Search Results: "ag"

Google did some interesting research on the impact of discrimination on code reviers [1]. It turns out that this is a bigger problem than most white men would have ever suspected and it even has an adverse effect on Asian people. nothello.net is an amusing site to make the point that you shouldn t use IM to say hello separately from asking the question [2]. A good link to share on your corporate IM system. TechCrunch has an amusing article about the Facebook farewell to Sheryl Sandburg [3]. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about a bug-bunty program from a crime syndicate offering up to $1M in crypto-currency [4]. Among other things finding the real first and last names of the crime lord gets you $1M. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about how deepfakes are being used to apply for work from home jobs [5]. I wonder whether the people doing that intend to actually do any of the work or just get paid for doing nothing while delaying getting sacked for as long as possible. I have read about people getting a job they don t want to do that has a long training period so that they can quit at the end of training without working apparently call center work is a good option for this. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about phishing attacks that use a VNC remote desktop connection to trick a user into authenticating using the attacker s PC [6]. The real problem here is getting humans to do things that computers do better, which is recognising the correct foreign party. Fortune has an interesting article about the problems with Tesla self-driving and the possibility of a recall [7]. The main issue is apparently Teslas driving at full speed into emergency services vehicles that are parked while attending an incident. Having a police car unexpectedly occupying a lane of traffic is something you just have to deal with, either stop or change lanes. Teslas have been turning off autopilot less than one second before impact so Telsa can claim that it didn t happen with autopilot engaged but in reality a human can t take over in less than one second, a pilot I know says it takes 2-3 seconds to take over the controls in a plane. BonAppetit has an interesting and amusing article about protest foods [8] which starts by explaining why Ukrainians are throwing pasta at the Russian consulate. The NVidia blog has an informative post about how Pony.ai optimised their pipeline for sensor data for autonomous cars [9]. Matt Crump wrote an educational and amusing blog post about his battle with cheaters in university tests he administered [10]. The Cricket Monthly has an insightful article about how a batsman manages to see and hit a cricket ball that s going well in excess of 100KM/h [11]. One particularly noteworthy part of this article is the comparison of what amateur cricketers do with what anyone who wants to be a contender for the national team must do. Darker Shades of Blue is an insightful paper by Tony Kern about the needless crash of a B52 at Fairchild air base in 1994 [12]. This is specifically written to teach people about correct and effective leadership.

