Search Results: "will"

6 July 2017

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: News on Debian on apexqtmo

I had been using my Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G for almost three years when I decided to get a new phone. I would use this new phone for daily tasks and take the chance to get a new model for hacking in the future. My apexqtmo would still be my companion and would now be more available for real hacking. And so it also happened that its power button got stuck. It was not the first time, but now it would happen every so often, and would require me to disassemble it. So I managed to remove the plastic button and leave it with a hole so I could press the button with a screwdriver or a paperclip. That was the excuse I needed to get it to running Debian only. Though it's now always plugged on my laptop, I got the chance to hack on it on my scarce free time. As I managed to get a kernel I built myself running on it, I started fixing things like enabling devtmpfs. I didn't insist much on running systemd, though, and kept with System V. The Xorg issues were either on the server or the client, depending on which client I ran. I decided to give a chance to running the Android userspace on a chroot, but gave up after some work to get some firmware loaded. I managed to get the ALSA controls right after saving them inside a chroot on my CyanogenMod system. Then, restoring them on Debian allowed to play songs. Unfortunately, it seems I broke the audio jack when disassembling it. Otherwise, it would have been a great portable audio player. I even wrote a small program that would allow me to control mpd by swiping on the touchscreen. Then, as Debian release approached, I decided to investigate the framebuffer issue closely. I ended finding out that it was really a bug in the driver, and after fixing it, the X server and client crashes were gone. It was beautiful to get some desktop environment running with the right colors, get a calculator started and really using the phone as a mobile device. There are two lessons or findings here for me. The first one is that the current environments are really lacking. Even something like GPE can't work. The buttons are tiny, scrollbars are still the only way for scrolling, some of the time. No automatic virtual keyboards. So, there needs to be some investing in the existing environments, and maybe even the development of new environments for these kinds of devices. This was something I expected somehow, but it's still disappointing to know that we had so much of those developed in the past and now gone. I really miss Maemo. Running something like Qtopia would mean grabing a very old unmaintained software not available in Debian. There is still matchbox, but it's as subpar as the others I tested. The second lesson is that building a userspace to run on old kernels will still hit the problem of broken drivers. In my particular case, unless I wrote code for using Ion instead of the framebuffer, I would have had that problem. Or it would require me to add code to xorg-xserver that is not appropriate. Or fix the kernel drivers of available kernel sourcecodes. But this does not scale much more than doing the right thing and adding upstream support for these devices. So, I decided it was time I started working on upstream support for my device. I have it in progress and may send some upstream patches soon. I have USB and MMC/SDcard working fine. DRM is still a challenge, but thanks to Rob Clark, it's something I expect to get working soon, and after that, I would certainly celebrate. Maybe even consider starting the work on other devices a little sooner. Trying to review my post on GNU on smartphones, here is where I would put some of the status of my device and some extra notes. On Halium I am really glad people started this project. This was one of the things I criticized: that though Ubuntu Phone and FirefoxOS built on Android userspace, they were not easily portable to many devices out there. But as I am looking for a more pure GNU experience, let's call it that, Halium does not help much in that direction. But I'd like to see it flourish and allow people to use more OSes on more devices. Unfortunately, it suffers from similar problems as the strategy I was trying to go with. If you have a device with a very old kernel, you won't be able to run some of the latest userspace, even with Android userspace help. So, lots of devices would be left unsupported, unless we start working on some upstream support. On RYF Hardware My device is one of the worst out there. It's a modem that has a peripherical CPU. Much has already been said about Qualcomm chips being some of the least freedom-friendly. Ironically, it's some with the best upstream support, as far as I found out while doing this upstreaming work. Guess we'll have to wait for opencores, openrisc and risc-v to catch up here. Diversity Though I have been experimenting with Debian, the upstream work would sure benefit lots of other OSes out there, mainly GNU+Linux based ones, but also other non-GNU Linux based ones. Not so much for other kernels. On other options After the demise of Ubuntu Phone, I am glad to see UBports catching up. I hope the project is sustainable and produce more releases for more devices. Rooting This needs documentation. Most of the procedures rely on booting a recovery system, which means we are already past the root requirement. We simply boot our own system, then. However, for some debugging strategies, getting root on the OEM system is useful. So, try to get root on your system, but beware of malware out there. Booting Most of these devices will have their bootloaders in there. They may be unlocked, allowing unsigned kernels to be booted. Replacing these bootloaders is still going to be a challenge for another future phase. Though adding a second bootloader there, one that is freedom respecting, and that allows more control on that booting step to the user is something possible once you have some good upstream support. One could either use kexec for that, or try to use the same device tree for U-Boot, and use the knowledge of the device drivers for Linux on writing drivers for U-Boot, GRUB or Libreboot. Installation If you have root on your OEM system, this is something that could be worked on. Otherwise, there is magic-device-tool, whose approach is one that could be used. Kernels While I am working on adding Linux upstream support for my device, it would be wonderful to see more kernels supporting those gadgets. Hopefully, some of the device driver writing and reverse engineering could help with that, though I am not too much optimistic. But there is hope. Basic kernel drivers Adding the basic support, like USB and MMC, after clocks, gpios, regulators and what not, is the first step to a long road. But it would allow using the device as a board computer, under better control of the user. Hopefully, lots of eletronic garbage out there would have some use as control gadgets. Instead of buying a new board, just grab your old phone and put it to some nice use. Sensors, input devices, LEDs There are usually easy too. Some sensors may depend on your modem or some userspace code that is not that easily reverse engineered. But others would just require some device tree work, or some small input driver. Graphics Here, things may get complicated. Even basic video output is something I have some trouble with. Thanks to some other people's work, I have hope at least for my device. And using the vendor's linux source code, some framebuffer should be possible, even some DRM driver. But OpenGL or other 3D acceleration support requires much more work than that, and, at this moment, it's not something I am counting on. I am thankful for the work lots of people have been doing on this area, nonetheless. Wireless Be it Wifi or Bluetooth, things get ugly here. The vendor driver might be available. Rewriting it would take a long time. Even then, it would most likely require some non-free firmware loading. Using USB OTG here might be an option. Modem/GSM The work of the Replicant folks on that is what gives me some hope that it might be possible to get this working. Something I would leave to after I have a good interface experience in my hands. GPS Problem is similar to the Modem/GSM one, as some code lives in userspace, sometimes talking to the modem is a requirement to get GPS access, etc. Shells This is where I would like to see new projects, even if they work on current software to get them more friendly to these form factors. I consider doing some work there, though that's not really my area of expertise. Next steps For me, my next steps are getting what I have working upstream, keep working on DRM support, packaging GPE, then experimenting with some compositor code. In the middle of that, trying to get some other devices started. But documenting some of my work is something I realized I need to do more often, and this post is some try on that.

