listened or read both, I think I prefer the course. It felt a bit more focused; the book is not padded, but the additional material is also not horribly memorable. That said, as a history, I found this a solid book. Irons opens with a surprisingly detailed look at the constitutional convention and the debates over the wording of the US Constitution, focusing on those sections that will become the heart of later controversy. Some of them were known to be controversial at the time and were discussed and argued at great length, such as anything related to slavery and the role of a bill of rights. But others, including many sections at the heart of modern controversies, were barely considered. Despite being a bit off-topic for the book, I found this section very interesting and am now wanting to seek out a good, full history of the convention. Irons's history from there is primarily chronological, although he does shift the order slightly to group some major cases into themes. He doesn't quite provide the biographies of each Supreme Court justice that he discussed in the introduction, but he comes close, along with discussion of the surrounding politics of the nomination and the political climate in which they were sitting. There's a bit of an overview of the types of cases each court saw, although not as much as I would have liked. Most of the history is, as one might expect, focused on more detailed histories of the major cases. Here, I was sometimes left satisfied and sometimes left a bit annoyed. The discussion of the Japanese internment cases is excellent, as you might expect given Irons's personal role in getting them overturned. The discussion of the segregation cases is also excellent; in general, I found Section V the strongest part of this book. Irons also does a good job throughout in showing how clearly political the court was and has always been, and the degree to which many major decisions were pre-decided by politics rather than reasoned legal judgment. Where I think he fails, however, is that much of this book has little sense of narrative arc. This is admittedly difficult in a history of a body that takes on widely varying and almost random cases, but there are some clear narratives that run through judicial thinking, and I don't think Irons does a good enough job telling those stories for the readers. For example, I remembered the evolution of interpretation of the 14th Amendment from freedom of contract to the keystone of application of the Bill of Rights to the states as a compelling and coherent story from his course, and here it felt scattered and less clear. In general, I liked the earlier sections of this book better than the later, with Section V on the Warren court as the best and last strong section. Beyond that point in the history, it felt like Irons was running out of steam, and it was harder and harder to see an underlying structure to the book. He would describe a few cases, in a factual but somewhat dry manner, make a few comments on the merits of the decision that felt more superficial than earlier sections of the book, and then move on to another case that might be largely unrelated. Recent judicial history is fascinating, but I don't think this is the book for that. Irons is much stronger in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries; beyond that, I prefer Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, which also has far deeper and more interesting biographies of recent justices. This is not a bad history of the Supreme Court. If you're looking for one, I can recommend it. But if you're flexible about format, I recommend Irons's course more. I think it's less dry, better presented, and flows better, and I don't feel like you'll miss much in the transformation of this book into an 18 hour course. It's also remarkable to hear the actual voices of the lawyers and justices in some of the landmark cases of the middle of the 20th century. But if you specifically want a book, this does the job. Do also read The Nine, though. It's a good complement to Irons's straight history, showing much more of the inner workings, political maneuverings, and day-to-day struggles of the justices. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Face of the Enemy, by Sandra Barret

Series:	Terran-Novan #1
Publisher:	Digital Mindancer
Copyright:	2007
Printing:	2009
ISBN:	1-934452-36-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	216

Set in a future SF world of an alliance of breakaway human colonies and a smoldering war between the Terrans (who focus on technology and implants) and the Novans (who have embraced genetic engineering), Face of the Enemy is military SF with a side of lesbian romance. Or vice versa. It was mentioned in a Tor.com roundup of SFF lesbian romance, and since I'd had good luck with lesbian romance and was looking for more light SF, I picked it up and read it between other things. Flaws first for this review: Face of the Enemy is not going to impress anyone with its originality. Technology versus bioengineering is an old, old bit of world-building. Barret doesn't bring much new to it other than enhanced pheromones, which provoked a bit of an eye roll. One protagonist is from a military family and is passionate about joining the family tradition, particularly since her mother is frequently blamed for the loss of a major battle. The other protagonist is the beautiful daughter of a diplomat but is half-Novan and hiding it, since the bioengineered Novans are second-class citizens viewed with suspicion and repulsion by the Terrans. You can doubtless make some good guesses about where the rest of the story goes. It's also the sort of story in which the protagonists are always the people you want to know: talented, eager, better than other cadets, but usually modest and loyal friends. Obviously, in a romance I want to like the protagonists and root for them. But the complex friendships of military cadets at the top of their class is another story that I've read many times before. That said, while it might sound like you could write the rest of the story from the setup, I was surprised several times. Barret throws in some twists and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the complications generated by the backgrounds of both protagonists don't always follow expected patterns, and I was impressed by the degree to which the story manages to avoid clear-cut villains. I don't think it fully engages with the underclass on which both sides have built their societies, but there's at least some movement in that direction. The opening had set my expectations low, but there's more to this world than it first appears. I thought Barret did a reasonably good job staying consistent with the backgrounds of her characters: they have some connections, and those are somewhat helpful, but they're still trainees and never get unrealistic amounts of real responsibility. And I did like these people and enjoyed reading about them. The romance itself has significant love-at-first-sight elements and lots of missed communication and unspoken uncertainty, which aren't my favorite plot elements. As you might imagine, the dark secret aspect of hidden genetic engineering angle is played to the hilt, with lots of failed communication and jumping to incorrect conclusions on both sides. It's the kind of story where people have to knock the heads of the protagonists together to get them to open up to each other, but at least that does happen, and is rewarding when it does. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book. It has significant flaws, some paint-by-numbers world-building, and some romantic stupidity. It's a minor work. But it did satisfy the reason I picked it up: light and unchallenging reading when I wanted something quick, optimistic, and with a happy ending. And although the romance isn't very original, it has the constant plus of lesbian romance: a refreshing deficit of standard sexist stereotypes. Rating: 5 out of 10

I spent most of my high-school years in a small town called Bendigo in Australia. These days, I'm living in the centre of Europe, Switzerland. Oddly enough, a more than trivial number of people in Bendigo are now trying to imitate one of the darkest moments in Switzerland's history, a crusade to prevent the construction of a mosque. At least in Switzerland, they tried to be slightly diplomatic: the official question on the referendum was about banning minarets rather than a whole religion. The placards in the street were more explicit, with the silhouette of blackened minarets arranged to resemble a field of inter-continental ballistic missiles:

In Bendigo, however, the gloves are off. One councillor has already declared "I wouldn't want to live near a mosque. Would you?" Will Bendigo ban the internet too? In Australia and Britain, the press has been fascinated with the recent release of a Jihad video on Youtube created by Brits and Aussies fighting in Syria. Fear-mongering fanatics claim the mosque will bring jihadists to Bendigo. If they genuinely believe that, shouldn't they be pushing to censor or ban the internet too, so that the children of Bendigo won't get their hands on these recruitment videos? Weeds will grow if nobody plucks them out The fact is, most of these anti-Islam campaigners are nutcases or opportunists looking for a political career. Hundreds of millions of muslims worship their God in peace every day. As the referendum in Switzerland demonstrates, if good people do nothing, the nutcases will flourish like weeds. Only 30% of Swiss people voted to ban minarets, but with 47% of people not voting at all, the nutcases won. Citizens of Bendigo who value their human rights (which includes freedom of religion) would be wise to avoid complacency. Even though the mosque may now have council approval, sinister groups from around the whole country are now conspiring to overturn the decision or perhaps just make the town a focal point for their Islamophobia campaigns.

