I had the wonderful privilege to go camping and hiking with my kids scouting group, the Pathfinders of Tantallon SDA church. The day started with a quick trip to Pugwash with one of the leaders to bring back some chairs to their school, and then we headed back out to Blomidon to meet up with the group. Click the photo below to start the slideshow.

The road trip started early to fetch some chairs click to start

A second maintenance release 0.1.4 of our RcppDE package, following on the heels of the recent 0.1.3. release arrived on CRAN today. RcppDE is a "port" of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential optimization, to C++. By using RcppArmadillo, the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. This version changes the package-internal code to use Rcpp Attributes which makes things a little simpler (and possibly more robust as well). Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Xperia X10 My first Android device was The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i [1]. One of the reasons I chose it was for the large 4 screen, nowadays the desirable phones (the ones that are marketed as premium products) are all bigger than that (the Galaxy S6 is 5.1 ) and even the slightly less expensive phones are bigger. At the moment Aldi is advertising an Android phone with a 4.5 screen for $129. But at the time there was nothing better in the price range that I was willing to pay. I devoted a lot of my first review to the default apps for SMS and Email. Shortly after that I realised that the default email app is never going to be adequate (I now use K9 mail) and the SMS app is barely adequate (but I mostly use instant messaging). I ve got used to the fact that most apps that ship with an Android device are worthless, the camera app and the app to make calls are the only built in apps I regularly use nowadays. In the bug list from my first review the major issue was lack of Wifi tethering which was fixed by an update to Android 2.3. Unfortunately Android 2.3 ran significantly more slowly which decreased the utility of the phone. The construction of the phone is very good. Over the last 2 years the 2 Xperia X10 phones I own have been on loan to various relatives, many of whom aren t really into technology and can t be expected to take good care of things. But they have not failed in any way. Apart from buying new batteries there has been no hardware failure in either phone. While 2 is a small sample size I haven t see any other Android device last nearly as long without problems. Unfortunately I have no reason to believe that Sony has continued to design devices as well. The Xperia X10 phones crash more often than most Android phones with spontaneous reboots being a daily occurrence. While that is worse than any other Android device I ve used it s not much worse. My second review of the Xperia X10 had a section about ways of reducing battery use [2]. Wow, I d forgotten how much that sucked! When I was last using the Xperia X10 the Life360 app that my wife and I use to track each other was taking 15% of the battery, on more recent phones the same app takes about 2%. The design of modern phones seems to be significantly more energy efficient for background tasks and the larger brighter displays use more energy instead. My father is using one of the Xperia phones now, when I give him a better phone to replace it I will have both as emergency Wifi access points. They aren t useful for much else nowadays. Samsung Galaxy S In my first review of the Galaxy S I criticised it for being thin, oddly shaped, and slippery [3]. After using it for a while I found the shape convenient as I could easily determine the bottom of the phone in my pocket and hold it the right way up before looking at it. This is a good feature for a phone that s small enough to rotate in my pocket the Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones is large enough to not rotate in a pocket. In retrospect I think that being slippery isn t a big deal as almost everyone buys a phone case anyway. But it would still be better for use on a desk if the bulge was at the top. I wrote about my Galaxy S failing [4]. Two of my relatives had problems with those phones too. Including a warranty replacement I ve seen 4 of those phones in use and only one worked reliably. The one that worked reliably is now being used by my mother, it s considerably faster than the Xperia X10 because it has more RAM and will probably remain in regular use until it breaks. CyanogenMod I tried using CyanogenMod [5]. The phone became defective 9 months later so even though CyanogenMod is great I don t think I got good value for the amount of time spent installing it. I haven t tried replacing the OS of an Android phone since then. I really wish that they would start manufacturing phones that can have the OS replaced as easily as a PC. Samsung Galaxy S3 and Wireless Charging The Galaxy S3 was the first phone I owned which competes with phones that are currently on sale [6]. A relative bought one at the same time as me and her phone is running well with no problems. But my S3 had some damage to it s USB port which means that the vast majority of USB cables don t charge it (only Samsung cables can be expected to work). After I bought the S3 I bought a Qi wireless phone charging device [7]. One of the reasons for buying that is so if a phone gets a broken USB port then I can still use it. It s ironic that the one phone that had a damaged USB port also failed to work correctly with the Qi card installed. The Qi charger is gathering dust. One significant benefit of the S3 (and most Samsung phones) is that it has a SD socket. I installed a 32G SD card in the S3 and now one of my relatives is happily using it as a media player. Nexus 4 I bought a Nexus 4 [8] for my wife as she needed a better phone but didn t feel like paying for a Galaxy S3. The Nexus 4 is a nice phone in many ways but the lack of storage is a serious problem. At the moment I m only keeping it to use with Google Cardboard, I will lend it to my parents soon. In retrospect I made a mistake buying the Nexus 4. If I had spent a little more money on another Galaxy S3 then I would have had a phone with a longer usage life as well as being able to swap accessories with my wife. The Nexus 4 seems reasonably solid, the back of the case (which is glass) broke on mine after a significant impact but the phone continues to work well. That s a tribute to the construction of the phone and also the Ringke Fusion case [9]. Generally the Nexus 4 is a good phone so I don t regret buying it. I just think that the Galaxy S3 was a better choice. Galaxy Note 2 I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 in mid 2013 [10]. In retrospect it was a mistake to buy the Galaxy S3, the Note series is better suited to my use. If I had known how good it is to have a larger phone I d have bought the original Galaxy Note when it was first released. Generally everything is good about the Note 2. While it only has 16G of storage (which isn t much by today s standards) it has an SD socket to allow expansion. It s currently being used by a relative as a small tablet. With a 32G SD card it can fit a lot of movies. Bluetooth Speakers I received Bluetooth speakers in late 2013 [11]. I was very impressed by them but ended up not using them for a while. After they gathered dust for about a year I started using them again recently. While nothing has changed regarding my review of the Hive speakers (which I still like a lot) it seems that my need for such things isn t as great as I thought. One thing that made me start using the Bluetooth speakers again is that my phone case blocks the sound from my latest phone and makes it worse than phone sound usually is. I bought Bluetooth speakers for some relatives as presents, the relatives seemed to appreciate them but I wonder how much they actually use them. Nexus 5 The Nexus 5 [12] is a nice phone. When I first reviewed it there were serious problems with overheating when playing Ingress. I haven t noticed such problems recently so I think that an update to Android might have made it more energy efficient. In that review I was very impressed by the FullHD screen and it made me want a Note 3, at the time I planned to get a Note 3 in the second half of 2014 (which I did). Galaxy Note 3 Almost a year ago I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 [13]. I m quite happy with it at the moment but I don t have enough data for a long term review of it. The only thing to note so far is that in my first review I was unhappy with the USB 3 socket as that made it more difficult to connect a USB cable in the dark. I ve got used to the socket and I can now reliably plug it in at night with ease. I wrote about Rivers jeans being the only brand that can fit a Samsung Galaxy Note series phone in the pocket [14]. The pockets of my jeans have just started wearing out and I think that it s partly due to the fact that I bought a Armourdillo Hybrid case [15] for my Note 3. I ve had the jeans for over 3 years with no noticable wear apart from the pockets starting to wear out after 10 months of using the Armourdillo case. I don t think that the Armourdillo case is bad, but the fact that it has deep grooves and hard plastic causes it to rub more on material when I take the phone out of my pocket. As I check my phone very frequently this causes some serious wear. This isn t necessarily a problem given that a phone costs 20* more than a pair of jeans, if the case was actually needed to save the phone then it would be worth having some jeans wear out. But I don t think I need more protection than a gel case offers. Another problem is that the Armourdillo case is very difficult to remove. This isn t a problem if you don t need access to your phone, IE if you use a phone like the Nexus 5 that doesn t permit changing batteries or SD cards. But if you need to change batteries, SD cards, etc then it s really annoying. My wife seems quite happy with her Armoudillo case but I don t think it was a good choice for me. I m considering abandoning it and getting one of the cheap gel cases. The sound on the Note 3 is awful. I don t know how much of that is due to a limitation in the speaker and how much is due to the case. It s quite OK for phone calls but not much good for music. Tablets I m currently on my third tablet. One was too cheap and nasty so I returned it. Another was still cheap and I hardly ever used it. The third is a Galaxy Note 10 which works really well. I guess the lesson is to buy something worthwhile so you can use it. A tablet that s slower and has less storage than a phone probably isn t going to get used much. Phone Longevity I owned the Xperia X10 for 22 months before getting the Galaxy S3. As that included 9 months of using a Galaxy S I only had 13 months of use out of that phone before lending it to other people. The Galaxy S3 turned out to be a mistake as I replaced it in only 7 months. I had the Note 2 for 15 months before getting the Note 3. I have now had the Note 3 for 11 months and have no plans for a replacement any time soon this is the longest I ve owned an Android phone and been totally satisfied with it. Also I only need to use it for another 4 months to set a record for using an Android phone. The Xperia was free as part of a telco contract. The other phones were somewhere between $500 and $600 each when counting the accessories (case, battery, etc) that I bought with them. So in 4 years and 7 months I ve spent somewhere between $1500 and $1800 on phones plus the cost of the Xperia that was built in to the contract. The Xperia probably cost about the same so I ll assume that I spent $2000 on phones and accessories. This seems like a lot. However that averages out to about $1.20 per day (and hopefully a lot less if my Note 3 lasts another couple of years). I could justify $1.20 per day for either the amount of paid work I do on Android phones or the amount of recreational activities that I perform (the Galaxy S3 was largely purchased for Ingress). Conclusion I think that phone companies will be struggling to maintain sales of high end phones in the future. When I chose the Xperia X10 I knew I was making a compromise, the screen resolution was an obvious limitation on the use of the device (even though it was one of the best devices available). The storage in the Xperia was also a limitation. Now FullHD is the minimum resolution for any sort of high-end device and 32G of storage is small. I think that most people would struggle to observe any improvement over a Nexus 5 or Note 3 at this time. I think that this explains the massive advertising campaign for the Galaxy S6 that is going on at the moment. Samsung can t sell the S6 based on it being better than previous phones because there s not much that they can do to make it obviously better. So they try and sell it for the image.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/04/17/more-about-xperia-x10/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/21/galaxy-xperia-android-network/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/09/11/back-to-xperia-x10/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/05/cyanogenmod-galaxy-s/
• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/21/galaxy-s3-power-case/
• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/20/qi-phone-charging/
• [8] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/05/29/nexus-4/
• [9] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/13/nexus-4-ringke-fusion-case/
• [10] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/07/10/samsung-galaxy-note-2/
• [11] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/23/hive-bluetooth-speakers/
• [12] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/23/nexus-5/
• [13] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/10/31/samsung-galaxy-note-3/
• [14] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/17/geeky-jeans/
• [15] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/25/nexus5-armourdillo-hybrid-case/