5 July 2017

Shirish Agarwal: Debian 9 release party at Co-hive

Dear all, This would be a biggish one so please have a chai/coffee or something stronger as it would take a while. I would start with attempt at some alcohol humor. While some people know that I have had a series of convulsive epileptic seizure I had shared bits about it in another post as well. Recovery is going through allopathic medicines as well as physiotherapy which I go to every alternate day. One of the exercises that I do in physiotherapy sessions is walk cross-legged on a line. While doing it today, it occurred to me that this is the same test that a Police inspector would do if they caught you drinking or are suspected of drunk driving. While some in the police force have now also have breath analyzer machines to determine alcohol content in the breath and body (and ways to deceive it are also there) the above exercise is still an integral part of examination. Now few of my friends who do drink have and had made expertise of walking on a line, while I due to this neurological disorder still have issues of walking on a line. So while I don t think of a drinking party in the near future (6 months at least), if I ever do get caught with a friend who is drunk (by association I would also be a suspect) by a policeman who doesn t have a breath analyzer machine, I could be in a lot of trouble. In addition if I tell him I have a neurological disorder I am bound to land up in a cell as he will think I m trying to make a fool of him. If you are able to picturize the situation, I m sure you will get a couple of laughs. Now coming to the release party, I was a bit apprehensive. It s been quite a while I had faced an audience and just coming out of illness didn t know how well or ill-prepared I would be for the session. I had forsaken/given up exercising two days earlier before the event as I wanted to have loose body, loose limbs all over. I also took a mild sedative (1mg) the day before just so I will have a fit night sleep and be able to focus all my energies on the big day. (I don t recommend sedatives unless the doctor prescribes) and I did have a doctor prescription so was able to have a nice sleep. I didn t do any Debian study as I hoped my somewhat long experience with both Ubuntu and Debian should help me. On the d-day, I had asked dhanesh (the organizer of the event) to accompany me from home to venue and back as I was unsure of the journey as it was around 9-10 kms. from my place and while I had been to the venue about couple of years back, I had just a mild remembrance of the place. Anyways, Dhanesh compiled with my request and together we reached the venue before the appointed 1500 hrs. As it was a Sunday I was unsure as how many people would turn up as people usually like to cozy up on a Sunday. Around 1530 hrs everybody showed up The whole group It included couple of co-organizers with most people being newbies so while I had thought of showing how to contribute via reporting bugs or putting up patches, had to set that aside and explain how things work in free software and open-source world. We didn t get into the debate of free vs open-source or free/open-source/open-core as that would have been counter-productive and probably confusing for newbies. We did however share the debian tree structure debian-tree-structure-discussion I was stumped by /var and /proc . I hadn t taken my lappy as it is expensive (a lenovo thinkpad I love very dearly) and I was unsure if I would be able to take care of it (weight wise). Dhanesh had told me that he had Debian on his lappy + zsh both of which are my favourites. While back at home I realized /var has been relegated to having apache/server logs and stuff like that, I do recall (vaguely) a thread on debian-devel about removing /var although that discussion went nowhere. One of the bugs that we hit early on is that nobody had enough space on their hdd to have Debian comfortably. It took a while to get an external hdd and push some of the content from somebody s lappy to the external drive to have space for the installation. I did share the /. /home, optional swap while Dhanesh helped by sharing about having a separate /boot partition as well which I had forgotten. I can t even begin to remember the number of times having a separate /boot partition has helped me in all of my systems. That done, we did try to install/show Debian 9 without network but were hit with #866629 so wasn t able to complete the installation. We had got the latest 9.0.1 as I had seen Steve s message about issues with the live images but even then we were hit with the above bug. As shared in the bug history, it might be a good idea to have the last couple of RC s (Release Candidate releases) as pre-release parties so people have a chance to report bugs and get them fixed. It was also nice to see Praveen raising the seriousness of the bug shared above. The next day I also filed #866971 as I had mistaken the release to be a regular release and not the live instance. I have pushed my rationale and hope the right thing happens. As installation takes a bit of time, we used the time to share about Google s Summer of Code and absence of Debian from GSoC this year. I should have directed them to an itfoss article I wrote sometime ago and also shared that Debian is also looking to having a similar apprenticeship within Debian itself. There were questions about why Debian would like to take the administrative overhead, my response was that it probably had to do with Debian wanting more control over the process. While Debian has had some great luck getting all number of seats that it asks for in GSoC, the ball is always in Google s court. Having that uncertainty off would be beneficial to Debian both in short-term as well as long-term. One interesting stat that was shared with me was that something akin to 89 students from India had been selected this year to GSoC even with the lower stipend and that is a far cry from the 10-15 students who are able to complete GSoC every year. Let s see what happens this year. One of the interesting fact/gossip I shared with them is that Google uses a modified/forked Debian internally which it probably would never release ever. There were quite a few queries about GSoC which resulted into how contributions are made and how git had become the master of all VCS (Version Control Systems). While I do have pet bugs about git (the biggest one being for places/countries having not big bandwidth git fails many a times while cloning). I *think* the bug has been reported enough times but haven t seen any improvements yet. There is a need of a solution like wget and wget -c so git just works even under the most trying circumstances (bandwidth wise) We also shared what a repo is and Dhanesh helpfully did a git shortlog to show people how commits are commented. It was from his official work so he couldn t show anything apart from the shortlog. I also shared how non-technical people can help with regard to documentation, artwork but didn t get into any concrete examples although wiki.debian.org would have been a good start. I also don t know if it s a fact or not but it seems/seemed that moinmoin (the current wiki solution used by debian) seems to have got sectional edit feature which I used sometime back. If moinmoin has got this feature then it is on par with mediawiki, although do know that mediawiki has lot more features going for it. Dhanesh did manage to install a Debian 8.0.7 (while 8.8.0 was the last release) which might have been better. The debian-installer (d-i) looks the same even though I know there are improvements with respect to UEFI and many updated components. There are and were many bugs which I wanted to share but didn t know if it was the right forum or not, for e.g. #597176 which probably needs improvements in other libraries along with the JPEG 2000 support #604859 all of which I m subscribed to. We also had a talk about code documentation and code readability, python (as almost everything in Debian is based on python) I had actually wanted to show metrics.debian.net but had seen it was down the day before and again checked to see it is down now as well, hence reported it, will hopefully come on Debian BTS some time soonish. The idea was to share that Debian does have/uses other programming languages as well and is only limited by people interested in a specific language and be willing to package and maintain packages in that specific programming language. As Dhanesh was part of Firefox OS and a Campus Ambassador we did discuss what went wrong in Firefox OS deployment and Firefox as a whole, specifically between the community and Mozilla the Corporation. In this there were lots that was lot that I wasn t able to share as had become tired otherwise would have shared that ncurses debian-installer interface although bit ugly to look at is still good as it has speech for visually differently abled people as well as people with poor sight. There is and was lots to share about Debian but was conscious that I might over-burden the audience and my stamina was also stretched. We also shared about automated builds bud didn t show either travis.debian.net or jeankins.debian.net We also had a small discussion about Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and how the outlook for people coming in Computer Science looks today. One thing I forgot to share we did do the cake-cutting together Dhanesh-Shirish cutting cake together Dhanesh is on the left while I m on the right. We did have a cute 3-4 year old boy as our guest as well bud didn t get good pictures of him. Lastly, the Debian cake itself Debian 9 cake We also talked about the kernel and subsystem maintainers and how Linus is the overlord. Look forward to comments. I am hoping Dhanesh might recollect some points that I might have missed/forgotten. Update 07/07/17 All programming languages stats. can be seen here
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #alcohol humor, #co-hive, #crystal-gazing, #Debian bugs, #Debian cake, #Debian-release-party-9-pune, #live-installer, #moinmoin, #planet-debian, debian-installer, Pune

Yakking: Open your minds, and your data (formats)

Whether I am writing my own program, or chosing between existing solutions, one aspect of the decision making process which always weighs heavily on my mind is that of the input and output data formats. I have been spending a lot of my work days recently working on converting data from a proprietary tool's export format into another tool's input format. This has involved a lot of XML diving, a lot more swearing, and a non-trivial amount of pain. This drove home to me once more that the format of input and output of data is such a critical part of software tooling that it must weigh as heavily as, or perhaps even more heavily than, the software's functionality. As Tannenbaum tells us, the great thing about standards is that there's so many of them to choose from. XKCD tells us, how that comes about. Data formats are many and varied, and suffer from specifications as vague as "plain text" to things as complex as the structure of data stored in custom database formats. If you find yourself writing software which requires a brand new data format then, while I might caution you to examine carefully if it really does need a new format, you should ensure that you document the format carefully and precisely. Ideally give your format specification to a third party and get them to implement a reader and writer for your format, so that they can check that you've not missed anything. Tests and normative implementations can help prop up such an endeavour admirably. Be sceptical of data formats which have "implementation specific" areas, or "vendor specific extension" space because this is where everyone will put the most important and useful data. Do not put such beasts into your format design. If you worry that you've made your design too limiting, deal with that after you have implemented your use-cases for the data format. Don't be afraid to version the format and extend later; but always ensure that a given version of the data format is well understood; and document what it means to be presented with data in a format version you do not normally process. Phew.
Given all that, I exhort you to consider carefully how your projects manage their input and output data, and for these things to be uppermost when you are choosing between different solutions to a problem at hand. Your homework is, as you may have grown to anticipate at this time, to look at your existing projects and check that their input and output data formats are well documented if appropriate.

