Following on:

Having seen some posts about this elsewhere on the 'Net:

• Your copyright remains your own unless you assign it
• Establish what you are being paid for: are you being paid for :

1. Your specific area of FLOSS expertise (or)
2. Your time / hours in an area unrelated to your FLOSS expertise (or)
3. A job that has no impact or bearing on your FLOSS expertise (or)
4. Your time / hours only - and negotiate accordingly

Your employer may be willing to negotiate / grant you an opt-out clause to protect your FLOSS expertise / accept an additional non-exclusive licence to your FLOSS code / be prepared to sign an assignment e.g.

"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program  Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written 
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice"

[http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

If none of the above is feasible: don't contribute anything that crosses the streams and mingles commercial and FLOSS expertise, however much you're offered to do so.

Patents / copyrights

"In the 1980s I had not yet realized how confusing it was to speak of the issue of intellectual property . That term is obviously biased; more subtle is the fact that it lumps together various disparate laws which raise very different issues. Nowadays I urge people to reject the term intellectual property entirely, lest it lead others to suppose that those laws form one coherent issue. The way to be clear is to discuss patents, copyrights, and trademarks separately. See further explanation of how this term spreads confusion and bias."
[http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html - footnote 8.]

If you want to assert a patent - it's probably not FLOSS. Go away :)

If you want to assert a trademark of your own - it's probably not FLOSS. Go away :)
[Trademarks may ordinarily be outside the scope of normal FLOSS legal considerations - but should be acknowledged wherever they occur both as a matter of law and as a matter of courtesy]

Copyright gives legal standing (locus standi in the terminology of English common law) to sue for infringement - that's the basis of licence enforcement actions.

Employees of governments and those doing government work

• Still have the right to own authorship and copyrights and to negotiate accordingly
• May need to establish more clearly what they're being paid for
• May be able to advise, influence or direct policy towards FLOSS in their own respective national jurisdiction
• Should, ideally, be primariily acknowledged as individuals, holding and maintaining an individual reputation and only secondarily as contractors/employees/others associated with government work.
• Contribution to national / international standards, international agreements and shared working practices should be informed in the light of FLOSS work.

This is complex: some FLOSS contributors see a significant amount of this as immaterial to them in the same way that some indigenous populations do not acknowledge imposed colonial legal structures as valid - but both value systems can co-exist

Review: Furiously Happy, by Jenny Lawson

Publisher:	Flatiron
Copyright:	September 2015
ISBN:	1-250-07700-1
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	329

Jenny Lawson, who blogs as The Bloggess, is best known for a combination of being extremely funny and being extremely open about her struggles with mental illness (a combination of anxiety and depression, alongside a few other problems). Her first book primarily told the story of her family, childhood, and husband. Furiously Happy is a more random and disconnected book, but insofar as it has a theme, it's about surviving depression, anxiety, and other manifestations of your brain being an asshole. I described Lawson's previous book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, as the closest thing I've found to a stand-up comedy routine in book form. Furiously Happy is very similar, but it lacks the cohesiveness of a routine. Instead, it feels like a blog collection: a pile of essays with only some vague themes and not a lot of continuity from essay to essay. This doesn't surprise me. Second books are very different than first books, particularly second books by someone whose writing focus is not writing books, and particularly for non-fiction. I feel like Let's Pretend This Never Happened benefited from drawing on Lawson's full life experience to form the best book she could write. When that became wildly popular, everyone of course wanted a second book, including me. But when the writing is this personal, the second book is, out of necessity, partly leftovers. Lawson's recent experiences don't generate as much material as her whole life up to the point of the first book. That said, there is a bit of a theme, and the title fits it. Early in the book, Lawson describes how, after the death of a friend and a bout of depression, she decided to be furiously, vehemently happy to get back at the universe, to spite its attempts to destroy her mood. It's one of the best bits in this book. The surrounding philosophy is about embracing the moment, enjoying the hell out of everything that one can enjoy, and taking a lot of chances. A lot of the stories in this book come after the beginning of Lawson's fame and popularity. She has book tours, a vacation tour of Australia, and a community of people from her blog. That, of course, doesn't make the depression and anxiety any better; indeed, it provides a lot of material for her anxiety to work with. Lawson talks a lot about surviving, about how important that community is to her, about not believing your brain when it lies to you. This isn't as uniformly funny as her first book, and sometimes it feels a bit too much like an earnest pep talk. But there are also moments of insightful life philosophy mixed into the madcap adventures and stream-of-consciousness wild associations. Lawson also does for anxiety what Allie Brosh does for depression: make the severe form of it relatable to people who have not suffered from it. I was particularly struck by her description of flying: the people around her are getting nervous and anxious as the plane starts to take off, and she's finally able to relax because her anxiety focused on all the things she had to do in order to get onto the right plane at the right time. Once she didn't have to make any decisions or do anything other than sit in one place, her anxiety let go. I don't have any type of clinical anxiety, but I was able to identify with that moment of relief and its contrast with anxiety in a deeper way than with other descriptions. Furiously Happy is a bit more serious and earnest, and I'm not sure it worked as well. I liked Lawson's first book better; this felt more like a blog archive. But she's still funny, entertaining, and delightful, and I'm happy to support her with a book purchase. Start with either her blog or Let's Pretend This Never Happened if you're new to Lawson, but if you're already a fan, here's more of her writing. Rating: 7 out of 10