Debian LTS August was the fourth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• pykerberors: Fixed a regression in DLA-265-1 affecting the default parameters of checkPassword(). This resulted in DLA-265-2.
• wordpress: Craig Small updated wordpress to fix CVE-2015-2213 CVE-2015-5622 CVE-2015-5731 CVE-2015-5732 and CVE-2015-5734. I did some testing and released DLA-294-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. Debconf 15 was a great opportunity to meet some of the other LTS contributors in person and to work on some of my packages: Git-buildpackage git-buildpackage gained buildpackage-rpm based on the work by Markus Lehtonnen and merging of mock support is hopefully around the corner. Debconf had two gbp skill shares hosted by dkg and a BoF by myself. A summary is here. Integration with dgit as (discussed with Ian) looks doable and I have parts of that on my todo list as well. Among other things gbp import-orig gained a --merge-mode option so you can replace the upstream branches verbatim on your packaging branch but keep the contents of the debian/ directory. Libvirt I prepared an update for libvirt in Jessie fixing a crasher bug, QEMU error reporting. apparmor support now works out of the box in Jessie (thanks to intrigeri and Felix Geyer for that). Speaking of apparmor I learned enough at Debconf to use this now by default so we hopefully see less breackage in this area when new libvirt versions hit the archive. The bug count wen't down quiet a bit and we have a new version of virt-manager in unstable now as well. As usual I prepared the RC candidates of libvirt 1.2.19 in experimental and 1.2.19 final is now in unstable.