4 July 2017

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in June 2017

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS I was allocated 12 hours to work on security updates for Debian 7 Wheezy. During this time I did the following: Debian packaging Django. A last-minute update to Django in stretch before the release, I uploaded python-django 1:1.10.7-2 fixing two bugs (among which one was release critical) and filed the corresponding unblock request. schroot. I tried to prepare another last-minute update, this time for schroot. The goal was to fix the bash completion (#855283) and a problem encountered by the Debian sysadmins (#835104). Those issues are fixed in unstable/testing but my unblock request got turned into a post-release stretch update because the release managers wanted to give the package some more testing time in unstable. Even now, they are wondering whether they should accept the new systemd service file. live-build, live-config and live-boot. On live-build, I merged a patch to add a keyboard shortcut for the advanced option menu entry (#864386). For live-config, I uploaded version 5.20170623 to fix a broken boot sequence when you have multiple partitions (#827665). For live-boot, I uploaded version 1:20170623 to fix the path to udevadm (#852570) and avoiding a file duplication in the initrd (864385). zim. I packaged a release candidate (0.67~rc2) in Debian Experimental and started to use it. I quickly discovered two annoying regressions that I reported upstream (here and here). logidee-tools. This is a package I authored a long time ago and that I m no longer actively using. It does still work but I sometimes wonder if it still has real users. Anyway I wanted to quickly replace the broken dependency on pgf but I ended up converting the Subversion repository to Git and I also added autopkgtests. At least those tests will inform me when the package no longer works otherwise I would not notice since I m no longer using it. Bugs filed. I filed #865531 on lintian because the new check testsuite-autopkgtest-missing is giving some bad advice and probably does its check in a bad way. I also filed #865541 on sbuild because sbuild --apt-distupgrade can under some circumstances remove build-essential and break the build chroot. I filed an upstream ticket on publican to forward the request I received in #864648. Sponsorship. I sponsored a jessie update for php-tcpdf (#814030) and dolibarr 5.0.4+dfsg3-1 for unstable. I sponsored many other packages, but all in the context of the pkg-security team. pkg-security work Now that the Stretch freeze is over, the team became more active again and I have been overwhelmed with the number of packages to review and sponsor: I also updated hashcat to a new upstream release (3.6.0) and had to discuss with upstream about its weird versioning change. Looks like we will have to introduce an epoch to be able to get back in sync with upstream. To be able to get in sync with Kali, I introduced an hashcat-meta source package (in contrib) providing hashcat-nvidia to make it easy to install hashcat for owners of NVidia hardware. Misc stuff Distro Tracker. I merged a small CSS fix from Aur lien Couderc (#858101) and added a missing constraint on the data model (found through an unexpected traceback that I received by email). I also updated the list of repositories shortly after the stretch release (#865070). Salt formulas. As part of my Kali work, I did setup a build daemon on Debian stretch host and I encountered a couple of issues with my Salt rules. I reported one against salt-formula (here) and I pushed updates for debootstrap-formula, apache-formula and schroot-formula. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Foteini Tsiami: Internationalization, part two

Now that sch-scripts has been renamed to ltsp-manager and translated to English, it was time to set up a proper project site for it in launchpad: http://www.launchpad.net/ltsp-manager The following subpages were created for LTSP Manager there: We currently have an initial version of LTSP Manager running in Debian Stretch; although more testing and more bug reports will be needed before we start the localization phase. Attaching a first screenshot!

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Netfilter Workshop 2017: I'm new coreteam member!

nfws2017 I was invited to attend the Netfilter Workshop 2017 in Faro, Portugal this week, so I m here with all the folks enjoying some days of talks, discussions and hacking around Netfilter and general linux networking. The Coreteam of the Netfilter project, with active members Pablo Neira Ayuso (head), Jozsef Kadlecsik, Eric Leblond and Florian Westphal have invited me to join them, and the appointment has happened today. You may contact me now at my new email address: arturo@netfilter.org This is the result of my continued contribution to the Netfilter project since several years now (probably since 2012-2013). I m really happy with this, and I appreciate their recognition. I will do my best in this new position. Thanks! Regarding the workshop itself, we are having lots of interesting talks and discussions about the state of the Netfilter technology, open issues, missing features and where to go in the future. Really interesting!

John Goerzen: Time, Frozen

We re expecting a baby any time now. The last few days have had an odd quality of expectation: any time, our family will grow. It makes time seem to freeze, to stand still. We have Jacob, about to start fifth grade and middle school. But here he is, still a sweet and affectionate kid as ever. He loves to care for cats and seeks them out often. He still keeps an eye out for the stuffed butterfly he s had since he was an infant, and will sometimes carry it and a favorite blanket around the house. He will also many days prepare the Yellow House News on his computer, with headlines about his day and some comics pasted in before disappearing to play with Legos for awhile. And Oliver, who will walk up to Laura and give baby a hug many times throughout the day and sneak up to me, try to touch my arm, and say doink before running off before I can doink him back. It was Oliver that had asked for a baby sister for Christmas before he knew he d be getting one! In the past week, we ve had out the garden hose a couple of times. Both boys will enjoy sending mud down our slide, or getting out the water slide to play with, or just playing in mud. The rings of dirt in the bathtub testify to the fun that they had. One evening, I built a fire, we made brats and hot dogs, and then Laura and I sat visiting and watching their water antics for an hour after, laughter and cackles of delight filling the air, and cats resting on our laps. These moments, or countless others like Oliver s baseball games, flying the boys to a festival in Winfield, or their cuddles at bedtime, warm the heart. I remember their younger days too, with fond memories of taking them camping or building a computer with them. Sometimes a part of me wants to just keep soaking in things just as they are; being a parent means both taking pride in children s accomplishments as they grow up, and sometimes also missing the quiet little voice that can be immensely excited by a caterpillar. And yet, all four of us are so excited and eager to welcome a new life into our home. We are ready. I can t wait to hold the baby, or to lay her to sleep, to see her loving and excited older brothers. We hope for a smooth birth, for mom and baby. Here is the crib, ready, complete with a mobile with a cute bear (and even a plane). I can t wait until there is a little person here to enjoy it.

3 July 2017

Antoine Beaupr : My free software activities, June 2017

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my monthly Debian LTS report. This time I worked on Mercurial, sudo and Puppet.

Mercurial remote code execution I issued DLA-1005-1 to resolve problems with the hg server --stdio command that could be abused by "remote authenticated users to launch the Python debugger, and consequently execute arbitrary code, by using --debugger as a repository name" (CVE-2017-9462). Backporting the patch was already a little tricky because, as is often the case in our line of work, the code had changed significantly in newer version. In particular, the commandline dispatcher had been refactored which made the patch non-trivial to port. On the other hand, mercurial has an extensive test suite which allowed me to make those patches in all confidence. I also backported a part of the test suite to detect certain failures better and to fix the output so that it matches the backported code. The test suite is slow, however, which meant slow progress when working on this package. I also noticed a strange issue with the test suite: all hardlink operations would fail. Somehow it seems that my new sbuild setup doesn't support doing hardlinks. I ended up building a tarball schroot to build those types of packages, as it seems the issue is related to the use of overlayfs in sbuild. The odd part is my tests of overlayfs, following those instructions, show that it does support hardlinks, so there maybe something fishy here that I misunderstand. This, however, allowed me to get a little more familiar with sbuild and the schroots. I also took this opportunity to optimize the builds by installing an apt-cacher-ng proxy to speed up builds, which will also be useful for regular system updates.

Puppet remote code execution I have issued DLA-1012-1 to resolve a remote code execution attack against puppetmaster servers, from authenticated clients. To quote the advisory: "Versions of Puppet prior to 4.10.1 will deserialize data off the wire (from the agent to the server, in this case) with a attacker-specified format. This could be used to force YAML deserialization in an unsafe manner, which would lead to remote code execution." The fix was non-trivial. Normally, this would have involved fixing the YAML parsing, but this was considered problematic because the ruby libraries themselves were vulnerable and it wasn't clear we could fix the problem completely by fixing YAML parsing. The update I proposed took the bold step of switching all clients to PSON and simply deny YAML parsing from the server. This means all clients need to be updated before the server can be updated, but thankfully, updated clients will run against an older server as well. Thanks to LeLutin at Koumbit for helping in testing patches to solve this issue.

Sudo privilege escalation I have issued DLA-1011-1 to resolve an incomplete fix for a privilege escalation issue (CVE-2017-1000368 from CVE-2017-1000367). The backport was not quite trivial as the code had changed quite a lot since wheezy as well. Whereas mercurial's code was more complex, it's nice to see that sudo's code was actually simpler and more straightforward in newer versions, which is reassuring. I uploaded the packages for testing and uploaded them a year later. I also took extra time to share the patch in the Debian bugtracker, so that people working on the issue in stable may benefit from the backported patch, if needed. One issue that came up during that work is that sudo doesn't have a test suite at all, so it is quite difficult to test changes and make sure they do not break anything.