Since the first week of April 2022 I have (finally!) changed my company car from a plug-in hybrid to a fully electic car. My new ride, for the next two years, is a BMW i4 M50 in Aventurine Red metallic. An ellegant car with very deep and memorable color, insanely powerful (544 hp/795 Nm), sub-4 second 0-100 km/h, large 84 kWh battery (80 kWh usable), charging up to 210 kW, top speed of 225 km/h and also very efficient (which came out best in this trip) with WLTP range of 510 km and EVDB real range of 435 km. The car also has performance tyres (Hankook Ventus S1 evo3 245/45R18 100Y XL in front and 255/45R18 103Y XL in rear all at recommended 2.5 bar) that have reduced efficiency. So I wanted to document and describe how was it for me to travel ~2000 km (one way) with this, electric, car from south of Germany to north of Latvia. I have done this trip many times before since I live in Germany now and travel back to my relatives in Latvia 1-2 times per year. This was the first time I made this trip in an electric car. And as this trip includes both travelling in Germany (where BEV infrastructure is best in the world) and across Eastern/Northen Europe, I believe that this can be interesting to a few people out there. Normally when I travelled this trip with a gasoline/diesel car I would normally drive for two days with an intermediate stop somewhere around Warsaw with about 12 hours of travel time in each day. This would normally include a couple bathroom stops in each day, at least one longer lunch stop and 3-4 refueling stops on top of that. Normally this would use at least 6 liters of fuel per 100 km on average with total usage of about 270 liters for the whole trip (or about 540 just in fuel costs, nowadays). My (personal) quirk is that both fuel and recharging of my (business) car inside Germany is actually paid by my employer, so it is useful for me to charge up (or fill up) at the last station in Gemany before driving on. The plan for this trip was made in a similar way as when travelling with a gasoline car: travelling as fast as possible on German Autobahn network to last chargin stop on the A4 near G rlitz, there charging up as much as reasonable and then travelling to a hotel in Warsaw, charging there overnight and travelling north towards Ionity chargers in Lithuania from where reaching the final target in north of Latvia should be possible. How did this plan meet the reality? Travelling inside Germany with an electric car was basically perfect. The most efficient way would involve driving fast and hard with top speed of even 180 km/h (where possible due to speed limits and traffic). BMW i4 is very efficient at high speeds with consumption maxing out at 28 kWh/100km when you actually drive at this speed all the time. In real situation in this trip we saw consumption of 20.8-22.2 kWh/100km in the first legs of the trip. The more traffic there is, the more speed limits and roadworks, the lower is the average speed and also the lower the consumption. With this kind of consumption we could comfortably drive 2 hours as fast as we could and then pick any fast charger along the route and in 26 minutes at a charger (50 kWh charged total) we'd be ready to drive for another 2 hours. This lines up very well with recommended rest stops for biological reasons (bathroom, water or coffee, a bit of movement to get blood circulating) and very close to what I had to do anyway with a gasoline car. With a gasoline car I had to refuel first, then park, then go to bathroom and so on. With an electric car I can do all of that while the car is charging and in the end the total time for a stop is very similar. Also not that there was a crazy heat wave going on and temperature outside was at about 34C minimum the whole day and hitting 40C at one point of the trip, so a lot of power was used for cooling. The car has a heat pump standard, but it still was working hard to keep us cool in the sun. The car was able to plan a charging route with all the charging stops required and had all the good options (like multiple intermediate stops) that many other cars (hi Tesla) and mobile apps (hi Google and Apple) do not have yet. There are a couple bugs with charging route and display of current route guidance, those are already fixed and will be delivered with over the air update with July 2022 update. Another good alterantive is the ABRP (A Better Route Planner) that was specifically designed for electric car routing along the best route for charging. Most phone apps (like Google Maps) have no idea about your specific electric car - it has no idea about the battery capacity, charging curve and is missing key live data as well - what is the current consumption and remaining energy in the battery. ABRP is different - it has data and profiles for almost all electric cars and can also be linked to live vehicle data, either via a OBD dongle or via a new Tronity cloud service. Tronity reads data from vehicle-specific cloud service, such as MyBMW service, saves it, tracks history and also re-transmits it to ABRP for live navigation planning. ABRP allows for options and settings that no car or app offers, for example, saying that you want to stop at a particular place for an hour or until battery is charged to 90%, or saying that you have specific charging cards and would only want to stop at chargers that support those. Both the car and the ABRP also support alternate routes even with multiple intermediate stops. In comparison, route planning by Google Maps or Apple Maps or Waze or even Tesla does not really come close. After charging up in the last German fast charger, a more interesting part of the trip started. In Poland the density of high performance chargers (HPC) is much lower than in Germany. There are many chargers (west of Warsaw), but vast majority of them are (relatively) slow 50kW chargers. And that is a difference between putting 50kWh into the car in 23-26 minutes or in 60 minutes. It does not seem too much, but the key bit here is that for 20 minutes there is easy to find stuff that should be done anyway, but after that you are done and you are just waiting for the car and if that takes 4 more minutes or 40 more minutes is a big, perceptual, difference. So using HPC is much, much preferable. So we put in the Ionity charger near Lodz as our intermediate target and the car suggested an intermediate stop at a Greenway charger by Katy Wroclawskie. The location is a bit weird - it has 4 charging stations with 150 kW each. The weird bits are that each station has two CCS connectors, but only one parking place (and the connectors share power, so if two cars were to connect, each would get half power). Also from the front of the location one can only see two stations, the otehr two are semi-hidden around a corner. We actually missed them on the way to Latvia and one person actually waited for the charger behind us for about 10 minutes. We only discovered the other two stations on the way back. With slower speeds in Poland the consumption goes down to 18 kWh/100km which translates to now up to 3 hours driving between stops. At the end of the first day we drove istarting from Ulm from 9:30 in the morning until about 23:00 in the evening with total distance of about 1100 km, 5 charging stops, starting with 92% battery, charging for 26 min (50 kWh), 33 min (57 kWh + lunch), 17 min (23 kWh), 12 min (17 kWh) and 13 min (37 kW). In the last two chargers you can see the difference between a good and fast 150 kW charger at high battery charge level and a really fast Ionity charger at low battery charge level, which makes charging faster still. Arriving to hotel with 23% of battery. Overnight the car charged from a Porsche Destination Charger to 87% (57 kWh). That was a bit less than I would expect from a full power 11kW charger, but good enough. Hotels should really install 11kW Type2 chargers for their guests, it is a really significant bonus that drives more clients to you. The road between Warsaw and Kaunas is the most difficult part of the trip for both driving itself and also for charging. For driving the problem is that there will be a new highway going from Warsaw to Lithuanian border, but it is actually not fully ready yet. So parts of the way one drives on the new, great and wide highway and parts of the way one drives on temporary roads or on old single lane undivided roads. And the most annoying part is navigating between parts as signs are not always clear and the maps are either too old or too new. Some maps do not have the new roads and others have on the roads that have not been actually build or opened to traffic yet. It's really easy to loose ones way and take a significant detour. As far as charging goes, basically there is only the slow 50 kW chargers between Warsaw and Kaunas (for now). We chose to charge on the last charger in Poland, by Suwalki Kaufland. That was not a good idea - there is only one 50 kW CCS and many people decide the same, so there can be a wait. We had to wait 17 minutes before we could charge for 30 more minutes just to get 18 kWh into the battery. Not the best use of time. On the way back we chose a different charger in Lomza where would have a relaxed dinner while the car was charging. That was far more relaxing and a better use of time. We also tried charging at an Orlen charger that was not recommended by our car and we found out why. Unlike all other chargers during our entire trip, this charger did not accept our universal BMW Charging RFID card. Instead it demanded that we download their own Orlen app and register there. The app is only available in some countries (and not in others) and on iPhone it is only available in Polish. That is a bad exception to the rule and a bad example. This is also how most charging works in USA. Here in Europe that is not normal. The normal is to use a charging card - either provided from the car maker or from another supplier (like PlugSufring or Maingau Energy). The providers then make roaming arrangements with all the charging networks, so the cards just work everywhere. In the end the user gets the prices and the bills from their card provider as a single monthly bill. This also saves all any credit card charges for the user. Having a clear, separate RFID card also means that one can easily choose how to pay for each charging session. For example, I have a corporate RFID card that my company pays for (for charging in Germany) and a private BMW Charging card that I am paying myself for (for charging abroad). Having the car itself authenticate direct with the charger (like Tesla does) removes the option to choose how to pay. Having each charge network have to use their own app or token bring too much chaos and takes too much setup. The optimum is having one card that works everywhere and having the option to have additional card or cards for specific purposes. Reaching Ionity chargers in Lithuania is again a breath of fresh air - 20-24 minutes to charge 50 kWh is as expected. One can charge on the first Ionity just enough to reach the next one and then on the second charger one can charge up enough to either reach the Ionity charger in Adazi or the final target in Latvia. There is a huge number of CSDD (Road Traffic and Safety Directorate) managed chargers all over Latvia, but they are 50 kW chargers. Good enough for local travel, but not great for long distance trips. BMW i4 charges at over 50 kW on a HPC even at over 90% battery state of charge (SoC). This means that it is always faster to charge up in a HPC than in a 50 kW charger, if that is at all possible. We also tested the CSDD chargers - they worked without any issues. One could pay with the BMW Charging RFID card, one could use the CSDD e-mobi app or token and one could also use Mobilly - an app that you can use in Latvia for everything from parking to public transport tickets or museums or car washes. We managed to reach our final destination near Aluksne with 17% range remaining after just 3 charging stops: 17+30 min (18 kWh), 24 min (48 kWh), 28 min (36 kWh). Last stop we charged to 90% which took a few extra minutes that would have been optimal. For travel around in Latvia we were charging at our target farmhouse from a normal 3 kW Schuko EU socket. That is very slow. We charged for 33 hours and went from 17% to 94%, so not really full. That was perfectly fine for our purposes. We easily reached Riga, drove to the sea and then back to Aluksne with 8% still in reserve and started charging again for the next trip. If it were required to drive around more and charge faster, we could have used the normal 3-phase 440V connection in the farmhouse to have a red CEE 16A plug installed (same as people use for welders). BMW i4 comes standard with a new BMW Flexible Fast Charger that has changable socket adapters. It comes by default with a Schucko connector in Europe, but for 90 one can buy an adapter for blue CEE plug (3.7 kW) or red CEE 16A or 32A plugs (11 kW). Some public charging stations in France actually use the blue CEE plugs instead of more common Type2 electric car charging stations. The CEE plugs are also common in camping parking places. On the way back the long distance BEV travel was already well understood and did not cause us any problem. From our destination we could easily reach the first Ionity in Lithuania, on the Panevezhis bypass road where in just 8 minutes we got 19 kWh and were ready to drive on to Kaunas, there a longer 32 minute stop before the charging desert of Suwalki Gap that gave us 52 kWh to 90%. That brought us to a shopping mall in Lomzha where we had some food and charged up 39 kWh in lazy 50 minutes. That was enough to bring us to our return hotel for the night - Hotel 500W in Strykow by Lodz that has a 50kW charger on site, while we were having late dinner and preparing for sleep, the car easily recharged to full (71 kWh in 95 minutes), so I just moved it from charger to a parking spot just before going to sleep. Really easy and well flowing day. Second day back went even better as we just needed an 18 minute stop at the same Katy Wroclawskie charger as before to get 22 kWh and that was enough to get back to Germany. After that we were again flying on the Autobahn and charging as needed, 15 min (31 kWh), 23 min (48 kWh) and 31 min (54 kWh + food). We started the day on about 9:40 and were home at 21:40 after driving just over 1000 km on that day. So less than 12 hours for 1000 km travelled, including all charging, bio stops, food and some traffic jams as well. Not bad. Now let's take a look at all the apps and data connections that a technically minded customer can have for their car. Architecturally the car is a network of computers by itself, but it is very secured and normally people do not have any direct access. However, once you log in into the car with your BMW account the car gets your profile info and preferences (seat settings, navigation favorites, ...) and the car then also can start sending information to the BMW backend about its status. This information is then available to the user over multiple different channels. There is no separate channel for each of those data flow. The data only goes once to the backend and then all other communication of apps happens with the backend. First of all the MyBMW app. This is the go-to for everything about the car - seeing its current status and location (when not driving), sending commands to the car (lock, unlock, flash lights, pre-condition, ...) and also monitor and control charging processes. You can also plan a route or destination in the app in advance and then just send it over to the car so it already knows where to drive to when you get to the car. This can also integrate with calendar entries, if you have locations for appointments, for example. This also shows full charging history and allows a very easy export of that data, here I exported all charging sessions from June and then trimmed it back to only sessions relevant to the trip and cut off some design elements to have the data more visible. So one can very easily see when and where we were charging, how much power we got at each spot and (if you set prices for locations) can even show costs. I've already mentioned the Tronity service and its ABRP integration, but it also saves the information that it gets from the car and gathers that data over time. It has nice aspects, like showing the driven routes on a map, having ways to do business trip accounting and having good calendar view. Sadly it does not correctly capture the data for charging sessions (the amounts are incorrect). Update: after talking to Tronity support, it looks like the bug was in the incorrect value for the usable battery capacity for my car. They will look into getting th eright values there by default, but as a workaround one can edit their car in their system (after at least one charging session) and directly set the expected battery capacity (usable) in the car properties on the Tronity web portal settings. One other fun way to see data from your BMW is using the BMW integration in Home Assistant. This brings the car as a device in your own smart home. You can read all the variables from the car current status (and Home Asisstant makes cute historical charts) and you can even see interesting trends, for example for remaining range shows much higher value in Latvia as its prediction is adapted to Latvian road speeds and during the trip it adapts to Polish and then to German road speeds and thus to higher consumption and thus lower maximum predicted remaining range. Having the car attached to the Home Assistant also allows you to attach the car to automations, both as data and event source (like detecting when car enters the "Home" zone) and also as target, so you could flash car lights or even unlock or lock it when certain conditions are met. So, what in the end was the most important thing - cost of the trip? In total we charged up 863 kWh, so that would normally cost one about 290 , which is close to half what this trip would have costed with a gasoline car. Out of that 279 kWh in Germany (paid by my employer) and 154 kWh in the farmhouse (paid by our wonderful relatives :D) so in the end the charging that I actually need to pay adds up to 430 kWh or about 150 . Typically, it took about 400 in fuel that I had to pay to get to Latvia and back. The difference is really nice! In the end I believe that there are three different ways of charging:

incidental charging - this is wast majority of charging in the normal day-to-day life. The car gets charged when and where it is convinient to do so along the way. If we go to a movie or a shop and there is a chance to leave the car at a charger, then it can charge up. Works really well, does not take extra time for charging from us.
fast charging - charging up at a HPC during optimal charging conditions - from relatively low level to no more than 70-80% while you are still doing all the normal things one would do in a quick stop in a long travel process: bio things, cleaning the windscreen, getting a coffee or a snack.
necessary charging - charging from a whatever charger is available just enough to be able to reach the next destination or the next fast charger.

The last category is the only one that is really annoying and should be avoided at all costs. Even by shifting your plans so that you find something else useful to do while necessary charging is happening and thus, at least partially, shifting it over to incidental charging category. Then you are no longer just waiting for the car, you are doing something else and the car magically is charged up again. And when one does that, then travelling with an electric car becomes no more annoying than travelling with a gasoline car. Having more breaks in a trip is a good thing and makes the trips actually easier and less stressfull - I was more relaxed during and after this trip than during previous trips. Having the car air conditioning always be on, even when stopped, was a godsend in the insane heat wave of 30C-38C that we were driving trough. Final stats: 4425 km driven in the trip. Average consumption: 18.7 kWh/100km. Time driving: 2 days and 3 hours. Car regened 152 kWh. Charging stations recharged 863 kWh. Questions? You can use this i4talk forum thread or this Twitter thread to ask them to me.

LWN reminds us that Git still uses SHA-1 by default. Commit or tag signing is not a mitigation, and to understand why you need to know a little about Git s internal structure. Git internally looks rather like a content-addressable filesystem, with four object types: tags, commits, trees and blobs. Content-addressable means changing the content of an object changes the way you address or reference it, and this is achieved using a cryptographic hash function. Here is an illustration of the internal structure of an example repository I created, containing two files (./foo.txt and ./bar/bar.txt) committed separately, and then tagged: Graphic showing an example Git internal structure featuring tags, commits, trees and blobs, and how these relate to each other.

Graphic showing an example Git internal structure featuring tags, commits, trees and blobs, and how these relate to each other.

You can see how trees represent directories, blobs represent files, and so on. Git can avoid internal duplication of files or directories which remain identical. The hash function allows very efficient lookup of each object within git s on-disk storage. Tag and commit signatures do not directly sign the files in the repository; that is, the input to the signature function is the content of the tag/commit object, rather than the files themselves. This is analogous to the way that GPG signatures actually sign a cryptographic hash of your email, and there was a time when this too defaulted to SHA-1. An attacker who can break that hash function can bypass the guarantees of the signature function. A motivated attacker might be able to replace a blob, commit or tree in a git repository using a SHA-1 collision. Replacing a blob seems easier to me than a commit or tree, because there is no requirement that the content of the files must conform to any particular format. There is one key technical mitigation to this in Git, which is the SHA-1DC algorithm; this aims to detect and prevent known collision attacks. However, I will have to leave the cryptanalysis of this to the cryptographers! So, is this in your threat model? Do we need to lobby GitHub for SHA-256 support? Either way, I look forward to the future operational challenge of migrating the entire world s git repositories across to SHA-256.

I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43 4K Monitor [1] and gone back to my Samsung 28 4K monitor model LU28E590DS/XY AKA UE590. The main listed differences are the size and the fact that the Samsung is TN but the Philips is IPS. Here s a comparison of TN and IPS technologies [2]. Generally I think that TN is probably best for a monitor but in theory IPS shouldn t be far behind. The Philips monitor has a screen with a shiny surface which may be good for a TV but isn t good for a monitor. Also it seemed to blur the pixels a bit which again is probably OK for a TV that is trying to emulate curved images but not good for a monitor where it s all artificial straight lines. The most important thing for me in a monitor is how well it displays text in small fonts, for that I don t really want the round parts of the letters to look genuinely round as a clear octagon or rectangle is better than a fuzzy circle. There is some controversy about the ideal size for monitors. Some people think that nothing larger than 28 is needed and some people think that a 43 is totally usable. After testing I determined that 43 is really too big, I had to move to see it all. Also for my use it s convenient to be able to turn a monitor slightly to allow someone else to get a good view and a 43 monitor is too large to move much (maybe future technology for lighter monitors will change this). Previously I had been unable to get my Samsung monitor to work at 4K resolution with 60Hz and had believed it was due to cheap video cards. I got the Philips monitor to work with HDMI so it s apparent that the Samsung monitor doesn t do 4K@60Hz on HDMI. This isn t a real problem as the Samsung monitor doesn t have built in speakers. The Philips monitor has built in speakers for HDMI sound which means one less cable to my PC and no desk space taken by speakers. I bought the Philips monitor on eBay in opened unused condition. Inside the box was a sheet with a printout stating that the monitor blanks the screen periodically, so the seller knew that it wasn t in unused condition, it was tested and failed the test. If the Philips monitor had been as minimally broken as described then I might have kept it. However it seems that certain patterns of input caused it to reboot. For example I could be watching Netflix and have it drop out, I would press the left arrow to watch that bit again and have it drop out again. On one occasion I did a test and found that a 5 second section of Netflix content caused the monitor to reboot on 6/8 times I viewed it. The workaround I discovered was to switch between maximised window and full-screen mode when it had a dropout. So I just press left-arrow and then F and I can keep watching. That s not what I expect from a $700 monitor! I considered checking for Philips firmware updates but decided against it because I didn t want to risk voiding the warranty if it didn t work correctly and I decided I just didn t like the monitor that much. Ideally for my next monitor I ll get a 4K screen of about 35 , TN, and a screen that s not shiny. At the moment there doesn t seem to be many monitors between 32 and 43 in size, so 32 may do. I am quite happy with the Samsung monitor so getting the same but slightly larger is fine. It s a pity they stopped making 5K displays.

Had some time to add more features to my libvirt backup utility, now it supports:

backing up virtual domains UEFI bios, initrd and kernel images if defined.
virtnbdmap now uses the nbdkit COW plugin to map the backups as regular NBD device. This allows users to replay complete backup chains (full+inc/diff) to recover single files. Also makes the mapped device writable, as such one can directly boot the virtual machine from the backup images.

Check out my last article on that topic or watch it in action. As a side note: still there s an RFP open, if one is interested in maintaining, as i find myself not having a valid key in the keyring.. laziness.

Had some time to add more features to my libvirt backup utility, now it supports:

Added backup mode differencial.
Save virtual domains UEFI bios, initrd and kernel images if defined.
virtnbdmap now uses the nbdkit COW plugin to map the backups as regular NBD device. This allows users to replay complete backup chains (full+inc/diff) to recover single files. As the resulting device is writable, one can directly boot the virtual machine from the backup images.

Check out my last article on that topic or watch it in action. Also, the dirty bitmap (incremental backup) feature now seems to be enabled by default as of newer qemu and libvirt (8.2.x) versions. As a side note: still there s an RFP open, if one is interested in maintaining, as i find myself not having a valid key in the keyring.. laziness.