I have moved to a new OpenPGP key. There are many tutorials and blog posts on GnuPG key generation around, but none of them matched exactly the setup I wanted to have. So I wrote down the steps I took, to remember them if I need to in the future. Briefly my requirements were as follows:

The new master GnuPG key is on an USB stick.
The USB stick is only ever used on an offline computer.
There are subkeys stored on a YubiKey NEO smartcard for daily use.
I want to generate the subkeys using GnuPG so I have a backup.
Some non-default hash/cipher preferences encoded into the public key.

After writing down the notes below, I posted about how to create a small JPEG image to embed in my OpenPGP key. I was planning to go live with the first key I generated, however as was gently pointed out to me, the JPEG image I generated was not optimal (too low quality and not sufficiently compressed). I have decided to retake the photo so I have a color image as a basis for size optimization. I don t want to postpone using the new key though, so I stepped through all of these steps again (except adding the photo) to get a new key. This is why the notes below are for a key 1C5C4717 that is now revoked. My new real key is 54265E8C. I will add the photo to my 54265E8C key once I have a JPEG file that I m happy with. Offline machine The offline machine setup I use is a Live CD on a machine that is physically well protected. I m using the Debian Live CD version 7.5.0 GNOME Desktop. The password for the auto-logged in user is live which you need if the screen-saver kicks in. Configure the keyboard layout if you need to. Insert an USB memory stick. I m using a VFAT filesystem to keep things simple; and for this writeup it happened to be mounted as /media/FA21-BEC7 so you will have to replace that path with something that points to your USB stick. Open a terminal since the rest of this writeup will be done from a terminal window. GnuPG configuration Set your GnuPG home directory to point at the USB memory device. You will need to do this in every terminal windows you open that you want to use GnuPG in.

user@debian:~$ export GNUPGHOME=/media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome
user@debian:~$ mkdir $GNUPGHOME
user@debian:~$

The GnuPG defaults (as of version 1.4.16) to rank SHA1 higher than SHA384, SHA512, and SHA224 in the default hash preference list. To be precise, the default hash preference order is SHA256, SHA1, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224. I consider SHA1 broken so I don t advertise it all, although I believe that will not prevent some implementations of using SHA1 anyway since it is the mandatory to implement hash algorithm. Regarding symmetric ciphers, the default order is AES256, AES192, AES128, CAST5, 3DES. I don t like ciphers with 64-bit block lengths, so I don t advertise them but similarily, I believe this will not prevent some implementations of using CAST5 or 3DES anyway. I also advertise support for Twofish and Camellia in case someone wants to use them, they are 128-bit block length and relatively modern ciphers after all. The default-preference-list keyword is used to override the default settings, which will be recorded into any newly generated keys. GnuPG self-sign keys with SHA1 by default, and I prefer to use a member of the SHA2 family, hence the cert-digest-algo keyword. Further down below we will use the GnuPG Agent to talk to the smartcard, so configure GnuPG to use it with the use-agent keyword. GnuPG prints ugly warning messages about locking (gpg: DBG: locking for /media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/secring.gpg.lock' done via O_EXCL), presumably because of the VFAT filesystem, so I use lock-never to silence that.

user@debian:~$ cat > $GNUPGHOME/gpg.conf
default-preference-list SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 AES256 AES192 AES CAMELLIA256 CAMELLIA192 CAMELLIA128 TWOFISH
cert-digest-algo SHA512
use-agent
lock-never
user@debian:~$

Generate master key Below I will use a 3744 bit RSA key, where the key size is selected based on the assumption that people will focus efforts to crack RSA keys on the usual power-of-two key sizes. I have chosen to not generate an encryption key, since I will use subkeys on a smartcard. With my old B565716F key I noticed that sometimes people will encrypt to my main encryption key even though I have encryption subkeys. Presumably this happens due to implementation flaws or user configuration mistakes. It could happen intentionally if someone had a public key from me with an expired subkeys but not expired main keys. This could be a reason to use the same expiration day for all your keys. Still, I chose to not generate an encryption key at all at this point. For additional protection, I m using a passphrase on the key.

user@debian:~$ gpg --gen-key
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
gpg: keyring  /media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring  /media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/pubring.gpg' created
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA and RSA (default)
   (2) DSA and Elgamal
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 3744
Requested keysize is 3744 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 100
Key expires at Fri 26 Sep 2014 10:50:22 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
You need a user ID to identify your key; the software constructs the user ID
from the Real Name, Comment and Email Address in this form:
    "Heinrich Heine (Der Dichter) "
Real name: Simon Josefsson
Email address: simon@josefsson.org
Comment: 
You selected this USER-ID:
    "Simon Josefsson "
Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o
You need a Passphrase to protect your secret key.
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
...
gpg: /media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key 1C5C4717 marked as ultimately trusted
public and secret key created and signed.
gpg: checking the trustdb
gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model
gpg: depth: 0  valid:   1  signed:   0  trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 1u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2014-09-26
pub   3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
      Key fingerprint = EF0A 1996 7B3B 4BAD 9D5C  A97F 1A44 08DD 1C5C 4717
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
Note that this key cannot be used for encryption.  You may want to use
the command "--edit-key" to generate a subkey for this purpose.
user@debian:~$

Add photo I m in the process of creating a better JPEG photo, so I skipped this step for my new key. However the notes here are correct anyway.

user@debian:~$ gpg --edit-key 1C5C4717
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
gpg> addphoto
Pick an image to use for your photo ID.  The image must be a JPEG file.
Remember that the image is stored within your public key.  If you use a
very large picture, your key will become very large as well!
Keeping the image close to 240x288 is a good size to use.
Enter JPEG filename for photo ID: /media/FA21-BEC7/simon-gpg.jpg
Is this photo correct (y/N/q)? y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ unknown] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
gpg> save
user@debian:~$

Add another identity Most people have multiple email addresses, and this needs to be reflected in the GnuPG key. Use the primary command to specify your main User ID.

user@debian:~$ gpg --edit-key 1C5C4717
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
gpg> adduid
Real name: Simon Josefsson
Email address: simon@yubico.com
Comment: 
You selected this USER-ID:
    "Simon Josefsson "
Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1)  Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3). Simon Josefsson 
gpg> uid 1
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1)* Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3). Simon Josefsson 
gpg> primary
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1)* Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> save
user@debian:~$