Should we upload on fridays? I brought up a discussion on the mailing list regarding uploads on fridays. With the sudo and puppet uploads pending, it felt really ... daring to upload both packages, on a friday. Years of sysadmin work hardwired me to be careful on fridays; as the saying goes: "don't deploy on a friday if you don't want to work on the weekend!" Feedback was great, but I was surprised to find that most people are not worried worried about those issues. I have tried to counter some of the arguments that were brought up: I wonder if there could be a disconnection here between the package maintainer / programmer work and the sysadmin work that is at the receiving end of that work. Having myself to deal with broken updates in the past, I'm surprised this has never come up in the discussions yet, or that the response is so underwhelming. So far, I'll try to balance the need for prompt security updates and the need for stable infrastructure. One does not, after all, go without the other...

Triage I also did small fry triage: Hopefully some of those will come to fruitition shortly.

Other work My other work this month was a little all over the place.

Stressant Uploaded a new release (0.4.1) of stressant to split up the documentation from the main package, as the main package was taking up too much space according to grml developers. The release also introduces limited anonymity option, by blocking serial numbers display in the smartctl output.

Debiman Also did some small followup on the debiman project to fix the FAQ links.

Local server maintenance I upgraded my main server to Debian stretch. This generally went well, althought the upgrade itself took way more time than I would have liked (4 hours!). This is partly because I have a lot of cruft installed on the server, but also because of what I consider to be issues in the automation of major Debian upgrades. For example, I was prompted for changes in configuration files at seemingly random moments during the upgrade, and got different debconf prompts to answer. This should really be batched together, and unfortunately I had forgotten to use the home-made script I established when i was working at Koumbit which shortens the upgrade a bit. I wish we would improve on our major upgrade mechanism. I documented possible solutions for this in the AutomatedUpgrade wiki page, but I'm not sure I see exactly where to go from here. I had a few regressions after the upgrade:
  • the infrared remote control stopped working: still need to investigate
  • my home-grown full-disk encryption remote unlocking script broke, but upstream has a nice workaround, see Debian bug #866786
  • gdm3 breaks bluetooth support (Debian bug #805414 - to be fair, this is not a regression in stretch, it's just that I switched my workstation from lightdm to gdm3 after learning that the latter can do rootless X11!)

Docker and Subsonic I did my first (and late?) foray into Docker and containers. My rationale was that I wanted to try out Subsonic, an impressive audio server which some friends have shown me. Since Subsonic is proprietary, I didn't want it to contaminate the rest of my server and it seemed like a great occasion to try out containers to keep things tidy. Containers may also allow me to transparently switch to the FLOSS fork LibreSonic once the trial period is over. I have learned a lot and may write more about the details of that experience soon, for now you can look at the contributions I made to the unofficial Subsonic docker image, but also the LibreSonic one. Since Subsonic also promotes album covers as first-class citizens, I used beets to download a lot of album covers, which was really nice. I look forward to using beets more, but first I'll need to implement two plugins.

Wallabako I did a small release of wallabako to fix the build with the latest changes in the underlying wallabago library, which led me to ask upstream to make versionned releases. I also looked into creating a separate documentation site but it looks like mkdocs doesn't like me very much: the table of contents is really ugly...

Small fry That's about it! And that was supposed to be a slow month...

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, June 2017

I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 hours. I worked all 20 hours. I spent most of my time working - together with other Linux kernel developers - on backporting and testing several versions of the fix for CVE-2017-1000364, part of the "Stack Clash" problem. I uploaded two updates to linux and issued DLA-993-1 and DLA-993-2. Unfortunately the latest version still causes regressions for some applications, which I will be investigating this month. I also released a stable update on the Linux 3.2 longterm stable branch (3.2.89) and prepared another (3.2.90) which I released today.

2 July 2017

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.8.1 released

apt-offline 1.8.1 released. This is a bug fix release fixing some python3 glitches related to module imports. Recommended for all users. apt-offline (1.8.1) unstable; urgency=medium * Switch setuptools to invoke py3
* No more argparse needed on py3
* Fix genui.sh based on comments from pyqt mailing list
* Bump version number to 1.8.1 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org> Sat, 01 Jul 2017 21:39:24 +0545
What is apt-offline 
Description: offline APT package manager
 apt-offline is an Offline APT Package Manager.
 .
 apt-offline can fully update and upgrade an APT based distribution without
 connecting to the network, all of it transparent to APT.
 .
 apt-offline can be used to generate a signature on a machine (with no network).
 This signature contains all download information required for the APT database
 system. This signature file can be used on another machine connected to the
 internet (which need not be a Debian box and can even be running windows) to
 download the updates.
 The downloaded data will contain all updates in a format understood by APT and
 this data can be used by apt-offline to update the non-networked machine.
 .
 apt-offline can also fetch bug reports and make them available offline.

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1 July 2017

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2017

FTP assistant This month I marked 100 packages for accept and rejected zero packages. I promise, I will reject more in July! Debian LTS This was my thirty-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload went down again to 16h. During that time I did LTS uploads of: I also tested the proposed apache2 package prepared by Roberto and started to work on a new bind9 upload Last but not least I had five days of frontdesk duties. Other stuff This month was filled with updating lots of machines to Stretch. Everything went fine, so thanks a lot to everybody involved in that release. Nevertheless I also did a DOPOM upload and now take care of otpw. Luckily most of the accumulated bugs already contained a patch, so that I just had to upload a new version and close them.

Daniel Silverstone: F/LOSS activity, June 2017

It seems to be becoming popular to send a mail each month detailing your free software work for that month. I have been slowly ramping my F/LOSS activity back up, after years away where I worked on completing my degree. My final exam for that was in June 2017 and as such I am now in a position to try and get on with more F/LOSS work. My focus, as you might expect, has been on Gitano which reached 1.0 in time for Stretch's release and which is now heading gently toward a 1.1 release which we have timed for Debconf 2017. My friend a colleague Richard has been working hard on Gitano and related components during this time too, and I hope that Debconf will be an opportunity for him to meet many of my Debian friends too. But enough of that, back to the F/LOSS. We've been running Gitano developer days roughly monthly since March of 2017, and the June developer day was attended by myself, Richard Maw, and Richard Ipsum. You are invited to read the wiki page for the developer day if you want to know exactly what we got up to, but a summary of my involvement that day is: Other than that, related to Gitano during June I: My non-Gitano F/LOSS related work in June has been entirely centred around the support I provide to the Lua community in the form of the Lua mailing list and website. The host on which it's run is ailing, and I've had to spend time trying to improve and replace that. Hopefully I'll have more to say next month. Perhaps by doing this reporting I'll get more F/LOSS done. Of course, July's report will be sent out while I'm in Montr al for debconf 2017 (or at least for debcamp at that point) so hopefully more to say anyway.