This is a minor release to the vnlog toolkit that adds a few convenience options to the vnl-filter tool. The new options are

`vnl-filter -l`
Prints out the existing columns, and exits. I've been low-level wanting this for years, but never acutely-enough to actually write it. Today I finally did it.

`vnl-filter --sub-abs`
Defines an absolute-value `abs()` function in the default `awk` mode. I've been low-level wanting this for years as well. Previously I'd use `--perl` just to get `abs()`, or I'd explicitly define it: = sub 'abs(x) return x>0?x:-x; '=. Typing all that out was becoming tiresome, and now I don't need to anymore.

`vnl-filter --begin ...` and `vnl-filter --end ...`
Theses add `BEGIN` and `END` clauses. They're useful to, for instance, `use` a perl module in `BEGIN`, or to print out some final output in `END`. Previously you'd add these inside the `--eval` block, but that was awkward because `BEGIN` and `END` would then appear inside the `while(<>)` loop. And there was no clear was to do it in the normal `-p` mode (no `--eval`). Clearly these are all minor, since the toolkit is now mature. It does everything I want it to, that doesn't require lots of work to implement. The big missing features that I want would patch the underlying GNU coreutils instead of vnlog:

The `sort` tool can select different sorting modes, but `join` works only with alphanumeric sorting. `join` should have similarly selectable sorting modes. In the vnlog wrappe I can currently do something like `vnl-join --vnl-sort n`. This would pre-sort the input alphanumerically, and then post-sort it numerically. That is slow for big datasets. If `join` could handle numerically-sorted data directly, neither the pre- or post-sorts would be needed

When joining on a numerical field, `join` should be able to do some sort of interpolation when given fields that don't match exactly.

Both of these probably wouldn't take a ton of work to implement, and I'll look into it someday.

Example map with tuneables on the right

WadC the procedural programming environment for generating Doom maps version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC. The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC might want to load up an example program which is potentially very complex and hard to unpick to figure out how it works. If the author could mark certain variables as "tuneable", the UI could provide an easy way for someone to tweak parameters and then see what happened. I had in mind the walls of patch panels and knobs you see with analog synthesizers: tweak this thing over here and see what happens over there. I think this kind of feature would be useful in other, similar programming environments, like OpenSCAD: I don't think they do yet, but I could be wrong.

Kayvan and Me, riding horse statues, somewhere in Germany, in the 1990s

This release of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Kayvan Walker (1983-2022). Kayvan was a childhood friend who committed suicide in March this year. Back in the nineties, Kayvan was responsible for introducing me to Doom in the first place: I used to visit his house on the way home to mine, as it was on the walk back from School. His mum works in IT and always encouraged us into it. Doom was so far ahead, in technical terms, of any other computer game I'd ever seen, and was the closest thing we had to virtual reality: we could create our own worlds. It's in no small part thanks to Kayvan and his Mum that I'm still creating worlds, nearly thirty years later. I owe my career and most of my hobbies to those pivotal moments. Thank you both. Kayvan did a lot more for me than just introduce me to Doom, or computing. He was one of a set of friends that I had every confidence that, no matter what, we would always be friends, through thick and thin. I miss him terribly. Please, if you reading this, are suffering, talk to someone. In the UK you can talk to Samaritans on 116 123.

This is a small Perl module that combines multiple key/value sources of data into a "shadow hash" that acts as if all of the underlying data sources have been merged. Any modifications made to the shadow hash are stored in an overlay and reflected in further accesses to the shadow hash, but the underlying data sources are read-only and are not changed. It had been 12 years since the last release of this small module, so it was overdue for some modernization and cleanup. I also removed the new() class method since shadow hashes should always be created with tie(), and documented a few more edge cases. You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the Tie::ShadowHash distribution page.

Review: Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-78907-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	371

Katrina Nguyen is an young abused transgender woman. As the story opens, she's preparing to run away from home. Her escape bag is packed with meds, clothes, her papers, and her violin. The note she is leaving for her parents says that she's going to San Francisco, a plausible lie. Her actual destination is Los Angeles, specifically the San Gabriel Valley, where a man she met at a queer youth conference said he'd give her a place to sleep. Shizuka Satomi is the Queen of Hell, the legendary uncompromising violin teacher responsible for six previous superstars, at least within the limited world of classical music. She's wealthy, abrasive, demanding, and intimidating, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world she has made a literal bargain with Hell. She has to deliver seven souls, seven violin players who want something badly enough that they'll bargain with Hell to get it. Six have already been delivered in spectacular fashion, but she's running out of time to deliver the seventh before her own soul is forfeit. Tamiko Grohl, an up-and-coming violinist from her native Los Angeles, will hopefully be the seventh. Lan Tran is a refugee and matriarch of a family who runs Starrgate Donut. She and her family didn't flee another unstable or inhospitable country. They fled the collapsing Galactic Empire, securing their travel authorization by promising to set up a tourism attraction. Meanwhile, she's careful to give cops free donuts and to keep their advanced technology carefully concealed. The opening of this book is unlikely to be a surprise in general shape. Most readers would expect Katrina to end up as Satomi's student rather than Tamiko, and indeed she does, although not before Katrina has a very difficult time. Near the start of the novel, I thought "oh, this is going to be hurt/comfort without a romantic relationship," and it is. But it then goes beyond that start into a multifaceted story about complexity, resilience, and how people support each other. It is also a fantastic look at the nuance and intricacies of being or supporting a transgender person, vividly illustrated by a story full of characters the reader cares about and without the academic abstruseness that often gets in the way. The problems with gender-blindness, the limitations of honoring someone's gender without understanding how other people do not, the trickiness of privilege, gender policing as a distraction and alienation from the rest of one's life, the complications of real human bodies and dysmorphia, the importance of listening to another person rather than one's assumptions about how that person feels it's all in here, flowing naturally from the story, specific to the characters involved, and never belabored. I cannot express how well-handled this is. It was a delight to read. The other wonderful thing Aoki does is set Satomi up as the almost supernaturally competent teacher who in a sense "rescues" Katrina, and then invert the trope, showing the limits of Satomi's expertise, the places where she desperately needs human connection for herself, and her struggle to understand Katrina well enough to teach her at the level Satomi expects of herself. Teaching is not one thing to everyone; it's about listening, and Katrina is nothing like Satomi's other students. This novel is full of people thinking they finally understand each other and realizing there is still more depth that they had missed, and then talking through the gap like adults. As you can tell from any summary of this book, it's an odd genre mash-up. The fantasy part is a classic "magician sells her soul to Hell" story; there are a few twists, but it largely follows genre expectations. The science fiction part involving Lan is unfortunately weaker and feels more like a random assortment of borrowed Star Trek tropes than coherent world-building. Genre readers should not come to this story expecting a well-thought-out science fiction universe or a serious attempt to reconcile metaphysics between the fantasy and science fiction backgrounds. It's a quirky assortment of parts that don't normally go together, defy easy classification, and are often unexplained. I suspect this was intentional on Aoki's part given how deeply this book is about the experience of being transgender. Of the three primary viewpoint characters, I thought Lan's perspective was the weakest, and not just because of her somewhat generic SF background. Aoki uses her as a way to talk about the refugee experience, describing her as a woman who brings her family out of danger to build a new life. This mostly works, but Lan has vastly more power and capabilities than a refugee would normally have. Rather than the typical Asian refugee experience in the San Gabriel valley, Lan is more akin to a US multimillionaire who for some reason fled to Vietnam (relative to those around her, Lan is arguably even more wealthy than that). This is also a refugee experience, but it is an incredibly privileged one in a way that partly undermines the role that she plays in the story. Another false note bothered me more: I thought Tamiko was treated horribly in this story. She plays a quite minor role, sidelined early in the novel and appearing only briefly near the climax, and she's portrayed quite negatively, but she's clearly hurting as deeply as the protagonists of this novel. Aoki gives her a moment of redemption, but Tamiko gets nothing from it. Unlike every other injured and abused character in this story, no one is there for Tamiko and no one ever attempts to understand her. I found that profoundly sad. She's not an admirable character, but neither is Satomi at the start of the book. At least a gesture at a future for Tamiko would have been appreciated. Those two complaints aside, though, I could not put this book down. I was able to predict the broad outline of the plot, but the specifics were so good and so true to characters. Both the primary and supporting cast are unique, unpredictable, and memorable. Light from Uncommon Stars has a complex relationship with genre. It is squarely in the speculative fiction genre; the plot would not work without the fantasy and (more arguably) the science fiction elements. Music is magical in a way that goes beyond what can be attributed to metaphor and subjectivity. But it's also primarily character story deeply rooted in the specific location of the San Gabriel valley east of Los Angeles, full of vivid descriptions (particularly of food) and day-to-day life. As with the fantasy and science fiction elements, Aoki does not try to meld the genre elements into a coherent whole. She lets them sit side by side and be awkward and charming and uneven and chaotic. If you're the sort of SF reader who likes building a coherent theory of world-building rules, you may have to turn that desire off to fully enjoy this book. I thought this book was great. It's not flawless, but like its characters it's not trying to be flawless. In places it is deeply insightful and heartbreakingly emotional; in others, it's a glorious mess. It's full of cooking and food, YouTube fame, the disappointments of replicators, video game music, meet-cutes over donuts, found family, and classical music drama. I wish we'd gotten way more about the violin repair shop and a bit less warmed-over Star Trek, but I also loved it exactly the way it was. Definitely the best of the 2022 Hugo nominees that I've read so far. Content warning for child abuse, rape, self-harm, and somewhat explicit sex work. The start of the book is rather heavy and horrific, although the author advertises fairly clearly (and accurately) that things will get better. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #19
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 1996
Printing:	February 2014
ISBN:	0-06-227551-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	392