Once again time for the monthly upstream Armadillo update -- version 5.500.2 was released earlier today by Conrad. And a new and matching RcppArmadillo release 0.5.500.2.0 in already on CRAN and will go to Debian shortly. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release contains mostly bug fixes and some internal code refactoring:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.500.2.0 (2015-09-03)

• Upgraded to Armadillo 5.500.2 ("Molotov Cocktail")
  • expanded object constructors and generators to handle size() based specification of dimensions
  • faster handling of submatrix rows
  • faster clamp()
  • fixes for handling sparse matrices

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

You may not know it, but wifi is under assault in the USA due to proposed FCC regulations about modifications to devices with modular radios. In short, it would make it illegal for vendors to sell devices with firmware that users can replace. This is of concern to everyone, because Wifi routers are notoriously buggy and insecure. It is also of special concern to amateur radio hobbyists, due to the use of these devices in the Amateur Radio Service (FCC Part 97). I submitted a comment to the FCC about this, which I am pasting in here. This provides a background and summary of the issues for those that are interested. Here it is: My comment has two parts: one, the impact on the Amateur Radio service; and two, the impact on security. Both pertain primarily to the 802.11 ( Wifi ) services typically operating under Part 15. The Amateur Radio Service (FCC part 97) has long been recognized by the FCC and Congress as important to the nation. Through it, amateurs contribute to scientific knowledge, learn skills that bolster the technological competitiveness of the United States, and save lives through their extensive involvement in disaster response. Certain segments of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wifi bands authorized under FCC Part 15 also fall under the frequencies available to licensed amateurs under FCC Part 97 [1]. By scrupulously following the Part 97 regulations, many amateur radio operators are taking devices originally designed for Part 15 use and modifying them for legal use under the Part 97 Amateur Radio Service. Although the uses are varied, much effort is being devoted to fault-tolerant mesh networks that provide high-speed multimedia communications in response to a disaster, even without the presence of any traditional infrastructure or Internet backbone. One such effort [2] causes users to replace the firmware on off-the-shelf Part 15 Wifi devices, reconfiguring them for proper authorized use under Part 97. This project has many vital properties, particularly the self-discovery of routes between nodes and self-healing nature of the mesh network. These features are not typically available in the firmware of normal Part 15 devices. It should also be noted that there is presently no vendor of Wifi devices that operate under Part 97 out of the box. The only route available to amateurs is to take Part 15 devices and modify them for Part 97 use. Amateur radio users of these services have been working for years to make sure they do not cause interference to Part 15 users [3]. One such effort takes advantage of the modular radio features of consumer Wifi gear to enable communication on frequencies that are within the Part 97 allocation, but outside (though adjacent) to the Part 15 allocation. For instance, the chart at [1] identifies frequencies such as 2.397GHz or 5.660GHz that will never cause interference to Part 15 users because they lie entirely outside the Part 15 Wifi allocation. If the FCC prevents the ability of consumers to modify the firmware of these devices, the following negative consequences will necessarily follow: 1) The use of high-speed multimedia or mesh networks in the Amateur Radio service will be sharply curtailed, relegated to only outdated hardware. 2) Interference between the Amateur Radio service which may use higher power or antennas with higher gain and Part 15 users will be expanded, because Amateur Radio service users will no longer be able to intentionally select frequencies that avoid Part 15. 3) The culture of inventiveness surrounding wireless communication will be curtailed in an important way. Besides the impact on the Part 97 Amateur Radio Service, I also wish to comment on the impact to end-user security. There have been a terrible slew of high-profile situations where very popular consumer Wifi devices have had incredible security holes. Vendors have often been unwilling to address these issues [4]. Michael Horowitz maintains a website tracking security bugs in consumer wifi routers [5]. Sadly these bugs are both severe and commonplace. Within just the last month, various popular routers have been found vulnerable to remote hacking [6] and platforms for launching Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks [7]. These impacted multiple models from multiple vendors. To make matters worse, most of these issues should have never happened in the first place, and were largely the result of carelessness or cluelessness on the part of manufacturers. Consumers should not be at the mercy of vendors to fix their own networks, nor should they be required to trust unauditable systems. There are many well-regarded efforts to provide better firmware for Wifi devices, which still keep them operating under Part 15 restrictions. One is OpenWRT [8], which supports a wide variety of devices with a system built upon a solid Linux base. Please keep control of our devices in the hands of consumers and amateurs, for the benefit of all. References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_multimedia_radio [2] http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/just-starting-read-this.html [3] http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/modify.html [4] http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/netgear-routers-security-hole,1-2461.html [5] http://routersecurity.org/bugs.php [6] https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/950576 [7] https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/resources-cloud-security-2015-q2-web-security-report.html [8] https://openwrt.org/

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Bdale Garbee uploaded tar/1.28-1 which includes the --clamp-mtime option. Patch by Lunar.

Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-2 by Stefan Fritsch.
• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-6 by Santiago Vila.
• buxon/0.0.5-5 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• cdtool/2.1.8-release-3 by Santiago Vila.
• check/0.10.0-1 by Tobias Frost.
• ffe/0.3.4-2 by Santiago Vila.
• flowscan-cuflow/1.7-9 by Santiago Vila.
• gmt/5.1.2+dfsg1-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• gtkspellmm/3.0.3+dfsg-2 by Philip Rinn.
• htp/1.19-2 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• igerman98/20131206-6 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• intlfonts/1.2.1-9 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• irda-utils/0.9.18-14 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jackd2/1.9.10+20150825git1ed50c92~dfsg-1 uploaded by Adrian Knoth, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• jquery/1.11.3+dfsg-1 uploaded by Antonio Terceiro, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libapache2-authcookie-perl/3.22-3 by Niko Tyni.
• libaqbanking/5.6.1beta-2 fixed and uploaded by Micha Lenk.
• libcitygml/1.4.3-1 by Bas Couwenberg with a fixed new upstream release.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libgnome2-perl/1.046-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libmarc-charset-perl/1.35-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libtime-y2038-perl/20100403-5 by Niko Tyni.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• lpc21isp/1.97-2 by Agustin Henze.
• luakit/2012.09.13-r1-6 by Santiago Vila, also with a patch from akira.
• moarvm/2015.07-1 by Daniel Dehennin with a fixed new upstream release.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• ngircd/22.1-2 by Christoph Biedl.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• owncloud-client/2.0.0~rc1+dfsg-1 by Sandro Knau .
• postfix-gld/1.7-7 uploaded by Santiago Vila, patches for gzip by Chris Lamb and mtimes by akira.
• pppconfig/2.3.22 by Santiago Vila.
• prometheus/0.15.1+ds-2 by Mart n Ferrari.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• recode/3.6-22 by Santiago Vila.
• ruby-rmagick/2.15.4-1 by Antonio Terceiro.
• scite/3.6.0-1 by Antonio Valentino.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• tar/1.28-1 uploaded by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• uruk/20150810-1 uploaded by Joost van Baal-Ili , original patch by Lunar.
• webassets/3:0.11-2 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfonts-bolkhov/1.1.20001007-8 by Santiago Vila.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• cvs-buildpackage/5.24 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.5 by Stephen Kitt.
• vtk6/6.2.0+dfsg1-4 by Anton Gladky.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #797027 on zyne by Chris Lamb: switch to pybuild to get rid of .pyc files.
• #797180 on python-doit by Chris Lamb: sort output when creating completion script for bash and zsh.
• #797211 on apt-dater by Chris Lamb: fix implementation of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #797215 on getdns by Chris Lamb: fix call to dpkg-parsechangelog in debian/rules.
• #797254 on splint by Chris Lamb: support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for version string.
• #797296 on shiro by Chris Lamb: remove username from build string.
• #797408 on splitpatch by Reiner Herrmann: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to set manpage date.
• #797410 on eigenbase-farrago by Reiner Herrmann: sets the comment style to scm-safe which tells ResourceGen that no timestamps should be included.
• #797415 on apparmor by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C. CAPABILITIES
• #797419 on resiprocate by Reiner Herrmann: set the embedded hostname to a static value.
• #797427 on jam by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C.
• #797430 on ii-esu by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.
• #797431 on tatan by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.

Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

It's been over 2 years since I decided to start a new, nomadic life. I had the idea of blogging about this experience as it happened, but not only I am incredibly lazy when it comes to writing, most of the time I have been too busy just enjoying this lifestyle! The TL;DR version of these last 2 years:

• Lounged a bit in Ireland after leaving work, went on a great road trip along the West coast.
• Lived in Nice 3 months, back in the same house I lived between 2009 and 2010.
  • During that time, my dad visited and took him for a trip around Nothern Italy, the C te d'Azur and Paris; then travelled to DebConf in Switzerland, visited Gregor in Innsbruck, and travelled back to Nice by train, crossing the alps and a big chunk of Italy.
• Then went to Buenos Aires for 3 months (mom was very happy).
• Back in Europe, attended Fosdem, and moved to Barcelona for 3 months; so far, the best city I ever lived in!
• Went back to Dublin for a while, ended up staying over 8 months, including getting a temporary job at a normal office (booo!).
  • Although one of these months I spent travelling in the States (meh).
  • And of course, many more short trips, including a couple of visits to Barcelona, Lille, Nice, and of course Brussels for Fosdem.
• Again went to Buenos Aires, only 2 months this time.
• Another month in Dublin, then holidays visiting my friends in Lisbon, wedding in Oviedo, and a road trip around Asturias and Galicia.
• From Spain I flew to Prague and stayed for 2 months (definitely not enough).
• Quick trip to Dublin, then CCC camp and DebConf in Germany.

And now, I am in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

View from my window

2 comments

Windows 10 is here, for better or worse. As the family sysadmin, I've been tasked to update the Windows machines: ultimately, failure modes are not well documented and I needed Free software and several hours to recover a vital machine.

The "free upgrade for users of prior Windows versions" is a limited time offer for a year from launch. Microsoft do not offer licence keys for the upgrade: once a machine has updated to Windows 10 and authenticated on the 'Net, then a machine can be re-installed and will be regarded by Microsoft as pre-authorised. Users don't get the key at any point.

Although Microsoft have pushed the fact that this can be done through Windows Update, there is the option to use Microsoft's Media Creation tool to do the upgrade directly on the Windows machine concerned. This would be necessary to get the machine to upgrade and register before a full clean install of Windows 10 from media.

This Media Creation Tool failed for me on three machines with "Unable to access System reserved partition'

All the machines have SSDs from various makers: a colleague suggested that resizing the partition might enable the upgrade to continue. Of the machines that failed, all were running Windows 7 - two were running using BIOS, one using UEFI boot on a machine with no Legacy/CSM mode.

Using GParted live .iso - itself based on Debian Live - allowed me to resize the System partition from 100MiB to 200MiB by moving the Windows partition but Windows became unbootable.