Keith Packard: DRM-lease-4

DRM leasing part three (vblank) The last couple of weeks have been consumed by getting frame sequence numbers and events handled within the leasing environment (and Vulkan) correctly. Vulkan EXT_display_control extension This little extension provides the bits necessary for applications to track the display of frames to the user. 
VkResult
vkGetSwapchainCounterEXT(VkDevice           device,
             VkSwapchainKHR         swapchain,
             VkSurfaceCounterFlagBitsEXT    counter,
             uint64_t           *pCounterValue);
This function just retrieves the current frame count from the display associated with swapchain. 
VkResult
vkRegisterDisplayEventEXT(VkDevice          device,
              VkDisplayKHR          display,
              const VkDisplayEventInfoEXT   *pDisplayEventInfo,
              const VkAllocationCallbacks   *pAllocator,
              VkFence           *pFence);
This function creates a fence that will be signaled when the specified event happens. Right now, the only event supported is when the first pixel of the next display refresh cycle leaves the display engine for the display. If you want something fancier (like two frames from now), you get to do that on your own using this basic function. drmWaitVBlank drmWaitVBlank is the existing interface for all things sequence related and has three modes (always nice to have one function do three things, I think). It can:
  1. Query the current vblank number
  2. Block until a specified vblank number
  3. Queue an event to be delivered at a specific vblank number
This interface has a few issues: For leases, figuring out the index into the kernel list of crtcs is pretty tricky -- our lease has a subset of those crtcs, so we can't actually compute the global crtc index. drmCrtcGetSequence 
int drmCrtcGetSequence(int fd, uint32_t crtcId,
               uint64_t *sequence, uint64_t *ns);
Here's a simple new function hand it a crtc ID and it provides the current frame sequence number and the time when that frame started (in nanoseconds). drmCrtcQueueSequence 
int drmCrtcQueueSequence(int fd, uint32_t crtcId,
                 uint32_t flags, uint64_t sequence,
             uint64_t user_data);
struct drm_event_crtc_sequence  
    struct drm_event    base;
    __u64           user_data;
    __u64           time_ns;
    __u64           sequence;
 ;
This will cause a CRTC_SEQUENCE event to be delivered at the start of the specified frame sequence. That event will include the frame when the event was actually generated (in case it's late), along with the time (in nanoseconds) when that frame was started. The event also includes a 64-bit user_data value, which can be used to hold a pointer to whatever data the application wants to see in the event handler. The 'flags' argument contains a combination of: 
#define DRM_CRTC_SEQUENCE_RELATIVE      0x00000001  /* sequence is relative to current */
#define DRM_CRTC_SEQUENCE_NEXT_ON_MISS      0x00000002  /* Use next sequence if we've missed */
#define DRM_CRTC_SEQUENCE_FIRST_PIXEL_OUT   0x00000004  /* Signal when first pixel is displayed */
These are similar to the values provided for the drmWaitVBlank function, except I've added a selector for when the event should be delivered to align with potential future additions to Vulkan. Right now, the only time you can ask for is first-pixel-out, which says that the event should correspond to the display of the first pixel on the screen. DRM events Vulkan fences With the kernel able to deliver a suitable event at the next frame, all the Vulkan code needed was a to create a fence and hook it up to such an event. The existing fence code only deals with rendering fences, so I added window system interface (WSI) fencing infrastructure and extended the radv driver to be able to handle both kinds of fences within that code. Multiple waiting threads I've now got three places which can be waiting for a DRM event to appear:
  1. Frame sequence fences.
  2. Wait for an idle image. Necessary when you want an image to draw the next frame to.
  3. Wait for the previous flip to complete. The kernel can only queue one flip at a time, so we have to make sure the previous flip is complete before queuing another one.
Vulkan allows these to be run from separate threads, so I needed to deal with multiple threads waiting for a specific DRM event at the same time. XCB has the same problem and goes to great lengths to manage this with a set of locking and signaling primitives so that only one thread is ever doing poll or read from the socket at time. If another thread wants to read at the same time, it will block on a condition variable which is then signaled by the original reader thread at the appropriate time. It's all very complicated, and it didn't work reliably for a number of years. I decided to punt and just create a separate thread for processing all DRM events. It blocks using poll(2) until some events are readable, processes those and then broadcasts to a condition variable to notify any waiting threads that 'something' has happened. Each waiting thread simply checks for the desired condition and if not satisfied, blocks on that condition variable. It's all very simple looking, and seems to work just fine. Code Complete, Validation Remains At this point, all of the necessary pieces are in place for the VR application to take advantage of an HMD using only existing Vulkan extensions. Those will be automatically mapped into DRM leases and DRM events as appropriate. The VR compositor application is working pretty well; tests with Dota 2 show occasional jerky behavior in complex scenes, so there's clearly more work to be done somewhere. I need to go write a pile of tests to independently verify that my code is working. I wonder if I'll need to wire up some kind of light sensor so I can actually tell when frames get displayed as it's pretty easy to get consistent-but-wrong answers in this environment. Source Code

Russ Allbery: Review: Make It Stick

Review: Make It Stick, by Peter C. Brown, et al.
Author: Peter C. Brown
Author: Henry L. Roediger III
Author: Mark A. McDaniel
Publisher: Belknap Press
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 0-674-72901-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 255
Another read for the work book club. "People generally are going about learning in the wrong ways." This is the first sentence of the preface of this book by two scientists (Roediger and McDaniel are both psychology researchers specializing in memory) and a novelist and former management consultant (Brown). The goal of Make It Stick is to apply empirical scientific research to the problem of learning, specifically retention of information for long-term use. The authors aim to convince the reader that subjective impressions of the effectiveness of study habits are highly deceptive, and that scientific evidence points strongly towards mildly counter-intuitive learning methods that don't feel like they're producing as good of results. I have such profound mixed feelings about this book. Let's start with the good. Make It Stick is a book containing actual science. The authors quote the studies, results, and scientific argument at length. There are copious footnotes and an index, as well as recommended reading. And the science is concrete and believable, as is the overlaid interpretation based on cognitive and memory research. The book's primary argument is that short-term and long-term memory are very different things, that what we're trying to achieve when we say "learning" is based heavily on long-term memory and recall of facts for an extended time after study, and that building this type of recall requires not letting our short-term memory do all the work. We tend towards study patterns that show obvious short-term improvement and that produce an increased feeling of effortless recall of the material, but those study patterns are training short-term memory and mean the knowledge slips away quickly. Choosing learning methods that instead make us struggle a little with what we're learning are significantly better. It's that struggle that leads to committing the material to long-term memory and building good recall pathways for it. On top of this convincingly-presented foundation, the authors walk through learning methods that feel worse in the moment but have better long-term effects: mixing practice of different related things (different types of solids when doing geometry problems, different pitches in batting practice) and switching types before you've mastered the one you're working on, forcing yourself to interpret and analyze material (such as writing a few paragraphs of summary in your own words) instead of re-reading it, and practicing material at spaced intervals far enough apart that you've forgotten some of the material and have to struggle to recall it. Possibly the most useful insight here (at least for me) was the role of testing in learning, not as just a way of measuring progress, but as a learning tool. Frequent, spaced, cumulative testing forces exactly the type of recall that builds long-term memory. The tests themselves help improve our retention of what we're learning. It's bad news for people like me who were delighted to leave school and not have to take a test again, but viewing tests as a more effective learning tool than re-reading and review (which they are) does cast them in a far more positive light. This is all solid stuff, and I'm very glad the research underlying this book exists and that I now know about it. But there are some significant problems with its presentation. The first is that there just isn't much here. The two long paragraphs above summarize nearly all of the useful content of this book. The authors certainly provide more elaboration, and I haven't talked about all of the study methods they mention or some of the useful examples of their application. But 80% of it is there, and the book is intentionally repetitive (because it tries to follow the authors' advice on learning theory). Make It Stick therefore becomes tedious and boring, particularly in the first four chapters. I was saying a lot of "yes, yes, you said that already" and falling asleep while trying to read it. The summaries at the end of the book are a bit better, but you will probably not need most of this book to get the core ideas. And then there's chapter five, which ends in a train wreck. Chapter five is on cognitive biases, and I see why the authors wanted to include it. The Dunning-Kruger effect is directly relevant to their topic. It undermines our ability to learn, and is yet another thing that testing helps avoid. Their discussion of Daniel Kahneman's two system theory (your fast, automatic, subconscious reactions and your slow, thoughtful, conscious processing) is somewhat less directly relevant, but it's interesting stuff, and it's at least somewhat related to the short-term and long-term memory dichotomy. But some of the stories they choose to use to illustrate this are... deeply unfortunate. Specifically, the authors decided to use US police work in multiple places as their example of choice for two-system thinking, and treat it completely uncritically. Some of you are probably already wincing because you can see where this is going. They interview a cop who, during scenario training for traffic stops, was surprised by the car trunk popping open and a man armed with a shotgun popping out of it. To this day, he still presses down on the trunk of the car as he walks up; it's become part of his checklist for every traffic stop. This would be a good example if the authors realized how badly his training has failed and deconstructed it, but they're apparently oblivious. I wanted to reach into the book and shake them. People have a limited number of things they can track and follow as part of a procedure, and some bad trainer has completely wasted part of this cop's attention in every traffic stop and thereby made him less safe! Just calculate the chances that someone would be curled up in an unlocked trunk with a shotgun and a cop would just happen to stop that car for some random reason, compared to any other threat the cop could use that same attention to watch for. This is exactly the type of scenario that's highly memorable but extremely improbable and therefore badly breaks human risk analysis. It's what Bruce Schneier calls a movie plot threat. The correct reaction to movie plot threats is to ignore them; wasting effort on mitigating them means not having that effort to spend on mitigating some other less memorable but more likely threat. This isn't the worst, though. The worst is the very next paragraph, also from police training, of showing up at a domestic call, seeing an armed person on the porch who stands up and walks away when ordered to drop their weapon, and not being sure how to react, resulting in that person (in the simulated exercise) killing the cop before they did anything. The authors actually use this as an example of how the cop was using system two and needed to train to use system one in that situation to react faster, and that this is part of the point of the training. Those of us who have been paying attention to the real world know what using system one here means: the person on the porch gets shot if they're black and doesn't get shot if they're white. The authors studiously refuse to even hint at this problem. I would have been perfectly happy if this book avoided the unconscious bias aspect of system one thinking. It's a bit far afield of the point of the book, and the authors are doubtless trying to stay apolitical. But that's why you pick some other example. You cannot just drop this kind of thing on the page and then refuse to even comment on it! It's like writing a chapter about the effect of mass transit on economic development, choosing Atlanta as one of your case studies, and then never mentioning race. Also, some editor seriously should have taken an ax to the sentence where the authors (for no justified reason) elaborate a story to describe a cop maiming a person, solely to make a cliched joke about how masculinity is defined by testicles and how people who lose body parts are less human. Thanks, book. This was bad enough that it dominated my memory of this chapter, but, reviewing the book for this review, I see it was just a few badly chosen examples at the end of the chapter and one pointless story at the start. The rest of the chapter is okay, although it largely summarizes things covered better in other books. The most useful part that's relevant to the topic of the book is probably the discussion of peer instruction. Just skip over all the police bits; you won't be missing anything. Thankfully, the rest of the book mostly avoids failing quite this hard. Chapter six does open with the authors obliviously falling for a string of textbook examples of survivorship bias (immediately after the chapter on cognitive biases!), but they shortly thereafter settle down to the accurate and satisfying work of critiquing theories of learning methods and types of intelligence. And by critiquing, I mean pointing out that they're mostly unscientific bullshit, which is fighting the good fight as far as I'm concerned. So, mixed feelings. The science seems solid, and is practical and directly applicable to my life. Make It Stick does an okay job at presenting it, but gets tedious and boring in places, particularly near the beginning. And there are a few train-wreck examples that had me yelling at the book and scribbling notes, which wasn't really the cure for boredom I was looking for. I recommend being aware of this research, and I'm glad the authors wrote this book, but I can't really recommend the book itself as a reading experience. Rating: 6 out of 10