Feet of Clay is the 19th Discworld novel, the third Watch novel, and probably not the best place to start. You could read only Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms before this one, though, if you wanted. This story opens with a golem selling another golem to a factory owner, obviously not caring about the price. This is followed by two murders: an elderly priest, and the curator of a dwarven bread museum. (Dwarf bread is a much-feared weapon of war.) Meanwhile, assassins are still trying to kill Watch Commander Vimes, who has an appointment to get a coat of arms. A dwarf named Cheery Littlebottom is joining the Watch. And Lord Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, has been poisoned. There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all in some sense related, it's more interwoven than part of a single story. The result felt to me like a day-in-the-life episode of a cop show: a lot of character development, a few largely separate plot lines so that the characters have something to do, and the development of a few long-running themes that are neither started nor concluded in this book. We check in on all the individual Watch members we've met to date, add new ones, and at the end of the book everyone is roughly back to where they were when the book started. This is, to be clear, not a bad thing for a book to do. It relies on the reader already caring about the characters and being invested in the long arc of the series, but both of those are true of me, so it worked. Cheery is a good addition, giving Pratchett an opportunity to explore gender nonconformity with a twist (all dwarfs are expected to act the same way regardless of gender, which doesn't work for Cheery) and, even better, giving Angua more scenes. Angua is among my favorite Watch characters, although I wish she'd gotten more of a resolution for her relationship anxiety in this book. The primary plot is about golems, which on Discworld are used in factories because they work nonstop, have no other needs, and do whatever they're told. Nearly everyone in Ankh-Morpork considers them machinery. If you've read any Discworld books before, you will find it unsurprising that Pratchett calls that belief into question, but the ways he gets there, and the links between the golem plot and the other plot threads, have a few good twists and turns. Reading this, I was reminded vividly of Orwell's discussion of Charles Dickens:

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a "change of heart" that, essentially, is what he is always saying. If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A "change of heart" is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

and later:

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, "Behave decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, "an expression on the human face."

I think Pratchett is, in that sense, a Dickensian writer, and it shows all through Discworld. He does write political crises (there is one in this book), but the crises are moral or personal, not ideological or structural. The Watch novels are often concerned with systems of government, but focus primarily on the popular appeal of kings, the skill of the Patrician, and the greed of those who would maneuver for power. Pratchett does not write (at least so far) about the proper role of government, the impact of Vetinari's policies (or even what those policies may be), or political theory in any deep sense. What he does write about, at great length, is morality, fairness, and a deeply generous humanism, all of which are central to the golem plot. Vimes is a great protagonist for this type of story. He's grumpy, cynical, stubborn, and prejudiced, and we learn in this book that he's a descendant of the Discworld version of Oliver Cromwell. He can be reflexively self-centered, and he has no clear idea how to use his newfound resources. But he behaves decently towards people, in both big and small things, for reasons that the reader feels he could never adequately explain, but which are rooted in empathy and an instinctual sense of fairness. It's fun to watch him grumble his way through the plot while making snide comments about mysteries and detectives. I do have to complain a bit about one of those mysteries, though. I would have enjoyed the plot around Vetinari's poisoning more if Pratchett hadn't mercilessly teased readers who know a bit about French history. An allusion or two would have been fun, but he kept dropping references while having Vimes ignore them, and I found the overall effect both frustrating and irritating. That and a few other bits, like Angua's uncommunicative angst, fell flat for me. Thankfully, several other excellent scenes made up for them, such as Nobby's high society party and everything about the College of Heralds. Also, Vimes's impish PDA (smartphone without the phone, for those younger than I am) remains absurdly good commentary on the annoyances of portable digital devices despite an original publication date of 1996. Feet of Clay is less focused than the previous Watch novels and more of a series book than most Discworld novels. You're reading about characters introduced in previous books with problems that will continue into subsequent books. The plot and the mysteries are there to drive the story but seem relatively incidental to the characterization. This isn't a complaint; at this point in the series, I'm in it for the long haul, and I liked the variation. As usual, Pratchett is stronger for me when he's not overly focused on parody. His own characters are as good as the material he's been parodying, and I'm happy to see them get a book that's not overshadowed by another material. If you've read this far in the series, or even in just the Watch novels, recommended. Followed by Hogfather in publication order and, thematically, by Jingo. Rating: 8 out of 10

In some ways it feels like 2016 all over again. I m seeing panic-stricken calls for everyone to delete their period apps, close their Facebook accounts, de-Google their cell phones and, generally speaking, turn their entire online lives upside down to avoid the techno-surveillance dragnet unleashed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I m sympathetic and generally agree that many of us should do most of those things on any given day. But, there is a serious problem with this cycle of repression and panic: it s very bad for organizing. In our rush to give people concrete steps they can take to feel safer, we re fueling a frenzy of panic and fear, which seriously inhibits activism. Now is the time to remind people that, over the last 20 years, a growing movement of organizers and technologists have been building user-driven, privacy-respecting, consentful technology platforms as well as organizations and communities to develop them. We have an entire eco system of:

technology platform cooperatives,
movement aligned Internet providers that pre-date the founding of Twitter and are still going strong (May First, Riseup, and Autistici just to name a few),
the fediverse, a well developed, de-centralized alterntiave to corporate social media (try Social.coop if you want to get started),
powerful open source, privacy respecting software geared for organizing and movement providers hosting it (see CiviCRM and Progressive Technology Project),
multi-year campaigns targeting poor tech practices of corporate technology giants (see Mijente s No Tech for ICE),
so many more examples, far too numerous to name.

All of these projects need our love and support over the long haul. Please help spread the word - rather then just deleting an app, let s encourage people to join an organziation or try out a new kind of technology that will serve us down the road when we may need it even more then today.

I ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN. One of its features is that it can dynamically assign addresses on the internal network to clients, and clients can assign these addresses and routes to interfaces. However, these interfaces must exist before iked can start. Some months ago I switched my Debian laptop s configuration from the traditional ifupdown to systemd-networkd. It took me some time to figure out how to have systemd-networkd create dummy interfaces on which iked can install addresses, but also not interfere with iked by trying to manage these interfaces. Here is my working configuration. First, I have systemd create the interface dummy1 by creating a systemd.netdev(5) configuration file at /etc/systemd/network/20-dummy1.netdev:

[NetDev]
Name=dummy1
Kind=dummy

Then I tell systemd not to manage this interface by creating a systemd.network(5) configuration file at /etc/systemd/network/20-dummy1.network:

[Match]
Name=dummy1
Unmanaged=yes

Restarting systemd-networkd causes these interfaces to get created, and we can then check their status using networkctl(8):

$ systemctl restart systemd-networkd.service
$ networkctl
IDX LINK     TYPE     OPERATIONAL SETUP
  1 lo       loopback carrier     unmanaged
  2 enp2s0f0 ether    off         unmanaged
  3 enp5s0   ether    off         unmanaged
  4 dummy1   ether    degraded    configuring
  5 dummy3   ether    degraded    configuring
  6 sit0     sit      off         unmanaged
  8 wlp3s0   wlan     routable    configured
  9 he-ipv6  sit      routable    configured

8 links listed.

Finally, I configure my flows in /etc/iked.conf, making sure to assign the received address to the interface dummy1.

ikev2 'hades' active esp \
        from dynamic to 10.0.1.0/24 \
        peer hades.rak.ac \
        srcid '/CN=asteria.rak.ac' \
        dstid '/CN=hades.rak.ac' \
        request address 10.0.1.103 \
        iface dummy1

Restarting openiked and checking the status of the interface reveals that it has been assigned an address on the internal network and that it is routable:

$ systemctl restart openiked.service
$ networkctl status dummy1
  4: dummy1
                     Link File: /usr/lib/systemd/network/99-default.link
                  Network File: /etc/systemd/network/20-dummy1.network
                          Type: ether
                          Kind: dummy
                         State: routable (configured)
                  Online state: online
                        Driver: dummy
              Hardware Address: 22:50:5f:98:a1:a9
                           MTU: 1500
                         QDisc: noqueue
  IPv6 Address Generation Mode: eui64
          Queue Length (Tx/Rx): 1/1
                       Address: 10.0.1.103
                                fe80::2050:5fff:fe98:a1a9
                           DNS: 10.0.1.1
                 Route Domains: .
             Activation Policy: up
           Required For Online: yes
             DHCP6 Client DUID: DUID-EN/Vendor:0000ab11aafa4f02d6ac68d40000

I d be happy to hear if there are simpler or more idiomatic ways to configure this under systemd.

As part of the continuing work to replace 1-element arrays in the Linux kernel, it s very handy to show that a source change has had no executable code difference. For example, if you started with this:

struct foo  
    unsigned long flags;
    u32 length;
    u32 data[1];
 ;
void foo_init(int count)
 
    struct foo *instance;
    size_t bytes = sizeof(*instance) + sizeof(u32) * (count - 1);
    ...
    instance = kmalloc(bytes, GFP_KERNEL);
    ...
 ;

And you changed only the struct definition:

-    u32 data[1];
+    u32 data[];

The bytes calculation is going to be incorrect, since it is still subtracting 1 element s worth of space from the desired count. (And let s ignore for the moment the open-coded calculation that may end up with an arithmetic over/underflow here; that can be solved separately by using the struct_size() helper or the size_mul(), size_add(), etc family of helpers.) The missed adjustment to the size calculation is relatively easy to find in this example, but sometimes it s much less obvious how structure sizes might be woven into the code. I ve been checking for issues by using the fantastic diffoscope tool. It can produce a LOT of noise if you try to compare builds without keeping in mind the issues solved by reproducible builds, with some additional notes. I prepare my build with the known to disrupt code layout options disabled, but with debug info enabled:

$ KBF="KBUILD_BUILD_TIMESTAMP=1970-01-01 KBUILD_BUILD_USER=user KBUILD_BUILD_HOST=host KBUILD_BUILD_VERSION=1"
$ OUT=gcc
$ make $KBF O=$OUT allmodconfig
$ ./scripts/config --file $OUT/.config \
        -d GCOV_KERNEL -d KCOV -d GCC_PLUGINS -d IKHEADERS -d KASAN -d UBSAN \
        -d DEBUG_INFO_NONE -e DEBUG_INFO_DWARF_TOOLCHAIN_DEFAULT
$ make $KBF O=$OUT olddefconfig

Then I build a stock target, saving the output in before . In this case, I m examining drivers/scsi/megaraid/:

$ make -jN $KBF O=$OUT drivers/scsi/megaraid/
$ mkdir -p $OUT/before
$ cp $OUT/drivers/scsi/megaraid/*.o $OUT/before/

Then I patch and build a modified target, saving the output in after :

$ vi the/source/code.c
$ make -jN $KBF O=$OUT drivers/scsi/megaraid/
$ mkdir -p $OUT/after
$ cp $OUT/drivers/scsi/megaraid/*.o $OUT/after/

And then run diffoscope:

$ diffoscope $OUT/before/ $OUT/after/

If diffoscope output reports nothing, then we re done. Usually, though, when source lines move around other stuff will shift too (e.g. WARN macros rely on line numbers, so the bug table may change contents a bit, etc), and diffoscope output will look noisy. To examine just the executable code, the command that diffoscope used is reported in the output, and we can run it directly, but with possibly shifted line numbers not reported. i.e. running objdump without --line-numbers:

$ ARGS="--disassemble --demangle --reloc --no-show-raw-insn --section=.text"
$ for i in $(cd $OUT/before && echo *.o); do
        echo $i
        diff -u <(objdump $ARGS $OUT/before/$i   sed "0,/^Disassembly/d") \
                <(objdump $ARGS $OUT/after/$i    sed "0,/^Disassembly/d")
done

If I see an unexpected difference, for example:

-    c120:      movq   $0x0,0x800(%rbx)
+    c120:      movq   $0x0,0x7f8(%rbx)

Then I'll search for the pattern with line numbers added to the objdump output:

$ vi <(objdump --line-numbers $ARGS $OUT/after/megaraid_sas_fp.o)

I'd search for "0x0,0x7f8", find the source file and line number above it, open that source file at that position, and look to see where something was being miscalculated:

$ vi drivers/scsi/megaraid/megaraid_sas_fp.c +329

Once tracked down, I'd start over at the "patch and build a modified target" step above, repeating until there were no differences. For example, in the starting example, I'd also need to make this change:

-    size_t bytes = sizeof(*instance) + sizeof(u32) * (count - 1);
+    size_t bytes = sizeof(*instance) + sizeof(u32) * count;

Though, as hinted earlier, better yet would be:

-    size_t bytes = sizeof(*instance) + sizeof(u32) * (count - 1);
+    size_t bytes = struct_size(instance, data, count);

But sometimes adding the helper usage will add binary output differences since they're performing overflow checking that might saturate at SIZE_MAX. To help with patch clarity, those changes can be done separately from fixing the array declaration.

2022, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do. This is the fifth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as a recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST) and Jan Nieuwenhuizen on Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix. Today, however, we will be talking with Hans-Christoph Steiner from the F-Droid project.

Chris: Welcome, Hans! Could you briefly tell me about yourself? Hans: Sure. I spend most of my time trying to private communications software usable by everyone, designing interactive software with a focus on human perceptual capabilities and building networks with free software. I ve been involved in Debian since approximately 2008 and became an official Debian developer in 2011. In the little time left over from that, I sometimes compose music with computers from my home in Austria.
Chris: For those who have not heard of it before, what is the F-Droid project? Hans: F-Droid is a community-run app store that provides free software applications for Android phones. First and foremost our goal is to represent our users. In particular, we review all of the apps that we distribute, and these reviews not only check for whether something is definitely free software or not, we additionally look for ethical problems with applications as well issues that we call Anti-Features . Since the project began in 2010, F-Droid now offers almost 4,000 free-software applications. F-Droid is also a app store kit as well, providing all the tools that are needed to operate an free app store of your own. It also includes complete build and release tools for managing the process of turning app source code into published builds.
Chris: How exactly does F-Droid differ from the Google Play store? Why might someone use F-Droid over Google Play?