GSOC Comme j ai mentionn dans au article ant rieur, je participe au programme Google Summer Of Code gr ce l organisation Debian qui supervise mes travaux contribuant au logiciel libre Ring.

Deux jours restants Il reste deux jours avant mon d part pour le Cape, en Afrique du sud. C est pour assister l v nement debconf ( Debian conference ), organis par Debian, que je me rends l . Cet v nement est organis chaque ann e et, l ann e prochaine, c est Montr al que a aura lieu !

J ai tr s h te de vivre cette exp rience qui sera sans doute innoubliable. Debian est une organisation pioni re du monde du logiciel libre. Je rencontrerai des gens tr s d vou s et partageant avec moi beaucoup d int r ts pour le logiciel libre et sa philosophie.

L Afrique du sud Ce sera la premi re fois que je prendrai l avion et je ferai une escale Amsterdam, une ville que j aimerais bien visiter un jour. Ahhhh Jacques Brel. Je suis tr s heureux que le continent d Afrique soit la premi re destination me permettant de sortir du continent d Am rique pour la premi re fois. J ai bien h te de vivre l ambiance du Cape.

Les requins Y parrait qu y a des requins au Cape.

This week I have been gathered with 38 KDE people in Randa, Switzerland. Randa is a place in a valley in the middle of the Alps close to various peaks like Matterhorn. It has been a week of intense hacking, bugfixing, brainstorming and a bit of enjoying the nature. R is for Reproducible builds I spent the first couple of days trying to get the Qt Documentation generation tool to reproducible generate documentation. Some of the fixes were of the usual put data in an randomized datastructure, then iterate over it and create output , where the fix is similar well known: Sort the datastructure first. Others were a bit more severe bugs that lead to the documentation to shuffle around the obsolete bit, and the inheritance chains. Most of these fixes have been reviewed and submitted to the Qt 5.6 branch, one is still pending review, but that hopefully gets fixed soon. Then most of Qt (except things containing copies of (parts) of webkit and derivatives) should be reproducible. R is for Roaming around in the mountains Sleeping, hacking and dining in the same building sometimes leads to a enormous desire for fresh air. Luckily in the middle of the alps, it is readily available, and at least once a day many people went for a walk. To say hi to a sheep. Or to just go uphill until tired and then going back down. Or just finding a circle around. For this area, OpenStreetMap seems to have better maps than Google. We also went on a nice group trip to Zermatt and surroundings, sponsored by our friends in Edeltech. R is for Releasing One of the tasks I set myself for was to get my barcode generation library (prison. you know. being behind bars.) ready for release. A bit of api cleanup, including some future proofing, was done, and all users adapted. Hopefully it will be released as part of the next KDE Frameworks release. R is for Reviewing code When signing up for the sprint, one has to declare a couple of tasks to work on. One of the things I put myself up to was reviewing David Faure s code changes. First, he is very productive, and second, he often gets into creating patches in code areas where many other contributors are scared to look. So someone has to do it, and code never scared me. R is for Running I planned on going running along the river monday, wednesday and friday. Fortunately that happened, but due to Switzerland having a bit more ups and downs than flat Denmark, it didn t go that fast. R is for Random bugfixing When in the hacking mood surrounded by great developers, it is very easy to just fix minor bugs when you encounter them. There is likely someone around who knows the code in question. Or you are just in the mood to actually fix it, rather than living with a missing clock applet or a corner case crash. R is for Rubber ducking I am a brilliant person sized rubber duck. And I did get the opportunity to show off my skills a couple of times, as well as using some of the other people for that. R is for Raising money These sprints in Randa is only possible because of all the nice donations from people and companies around the world. The fundraiser is still running, and can be found at