30 June 2017

Daniel Pocock: A FOSScamp by the beach

I recently wrote about the great experience many of us had visiting OSCAL in Tirana. Open Labs is doing a great job promoting free, open source software there. They are now involved in organizing another event at the end of the summer, FOSScamp in Syros, Greece. Looking beyond the promise of sun and beach, FOSScamp is also just a few weeks ahead of the Outreachy selection deadline so anybody who wants to meet potential candidates in person may find this event helpful. If anybody wants to discuss the possibilities for involvement in the event then the best place to do that may be on the Open Labs forum topic. What will tomorrow's leaders look like? While watching a talk by Joni Baboci, head of Tirana's planning department, I was pleasantly surprised to see this photo of Open Labs board members attending the town hall for the signing of an open data agreement: It's great to see people finding ways to share the principles of technological freedoms far and wide and it will be interesting to see how this relationship with their town hall grows in the future.

28 June 2017

Steve Kemp: Yet more linux security module craziness ..

I've recently been looking at linux security modules. My first two experiments helped me learn:
My First module - whitelist_lsm.c
This looked for the presence of an xattr, and if present allowed execution of binaries. I learned about the Kernel build-system, and how to write a simple LSM.
My second module - hashcheck_lsm.c
This looked for the presence of a "known-good" SHA1 hash xattr, and if it matched the actual hash of the file on-disk allowed execution. I learned how to hash the contents of a file, from kernel-space.
Both allowed me to learn things, but both were a little pointless. They were not fine-grained enough to allow different things to be done by different users. (i.e. If you allowed "alice" to run "wget" you'd also allow www-data to do the same.) So, assuming you wanted to do your security job more neatly what would you want? You'd want to allow/deny execution of commands based upon: So your local users could run "bad" commands, but "www-data" (post-compromise) couldn't. Obviously you don't want to have to recompile your kernel to change the rules of who can execute what. So you think to yourself "I'll write those rules down in a file". But of course reading a file from kernel-space is tricky. And parsing any list of rules, in a file, from kernel-space would prone to buffer-related problems. So I had a crazy idea: Calling userspace? Every time a command is to be executed? Crazy. But it just might work. One problem I had with this approach is that userspace might not even be available, when you're booting. So I setup a flag to enable this stuff: 
# echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/can-exec/enabled
Now the kernel will invoke the following on every command: 
/sbin/can-exec $UID $PATH
Because the kernel waits for this command to complete - as it reads the exit-code - you cannot execute any child-processes from it as you'd end up in recursive hell, but you can certainly read files, write to syslog, etc. My initial implementionation was as basic as this: 
int main( int argc, char *argv[] )
 
...
  // Get the UID + Program
  int uid = atoi( argv[1] );
  char *prg = argv[2];
  // syslog
  openlog ("can-exec", LOG_CONS   LOG_PID   LOG_NDELAY, LOG_LOCAL1);
  syslog (LOG_NOTICE, "UID:%d CMD:%s", uid, prg );
  // root can do all.
  if ( uid == 0 )
    return 0;
  // nobody
  if ( uid == 65534 )  
    if ( ( strcmp( prg , "/bin/sh" ) == 0 )  
         ( strcmp( prg , "/usr/bin/id" ) == 0 ) )  
      fprintf(stderr, "Allowing 'nobody' access to shell/id\n" );
      return 0;
     
   
  fprintf(stderr, "Denied\n" );
  return -1;
Although the UIDs are hard-code it actually worked! Yay! I updated the code to convert the UID to a username, then check executables via the file /etc/can-exec/$USERNAME.conf, and this also worked. I don't expect anybody to actually use this code, but I do think I've reached a point where I can pretend I've written a useful (or non-pointless) LSM at last. That means I can stop.

27 June 2017

Daniel Pocock: How did the world ever work without Facebook?