Hans: One key difference to the Google Play Store is that F-Droid does not ship proprietary software by default. All apps shipped from f-droid.org are built from source on our own builders. This is partly because F-Droid is backed by the free software community; that is, people who have engaged in the free software community long before Android was conceived, and, in particular, share many if not all of its values. Using F-Droid will therefore feel very familiar to anyone familiar with a modern Linux distribution.
Chris: How do you describe reproducibility from the F-Droid point of view? Hans: All centralised software repositories are extremely tempting targets for exploitation by malicious third parties, and the kinds of personal or otherwise sensitive data on our phones only increase this risk. In F-Droid s case, not only could the software we distribute be theoretically replaced with nefarious copies, the build infrastructure that generates that software could be compromised as well. F-Droid having reproducible builds is extremely important as it allows us to verify that our build systems have not been compromised and distributing malware to our users. In particular, if an independent build infrastructure can produce precisely the same results from a build, then we can be reasonably sure that they haven t been compromised. Technically-minded users can also validate their builds on their own systems too, further increasing trust in our build infrastructure. (This can be performed using fdroid verify command.) Our signature & trust scheme means that F-Droid can verify that an app is 100% free software whilst still using the developer s original .APK file. More details about this may be found in our reproducibility documentation and on the page about our Verification Server.
Chris: How do you see F-Droid fitting into the rest of the modern security ecosystem?

Hans: Whilst F-Droid inherits all of the social benefits of free software, F-Droid takes special care to respect your privacy as well we don t attempt to track your device in any way. In particular, you don t need an account to use the F-Droid client, and F-Droid doesn t send any device-identifying information to our servers other than its own version number. What is more, we mark all apps in our repository that track you, and users can choose to hide any apps that has been tagged with a specific Anti-Feature in the F-Droid settings. Furthermore, any personal data you decide to give us (such as your email address when registering for a forum account) goes no further than us as well, and we pledge that it will never be used for anything beyond merely maintaining your account.
Chris: What would fully reproducible mean to F-Droid? What it would look like if reproducibility was a solved problem ? Or, rather, what would be your ultimate reproducibility goals? Hans: In an ideal world, every application submitted to F-Droid would not only build reproducibly, but would come with a cryptographically-signed signature from the developer as well. Then we would only distribute an compiled application after a build had received a number of matching signatures from multiple, independent third parties. This would mean that our users were not placing their trust solely in software developers machines, and wouldn t be trusting our centralised build servers as well.
Chris: What are the biggest blockers to reaching this state? Are there any key steps or milestones to get there?

Hans: Time is probably the main constraint to reaching this goal. Not only do we need system administrators on an ongoing basis but we also need to incorporate reproducibly checks into our Continuous Integration (CI) system. We are always looking for new developers to join our effort, as well as learning about how to better bring them up to speed. Separate to this, we often experience blockers with reproducibility-related bugs in the Android build tooling. Luckily, upstreams do ultimately address these issues, but in some cases this has taken three or four years to reach end-users and developers. Unfortunately, upstream is not chiefly concerned with the security aspects of reproducibility builds; they care more about how it can minimise and optimise download size and speed.
Chris: Are you tracking any statistics about reproducibility in F-Droid over time? If so, can you share them? Does F-Droid track statistics about its own usage? Hans: To underline a topic touched on above, F-Droid is dedicated to preserving the privacy of its users; we therefore do not record usage statistics. This is, of course, in contrast to other application stores. However, we are in a position to track whether packages in F-Droid are reproducible or not. As in: what proportion of APKs in F-Droid have been independently verified over time? Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we do not yet automatically publish charts for this. We do publish some raw data that is related, though, and we naturally welcome contributions of visualizations based on any and all of our data. The All our APIs page on our wiki is a good place to start for someone wanting to contribute, everything about reproducible F-Droid apps is available in JSON format, what s missing are apps or dashboards making use of the available raw data.
Chris: Many thanks for this interview, Hans, and for all of your work on F-Droid and elsewhere. If someone wanted to get in touch or learn more about the project, where might someone go?

Hans: The best way to find out about F-Droid is, of course, the main F-Droid homepage, but we are also on Twitter @fdroidorg. We have many avenues to participate and to learn more! We have an About page on our website and a thriving forum. We also have part of our documentation specifically dedicated to reproducible builds.

For more information about the Reproducible Builds project, please see our website at reproducible-builds.org. If you are interested in ensuring the ongoing security of the software that underpins our civilisation and wish to sponsor the Reproducible Builds project, please reach out to the project by emailing contact@reproducible-builds.org.

Review: A Dead Djinn in Cairo, by P. Dj l Clark

Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	May 2016
ASIN:	B01DJ0NALI
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	47

Fatma el-Sha'arawi is a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities in an alternate 1912 Egypt. In Fatma's world, the mystic al-Jahiz broke through to the realm of the djinn in the late 1800s, giving Egypt access to magic and the supernatural and the djinn access to Egypt. It is now one of the great powers of the world, able to push off the Europeans and control its own politics. This is a Tor.com original novelette, so you can read it on-line for free or drop $2 on a Kindle version for convenience. It's the first story in the "Dead Djinn" universe, in which Clark has also written a novella and a novel (the latter of which won the Nebula Award for best novel in 2022). There are three things here I liked. Fatma is a memorable character, both for her grumpy demeanor as a rare female investigator having to put up with a sexist pig of a local police liaison, and for her full British attire (including a bowler hat) and its explanation. (The dynamics felt a bit modern for a story set in 1912, but not enough to bother me.) The setting is Arabian-inspired fantasy, which is a nice break from the normal European or Celtic stuff. And there are interesting angels (Fatma: "They're not really angels"), which I think have still-underused potential, particularly when they can create interesting conflicts with Coptic Christianity and Islam. Clark's version are energy creatures of some sort inside semi-mechanical bodies with visuals that reminded me strongly of Diablo III (which in this context is a compliment). I'm interested to learn more about them, although I hope there's more going on than the disappointing explanation we get at the end of this story. Other than those elements, there's not much here. As hinted by the title, the story is structured as a police investigation and Fatma plays the misfit detective. But there's no real mystery; the protagonists follow obvious clue to obvious clue to obvious ending. The plot structure is strictly linear and never surprised me. Aasim is an ass, which gives Fatma something to react to but never becomes real characterization. The world-building is the point, but most of it is delivered in infodumps, and the climax is a kind-of-boring fight where the metaphysics are explained rather than discovered. I'm possibly being too harsh. There's space for novelettes that tell straightforward stories without the need for a twist or a sting. But I admit I found this boring. I think it's because it's not tight enough to be carried by the momentum of a simple plot, and it's also not long enough for either the characters or the setting to breathe and develop. The metaphysics felt rushed and the characterization cramped. I liked Siti and the dynamic between Siti and Fatma at the end of the story, but there wasn't enough of it. As a world introduction, it does its job, and the non-European fantasy background is interesting enough that I'd be willing to read more, even without the incentive of reading all award winning novels. But "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" doesn't do more than its job. It might be worth skipping (I'll have to read the subsequent works to know for certain), but it won't take long to read and the price is right. Followed by The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Rating: 6 out of 10

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding Two [1, 2] projects are in the pipeline now. Tryton project is in a final phase. Gradle projects is fighting with technical difficulties. In May, we put aside 2233 EUR to fund Debian projects. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In May, 14 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 14h assigned).
Andreas R nnquist did 14.5h (out of 25.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.5h to June.
Anton Gladky did 19h (out of 19h assigned).
Ben Hutchings did 8h (out of 11h assigned and 13h from April), thus carrying over 16h to June.
Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
Dominik George did 2h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 18h to June.
Enrico Zini did 9.5h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to June.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 28h (out of 13.75h assigned and 35.25h from April), thus carrying over 21h to June.
Markus Koschany did 40h (out of 40h assigned).
Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 32h assigned), thus carrying over 18.5h to June.
Sylvain Beucler did 23.5h (out of 20h assigned and 20h from April), thus carrying over 16.5h to June.
Stefano Rivera did 5h in April and 14h in May (out of 17.5h assigned), thus anticipating 1.5h for June.
Thorsten Alteholz did 40h (out of 40h assigned).
Utkarsh Gupta did 35h (out of 19h assigned and 30h from April), thus carrying over 14h to June.