In two cases, I was able to boot from DVD Windows installation media and make Windows bootable again at which point the Microsoft Media Creation Tool could be used to install Windows 10

The UEFI boot machine proved more problematic: I had to create a Windows 7 System Repair disk and repair Windows booting before Windows 10 could proceed.

My Windows-using colleaague had used only Windows-based recovery disks: using Linux tools allowed me to repair Windows installations I couldn't boot

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success. We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet it wouldn t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you! Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos. To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food & accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference. We re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki. We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before. On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended. And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising. On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob. DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: it s a thing now, he said. The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release stretch received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed. DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that s what makes DebConf be DebConf. Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn. The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state. And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro. DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much. See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

A new version of RcppGSL just arrived on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package. Following on the heels of an update last month we updated the package (and its vignette) further. One of the key additions concern memory management: Given that our proxy classes around the GSL vector and matrix types are real C++ object, we can monitor their scope and automagically call free() on them rather then insisting on the user doing it. This renders code much simpler as illustrated below. Dan Dillon added const correctness over a series on pull request which allows us to write more standard (and simply nicer) function interfaces. Lastly, a few new typedef declaration further simply the use of the (most common) double and int vectors and matrices. Maybe a code example will help. RcppGSL contains a full and complete example package illustrating how to write a package using the RcppGSL facilities. It contains an example of computing a column norm -- which we blogged about before when announcing an much earlier version. In its full glory, it looks like this:

#include <RcppGSL.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_matrix.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_blas.h>
extern "C" SEXP colNorm(SEXP sM)  
  try  
        RcppGSL::matrix<double> M = sM;     // create gsl data structures from SEXP
        int k = M.ncol();
        Rcpp::NumericVector n(k);           // to store results
        for (int j = 0; j < k; j++)  
            RcppGSL::vector_view<double> colview = gsl_matrix_column (M, j);
            n[j] = gsl_blas_dnrm2(colview);
         
        M.free() ;
        return n;                           // return vector
    catch( std::exception &ex )  
        forward_exception_to_r( ex );
    catch(...)  
        ::Rf_error( "c++ exception (unknown reason)" );
   
  return R_NilValue; // -Wall
 

We manually translate the SEXP coming from R, manually cover the try and catch exception handling, manually free the memory etc pp. Well in the current version, the example is written as follows:

#include <RcppGSL.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_matrix.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_blas.h>
// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::NumericVector colNorm(const RcppGSL::Matrix & G)  
    int k = G.ncol();
    Rcpp::NumericVector n(k);           // to store results
    for (int j = 0; j < k; j++)  
        RcppGSL::VectorView colview = gsl_matrix_const_column (G, j);
        n[j] = gsl_blas_dnrm2(colview);
     
    return n;                           // return vector
 

This takes full advantage of Rcpp Attributes automagically creating the interface and exception handler (as per the previous release), adds a const & interface, does away with the tedious and error-pronce free() and uses the shorter-typedef forms for RcppGSL::Matrix and RcppGSL::VectorViews using double variables. Now the function is short and concise and hence easier to read and maintain. The package vignette has more details on using RcppGSL. The NEWS file entries follows below:

Changes in version 0.3.0 (2015-08-30)

• The RcppGSL matrix and vector class now keep track of object allocation and can therefore automatically free allocated object in the destructor. Explicit x.free() use is still supported.
• The matrix and vector classes now support const reference semantics in the interfaces (thanks to PR #7 by Dan Dillon)
• The matrix_view and vector_view classes are reorganized to better support const arguments (thanks to PR #8 and #9 by Dan Dillon)
• Shorthand forms such as Rcpp::Matrix have been added for double and int vectors and matrices including views.
• Examples such as fastLm can now be written in a much cleaner and shorter way as GSL objects can appear in the function signature and without requiring explicit .free() calls at the end.
• The included examples, as well as the introductory vignette, have been updated accordingly.

Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

tl;dr; You can add 1960+ SubjectAlternativeNames on one certificate and at least Firefox and Chrome are working fine with that. Internet Explorer failed but I did not investigate why. So why would you want to have close to 2K SANs on one certificate? While we're working on adopting a more dynamic development workflow at my workplace we're currently bound to a central development system. From there we serve a classic virtual hosting setup with "projectname.username.devel.ourdomain.example" mapped on "/web/username/projectname/". That is 100% dynamic with wildcard DNS entries and you can just add a new project to your folder and use it directly. All of that is served from just a single VirtualHost. Now our developers started to go through all our active projects to make them fit for serving via HTTPS. While we can verify the proper usage of https on our staging system where we've validating certificates, that's not the way you'd like to work. So someone approached me to look into a solution for our development system. Obvious choices like wildcard certificates do not work here because we've two dynamic components in the FQDN. So we would've to buy a wildcard certificate for every developer and we would've to create a VirtualHost entry for every new developer. That's expensive and we don't want all that additional work. So I started to search for documented limits on the number of SANs you can have on a certificate. The good news: there are none. The RFC does not define a limit. So much about the theory. Following Ivans excellent documentation I setup an internal CA and an ugly "find ... sed ... tr ..." one-liner later I had a properly formated openssl config file to generate a CSR with all 1960 "projectname.username..." SAN combinations found on the development system. Two openssl invocations (CSR generation and signing) later I had a signed certificate with 1960 SANs on it. I imported the internal CA I created in Firefox and Chrome, and to my surprise it worked. Noteworthy: To sign with "openssl ca" without interactive prompts you've to use the "-batch" option. I'm thinking about regenerating the certificate every morning so our developers just have to create a new project directory and within 24h serving via HTTPS would be enabled. The only thing I'm currently pondering about is how to properly run the CA in a corporate Windows world. We could of course ask the Windows guys to include it for everyone but then we would've to really invest time in properly running the CA. I'd like to avoid that hassle. So I'd guess we just stick to providing the CA for those developers who need it. This all or nothing model is a constant PITA, and you really do not want to get owned via your own badly managed CA. Regarding Internet Explorer it jumped in my face with a strange error message that recommended to enable TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 in the options menu. Of course that's already enable. I'll try to take a look at the handshake next week, but I bet we've to accept for the moment that IE will not work with so many SANs. Would be interesting to try out Windows 10 with Spartan, but well I'm not that interested in Windows to invest more time on that front. Other TLS implementations, like Java, would be also interesting to test.