Almost every day, somebody tells me there is no way they can survive without some social media like Facebook or Twitter. Otherwise mature adults fearful that without these dubious services, they would have no human contact ever again, they would die of hunger and the sky would come crashing down too. It is particularly disturbing for me to hear this attitude from community activists and campaigners. These are people who aspire to change the world, but can you really change the system using the tools the system gives you? Revolutionaries like Gandhi and the Bolsheviks don't have a lot in common: but both of them changed the world and both of them did so by going against the system. Gandhi, of course, relied on non-violence while the Bolsheviks continued to rely on violence long after taking power. Neither of them needed social media but both are likely to be remembered far longer than any viral video clip you have seen recently. With US border guards asking visitors for their Facebook profiles and Mark Zuckerberg being a regular participant at secretive Bilderberg meetings, it should be clear that Facebook and conventional social media is not on your side, it's on theirs. Kettling has never been easier When street protests erupt in major cities such as London, the police build fences around the protesters, cutting them off from the rest of the world. They become an island in the middle of the city, like a construction site or broken down bus that everybody else goes around. The police then set about arresting one person at a time, taking their name and photograph and then slowly letting them leave in different directions. This strategy is called kettling. Facebook helps kettle activists in their arm chair. The police state can gather far more data about them, while their impact is even more muted than if they ventured out of their home. You are more likely to win the lottery than make a viral campaign Every week there is news about some social media campaign that has gone viral. Every day, marketing professionals, professional campaigners and motivated activists sit at their computer spending hours trying to replicate this phenomenon. Do the math: how many of these campaigns can really be viral success stories? Society can only absorb a small number of these campaigns at any one time. For most of the people trying to ignite such campaigns, their time and energy is wasted, much like money spent buying lottery tickets and with odds that are just as bad. It is far better to focus on the quality of your work in other ways than to waste any time on social media. If you do something that is truly extraordinary, then other people will pick it up and share it for you and that is how a viral campaign really begins. The time and effort you put into trying to force something to become viral is wasting the energy and concentration you need to make something that is worthy of really being viral. An earthquake and an escaped lion never needed to announce themselves on social media to become an instant hit. If your news isn't extraordinary enough for random people to spontaneously post, share and tweet it in the first place, how can it ever go far? The news media deliberately over-rates social media News media outlets, including TV, radio and print, gain a significant benefit crowd-sourcing live information, free of charge, from the public on social media. It is only logical that they will cheer on social media sites and give them regular attention. Have you noticed that whenever Facebook's publicity department makes an announcement, the media are quick to publish it ahead of more significant stories about social or economic issues that impact our lives? Why do you think the media puts Facebook up on a podium like this, ahead of all other industries, if the media aren't getting something out of it too? The tail doesn't wag the dog One particular example is the news media's fascination with Donald Trump's Twitter account. Some people have gone as far as suggesting that this billionaire could have simply parked his jet and spent the whole of 2016 at one of his golf courses sending tweets and he would have won the presidency anyway. Suggesting that Trump's campaign revolved entirely around Twitter is like suggesting the tail wags the dog. The reality is different: Trump has been a prominent public figure for decades, both in the business and entertainment world. During his presidential campaign, he had at least 220 major campaign rallies attended by over 1.2 million people in the real world. Without this real-world organization and history, the Twitter account would have been largely ignored like the majority of Twitter accounts. On the left of politics, the media have been just as quick to suggest that Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have been supported by the "Facebook generation". This label is superficial and deceiving. The reality, again, is a grass roots movement that has attracted young people to attend local campaign meetings in pubs up and down the country. Getting people to get out and be active is key. Social media is incidental to their campaign, not indispensible. Real-world meetings, big or small, are immensely more powerful than a social media presence. Consider the Trump example again: if 100,000 people receive one of his tweets, how many even notice it in the non-stop stream of information we are bombarded with today? On the other hand, if 100,000 bellow out a racist slogan at one of his rallies, is there any doubt whether each and every one of those people is engaged with the campaign at that moment? If you could choose between 100 extra Twitter followers or 10 extra activists attending a meeting every month, which would you prefer? Do we need this new definition of a Friend? Facebook is redefining what it means to be a friend. Is somebody who takes pictures of you and insists on sharing them with hundreds of people, tagging your face for the benefit of biometric profiling systems, really a friend? If you want to find out what a real friend is and who your real friends really are, there is no better way to do so then blowing away your Facebook and Twitter account and waiting to see who contacts you personally about meeting up in the real world. If you look at a profile on Facebook or Twitter, one of the most prominent features is the number of friends or followers they have. Research suggests that humans can realistically cope with no more than about 150 stable relationships. Facebook, however, has turned Friending people into something like a computer game. This research is also given far more attention then it deserves though: the number of really meaningful friendships that one person can maintain is far smaller. Think about how many birthdays and spouse's names you can remember and those may be the number of real friendships you can manage well. In his book Busy, Tony Crabbe suggests between 10-20 friendships are in this category and you should spend all your time with these people rather than letting your time be spread thinly across superficial Facebook "friends". This same logic can be extrapolated to activism and marketing in its many forms: is it better for a campaigner or publicist to have fifty journalists following him on Twitter (where tweets are often lost in the blink of an eye) or three journalists who he meets for drinks from time to time? Facebook alternatives: the ultimate trap? Numerous free, open source projects have tried to offer an equivalent to Facebook and Twitter. GNU social, Diaspora and identi.ca are some of the more well known examples. Trying to persuade people to move from Facebook to one of these platforms rarely works. In most cases, Metcalfe's law suggests the size of Facebook will suck them back in like the gravity of a black hole. To help people really beat these monstrosities, the most effective strategy is to help them live without social media, whether it is proprietary or not. The best way to convince them may be to give it up yourself and let them see how much you enjoy life without it. Share your thoughts The FSFE community has recently been debating the use of propriety software and services. Please feel free to join the list and click here to reply on the thread.

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 113 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday June 18 and Saturday June 24 2017: Upcoming and Past events Our next IRC meeting is scheduled for the 6th of July at 17:00 UTC with this agenda currently:
  1. Introductions
  2. Reproducible Builds Summit update
  3. NMU campaign for buster
  4. Press release: Debian is doing Reproducible Builds for Buster
  5. Reproducible Builds Branding & Logo
  6. should we become an SPI member
  7. Next meeting
  8. Any other business
On June 19th, Chris Lamb presented at LinuxCon China 2017 on Reproducible Builds. On June 23rd, Vagrant Cascadian held a Reproducible Builds question and answer session at Open Source Bridge. Reproducible work in other projects LEDE: firmware-utils and mtd-utils/mkfs.jffs2 now honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Toolchain development and fixes There was discussion on #782654 about packaging bazel for Debian. Dan Kegel wrote a patch to use ar determinitiscally for Homebrew, a package manager for MacOS. Dan Kegel worked on using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and other reproduciblity fixes in fpm, a multi plattform package builder. The Fedora Haskell team disabled parallel builds to achieve reproducible builds. Bernhard M. Wiedemann submitted many patches upstream: Packages fixed and bugs filed Patches submitted upstream: Other patches filed in Debian: Reviews of unreproducible packages 573 package reviews have been added, 154 have been updated and 9 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development Version 83 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It also moved the previous changes from experimental (to where they were uploaded) to unstable. It included contributions from previous weeks. You can read about these changes in our previous weeks' posts, or view the changelog directly (raw form). We plan to maintain a backport of this and future versions in stretch-backports. Ximin Luo also worked on better html-dir output for very very large diffs such as those for GCC. So far, this includes unreleased work on a PartialString data structure which will form a core part of a new and more intelligent recursive display algorithm. strip-nondeterminism development Versions 0.035-1 was uploaded to unstable from experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Later in the week Mattia Rizzolo uploaded 0.035-2 with some improvements to the autopkgtest and to the general packaging. We currently don't plan to maintain a backport in stretch-backports like we did for jessie-backports. Please speak up if you think otherwise. reproducible-website development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Mattia Rizzolo, Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Colin Watson: New address book