Hi to all the souls on planet.debian.org . I hope to meet many of you in Debconf16 which is being held at UCT (University of Cape Town), Rhondenbosch, South Africa and am excited to be part of it. I pushed a blog post about my journey to debconf till date. I express my sympathy and condolences to all the people who died in the cowardly shooting spree done by a madman in Orlando . I have been upset about this development but as what s done is done, it s best to just keep moving. Closer to my own reality, I was shocked to discover during my whole visa experience that nowhere there is any knowledge about vaccinations that people should have when they are traveling internationally. I was kinda rudely awakened by this mail which prompted me to take Hep A shot and also start a thread on the mailing list. The more comprehensive info. I got was at the CDC site . It seems to be a go-to site to find about what is recommended. While I will not be taking any shots now as it s nearing to the date of travel, if I had known before, it would have been a valuable resource in itself. Definitely something to be bookmarked if you are going overseas and are worried or have health concerns. On another note, About few days back, there was a discussion as recently, travel advisories have been issued about possible terror action in South Africa by various embassies due to the holy month of Ramadan. My take on it some would describe as simplistic, there are things which you can control, there are things beyond your control. No security agency, no country can guarantee it. By being either home or away, you can t wish you will not get bitten. Got images of Final Destination invoked when I was sharing that, for as an Indian, do believe a bit on fate and karma. Also, me being single also plays a part, perhaps I would have been more cautious or have different motivations if I had a family so I do understand some of the concerns which have been raised by people in that thread. At the end of it, it really is a non-choice in my book. If you don t take part due to fear,uncertainty of a possible attack, you have already given in to fear and uncertainty and I believe this goes against the very philosophy of what Debian stands for, being bold, taking chances and having trust in your fellow men. If we haven t allowed proprietary, commercial software to win over us, how can we allow less than 0.1% radically motivated people to scare us ? And the recent attack just proves that it takes just one twisted personality with a perverse sense of justice or whatever s/he/ thinks as just to do what s/he did. More guns and more security are certainly not the answer here. A more troubling part is not terrorism but caste-ism and racism which have been also making news (not in a good way) in India. Now while I cannot claim to have any knowledge about Africans apart from 2-3 conversations which didn t go anywhere, two-three preconceived notions about them can easily be countered. As far as drugs are concerned, IF some Africans are doing drugs smuggling, it would be wrong to pin all of it onto them. India has been fighting drugs smuggling from the 70 s itself. From what we know and have learnt over the years from consuming media, India shares porous borders with almost all our neighbors. Of those, Pakistan is supposed to be the largest grower and supplier and then Nepal where young boys are used as Traffickers. The recent film Rocky Handsome and the recent upcoming controversial movie Udta Punjab are trying to explore these issues. As far as drinking in open is concerned, I have seen and been part of Punjabi parties where both men and women drink without abandon in farm parties. Russians, Germans and Israelis can also out-drink a person on their day/mood. As far as sexuality is concerned, we are the second most populous country in the world, so the less said the better . I believe though that underneath this racism is money, greed, phobia, language barriers and just maybe some lifestyle choices as well. I have seen North-Eastern, Chinese, Buddhist people being colored with the same brush. The more interesting case is with the Buddhist as can be seen in Himachal Pradesh, where locals feel they are deprived as Europeans come and indulge Buddhists for their monasteries and their way of life while locals don t get much money from them. This is partly true, but also due to our own short-comings in dealing with westerners. I have never seen my own countrymen going out of their way to make westerners or any tourists for that matter feel welcome in a genuine way. More often, the behavior is between hostility, jealousy and a perverted sense of hero-worship due to the color of skin. As far as being racist and bigoted are concerned, it seems we are not alone, just day before came across this news from Malaysia which is interesting in the sense that how people from different communities frame their own history and people around them, forget that is false and misleading to what we in India know to be the truth, it probably is/would be interesting for somebody who does comparative history, myth and folklore analysis. I was actually planning to talk about some of the talks I am looking forward to hearing and seeing on Debconf but guess that will have to wait for few more days. Hope to publish one more before actually flying to Debconf. Till later.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #racism, #terrorism, #vaccinations