Create a revocation certificate It is good practice to generate a revocation certificate in case you lose your key. Store this in a safe place, possibly printed out on paper.

user@debian:~$ gpg --output $GNUPGHOME/../revocation-certificate.txt --gen-revoke 1C5C4717
sec  3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 Simon Josefsson 
Create a revocation certificate for this key? (y/N) y
Please select the reason for the revocation:
  0 = No reason specified
  1 = Key has been compromised
  2 = Key is superseded
  3 = Key is no longer used
  Q = Cancel
(Probably you want to select 1 here)
Your decision? 1
Enter an optional description; end it with an empty line:
> Created during key creation, emergency use only.
> 
Reason for revocation: Key has been compromised
Created during key creation, emergency use only.
Is this okay? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
ASCII armored output forced.
Revocation certificate created.
Please move it to a medium which you can hide away; if Mallory gets
access to this certificate he can use it to make your key unusable.
It is smart to print this certificate and store it away, just in case
your media become unreadable.  But have some caution:  The print system of
your machine might store the data and make it available to others!
user@debian:~$

Make a backup of the master key To have an easy way to move back and forward in time in GnuPG, I both export the key to a stable data format and keep a backup of the actual GnuPG home directory.

user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export-secret-keys 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../masterkey.txt
user@debian:~$ cp -a $GNUPGHOME $GNUPGHOME-backup-masterkey
user@debian:~$

Create subkeys Now I will generate three keys that will go onto the smartcard. I have chosen to generate these using GnuPG and then move the keys onto the smartcards, instead of generating the keys directly on the card. The difference is that with this approach, I get a backup of the keys and can import them to another key in the future if I need to. Each key has its own purpose: Signature, Encryption, and Authentication. Smartcards typically have limitation on key sizes, so I select 2048 as a widely supported size. Expert mode is required to generate authentication subkeys.

user@debian:~$ gpg --expert --edit-key 1C5C4717
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ultimate] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> addkey
Key is protected.
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
   (6) RSA (encrypt only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 
Requested keysize is 2048 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 100
Key expires at Fri 26 Sep 2014 11:03:16 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
..+++++
....+++++
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ultimate] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> addkey
Key is protected.
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
   (6) RSA (encrypt only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
Your selection? 6
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 
Requested keysize is 2048 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 100
Key expires at Fri 26 Sep 2014 11:03:31 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
......+++++
Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 7 more bytes)
.+++++
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ultimate] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> addkey
Key is protected.
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
   (6) RSA (encrypt only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
Your selection? 8
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? s
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: Encrypt 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? e
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? a
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: Authenticate 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? q
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 
Requested keysize is 2048 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 100
Key expires at Fri 26 Sep 2014 11:03:59 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
+++++
Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 56 more bytes)
+++++
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
sub  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ultimate] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> save
user@debian:~$

Export subkeys for backup This is a good time to save a restore point for your key. Note in the output of --list-secret-keys the keywords sec and ssb which means the main key and the subkeys are available. If the secret keyring contained only stubs, it would be sec> and sec#.

user@debian:~$ gpg --list-keys
/media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/pubring.gpg
--------------------------------------
pub   3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 6048]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
sub   2048R/72D5245B 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
sub   2048R/A11F46D2 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
sub   2048R/D6987A02 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
user@debian:~$ gpg --list-secret-keys
/media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/secring.gpg
--------------------------------------
sec   3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 6048]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
ssb   2048R/72D5245B 2014-06-18
ssb   2048R/A11F46D2 2014-06-18
ssb   2048R/D6987A02 2014-06-18
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export-secret-keys 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../mastersubkeys.txt
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export-secret-subkeys 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../subkeys.txt
user@debian:~$ cp -a $GNUPGHOME $GNUPGHOME-backup-mastersubkeys
user@debian:~$

Configure machine for smartcards The YubiKey NEO requires that RSA keys are imported with some additional parameters, used for CRT speedups. This was fixed in GnuPG 2.0.22. Unfortunately, it is not fixed in GnuPG 1.x. However, GnuPG 1.x can use gpg-agent and scdaemon from GnuPG to communicate with the smartcard. So let s work around the limitation in GnuPG 1.x by installing parts from GnuPG 2.x and use those. You will need to install the following packages: gnupg-agent, libpth20, pinentry-curses, libccid, pcscd, scdaemon, libksba8. Make sure that scdaemon is version 2.0.22 or later (get it from backports). I downloaded these packages and put them on the USB stick. Unfortunately, libccid in Debian is a bit outdated, and does not contain the USB device vendor/product ID in /etc/libccid_Info.plist. You will need to manually add this, and restart pcscd. user@debian:~$ sudo gedit /etc/libccid_Info.plist
user@debian:~$ sudo service pcscd restart Start gnupg-agent and setup the environment variable for this session:

user@debian:~$ gpg-agent --daemon
gpg-agent[22556]: directory  /media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/private-keys-v1.d' created
GPG_AGENT_INFO=/tmp/gpg-wGji5C/S.gpg-agent:22557:1; export GPG_AGENT_INFO;
gpg-agent[22557]: gpg-agent (GnuPG) 2.0.22 started
user@debian:~$ GPG_AGENT_INFO=/tmp/gpg-wGji5C/S.gpg-agent:22557:1; export GPG_AGENT_INFO;
user@debian:~$

Prepare YubiKey NEO Make sure you have a recent firmware version, 3.1.8 or later; use lsusb -v to find out. Make sure the device is in OTP/CCID or CCID mode, use ykpersonalize -m from the YubiKey Personalization project to switch. Make sure you have the OpenPGP applet loaded properly, otherwise see the YubiKey NEO OpenPGP applet project on installing it. You may want to set a proper Application ID, see herlo s ssh-gpg-smartcard-config github repository for some hints. Configure OpenPGP applet This also changes the PIN and Admin codes.

user@debian:~$ gpg --card-edit
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000060000000420000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unknown
Serial number ....: 00000042
Name of cardholder: [not set]
Language prefs ...: [not set]
Sex ..............: unspecified
URL of public key : [not set]
Login data .......: [not set]
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: 2048R 2048R 2048R
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
gpg/card> admin
Admin commands are allowed
gpg/card> passwd
gpg: OpenPGP card no. D2760001240102000060000000420000 detected
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 3
PIN changed.
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 1
PIN changed.
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? q
gpg/card> name
Cardholder's surname: Josefsson
Cardholder's given name: Simon
gpg/card> lang
Language preferences: sv
gpg/card> url
URL to retrieve public key: https://josefsson.org/1c5c4717.txt
gpg/card> sex
Sex ((M)ale, (F)emale or space): m
gpg/card> login
Login data (account name): jas
gpg/card> 
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000060000000420000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unknown
Serial number ....: 00000042
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Sex ..............: male
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/1c5c4717.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: 2048R 2048R 2048R
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
gpg/card> quit
user@debian:~$