I ve had a kludgy mess of electronic address books for most of two decades, and have got rather fed up with it. My stack consisted of: The biggest practical problem with this was that I had the address book that was most convenient for me to add things to (Google Contacts) and the one I used when sending email, and no sensible way to merge them or move things between them. I also wasn t especially comfortable with having all my contact information in a proprietary web service. My goals for a replacement address book system were: I think I have all this now! New stack The obvious basic technology to use is CardDAV: it s fairly complex, admittedly, but lots of software supports it and one of my goals was not having to write my own thing. This meant I needed a CardDAV server, some way to sync the database to and from both Android and the system where I run mutt, and whatever query glue was necessary to get mutt to understand vCards. There are lots of different alternatives here, and if anything the problem was an embarrassment of choice. In the end I just decided to go for things that looked roughly the right shape for me and tried not to spend too much time in analysis paralysis. CardDAV server I went with Xandikos for the server, largely because I know Jelmer and have generally had pretty good experiences with their software, but also because using Git for history of the backend storage seems like something my future self will thank me for. It isn t packaged in stretch, but it s in Debian unstable, so I installed it from there. Rather than the standalone mode suggested on the web page, I decided to set it up in what felt like a more robust way using WSGI. I installed uwsgi, uwsgi-plugin-python3, and libapache2-mod-proxy-uwsgi, and created the following file in /etc/uwsgi/apps-available/xandikos.ini which I then symlinked into /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/xandikos.ini: 
[uwsgi]
socket = 127.0.0.1:8801
uid = xandikos
gid = xandikos
umask = 022
master = true
cheaper = 2
processes = 4
plugin = python3
module = xandikos.wsgi:app
env = XANDIKOSPATH=/srv/xandikos/collections
The port number was arbitrary, as was the path. You need to create the xandikos user and group first (adduser --system --group --no-create-home --disabled-login xandikos). I created /srv/xandikos owned by xandikos:xandikos and mode 0700, and I recommend setting a umask as shown above since uwsgi s default umask is 000 (!). You should also run sudo -u xandikos xandikos -d /srv/xandikos/collections --autocreate and then Ctrl-c it after a short time (I think it would be nicer if there were a way to ask the WSGI wrapper to do this). For Apache setup, I kept it reasonably simple: I ran a2enmod proxy_uwsgi, used htpasswd to create /etc/apache2/xandikos.passwd with a username and password for myself, added a virtual host in /etc/apache2/sites-available/xandikos.conf, and enabled it with a2ensite xandikos: 
<VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName xandikos.example.org
        ServerAdmin me@example.org
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/xandikos-error.log
        TransferLog /var/log/apache2/xandikos-access.log
        <Location />
                ProxyPass "uwsgi://127.0.0.1:8801/"
                AuthType Basic
                AuthName "Xandikos"
                AuthBasicProvider file
                AuthUserFile "/etc/apache2/xandikos.passwd"
                Require valid-user
        </Location>
</VirtualHost>
Then service apache2 reload, set the new virtual host up with Let s Encrypt, reloaded again, and off we go. Android integration I installed DAVdroid from the Play Store: it cost a few pounds, but I was OK with that since it s GPLv3 and I m happy to help fund free software. I created two accounts, one for my existing Google Contacts database (and in fact calendaring as well, although I don t intend to switch over to self-hosting that just yet), and one for the new Xandikos instance. The Google setup was a bit fiddly because I have two-step verification turned on so I had to create an app-specific password. The Xandikos setup was straightforward: base URL, username, password, and done. Since I didn t completely trust the new setup yet, I followed what seemed like the most robust option from the DAVdroid contacts syncing documentation, and used the stock contacts app to export my Google Contacts account to a .vcf file and then import that into the appropriate DAVdroid account (which showed up automatically). This seemed straightforward and everything got pushed to Xandikos. There are some weird delays in syncing contacts that I don t entirely understand, but it all seems to get there in the end. mutt integration First off I needed to sync the contacts. (In fact I happen to run mutt on the same system where I run Xandikos at the moment, but I don t want to rely on that, and going through the CardDAV server means that I don t have to poke holes for myself using filesystem permissions.) I used vdirsyncer for this. In ~/.vdirsyncer/config: 
[general]
status_path = "~/.vdirsyncer/status/"
[pair contacts]
a = "contacts_local"
b = "contacts_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
[storage contacts_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.contacts/"
fileext = ".vcf"
[storage contacts_remote]
type = "carddav"
url = "<Xandikos base URL>"
username = "<my username>"
password = "<my password>"
Running vdirsyncer discover and vdirsyncer sync then synced everything into ~/.contacts/. I added an hourly crontab entry to run vdirsyncer -v WARNING sync. Next, I needed a command-line address book tool based on this. khard looked about right and is in stretch, so I installed that. In ~/.config/khard/khard.conf (this is mostly just the example configuration, but I preferred to sort by first name since not all my contacts have neat first/last names): 
[addressbooks]
[[contacts]]
path = ~/.contacts/<UUID of my contacts collection>/
[general]
debug = no
default_action = list
editor = vim
merge_editor = vimdiff
[contact table]
# display names by first or last name: first_name / last_name
display = first_name
# group by address book: yes / no
group_by_addressbook = no
# reverse table ordering: yes / no
reverse = no
# append nicknames to name column: yes / no
show_nicknames = no
# show uid table column: yes / no
show_uids = yes
# sort by first or last name: first_name / last_name
sort = first_name
[vcard]
# extend contacts with your own private objects
# these objects are stored with a leading "X-" before the object name in the vcard files
# every object label may only contain letters, digits and the - character
# example:
#   private_objects = Jabber, Skype, Twitter
private_objects = Jabber, Skype, Twitter
# preferred vcard version: 3.0 / 4.0
preferred_version = 3.0
# Look into source vcf files to speed up search queries: yes / no
search_in_source_files = no
# skip unparsable vcard files: yes / no
skip_unparsable = no
Now khard list shows all my contacts. So far so good. Apparently there are some awkward vCard compatibility issues with creating or modifying contacts from the khard end. I ve tried adding one address from ~/.mutt/aliases using khard and it seems to at least minimally work for me, but I haven t explored this very much yet. I had to install python3-vobject 0.9.4.1-1 from experimental to fix eventable/vobject#39 saving certain vCard files. Finally, mutt integration. I already had set query_command="lbdbq '%s'" in ~/.muttrc, and I wanted to keep that in place since I still wanted to use LDAP querying as well. I had to write a very small amount of code for this (perhaps I should contribute this to lbdb upstream?), in ~/.lbdb/modules/m_khard: 
#! /bin/sh
m_khard_query ()  
    khard email --parsable --remove-first-line --search-in-source-files "$1"
My full ~/.lbdb/rc now reads as follows (you probably won t want the LDAP stuff, but I ve included it here for completeness): 
MODULES_PATH="$MODULES_PATH $HOME/.lbdb/modules"
METHODS='m_muttalias m_khard m_ldap'
LDAP_NICKS='debian canonical'
Next steps I ve deleted one account from Google Contacts just to make sure that everything still works (e.g. I can still search for it when composing a new message), but I haven t yet deleted everything. I won t be adding anything new there though. I need to push everything from ~/.mutt/aliases into the new system. This is only about 30 contacts so shouldn t take too long. Overall this feels like a big improvement! It wasn t a trivial amount of setup for just me, but it means I have both better usability for myself and more independence from proprietary services, and I think I can add extra users with much less effort if I need to. Postscript A day later and I ve consolidated all my accounts from Google Contacts and ~/.mutt/aliases into the new system, with the exception of one group that I had defined as a mutt alias and need to work out what to do with. This all went smoothly. I ve filed the new lbdb module as #866178, and the python3-vobject bug as #866181.

Joey Hess: 12 to 24 volt house conversion

Upgrading my solar panels involved switching the house from 12 volts to 24 volts. No reasonably priced charge controllers can handle 1 KW of PV at 12 volts. There might not be a lot of people who need to do this; entirely 12 volt offgrid houses are not super common, and most upgrades these days probably involve rooftop microinverters and so would involve a switch from DC to AC. I did not find a lot of references online for converting a whole house's voltage from 12V to 24V. To prepare, I first checked that all the fuses and breakers were rated for > 24 volts. (Actually, > 30 volts because it will be 26 volts or so when charging.) Also, I checked for any shady wiring, and verified that all the wires I could see in the attic and wiring closet were reasonably sized (10AWG) and in good shape. Then I:
  1. Turned off every light, unplugged every plug, pulled every fuse and flipped every breaker.
  2. Rewired the battery bank from 12V to 24V.
  3. Connected the battery bank to the new charge controller.
  4. Engaged the main breaker, and waited for anything strange.
  5. Screwed in one fuse at a time.
lighting The house used all fluorescent lights, and they have ballasts rated for only 12V. While they work at 24V, they might blow out sooner or overheat. In fact one died this evening, and while it was flickering before, I suspect the 24V did it in. It makes sense to replace them with more efficient LED lights anyway. I found some 12-24V DC LED lights for regular screw-in (edison) light fixtures. Does not seem very common; Amazon only had a few models and they shipped from China. Also, I ordered a 15 foot long, 300 LED strip light, which runs on 24V DC and has an adhesive backing. Great stuff -- it can be cut to different lengths and stuck anywhere. I installed some underneath the cook stove hood and the kitchen cabinets, which didn't have lights before. Similar LED strips are used in some desktop lamps. My lamp was 12V only (barely lit at 24V), but I was able to replace its LED strip, upgrading it to 24V and three times as bright. (Christmas lights are another option; many LED christmas lights run on 24V.) appliances My Lenovo laptop's power supply that I use in the house is a vehicle DC-DC converter, and is rated for 12-24V. It seems to be running fine at 26V, did not get warm even when charging the laptop up from empty. I'm using buck converters to run various USB powered (5V) ARM boxes such as my sheevaplug. They're quarter sized, so fit anywhere, and are very efficient. My satellite internet receiver is running with a large buck converter, feeding 12V to an inverter, feeding to a 30V DC power supply. That triple conversion is inneficient, but it works for now. The ceiling fan runs on 24V, and does not seem to run much faster than on 12V. It may be rated for 12-24V. Can't seem to find any info about it. The radio is a 12V car radio. I used a LM317 to run it on 24V, to avoid the RF interference a buck converter would have produced. This is a very inneficient conversion; half of the power is wasted as heat. But since I can stream internet radio all day now via satellite, I'll not use the FM radio very often. Fridge... still running on propane for now, but I have an idea for a way to build a cold storage battery that will use excess power from the PV array, and keep a fridge at a constant 34 degrees F. Next home improvement project in the queue.

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