Elsa Bike Trophy 2016 my first bike race! So today, after two months of intermittent training using Zwift and some actual outside rides, I did my first bike race. Not of 2016, not of 2000+, but like ever. Which is strange, as I learned biking very young, and I did like to bike. But as it turned out, even though I didn't like running as a child, I did participate in a number of running events over the years, but no biking ones. The event Elsa Bike Trophy is a mountain bike event cross-country, not downhill or anything crazy; it takes part in Estavayer-le-Lac, and has two courses - one 60Km with 1'791m altitude gain, and a smaller one of 30Km with 845m altitude gain. I went, of course, for the latter. 845m is more than I ever did in a single ride, so it was good enough for a first try. The web page says that this smaller course est nerveux, technique et ne laisse que peu de r pit . I choose to think that's a bit of an exaggeration, and that it will be relatively easy (as I'm not too skilled technically). The atmosphere there was like for the running races, with the exception of bike stuff being sold, and people on very noisy rollers. I'm glad for my trainer which sounds many decibels quieter The long race started at 12:00, and the shorter one at 12:20. While waiting for the start I had to concerns in mind: whether I'm able to do the whole course (endurance), and whether it will be too cold (the weather kept moving towards rain). I had a small concern about the state of the course, as it was not very nice weather recently, but a small one. And then, after one hour plus of waiting, go! Racing, with a bit of "swimming" At first thing went as expected. Starting on paved roads, moving towards the small town exit, a couple of 14% climbs, then more flat roads, then a nice and hard 18% short climb (I'll never again complain about < 10%!), then entering the woods. It became quickly apparent that the ground in the forest was in much worse state than I feared. Much worse as in a few orders of magnitude. In about 5 minutes after entering the tree cover, my reasonably clean, reasonably light bike became a muddy, heavy monster. And the pace that until then went quite OK became walking pace, as the first rider that didn't manage to keep going up because the wheel turned out of the track blocked the one behind him, which had to stop, and repeat until we were one line (or two, depending on how wide the trail was) of riders walking their bikes up. While on dry ground walking your bike up is no problem, or hiking through mud with good hiking shoes is also no problem, walking up with biking shoes is a pain. Your foot slides and you waste half of your energy "swimming" in the mud. Once the climb is over, you get on the bike, and of course the pedals and cleats are full of heavy mud, so it takes a while until you can actually clip in. Here the trail version of SPD was really useful, as I could pedal reasonably well without being clipped-in, just had to be careful and push too hard. Then maybe you exit the trail and get on paved road, but the wheels are so full of mud that you still are very slow (and accelerate very slowly), until the shed enough of the mud to become somewhat more "normal". After a bit of this "up through mud, flat and shedding mud", I came upon the first real downhill section. I would have been somewhat confident in dry ground, but I got scared and got off my bike. Better safe than sorry was the thing for now. And after this is was a repetition of the above: climb, sometimes (rarely) on the bike, most times pushing the bike, fast flat sections through muddy terrain where any mistake of controlling the bike can send the front wheel flying due to the mud being highly viscous, slow flat sections through very liquid mud where it definitely felt like swimming, or any dry sections. My biggest fear, uphill/endurance, was unfounded. The most gains I made were on the dry uphills, where I had enough stamina to overtake. On flat ground I mostly kept order (i.e. neither being overtaken nor overtaking), but on downhill sections, I lost lots of time, and was overtaken a lot. Still, it was a good run. And then, after about 20 kilometres out of the 30, I got tired enough of getting off the bike, on the bike, and also tired mentally and not being careful enough, that I stopped getting off the bike on downhills. And the feeling was awesome! It was actually much much easier to flow through the mud and rocks and roots on downhill, even when it was difficult (for me) like 40cm drops (estimated), than doing it on foot, where you slide without control and the bike can come crashing down on you. It was a liberating feel, like finally having overcome the mud. I was soo glad to have done a one-day training course with Swiss Alpine Adventure, as it really helped. Thanks Dave! Of course, people were still overtaking me, but I also overtook some people (who were on foot; he he, I wasn't the only one it seems). And being easier, I had some more energy so I was able to push a bit harder on the flats and dry uphill sections. And then the remaining distance started shrinking, and the last downhill was over, I entered through familiar roads the small town, a passer-by cries "one kilometre left", I push hard (I mean, hard as I could after all the effort), and I reach the finish. Oh, and my other concern, the rain? Yes it did rain somewhat, and I was glad for it (I keep overheating); there was a single moment I felt cold, when exiting a nice cosy forest into a field where the wind was very strong headwind, of course. Lessons learned I did learn a lot in this first event.