Evolution of the situation In May we released 49 DLAs. The security tracker currently lists 71 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 65 packages needing an update. The number of paid contributors increased significantly, we are pleased to welcome our latest team members: Andreas R nnquist, Dominik George, Enrico Zini and Stefano Rivera. It is worth pointing out that we are getting close to the end of the LTS period for Debian 9. After June 30th, no new security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. We are preparing to overtake Debian 10 Buster for the next two years and to make this process as smooth as possible. But Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 9 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. If you have Debian 9 servers to keep secure, it s time to subscribe! You might not have noticed, but Freexian formalized a mission statement where we explain that our purpose is to help improve Debian. For this, we want to fund work time for the Debian developers that recently joined Freexian as collaborators. The Extended LTS and the PHP LTS offers are built following a model that will help us to achieve this if we manage to have enough customers for those offers. So consider subscribing: you help your organization but you also help Debian! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:
- TOSHIBA (for 81 months)
- GitHub (for 72 months)
- Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 49 months)
Gold sponsors:
- Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 92 months)
- Linode (for 86 months)
- Babiel GmbH (for 75 months)
- Plat Home (for 75 months)
- University of Oxford (for 31 months)
- Deveryware (for 18 months)
- VyOS Inc (for 13 months)
- EDF SA
Silver sponsors:
- The Positive Internet Company (for 97 months)
- Domeneshop AS (for 96 months)
- Nantes M tropole (for 90 months)
- Univention GmbH (for 82 months)
- Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 82 months)
- Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 76 months)
- Exonet B.V. (for 66 months)
- Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 60 months)
- CINECA (for 49 months)
- Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 43 months)
- Cloudways Ltd (for 33 months)
- Dinahosting SL (for 31 months)
- Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 25 months)
- Platform.sh (for 25 months)
- Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 19 months)
- sipgate GmbH (for 16 months)
- OVH US LLC (for 14 months)
- Tilburg University (for 14 months)
- GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 6 months)
- Telecats BV (for 4 months)
- Soliton Systems K.K. (for 3 months)
Bronze sponsors:
- Evolix (for 97 months)
- Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 97 months)
- Intevation GmbH (for 94 months)
- Linuxhotel GmbH (for 94 months)
- Daevel SARL (for 92 months)
- Bitfolk LTD (for 91 months)
- Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 91 months)
- Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 90 months)
- NUMLOG (for 90 months)
- WinGo AG (for 90 months)
- Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 86 months)
- Entr ouvert (for 81 months)
- Adfinis AG (for 78 months)
- GNI MEDIA (for 73 months)
- Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 73 months)
- Tesorion (for 73 months)
- Bearstech (for 64 months)
- LiHAS (for 64 months)
- People Doc (for 61 months)
- Catalyst IT Ltd (for 59 months)
- Supagro (for 54 months)
- Demarcq SAS (for 53 months)
- Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 39 months)
- TouchWeb SAS (for 31 months)
- SPiN AG (for 28 months)
- CoreFiling (for 23 months)
- Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 18 months)
- Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 15 months)
- Tem Innovations GmbH (for 10 months)
- WordFinder.pro (for 9 months)
- CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 8 months)
- Alter Way

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 217. This version includes the following changes:

* Update test fixtures for GNU readelf 2.38 (now in Debian unstable).
* Be more specific about the minimum required version of readelf (ie.
  binutils) as it appears that this "patch" level version change resulted in
  a change of output, not the "minor" version. (Closes: #1013348)
* Don't leak the (likely-temporary) pathname when comparing PDF documents.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

I have been looking for a good tablet for Debian for well, years. I want thin, light, portable, excellent battery life, and a servicable keyboard. For a while, I tried a Lenovo Chromebook Duet. It meets the hardware requirements, well sort of. The problem is with performance and the OS. I can run Debian inside the ChromeOS Linux environment. That works, actually pretty well. But it is slow. Terribly, terribly, terribly slow. Emacs takes minutes to launch. apt-gets also do. It has barely enough RAM to keep its Chrome foundation happy, let alone a Linux environment also. But basically it is too slow to be servicable. Not just that, but I ran into assorted issues with having it tied to a Google account particularly being unable to login unless I had Internet access after an update. That and my growing concern over Google s privacy practices led me sort of write it off. I have a wonderful System76 Lemur Pro that I m very happy with. Plenty of RAM, a good compromise size between portability and screen size at 14.1 , and so forth. But a 10 goes-anywhere it s not. I spent quite a lot of time looking at thin-and-light convertible laptops of various configurations. Many of them were quite expensive, not as small as I wanted, or had dubious Linux support. To my surprise, I wound up buying a Surface Go 2 from the Microsoft store, along with the Type Cover. They had a pretty good deal on it since the Surface Go 3 is out; the highest-processor model of the Go 2 is roughly similar to the Go 3 in terms of performance. There is an excellent linux-surface project out there that provides very good support for most Surface devices, including the Go 2 and 3. I put Debian on it. I had a fair bit of hassle with EFI, and wound up putting rEFInd on it, which mostly solved those problems. (I did keep a Windows partition, and if it comes up for some reason, the easiest way to get it back to Debian is to use the Windows settings tool to reboot into advanced mode, and then select the appropriate EFI entry to boot from there.) Researching on-screen keyboards, it seemed like Gnome had the most mature. So I wound up with Gnome (my other systems are using KDE with tiling, but I figured I d try Gnome on it.) Almost everything worked without additional tweaking, the one exception being the cameras. The cameras on the Surfaces are a known point of trouble and I didn t bother to go to all the effort to get them working. With 8GB of RAM, I didn t put ZFS on it like I do on other systems. Performance is quite satisfactory, including for Rust development. Battery life runs about 10 hours with light use; less when running a lot of cargo builds, of course. The 1920 1280 screen is nice at 10.5 . Gnome with Wayland does a decent job of adjusting to this hi-res configuration. I took this as my only computer for a trip from the USA to Germany. It was a little small at times; though that was to be expected. It let me take a nicely small bag as a carryon, and being light, it was pleasant to carry around in airports. It served its purpose quite well. One downside is that it can t be powered by a phone charger like my Chromebook Duet can. However, I found a nice slim 65W Anker charger that could charge it and phones simultaneously that did the job well enough (I left the Microsoft charger with the proprietary connector at home). The Surface Go 2 maxes out at a 128GB SSD. That feels a bit constraining, especially since I kept Windows around. However, it also has a micro SD slot, so you can put LUKS and ext4 on that and use it as another filesystem. I popped a micro SD I had lying around into there and that felt a lot better storage-wise. I could also completely zap Windows, but that would leave no way to get firmware updates and I didn t really want to do that. Still, I don t use Windows and that could be an option also. All in all, I m pretty pleased with it. Around $600 for a fully-functional Debian tablet, with a keyboard is pretty nice. I had been hoping for months that the Pinetab would come back into stock, because I d much rather support a Linux hardware vendor, but for now I think the Surface Go series is the most solid option for a Linux tablet.

As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists' hacklab) to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise. Although there were fewer people than at our last meeting¹, we still did a lot of work! I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Clojure packages², LeLutin worked on podman and packaged libinfluxdb-http-perl and anarcat worked on internetarchive, trocla and moneta. Olivier also came by and worked on debugging his Kali install. We are planning to have our next meeting at the end of August. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre. Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizza! Here is a nice picture anarcat took of (one of) the glasses of porter we had afterwards, at the next door brewery: A glass of English Porter from Silo Brewery

A glass of English Porter from Silo Brewery

Summer meetings are always less populous and it also happened to be Father's Day...
#1012824, #1011856, #1011837, #1011844, #1011864 and #1011967.