Review: Pound Foolish, by Helaine Olen

Publisher:	Penguin
Copyright:	2012, 2013
Printing:	2013
ISBN:	1-59184-679-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	241

For at least the last six years, it's not been surprising news that the relationship between the average person and the US financial system is tense at best, and downright exploitative at worst. The collapse of the housing bubble revealed a morass of predatory lending practices, spectacularly poor (or spectacularly cynical) investment decisions, and out-of-control personal debt coupled with erosion of bankruptcy law. Despite this, there's always a second story in all discussions of the finances of the US population: the problem isn't with financial structures and products, but with us. We're too stupid, or naive, or emotional, or uninformed, or greedy, or unprincipled, or impatient. Finances are complicated, yes, but that just means we have to be more thoughtful. All of these complex financial products could have been used properly. Helaine Olen's Pound Foolish is a systemtic, biting, well-researched, and pointed counter to that second story. The short summary of this book is that it's not us. We're being set up for failure, and there is a large and lucrative industry profiting off of that failure. And many (although not all) people in that industry know exactly what they're doing. Pound Foolish is one of my favorite forms of non-fiction: long-form journalism. This is an investigative essay into the personal finance and investment industry, developed to book length. Readers of Michael Lewis will feel right at home. Olen doesn't have Lewis's skill with characterization and biography, but she makes up for it in big-picture clarity. She takes a wealth of individual facts about who is involved in personal finance, how they make money, what they recommend, and who profits, and develops it into a clear and coherent overview. If you have paid any attention to US financial issues, you'll know some of this already. Frontline has done a great job of covering administrative fees in mutual funds. Lots of people have warned about annuities. The spectacular collapse of the home mortgage is old news now. But Olen does a great job of finding the connections between these elements and adding some less familiar ones, including an insightful and damning analysis of financial literacy campaigns and the widespread belief that these problems are caused by lack of consumer understanding. I've read and watched a lot of related material, including several full-book treatments of the mortgage crisis, so I think it's telling that I never got bored in the middle of Olen's treatment. I find the deep US belief in the power of personal improvement fascinating. It feels like one of the defining characteristics of US culture, for both good and for ill. We're very good at writing compelling narratives of personal improvement, and sometimes act on them. We believe that everyone can and should improve themselves. But that comes coupled to a dislike and distrust of expertise, even when it is legitimate and earned (Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life develops this idea at length). And I believe we significantly overestimate the ability of individuals to act despite systems that are stacked against us, and significantly overestimate our responsibility for the inevitable results. This was the main message I took from Pound Foolish: we desperately want to believe in the myth of personal control. We want to believe that our financial troubles are something we can fix through personal education, more will power, better decisions, or just the right investment. And so, we turn to gurus like Suze Orman and buy their mix of muddled financial advice and "tough love" that completely ignores broader social factors. We're easy marks for psychologically-trained investment sellers who mix fear, pressure, and a fantasy of inside knowledge and personal control. We're fooled by a narrative of empowerment and stand by while a working retirement system (guaranteed benefit pensions) is undermined and destroyed in favor of much riskier investment schemes... riskier for us, at least, but loaded with guaranteed profits for the people who "advise" us. And we cling to financial literacy campaigns that are funded by exactly the same credit card companies who fight tooth and nail against regulations that would require they provide simple, comprehensible descriptions of loan terms. One wonders if they support them precisely because they know they don't work. Olen mentions, in passing, the Stanford marshmallow experiment, which is often used as a foundation for arguments about personal responsibility for financial outcomes, but she doesn't do a detailed critique. I wish she had, since I think it's such a good example of the theme of this book. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a psychological experiment from the late 1960s and early 1970s in delayed gratification. Children were put in a room in front of some treat (marshmallows, cookies, pretzels) and told that they could eat it if they wished. But if they didn't eat the treat before the monitor came back, they would get two of the treat instead. Long-term follow-up studies found that the children who refrained from eating the treat and got the reward had better life outcomes along multiple metrics: SAT scores, educational attainment, and others. On the surface, this seems to support everything US culture loves to believe about the power of self-control, self-improvement, and the Protestant work ethic. People who can delay gratification and save for a future reward do better in the world. (The darker interpretation, also common since the experiment was performed on children, is that the ability to delay gratification has a genetic component, and some people are just doomed to make poor decisions due to their inability to exercise self-control.) However, I can call the traditional interpretation into question with one simple question that the experimenters appeared not to ask: under what circumstances would taking the treat immediately be the rational and best choice? One answer, of course, is when one does not trust the adult to produce the promised reward. If the adult might come back, take the treat away, and not give any treat, it's to the child's advantage to take the treat immediately. Even if the adult left the treat but wouldn't actually double it, it's to the child's advantage to take the treat immediately. The traditional interpretation assumes the child trusts the adults performing the experiment a logical assumption for those of us whose childhood experience was that adults could generally be trusted and that promised rewards would materialize. If the child instead came from a chaotic family where adults weren't reliable, or just one where frequent unexpected money problems meant that promised treats often didn't materialize, the most logical assumption may be much different. One has to ask if such a background may have more to do with the measured long-term life outcomes than the child's unwillingness to trust in a future reward. And this is one of the major themes of this book. Problems the personal finance industry attributes to our personal shortcomings (which they're happy to take our money to remedy) are often systematic, or at least largely outside of our control. We may already be making the most logical choices given our personal situations. We're in worse financial shape because we're making less money. Our retirements are in danger because our retirement systems were dismantled and replaced with risky and expensive alternatives. And where problems are attributed to our poor choices, one can find entire industries that focus on undermining our ability to make good choices: scaring us, confusing us, hiding vital information, and exploiting known weaknesses of human psychology to route our money to them. These are not problems that can be solved by watching Suze Orman yell at us to stop buying things. These are systematic social problems that demand a sweeping discussion about regulation, automatic savings systems, and social insurance programs to spread risk and minimize the weaknesses of human psychology. Exactly the kind of discussion that the personal finance industry doesn't want us to have. Those who are well-read in these topics probably won't find a lot new here. Those who aren't in the US will shake their heads at some of the ways that the US fails its citizens, although many of Olen's points apply even to countries with stronger social safety nets. But if you're interested in solid long-form journalism on this topic, backed by lots of data on just how badly a focus on personal accountability is working for us, I recommend Pound Foolish. Rating: 8 out of 10