• indoor training sessions only help with endurance (but they do good on this); they don't help with technique, and most importantly, they don't teach how to handle the bike in inclement weather; biking to work on paved road also doesn't help.
• nevertheless, indoor training does help with endurance
• mud guards ; before the race, I thought they'll help; during the race, I cursed at the extra weight and their seemingly uselessness; after the race, after I saw how other people looked, I realised that indeed they helped a lot I was only dirty on my legs, mostly below the knee, but not on my upper body. Unsure whether I will use the again.
• a drop seat is not needed if your seat is set in-between, but sure damn would have been more easy with one
• installing your GPS on your handle-bar with elastic bands in a section of non-constant diameter is a very bad idea, as it lives in an unstable equilibrium: any move towards the thinner section makes the mount very loose, and you have to lose time fixing it.

Results So, how did I do after all? As soon as I reached the finish and recovered my items, among which the phone, I checked the datasport page: I was rank 59/68 in my category. Damn, I hoped (and thought) I would do better. Similar % in the overall ranking for this distance. That aside, it was mighty fun. So much fun I'd do it again tomorrow! I forgot the awesome atmosphere of such events, even in the back of the rankings. And then, after I reach drive home and open on my workstation the datasport page, I get very confused: the overall number of participants was different. And the I realised: not everybody finished the race when I first checked (d'oh)! Final ranking: 59 out of 84 in my category, and 247/364 in the overall 30km rankings. That makes it 70% and 67% respectively, which matches somewhat with my usual running results a few years back (but a bit worse). It is in any case better than what I thought originally, yay! Also, Strava activity for some more statistics (note that my Garmin says it was not 800+ meters of altitude ): I'd embed a Veloviewer nice 3D-map but I can't seem to get the embed option, hmm TODO: train more endurance, train more technique, train in more various conditions!

A longish blog post, please bear, a second part of the blog post would be published in few days from now. My fixed visa finally arrived, yeah But this story doesn t start here, it starts about a year back. While I have been contributing to Debian in my free time over the years, and sometimes paid time as well, I had never thought of going overseas as the experiences I knew from friends and relatives, it isn t easy to get all the permissions and paperwork done to say the least (bureaucracy @ work). But last year, when Debconf 15 was being launched, there are/were 2-3 friends of mine who are studying, doing their Ph.D. in some computer/web stuff, living in Germany currently that they goaded me to apply. The first few times I gave some standard excuses, but when they kept on for a while, just to shut them up I applied to the debconf team applying for food, accommodation and travel sponsorship. I didn t have high hopes as there obviously are many more talented peers around me who understand FOSS and Debian at a much more fundamental, philosophical as well as technical level than me. Much to my surprise though, about a month (and around two or three weeks just before the event was about to take place) I got the bursary/sponsorships for food, accommodation as well as travel. I was unsure that the remaining time was enough to get a visa hence declined that time around. That whole episode gave me the confidence that perhaps my application would be accepted if I applied again. Using my previous years understanding, decided to give it a shot again as this would also enable me to get a feel of visa bureaucracy as well as gain a bit of novice understanding about what factors go in choosing a flight and believe me the latter part proved to be pretty confusing. While the visa business seems easy, the form at least is easy and what they ask, it can be troublesome as far as visa-processing process is concerned. It took a better part of the month to get the visa which I needed. The in-between time is and can be a bit stressful as you have committed funds for travel i.e. the airline tickets and are in a limbo as you didn t know that if the visa is cancelled for some reason, your tickets would be refunded or not. A little history is needed and hopefully is helpful for anybody who s applying for a short-stay Visa in South Africa. Exactly, A month and day back I had applied for visa. The visa I had applied for is 17 days as the flights within my budget was for those days only. The visa I got was for 10 days only which was ending in the middle of the conference. I tried many avenues to get information and was told that I needed to write a correction letter telling/sharing the information about the correct time period and dates in BOLD with a heavier weight/point which is what I did and gave to VFS office without any further payment on my part. It took a bit more time than the first time around but the consulate co-operated. While I can understand the oversight as they probably get more visas requests along with special and urgent requests so such occurrences can happen. I am and was happy that there was a recourse rather than starting from scratch which probably would have made me more anxious due to the first experience . Apparently I was lucky that I had done with Qatar Airways as later came to know that there are other airways which don t refund money even after visa rejection . This information I got to know pretty late in the game otherwise I wouldn t have been much stressed. As had committed knew had to go the whole hog and whatever barriers are there, have overcome at least as far as the visa part/process is concerned. Now after few days, will probably start to worry about the actual travel, part nervousness, part excitement, nervousness as it will be an alien land, am obese so traveling economy on 787-8 and 777-300 ER will be tricky. The 787-8 will probably be a rough ride as it s a 9 hr. journey and the seat are a mere 18 , the cattle class as shared by one of our esteemed politicians. This blame has to do with Boeing 787 rather than anybody else. Hopefully, if there is a next time, would make better choices. Anyways,have selected an aisle seat so that will be able to walk every hr. or so to get the circulation in legs going as leg room in economy is not much from my domestic air travel experiences. If I do survive the travel, then will see South Africa and try to get some free time and explore South Africa and try to figure out how are they able to get one and half time tourists while we get around half figure for a whole year even though we are bigger (area-wise) to South Africa. I did find something positive for us as well, it s not all doldrums all around. Now, I had been thinking about if I know any South African music and movies. I had explored djembe while growing up in teens but other than that, not much. The only music I have heard is Harry Belafonte . So I hope to bring some Indian movies and music with me so that people if they have not explored Bollywood as well as Indian classical music could explore some of it, of course it will be pale imitation of what Sawai Gandharva Music Festival for instance gives. I also hope to hear and get some music and movies to learn more about South Africa.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #bollywood, #Debconf Germany 2015, #Debconf South Africa 2016, #Debconf15, #Debconf16, #djembe, #South-African consulate, music, tourism, visa