Move subkeys to YubiKey NEO Moving subkeys to a NEO is a destructive operation, so make sure you took backups of the subkeys as above. After this step, your GnuPG keyring will contain stubs for the subkeys.

user@debian:~$ gpg --edit-key 1C5C4717
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
sub  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ultimate] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> toggle
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 1
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb* 2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> keytocard
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
Please select where to store the key:
   (1) Signature key
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
2048-bit RSA key, ID 72D5245B, created 2014-06-18
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb* 2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 1
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 2
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb* 2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> keytocard
Signature key ....: EF34 D1F7 95C0 3392 E52A  54FE DFF1 6372 72D5 245B
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
Please select where to store the key:
   (2) Encryption key
Your selection? 2
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
2048-bit RSA key, ID A11F46D2, created 2014-06-18
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb* 2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 2
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 3
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb* 2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> keytocard
Signature key ....: EF34 D1F7 95C0 3392 E52A  54FE DFF1 6372 72D5 245B
Encryption key....: E24D 5135 C2FC 905C 8995  ACD8 EC96 9E77 A11F 46D2
Authentication key: [none]
Please select where to store the key:
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
2048-bit RSA key, ID D6987A02, created 2014-06-18
sec  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb* 2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: never     
                     card-no: 0060 00000042
(1)  Simon Josefsson 
(2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
(3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> save
user@debian:~$

Take another backup Can you tell yet that I like having backup options? Note that the subkeys are now marked ssb> indicating they are stubs for a smartcard key.

user@debian:~$ gpg --list-secret-keys
/media/FA21-BEC7/gnupghome/secring.gpg
--------------------------------------
sec   3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 6048]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
ssb>  2048R/72D5245B 2014-06-18
ssb>  2048R/A11F46D2 2014-06-18
ssb>  2048R/D6987A02 2014-06-18
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export-secret-keys 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../masterstubs.txt
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export-secret-subkeys 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../subkeysstubs.txt
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export 1C5C4717 > $GNUPGHOME/../publickey.txt
user@debian:~$ cp -a $GNUPGHOME $GNUPGHOME-backup-masterstubs

Transfer to daily machine Copy publickey.txt to your day-to-day laptop and import it.

jas@latte:~$ gpg --import < publickey.txt 
gpg: key 1C5C4717: public key "Simon Josefsson " imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
jas@latte:~$

Insert the YubiKey NEO and generate secret key stubs:

jas@latte:~$ gpg --card-status
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000060000000420000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unknown
Serial number ....: 00000042
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Sex ..............: male
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/1c5c4717.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: 2048R 2048R 2048R
Max. PIN lengths .: 0 0 0
PIN retry counter : 0 0 0
Signature counter : 0
Signature key ....: EF34 D1F7 95C0 3392 E52A  54FE DFF1 6372 72D5 245B
      created ....: 2014-06-18 23:03:16
Encryption key....: E24D 5135 C2FC 905C 8995  ACD8 EC96 9E77 A11F 46D2
      created ....: 2014-06-18 23:03:31
Authentication key: 2768 2EF9 415C 19FC F0CC  9CA5 DA81 BA39 D698 7A02
      created ....: 2014-06-18 23:03:59
General key info..: pub  2048R/72D5245B 2014-06-18 Simon Josefsson 
sec#  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
ssb>  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
                      card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb>  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
                      card-no: 0060 00000042
ssb>  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26
                      card-no: 0060 00000042
jas@latte:~$

Now you should have a offline master key with subkey stubs. Note that the master key is not available (sec#) and the subkeys are stubs for smartcard keys (ssb>).

jas@latte:~$ gpg --list-secret-keys 1c5c4717
sec#  3744R/1C5C4717 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 6048]
uid                  Simon Josefsson 
ssb>  2048R/72D5245B 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
ssb>  2048R/A11F46D2 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
ssb>  2048R/D6987A02 2014-06-18 [expires: 2014-09-26]
jas@latte:~$

Mark the key as ultimately trusted.

jas@latte:~$ gpg --edit-key 1c5c4717
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
sub  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: A   
[ unknown] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ unknown] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> trust
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
sub  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: A   
[ unknown] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ unknown] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
Please decide how far you trust this user to correctly verify other users' keys
(by looking at passports, checking fingerprints from different sources, etc.)
  1 = I don't know or won't say
  2 = I do NOT trust
  3 = I trust marginally
  4 = I trust fully
  5 = I trust ultimately
  m = back to the main menu
Your decision? 5
Do you really want to set this key to ultimate trust? (y/N) y
pub  3744R/1C5C4717  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: unknown
sub  2048R/72D5245B  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: S   
sub  2048R/A11F46D2  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: E   
sub  2048R/D6987A02  created: 2014-06-18  expires: 2014-09-26  usage: A   
[ unknown] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ unknown] (2)  [jpeg image of size 6048]
[ unknown] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
Please note that the shown key validity is not necessarily correct
unless you restart the program.
gpg> quit
jas@latte:~$

Signing keys This needs to be done using your master key, since it is your certification key that will be used. So boot the Live CD and make the usual GnuPG configurations. Below I m signing my own old key (0xB565716F) so the output may look a bit confusing with me signing my own key, but there is really two different keys involved here. The same process apply if you want to sign someone else s key too. Before signing the key, you need to put the public key on a USB stick and move it to the secure machine. On your laptop:

jas@latte:~$ gpg -a --export b565716f > /media/KINGSTON/b565716f.txt
jas@latte:~$

On the disconnected machine:

user@debian:~$ gpg --import < /media/KINGSTON/b565716f.txt 
gpg: key B565716F: public key "Simon Josefsson " imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model
gpg: depth: 0  valid:   1  signed:   0  trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 1u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2014-09-26
user@debian:~$ gpg --sign-key b565716f
pub  1280R/B565716F  created: 2002-05-05  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: SC  
                     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
sub  2048R/105E722E  created: 2012-03-13  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: S   
sub  2048R/728AB82C  created: 2012-03-13  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: E   
sub  2048R/9394F626  created: 2012-03-13  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: A   
sub  1280R/4D5D40AE  created: 2002-05-05  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: E   
sub  1024R/09CC4670  created: 2006-03-18  expired: 2011-05-23  usage: A   
sub  1024R/AABB1F7B  created: 2006-03-18  expired: 2011-05-23  usage: S   
sub  1024R/A14C401A  created: 2006-03-18  expired: 2011-05-23  usage: E   
[ unknown] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ unknown] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
[ revoked] (3)  Simon Josefsson 
Really sign all user IDs? (y/N) y
User ID "Simon Josefsson " is revoked.  Unable to sign.
pub  1280R/B565716F  created: 2002-05-05  expires: 2014-11-10  usage: SC  
                     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
 Primary key fingerprint: 0424 D4EE 81A0 E3D1 19C6  F835 EDA2 1E94 B565 716F
     Simon Josefsson 
     Simon Josefsson 
This key is due to expire on 2014-11-10.
Are you sure that you want to sign this key with your
key "Simon Josefsson " (1C5C4717)
Really sign? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 1C5C4717, created 2014-06-18
user@debian:~$