I usually send patches from git via git imap-send, which gives me a chance to edit and save them through my regular mail client. Obviously I want to make a secure connection to the IMAP server. The upstream code now supports doing this with OpenSSL, but git is under GPL and it seems that not all relevant contributors have given the extra permission to link with OpenSSL. So in Debian you still need to use an external program to provide a TLS tunnel. The commonly used TLS tunnelling programs, openssl s_client and stunnel, do not validate server certificates in a useful way - at least by default. Here's how I've configured git imap-send and stunnel to properly validate the server certificate. If you use the PLAIN or LOGIN authentication method with the server, you will still see the warning:

*** IMAP Warning *** Password is being sent in the clear

The server does see the clear-text password, but it is encrypted on the wire and git imap-send just doesn't know that. ~/.gitconfig

[imap]
	user = ben
	folder = "drafts"
	tunnel = "stunnel ~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf"

~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf

debug = 3
foreground = yes
client = yes
connect = mail.decadent.org.uk:993
sslVersion = TLSv1.2
renegotiation = no
verify = 2
; Current CA for the IMAP server.
; If you don't want to pin to a specific CA certificate, use
; /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt instead.
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/StartCom_Certification_Authority.pem
checkHost = mail.decadent.org.uk

If stunnel chokes on the checkHost variable, it doesn't support certificate name validation. Unfortunately no Debian stable release has this feature - only testing/unstable. I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to backport it or even to make a stable update to add this important security feature.

I usually send patches from git via git imap-send, which gives me a chance to edit and save them through my regular mail client. Obviously I want to make a secure connection to the IMAP server. The upstream code now supports doing this with OpenSSL, but git is under GPL and it seems that not all relevant contributors have given the extra permission to link with OpenSSL. So in Debian you still need to use an external program to provide a TLS tunnel. The commonly used TLS tunnelling programs, openssl s_client and stunnel, do not validate server certificates in a useful way - at least by default. Here's how I've configured git imap-send and stunnel to properly validate the server certificate. If you use the PLAIN or LOGIN authentication method with the server, you will still see the warning:

*** IMAP Warning *** Password is being sent in the clear

The server does see the clear-text password, but it is encrypted on the wire and git imap-send just doesn't know that. ~/.gitconfig

[imap]
	user = ben
	folder = "drafts"
	tunnel = "stunnel ~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf"

~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf

debug = 3
foreground = yes
client = yes
connect = mail.decadent.org.uk:993
sslVersion = TLSv1.2
renegotiation = no
verify = 2
; Current CA for the IMAP server.
; If you don't want to pin to a specific CA certificate, use
; /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt instead.
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/StartCom_Certification_Authority.pem
checkHost = mail.decadent.org.uk

If stunnel chokes on the checkHost variable, it doesn't support certificate name validation. Unfortunately no Debian stable release has this feature - only testing/unstable. I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to backport it or even to make a stable update to add this important security feature.

I usually send patches from git via git imap-send, which gives me a chance to edit and save them through my regular mail client. Obviously I want to make a secure connection to the IMAP server. The upstream code now supports doing this with OpenSSL, but git is under GPL and it seems that not all relevant contributors have given the extra permission to link with OpenSSL. So in Debian you still need to use an external program to provide a TLS tunnel. The commonly used TLS tunnelling programs, openssl s_client and stunnel, do not validate server certificates in a useful way - at least by default. Here's how I've configured git imap-send and stunnel to properly validate the server certificate. If you use the PLAIN or LOGIN authentication method with the server, you will still see the warning:

*** IMAP Warning *** Password is being sent in the clear

The server does see the clear-text password, but it is encrypted on the wire and git imap-send just doesn't know that. ~/.gitconfig

[imap]
	user = ben
	folder = "drafts"
	tunnel = "stunnel ~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf"

~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf

debug = 3
foreground = yes
client = yes
connect = mail.decadent.org.uk:993
sslVersion = TLSv1.2
renegotiation = no
verify = 2
; Current CA for the IMAP server.
; If you don't want to pin to a specific CA certificate, use
; /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt instead.
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/StartCom_Certification_Authority.pem
checkHost = mail.decadent.org.uk

If stunnel chokes on the checkHost variable, it doesn't support certificate name validation. Unfortunately no Debian stable release has this feature - only testing/unstable. I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to backport it or even to make a stable update to add this important security feature.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 79.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings did 14.75 hours.
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
• Rapha l Hertzog did 15 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 14.75 hours.
• Scott Kitterman did 4 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 15 hours.