Debian is quite probably the project that most uses a OpenPGP implementation (that is, GnuPG, or gpg) for many of its internal operations, and that places most trust in it. PGP is also very widely used, of course, in many other projects and between individuals. It is regarded as a secure way to do all sorts of crypto (mainly, encrypting/decrypting private stuff, signing public stuff, certifying other people's identities). PGP's lineage traces back to Phil Zimmerman's program, first published in 1991 By far, not a newcomer PGP is secure, as it was 25 years ago. However, some uses of it might not be so. We went through several migrations related to algorithmic weaknesses (i.e. v3 keys using MD5; SHA1 is strongly discouraged, although not yet completely broken, and it should be avoided as well) or to computational complexity (as the migration away from keys smaller than 2048 bits, strongly prefering 4096 bits). But some vulnerabilities are human usage (that is, configuration-) related. Today, Enrico Zini gave us a heads-up in the #debian-keyring IRC channel, and started a thread in the debian-private mailing list; I understand the mail to a private list was partly meant to get our collective attention, and to allow for potentially security-relevant information to be shared. I won't go into details about what is, is not, should be or should not be private, but I'll post here only what's public information already. What are short and long key IDs? I'll start by quoting Enrico's mail:

there are currently at least 3 ways to refer to a gpg key: short key ID (last 8 hex digits of fingerprint), long key ID (last 16 hex digits) and full fingerprint. The short key ID used to be popular, and since 5 years it is known that it is computationally easy to generate a gnupg key with an arbitrary short key id. A mitigation to this is using "keyid-format long" in gpg.conf, and a better thing to do, especially in scripts, is to use the full fingerprint to refer to a key, or just ship the public key for verification and skip the key servers. Note that in case of keyid collision, gpg will download and import all the matching keys, and will use all the matching keys for verifying signatures.

So... What is this about? We humans are quite bad at recognizing and remembering randomly-generated strings with no inherent patterns in them. Every GPG key can be uniquely identified by its fingerprint, a 128-bit string, usually encoded as ten blocks of four hexadecimal characters (this allows for 160 bits; I guess there's space for a checksum in it). That is, my (full) key's signature is:

AB41 C1C6 8AFD 668C A045  EBF8 673A 03E4 C1DB 921F

However, it's quite hard to recognize such a long string, let alone memorize it! So, we often do what humans do: Given that strong cryptography implies a homogenous probability distribution, people compromised on using just a portion of the key the last portion. The short key ID. Mine is then the last two blocks (shown in boldface): C1DB921F. We can also use what's known as the long key ID, that's twice as long: 64 bits. However, while I can speak my short key ID on a single breath (and maybe even expect you to remember and note it down), try doing so with the long one (shown in italics above): 673A03E4C1DB921F. Nah. Too much for our little, analog brains. This short and almost-rememberable number has then 32 bits of entropy I have less than one in 4,000,000,000 chance of generating a new key with this same short key ID. Besides, key generation is a CPU-intensive operation, so it's quite unlikely we will have a collision, right? Well, wrong. Previous successful attacks on short key IDs Already five years ago, Asheesh Laroia migrated his 1024D key to a 4096R. And, as he describes in his always-entertaining fashion, he made his computer sweat until he was able to create a new key for which the short key ID collided with the old one. It might not seem like a big deal, as he did this non-maliciously, but this easily should have spelt game over for the usage of short key IDs. After all, being able to generate a collision is usually the end for cryptographic systems. Asheesh specifically mentioned in his posting how this could be abused. But we didn't listen. Short key IDs are just too convenient! Besides, they allow us to have fun, can be a means of expression! I know of at least two keys that would qualify as vanity: Obey Arthur Liu's 0x29C0FFEE (created in 2009) and Keith Packard's 0x00000011 (created in 2012). Then we got the Evil 32 project. They developed Scallion, started (AFAICT) in 2012. Scallion automates the search for a 32-bit collision using GPUs; they claim that it takes only four seconds to find a collision. So, they went through the strong set of the public PGP Web of Trust, and created a (32-bit-)colliding key for each of the existing keys. And what happened now? What happened today? We still don't really know, but it seems we found a first potentially malicious collision that is, the first "nonacademic" case. Enrico found two keys sharing the 9F6C6333 short ID, apparently belonging to the same person (as would be the case of Asheesh, mentioned above). After contacting Gustavo, though, he does not know about the second That is, it can be clearly regarded as an impersonation attempt. Besides, what gave away this attempt are the signatures it has: Both keys are signed by what appears to be the same three keys: B29B232A, F2C850CA and 789038F2. Those three keys are not (yet?) uploaded to the keyservers, though... But we can expect them to appear at any point in the future. We don't know who is behind this, or what his purpose is. We just know this looks very evil. Now, don't panic: Gustavo's key is safe. Same for his certifiers, Marga, Agust n and Maxy. It's just a 32-bit collision. So, in principle, the only parties that could be cheated to trust the attacker are humans, right? Nope. Enrico tested on the PGP pathfinder & key statistics service, a keyserver that finds trust paths between any two arbitrary keys in the strong set. Surprise: The pathfinder works on the short key IDs, even when supplied full fingerprints. So, it turns out I have three faked trust paths into our impostor. What next? There are several things this should urge us to do.

• First of all, configure your local GPG to never show you short IDs. This is done by adding the line keyid-format 0xlong to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.
  • I just checked both in /usr/share/gnupg/options.skel and /usr/share/gnupg2/gpg-conf.skel, and that setting is not yet part of the packages' defaults. I'll check a bit deeper and file bugs right away if needed!
• Have you written or maintained any program that deals with GPG keys in any way? Make sure it specifies --keyid-format long or 0xlong in any relevant call. It might even be better to use the machine-oriented representation instead: --with-colons.
  • ...Of course, your computer will not feel tired or confused at comparing 160-bit full fingerprints instead of 64-bit long IDs, so it's better if our scripts use the full version for everything.
• Only sign somebody else's key if you see and verify its full fingerprint (this is not a new issue, but given we are talking about it, and that DebConf is around the corner, and that we will have a KSP as usual...)

And there are surely many other important recommendations. But this is a good set of points to start with. [update] I was pointed at Daniel Kahn Gillmor's 2013 blog post, OpenPGP Key IDs are not useful. Daniel argues, in short, that cutting a fingerprint in order to get a (32- or 64-bit) short key ID is the worst of all worlds, and we should rather target either always showing full fingerprints, or not showing it at all (and leaving all the crypto-checking bits to be done by the software, as comparing 160-bit strings is not natural for us humans). [update] This post was picked up by LWN.net. A very interesting discussion continues in their comments.