Then export the newly signed key back to your laptop for further distribution.

user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export b565716f > /media/KINGSTON/signed-b565716f.txt
user@debian:~$

On your laptop, either email it encrypted to the other person, or upload it to keyservers directly depending on your preference. By emailing it encrypted to the other person, they need to prove posession of the key before receiving your signature. In my case, I m the other person, so I just import the signed key and then send the key:

jas@latte:~$ gpg --import < /media/KINGSTON/signed-b565716f.txt
jas@latte:~$ gpg --send-keys b565716f

Key transition Since I'm migrating from an key to a new, I sign my new key using my old key, and publish that signature on keyservers. This allows people to trust my new key more easily. To let the world know about your key transition, I created a key transition statement. The transition statement should be signed by both keys. I created a new temporary GnuPG home directory and imported both master keys, and clearsigned the file. Note that I used "54265e8c!" to make GnuPG use the master key for signing rather than a subkey, which it would normally do.

user@debian:~$ export GNUPGHOME=/tmp/kts
user@debian:~$ mkdir $GNUPGHOME
user@debian:~$ gpg --import b565716f.txt 
gpg: WARNING: unsafe permissions on homedir  /tmp/kts'
gpg: keyring  /tmp/kts/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring  /tmp/kts/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: key B565716F: secret key imported
gpg: /tmp/kts/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key B565716F: public key "Simon Josefsson " imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
gpg:       secret keys read: 1
gpg:   secret keys imported: 1
user@debian:~$ gpg --import /media/FA21-AE97/secret-master-subkeys.txt 
gpg: WARNING: unsafe permissions on homedir  /tmp/kts'
gpg: key 54265E8C: secret key imported
gpg: key 54265E8C: public key "Simon Josefsson " imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
gpg:       secret keys read: 1
gpg:   secret keys imported: 1
user@debian:~$ cat key-transition-2014-06-22-unsigned.txt   gpg --clearsign --personal-digest-preferences "SHA512" --local-user b565716f --local-user 54265e8c! > key-transition-2014-06-22.txt 
gpg: WARNING: unsafe permissions on homedir  /tmp/kts'
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 54265E8C, created 2014-06-22
                  
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
1280-bit RSA key, ID B565716F, created 2002-05-05
user@debian:~$

My statement is available as https://josefsson.org/key-transition-2014-06-22.txt if you want to download the signed text file directly. Feel free to base your own document on it, as I based mine on earlier examples.

I just did some Debian package review in a somewhat unusual way, and I wanted to share that. I'm hoping other Debian developers (and other free software contributors) that need to review others' contributions can learn something from this, and that I can use this blog post as a way to find out if other people are doing something similar. It was pretty exciting! At the end of it, I joined #debian-mentors to talk about how my cool process. Someone summarized it very accurately:

<sney> it almost sounds like you're working to replace yourself with automation

Context about alpine in Debian (Skip to "Package review, with automation" if you're familiar with Debian.) I'm the maintainer of alpine in Debian. There are quite a few problems with the alpine package in Debian right now, the biggest of which are:
We're one version behind -- 2.11 is the latest available, but 2.10 is the newest that we have in Debian.

The packaging uses a decreasingly-popular packaging helper, cdbs, about which I happen to know less than the dh-style helper (aka dh7).

There are lots of bugs filed, and I don't respond in a timely fashion.
This doesn't change my deep love for alpine -- I've had that for about half my life now, and so far, I don't see it going away. A month or so ago, I got a friendly private message from Unit193, saying he had converted the package to the dh style, and also packaged the newer version. They wanted to know if they should clean this up into something high-enough quality to land in Debian. (In Debian, we have a common situation where enthusiastic users update or create a new package, and aren't yet Debian Developers, so they don't have permission to upload that directly to the "Debian archive", which is the Debian equivalent of git master. Package "sponsorship" is how we handle that -- a Debian Developer reviews the package, makes sure it is of high quality, and uploads it to the Debian archive along with the Debian Developer's OpenPGP signature, so the archive processing tools know to trust it.) On Friday evening, I had a spare moment, so I sent a private message to Unit193 apologizing for not getting back to them in a reasonable amount of time. Having another person help maintain is a pretty exciting prospect, and I wanted to treat that enthusiasm with the respect it deserves, or at least apologize when I haven't. I was surprised to see a reply within a few minutes. At that point, I thought: I wasn't planning on doing any package review this weekend, but if they're online and I'm online... might as well!

Package review, with automation Unit193 and I popped into ##alpine on irc.freenode.net, and I started reading through their packaging changes, asking questions. As I asked questions, I wondered -- how will I know if they are going to fix the issues I'm raising? Luckily, Unit193 wanted to use git to track the packaging, and we settled on using git-buildpackage, a tool that was fairly new to both of us. I thought, I might as well have some executable documentation so I don't forget how to use it. ("Executable documentation" is Asheesh-speak for a shell script.) One thing I knew was that I'd have to test the package in a pbuilder, or other pristine build environment. But all I had on me at the moment was my work laptop, which didn't have one set up. Then I had a bright idea: I could use Travis-CI, a public continuous integration service, to check Unit193's packaging. If I had any concerns, I could add them to the shell script and then point at the build log and say, "This needs to be fixed." Then there would be great clarity about the problems. Some wonderful things about Travis-CI:
They give you root access on an Ubuntu Precise (10.04) virtual machine.
Their build hosts are well-connected to the Internet, which means fast downloads in e.g. pbuilder.
They will let you run a build for up to 50 minutes, for free.
Build just means "command" or "set of commands," so you can just write a shell script and they will run it.
Travis-CI will watch a github.com repository, if you like. This means you can 'git commit --allow-empty' then 'git push' and ask it to re-run your script.
Since Unit193's packaging was in git (but not on github), I created a git repo containing the same contents, where I would experiment with fixes for packaging problems I found. It'd be up to Unit193 to fix the problems in the Alioth packaging. This way, I would be providing advice, and Unit193 would have an opportunity to ask questions, so it would be more like mentorship and less like me fixing things. We did a few rounds of feedback this way, and got the packaging to higher and higher quality. Every time Unit193 made a fix and pushed it, I would re-run the auto-build, and see if the problems I spotted had gone away. While the auto-build runs, I can focus on conversing with my mentee about problems or just generally chatting. Chatting is valuable community-building! It's extremely nice that I can do that while waiting on the build, knowing that I don't have to read it carefully -- I can just wait a few minutes, then see if it's done, and see if it's red or green. Having the mentee around while I'm reviewing it means that I can use the time I'm waiting on builds as fun free software social time. (Contrast this with asynchronous review, where, all alone, I would wait for a build to finish, then write up an email at the end of it all.) This kind of mentorship + chatting was spread out over Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday morning. By the end of it, we had a superb package that I'm excited to sign and push into Debian when I'm next near my OpenPGP key.