Evolution of the situation August has seen a small decrease in terms of sponsored hours (71.50 hours per month) because two sponsors did not pay their renewal invoice on time. That said they reconfirmed their willingness to support us and things should be fixed after the summer. And we should be able to reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position, in particular since a new platinum sponsor might join the project. DebConf 15 happened this month and Debian LTS was featured in a talk and in a work session. Have a look at the video recordings:

• Debian Long Term Support: Past Present and Future (slides)
• Preparing for Wheezy LTS

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 20 packages awaiting an update (4 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (11 less than last month). The new LTS frontdesk ensures regular triage of CVE reports and the difference between both counts dropped significantly. That s good! Thanks to our sponsors Thanks to Sig-I/O, a new bronze sponsor, which joins our 35 other sponsors.

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 14 months already)
• Linode LLC (for 3 months already)
• Silver sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 14 months already)
• Blablacar (for 13 months already)
• Domeneshop AS (for 13 months already)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 13 months already)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 11 months already)
• Gandi SAS (for 8 months already)
• University of Luxembourg (for 5 months already)
• Rentabiliweb Group (for 4 months already)
• Bronze sponsors:
• Evolix (for 14 months already)
• Offensive Security (for 14 months already)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 14 months already)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 13 months already)
• MyTux (for 13 months already)
• Intevation GmbH (for 11 months already)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 11 months already)
• Nantes M tropole (for 11 months already)
• Daevel SARL (for 9 months already)
• FOSSter (for 9 months already)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 8 months already)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 8 months already)
• Gree, Inc. (for 7 months already)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 7 months already)
• NUMLOG (for 7 months already)
• WinGo AG (for 7 months already)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 3 months already)
• Sig-I/O

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A new maintenance release 0.4.3 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. This release comes upon the request of CRAN and adds additional import statements to the NAMESPACE file. While we were at it, a few more things got cleaned up and edited---but no new code was added. Full details are below.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.3 (2015-08-25)

• Declare additional imports from methods in NAMESPACE.
• Travis CI tests now run faster as all CRAN dependencies are installed as binaries.
• The tools/winlibs.R script now tests for R (< 3.3.0) before calling the (soon-to-be phased out) setInternet2() function.
• Several small edits were made to DESCRIPTION to clarify library dependencies, provide additonal references and conform to now-current R packaging standards.

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has a package vignette, a a 'quick' overview vignette, and a unit test summary vignette. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.

Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15

Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Toolchain fixes

• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-12 which makes class and modules ordering predictable (#795835) and fixes __repr__ so memory addresses don't appear in docs (#795826). Patches by Val Lorentz.
• Sergei Golovan uploaded erlang/1:18.0-dfsg-2 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to erlc. Patch by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-5 which make grammar, inventory, and JavaScript locales generation deterministic. Original patch by Val Lorentz.
• St phane Glondu uploaded ocaml/4.02.3-2 to experimental, making startup files and native packed libraries deterministic. The patch adds deterministic .file to the assembler output.
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-ldoc/1.4.3-3 which now pass the -d option to txt2man and add the --date option to override the current date.

Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware.

• #796330 on d-shlibs by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.

St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-3 by Stefan Fritsch.
• aprx/2.08.svn593+dfsg-2 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blkreplay/1.0-3 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Dhole.
• cal3d/0.11.0-6 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, patch by akira.
• cgsi-gsoap/1.3.8-1 by Mattias Ellert.
• eyefiserver/2.4+dfsg-1 by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gnujump/1.0.8-3 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• hkgerman/1:2-29 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libmkdoc-xml-perl/0.75-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-6 by Niko Tyni.
• librostlab-blast/1.0.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• lua-penlight/1.3.2-2 by Enrico Tassi.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• nagios-plugins-contrib/15.20150818 by Jan Wagner and Bernd Zeimetz.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pybik/2.1-1 by B. Clausius.
• pyepr/0.9.3-1 uploaded by Antonio Valentino, original patch by Juan Picca.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• unoconv/0.7-1.1 sponsored by Vincent Bernat, fix by Dhole.
• vim-latexsuite/20141116.812-1 uploaded by Johann Felix Soden, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• volk/1.0.2-2 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• xbmc/2:13.2+dfsg1-5 by Balint Reczey.
• xdotool/1:3.20150503.1-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, initial patch by Chris Lamb.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfireworks/1.3-10 uploaded by Yukiharu YABUKI, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xul-ext-monkeysphere/0.8-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, original patch by Dhole.

Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues:

• brian/1.4.1-3 uploaded by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Juan Picca.
• opennebula/4.12.3+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• pcsx2/1.3.1-1008-g9f291a6+dfsg-1 by Miguel A. Col n V lez.
• webassets/3:0.11-1 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• apache2/2.4.16-3 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, original patch by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gerris/20131206+dfsg-6 uploaded by Anton Gladky, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kodi/15.1+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• zshdb/0.05+git20101031-4 uploaded by Iain R. Learmonth, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #795861 on fakeroot by Val Lorentz: set the mtime of all files to the time of the last debian/changelog entry.
• #795870 on fatresize by Chris Lamb: set build date to the time of the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795945 on projectl by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #795977 on dahdi-tools by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795981 on x11proto-input by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795983 on dbusada by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795984 on postgresql-plproxy by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795985 on xorg by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795987 on pngcheck by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795997 on python-babel by Val Lorentz: make build timestamp independent from the timezone and remove the name of the build system locale from the documentation.
• #796092 on a7xpg by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796212 on bittornado by Chris Lamb: remove umask-varying permissions.
• #796251 on liblucy-perl by Niko Tyni: generate lib/Lucy.xs in a deterministic order.
• #796271 on tcsh by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796275 on hspell by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamp from aff files generated by mk_he_affix.
• #796324 on fftw3 by Reiner Herrmann: remove date from documentation files.
• #796335 on nasm by Val Lorentz: remove extra timestamps from the build system.
• #796360 on libical by Chris Lamb: removes randomess caused Perl in generated icalderivedvalue.c.
• #796375 on wcd by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796376 on mapivi by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796527 on vserver-debiantools by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.

St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21^st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.