Implementation details You can see the final shell script here:
do.sh
And you can see the various builds here:
builds
The shell script:
Alternates between the Alioth packaging vs. my fork of it. (This way, I can test packaging changes/suggestions.)
Disables ccache in pbuilder, due to a permissions problem with ccache/pbuilder/travis-ci, and I didn't need ccache anyway.
Handles 'git dch' slightly wrong. I need to figure that out.
Optionally passes --git-ignore-new to git-buildpackage, which was required initially, but should not be required by the time the package is ready. (This is an example of a thing I might forget to remark upon to my mentee.)
Plays games with git branches so that git-buildpackage on Travis-CI can find the pristine-tar branch.
Tries to use cdn.debian.net as its mirror, but on Saturday ran into problems with whicever mirror that is, so it falls back to mirror.mit.edu in case that fails.
Contains a GPG homedir, and imports the Debian archive key, so that it can get past Ubuntu-Debian pbuilder trust issues.
I also had a local shell script that would run, effectively:
git commit --allow-empty -m 'Trigger build'
git push
This was needed since I was basically using Travis-CI as remote shell service -- moreover, the scripts Travis-CI runs are in a different repo (travis-debcheck) than the software I'm actually testing (collab-maint/alpine.git). Unit193 and I had a technical disagreement at one point, and I realized that rather than discuss it, I could just ask Travis-CI to test which one of us was right. At one point in the revisions, the binary package build failed to build on Precise Pangolin (the Ubuntu release that the Travis-CI worker is running), and Unit193 said that it was probably due to a problem with building on Ubuntu. So I added a configuration option to build just the source package in Ubuntu, keeping the binary package test-build within the Debian sid pbuilder, although I believed that there was actually a problem with the packaging. This way, I could modify the script so that I could demonstrate the problem could be reproduced in a sid pbuilder. Of course, by the time I got that far, Unit193 had figured out that it was indeed a packaging bug. I also created an option to SKIP_PBUILDER; initially, I wanted to get quick automated feedback on the quality of the source package without waiting for pbuilder to create the chroot and for the test build to happen. You might notice that the script is not very secure -- Niels Thykier already did! That's fine by me; it's only Travis-CI's machines that could be worsened by that insecurity, and really, they already gave me a root shell with no password. (This might sound dismissive of Travis-CI -- I don't mean it to be! I just mean that their security model already presumably involves throwing away the environment in which my code is executing, and I enjoy taking advantage of that.) Since the Travis virtual machine is Ubuntu, and we want to run the latest version of lintian (a Debian packaging "lint" checker), we run lintian within the Debian sid pbuilder. To do that, I use the glorious "B90lintian" sample pbuilder hook script, which comes bundled with pbuilder in /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/. The full build, which includes creating a sid pbuilder from scratch, takes merely 7-10 minutes. I personally find this kind of shockingly speedy -- in 2005, when I first got involved, doing a pbuilder build seemed like it would take forever. Now, a random free shell service on the Internet will create a pbuilder, and do a test build within it, in about 5 minutes.

Package review, without automation I've done package review for other mentees in the past. I tend to do it in a very bursty fashion -- one weekend day or one weeknight I decide sure, it's a good day to read Debian packages and provide feedback. Usually we do it asynchronously on the following protocol:

I dig up an email from someone who needed review.
I read through the packaging files, doing a variety of checks as they occur to me.
If I find problems, I write an email about them to the mentee. If not, success! I sign and upload the package.

There are some problems with the above:

The burstiness means that if someone fixes the issues, I might not have time to re-review for another month or longer.
The absence of an exhaustive list of things to look for means that I could fail to provide that feedback in the first round of review, leading to a longer wait time.
The person receiving the email might not understand my comments, which could interact really badly with the burstiness.

I did this for Simon Fondrie-Teitler's python-pypump package recently. We followed the above protocol. I wrote a long email to Simon, where I remarked on various good and bad points of the packaging. It was part commentary, part terminal transcript -- I use the terminal transcripts to explain what I mean. This is part of the email I sent:

I got an error in the man page generation phase -- because at 
build-time, I don't have requests-oauthlib:
make[2]: Leaving directory  /tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/docs'
help2man --no-info \
	-n 'sets up an environment and oauth tokens and allows for interactive testing' \
        --version-string=0.5.1 /tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump-shell > /tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/debian/pypump-shell.1
help2man: can't get  --help' info from /tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump-shell
Try  --no-discard-stderr' if option outputs to stderr
make[1]: *** [override_dh_auto_build] Error 1
This seems to be because:
   python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg  ./pypump-shell 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./pypump-shell", line 26, in <module>
    from pypump import PyPump, Client
  File "/tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    from pypump.pypump import PyPump, WebPump
  File "/tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump/pypump.py", line 28, in <module>
    from six.moves.urllib import parse
ImportError: No module named urllib
$ ./pypump-shell 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./pypump-shell", line 26, in <module>
    from pypump import PyPump, Client
  File "/tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    from pypump.pypump import PyPump, WebPump
  File "/tmp/python-pypump-0.5-1+dfsg/pypump/pypump.py", line 29, in <module>
    from requests_oauthlib import OAuth1
ImportError: No module named requests_oauthlib

The deeper problem was a missing build-dependency, and I explained that in my email. But the meta problem is that Simon didn't try building this in a pbuilder, or otherwise clean build environment. Simon fixed these problems, and submitted a fresh package to Paul Tagliamonte and myself. It happened to have some typos in the names of the new build dependencies. Paul reviewed the fixed package, noticed the typos, fixed them, and uploaded it. Simon had forgotten to do a test build the second time, too, which is an understandable human failure. There was a two-day delay between Simon's fixed resubmission, and Paul signing+uploading the fixed result. In a pedagogical sense, there's something disappointing about that exchange for me: Paul fixed an error Simon introduced, so we're not teaching Simon to take total responsibility for his packages in Debian, nor to understand the Debian system as well as he could. (Luckily, I think Simon already understands the importance of taking responsibility! In this case, it's just a hypothetical in this case.)

For the future The next time I review a package, I'm going to try to do something similar to my Travis-CI hack. It would be nice to have the do.sh script be a little more abstract; I imagine that as I try to use it for a different package, I'll discover the right abstractions. I'd love it if Travis-CI did not require the git repositories to be on GitHub. I'd also like if the .travis.yml file could be in a different path. If so, we could create debian/travis-configuration (or something) and keep the packaging files nice and separate from the upstream source. I'd also love to hear about other people's feedback. Are you doing something similar? Do you want to be? Would you have done some of this differently? Leave a comment here, or ping me (paulproteus) on #debian-mentors on irc.debian.org (aka irc.oftc.net). I'll leave you with some conversation from #debian-mentors:

<paulproteus> The automation here, I think, is really interesting.
<paulproteus> What I really want is for mentees to show up to me and say "Here is my package + build log with pbuilder, can you sponsor it please?"
<Unit193> Oooooh!
-*- Unit193 gets ideas.
<paulproteus> Although the irony is that I actually like the community-building and relationship-building nature of having these things be conversations.
<bremner> how will this brave new world cope with licensing issues?
<paulproteus> bremner: It's not a replacement for actual review, just a tool-assist.
<paulproteus> bremner: You might be relieved to know that much of Unit193's and my back and forth related to get-orig-source and licensing. (-:
<bremner> I didn't doubt you ;).
<paulproteus> If necessary I can just be a highly productive reviewer, but I would prefer to figure out some way that I can get other non-paulproteus people to get a similar assist.
<paulproteus> I think the current blocker is "omg travis why are you bound to githubbbbbbbb" which is a reasonable concern.

This week, I started work on something I m calling moxie. Due to wanting to use my aiodocker bindings on the backend, I decided to implement it in 100% AsyncIO Python 3.4. What pushed me over the edge was finding the aiopg driver (postgres asyncio bindings), with very (let me stress - very) immature SQLAlchemy support.

Unfortunately, no web frameworks support asyncio as a first-class member of the framework, so I was forced into writing a microframework. The resulting app looks pretty not bad, and likely easy to switch if Flask ever gets support for asyncio. One neat side-effect was that the framework can support stuff like websockets as a first-class element of the framework, just like GET requests. Moxie will be a tool to run periodic long-running jobs in a sane way using docker.io. More soon!

We re now in the middle of the talk submission period. Our new web interface doesn t allow to show all the proposals and we decided to start accepting some talks in order to inspire you to propose your own talks.

If your talk is not on the list doesn t mean is not accepted, don t panic! And now, we re calling you all to bring up your best Debian-related ideas, proposals, stories. To think about what you want to organize a discussion on. Which tracks would you like to coordinate or see populated with interesting talks. Talks are the main ingredient for a successful, interesting, discussion-sparking DebConf. Don t be shy, and read how to submit your talk

Recently two companies have suffed problems due to compromised AWS credentials:

Code Spaces
- The company has effectively folded. Thier AWS account was compromised, and all their data and backups were deleted.
Bonsai
- Within two minutes all their instances were terminated.
- This is still live - watch updates of the recovery process.

I'm just about to commit to using Amazon for hosting DNS for paying customers, so this is the kind of thing that makes me paranoid. I'll be storing DNS-data in Git, and if the zones were nuked on the Amazon-side I could re-upload them, but users would be dead regardless - because they'd need to update the nameservers in whois before the re-uploaded data would be useful. I suspect I need to upload to two DNS providers, to get more redundency. Currently I have a working system which allows me to push DNS records to a Git repository, and that seamlessly triggers a DNS update (i.e. A webhook trigged by github/bitbucket/whatever). Before I publish anything I need to write more code, more documentation, and agree on pricing details. Then I'll setup a landing-page at http://dns-api.com/. I've been challenged to find paying customers before launching, and thus far have two, which is positive. The DHCP.io site has now been freed. I'm no longer going to try to commercialize it, instead I will only offer the Git-based product as a commercial service. On that basis I upped the service so users could manage up to five names per account, more if you mail me privately and beg ;) (ObRandom: Google does hosted DNS with an API. They're expensive. I'm surprised I'd not heard of them doing this.)

When I gave my Haskell Bytes talk on the runtime representation of Haskell values the first time, I wrote here It is in German, so [..] if you want me to translate it, then (convince your professor or employer to) invite me to hold the talk again . This has just happened: I got to hold the talk as a Tech Talk at Galois in Portland, so now you can fetch the text also in English. Thanks to Jason for inviting me!
This was on my way to the Oregon Summer School on Programming Languages in Eugene, where I m right now enjoying the shade of a tree next to the campus. We ve got a relatively packed program with lectures on dependent types, categorical logic and other stuff, and more student talks in the evening (which unfortunately always collide with the open board game evenings at the local board game store). So at least we started to have a round of diplomacy, where I am about to be crushed from four sides at once. (And no, I don t think that this has triggered the illegal download warning that the University of Oregon received about our internet use and threatens our internet connectivity.)

I m in the process of moving to a new OpenPGP key, and I want to include a small JPEG image of myself in it. The OpenPGP specification describes, in section 5.12.1 of RFC 4880, how an OpenPGP packet can contain an JPEG image. Unfortunately the document does not require or suggest any properties of images, nor does it warn about excessively large images. The GnuPG manual helpfully asserts that Note that a very large JPEG will make for a very large key. .

Researching this further, it seems that proprietary PGP program suggests 120 144 as the maximum size, although I haven t found an authoritative source of that information. Looking at the GnuPG code, you can see that it suggests around 240 288 in a string saying Keeping the image close to 240 288 is a good size to use . Further, there is a warning displayed if the image is above 6144 bytes saying that This JPEG is really large . I think the 6kb warning point is on the low side today, however without any more researched recommendation of image size, I m inclined to go for a 6kb 240 288 image. Achieving this was not trivial, I ended up using GIMP to crop an image, resize it to 240 288, and then export it to JPEG. Chosing the relevant parameters during export is the tricky part. First, make sure to select Show preview in image window so that you get a file size estimate and a preview of how the photo will look. I found the following settings useful for reducing size:

Disable Save EXIF data
Disable Save thumbnail
Disable Save XMP data
Change Subsampling from the default 4:4:4 (best quality) to 4:2:0 (chroma quartered) .
Try enabling only one of Optimize and Progressive . Sometimes I get best results disabling one and keeping the other enabled, and sometimes the other way around. I have not seen smaller size with both enabled, nor with both disabled.
Smooth the picture a bit to reduce pixel effects and size.
Change quality setting, I had to reduce it to around 25%.

See screenshot below of the settings windows. GnuPG photo GIMP settings window

Eventually, I managed to get a photo that I was reasonable happy with. It is 240 288 and is 6048 bytes large. GnuPG photo for Simon

If anyone has further information, or opinions, on what image sizes makes sense for OpenPGP photos, let me know. Ideas on how to reduce size of JPEG images further without reducing quality as much would be welcome.

Tree Frog Dashboard Mat

I ve been given some more MobileZap products to review. The first is the Tree Frog anti-slip dashboard mat [1]. This is designed to allow a phone to stick to an angled surface of the inside of the car without slipping. The pictures on the web site show a phone stuck to a curved angular surface of a car dash. To test this I stuck my phone to my fridge, the flat metal surface of the fridge and the almost flat plastic surface of the gel case of my phone are pretty much ideal surfaces for the sticky mat to adhere to. But even so keeping my phone stuck to a vertical surface is impressive. This mat is cheap enough that it could be used for many other tasks than securing a phone in a car, for example it could be used to stick a phone to the wall of your office. It s apparently washable and can be expected to keep gripping things if washed regularly. One thing that could be improved in the mat would be to have some holes in it. When I detached my phone from the fridge some large air bubbles developed between the mat and the fridge, this would be a problem if I wanted to regularly stick my phone to a flat surface such as an office wall. When in my car it didn t work nearly as well. The pattern on the surface of the car dash which is designed to avoid glare when driving is difficult to stick to, it s a bit like trying to attach sticky-tape to unpainted wood for similar reasons. A phone will still remain in place on a 30 degree angle from the horizontal (which is significant) but the mat grips much more tightly to the phone than the dash, which is a little inconvenient as the mat stays attached to the phone when you remove it from the dash. Sorry for the boring picture, it s black and flat so there s not much scope for making it interesting. 3.1A USB Car Charger

Above is a picture of a 3.1A USB car charger and a AA battery charger. The car charger isn t particularly exciting, but providing 3.1A through two USB sockets is noteworthy it can charge one device at 2.1A (the maximum any device draws) or two devices for a total of up to 3.1A [2] (with protection against over-current). Previously in my car I used the 2.1A charger that shipped with my Galaxy Note 2 and an inverter to provide 240VAC as the devices I had to charge a phone from a car socket didn t provide enough current. This new device uses less space and also allows charging two phones at once. One problem with this device was finding USB cables that could handle the current, for benchmarking I used a phone that was running Ingress and acting as a Wifi access point. I discovered that the cables that Samsung ships with their recent devices (Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet) seem to work best and support charging my Galaxy Note 2 or my wife s Nexus 5 while playing Ingress and running as a Wifi AP. Most of the other cables that I have in my collection won t even allow a phone to remain at the same charge level while playing Ingress. AA Emergency Phone Charger The AA phone charger is best suited for emergency use only, it takes one AA battery and has limited current capacity [3]. A NiMh rechargeable battery has a nominal Voltage of 1.2V, to provide 5V to charge a phone the Voltage has to be boosted by a factor of 4.16 which would reduce the current by a factor of 4.16 if the charger was 100% efficient. As 100% efficiency is impossible the current would be reduced even more. It seems unlikely that a AA battery would be able to sustain a current of 2A so the supply from that charger would be less than 500mA IE less than the least capable PC USB port or mains powered phone charger. A test with a Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level decreasing while being very lightly used (mostly just checking whether the charge level was increasing) when a NiMH battery was connected. A test with an alkaline battery and the same Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level increasing when lightly used but it probably wouldn t do so while playing Ingress. It seems that a single NiMH AA battery can only be used for charging a phone in a real emergency situation (IE an act of god type disaster not a need to level up in Ingress). If mains power was out then you could charge a phone while it s turned off (AFAIK all Android phones support this) and then use it once it s charged. This charger supports a wide range of phones (including LG phones from 5+ years ago and Nokia from ~10 years ago) so it could be good for charging an old phone in an emergency. Older phones need less power to charge and generally last longer between charges. With an alkaline battery the charger works a lot better, but it s still for emergency use as I generally only use rechargeable batteries. This is a device I might put in the bottom of my case when travelling, not a device that I ll use regularly. I don t think that this is a deficiency in the product, it s just a limit of what can be done with the power requirements of modern phones and the capabilities of AA batteries. If you want a battery to use while playing Ingress you definitely need something a lot larger. This charger is good for emergencies but not suitable for my main use (charging phones while playing Ingress) so I ll give it to my parents, they do a lot of hiking and camping and my father often goes fishing. Taking a few AA batteries to charge a phone would be much more convenient for such use than taking one of the larger batteries I use for Ingress. Also as the charger is relatively cheap there s less potential financial loss if you drop it in sea-water. 20800mAh Battery

Above is a picture of a 20800mAh battery pack that MobileZap sent me [4]. I haven t yet discovered what it s capacity is, during the recent Interitus anomaly it kept my Galaxy Note 2 and my wife s Nexus 5 adequately charged for 5 hours of intensive Ingress playing (we alternated between phones). Without an external battery it would be unusual for either of those phones to last for 2 hours. The battery has two ports labeled 1A and 2.1A which implies that it can supply a total of 3.1A. I am a little dubious of that implication. After the Interitus anomaly my wife and I had dinner with some friends and I let a friend charge her Samsung Galaxy S5 on the battery at the same time as my Note 2 (which claimed to be 2% charged). When I connected my friend s phone my phone instantly shut itself down due to lack of charge, so I presume that the supply on the 2.1A port is reduced when a demanding device is connected to the 1A port. The next day my wife and I went to the city again to play Ingress and attend a protest against some of the awful things that the Abbott government is doing. As an experiment I didn t charge this battery to see how it would go for two days of use charging two phones. Again there was no problem and it still claimed to be half charged when we got home. So far the only problem I ve found with this battery is that it never reports being fully charged, not even if I leave it on charge for days. That doesn t seem to be a great problem to me, if I disconnect it before it s fully charged then that won t hurt the battery life (unlike NiCd batteries that have to be fully charged every time) and even if it s not fully charged it will still charge phones for a long time. The battery is about 19cm long. I have jeans with unusually large pockets to fit large phones [5] so I can fit this battery in my pocket while a USB cable is connected to charge my phone. I also have a new winter jacket from Scottwear which has pockets that can fit the battery (and lots of other things). Anyone who doesn t have such clothing should plan to use a backpack, handbag, or some other bag this type of battery won t fit in the pockets in most clothing. MobileZap also has some other interesting Nexus 5 accessories [6].

Search Results: "nate"

2 July 2014

Tanguy Ortolo: PayPal cut a secure email project's funds

Mike Hommey: Firefox and Gtk+ 3

Russ Allbery: Review: Lockstep

1 July 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: Ancillary Justice

30 June 2014

Jon Dowland: Blade Runner remastered OST

29 June 2014

Matthew Palmer: Adventures in DNSSEC

Paul Tagliamonte: Apple and Debian: A tragic love story

Russ Allbery: Review: The Wilding

28 June 2014

Wouter Verhelst: NBD

26 June 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: A People's History of the Supreme Court

25 June 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: Face of the Enemy

23 June 2014

Daniel Pocock: Bendigo: a risk of becoming the Australian capital of Islamophobia?

Simon Josefsson: Offline GnuPG Master Key and Subkeys on YubiKey NEO Smartcard

22 June 2014

Asheesh Laroia: Interactive semi-automated package review (by abusing Travis-CI)

Paul Tagliamonte: Adventures in AsyncIO: Moxie

DebConf team: First set of talks accepted; we are still waiting for yours! (Posted by Ana Guerrero Lopez)

20 June 2014

Steve Kemp: The perils of the cloud..

19 June 2014

Joachim Breitner: Another instance of Haskell Bytes

Simon Josefsson: Creating a small JPEG photo for your OpenPGP key

Russell Coker: Phone Car Accessories