How to manage your photos? That is probably the biggest question for anyone doing anything with a photo camera. As resolutions of cameras grow, the data we have to manage is growing ever. In my case I am talking about more than 50000 photos and videos measuring up to about 200Gb of disk space, constantly growing. There are several photo management softwares out there, I guess the most commonly used ones are Shotwell for the Gnome desktop, digiKam for the KDE world, and FotoXX. I have not used Shotwell and digiKam for quite some time, and collect here my experiences of strength and weaknesses of the two programs. FotoXX seems to be very powerful, too, but I haven t tested it till now.
There is no clear winner here, unfortunately. Both have their strength and their weaknesses. And as a consequence I am using both in parallel. Before I start a clear declaration: I have been using Shotwell for many years, and have myself contributed considerable code to Shotwell, in particular the whole comment system (comments for photos and events), as well as improved the Piwigo upload features. I started using digiKam some month ago when I started to look for offloading parts of my photo library to external devices. Since then I have used both in parallel. Let us start with what these programs say about themselves: Shotwell is declared as a Photo Manager for Gnome 3, with the following features:

• Import from disk or camera
• Organize by time-based Events, Tags (keywords), Folders, and more
• View your photos in full-window or fullscreen mode
• Crop, rotate, color adjust, straighten, and enhance photos
• Slideshow
• Video and RAW photo support
• Share to major Web services, including Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube

digiKam says about itself that it is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX. It has a very long feature page with a short list at the beginning:

• import pictures
• organize your collection
• view items
• edit and enhance
• create (slideshows, calendar, print, )
• share your creations (using social web services, email, your own web allery, )

Now that sounds like they are very similar, but upon using them it turns out that there are huge differences, that can easily be summed up in a short statement:

Shotwell is Gnome 3 that means get rid of functionality. digiKam is KDE that means provide as much functionality as possible.

Now before you run after me with a knife because you do not agree with me on the above, either read on, or stop reading. I am not interested in flame wars over Gnome versus KDE philosophy. I have been using Gnome since many years, and tried to convince myself to G3 for more than a year until I threw out all of it but selected programs but their number is going down. Let us look at those aspects I am using: organization, offline, sharing, editing. Organization In Shotwell, your photos are organized into events, independent from their location on disk. These events can have title and comment and collect a set of related photos. In my case I often have photos from two or more cameras (my camera and mobile, photos of friends), which I keep in separate directories within a main directory for the event. For example I have a folder 2016/05.21-22.Climbing.Tanigakadake with two sub-folders Norbert (for my photos) and Friend (for my friends photos). In Shotwell all the photos are in the same event, which is shown with title 05.21-22 Tanigakawadake Climbing within the 2016 year and May month.
So in short Shotwell distinguishes between disk layout and album/event names. In digiKam there is a strict connection between disk layout and album names 1:1. Albums are directories. One can adjust the viewer to show all photos of sub-albums in the main album, and by this one can achieve the same effect of merging all photos of my friend and myself. The good thing in this approach is that one can easily have sub-albums: Imagine a trip to three different islands of Hawaii during one trip. This is something easy to achieve in digiKam, but hard in Shotwell.
Other organization methods Both Shotwell and digiKam support tags, including hierarchical tags and rating (0-5 stars). Shotwell has in addition a quick flag action that I used quite often for initial selecting photos, as well as accepted and rejected. digiKam also has so called picks (no pick, reject, pending, accepted), and colors (not used by now). Both programs have some face detection support, but also this I haven t used. So in the organization respect there is no clear winner. I like the Event idea of Shotwell, or better, the separation of events from the disk structure. But on the other hand, Shotwell does not allow for sub-albums, which is also a pain. No clear winner draw Offline storage That is simple: Shotwell: forget it, not reasonably possible. One can move parts to an external HD, then unplug it, and Shotwell will tell you that all the photos are missings. And when you plug the external HD in, it will redetect them. But this is not proper support, just a consequence of hash sum storage. Also separation into several libraries (online and offline) is not supported. On the other hand, digiKam supports multiple libraries, partly offline, without a hinch. I would love to have this feature in Shotwell, because I need to free disk space, urgently!!! Clear winner: digiKam Sharing Again here my testing is very restricted I am using my own Piwigo installation exclusively. Here Shotwell is excellent in providing support for various features: upload to existing category, create new category, resize, optionally remove tags, add comments to albums and photos, etc. (partly implemented by me
On the other hand digiKam has a very barebone interface to Piwigo you can upload photos to an existing album and resize them, but that is already everything. One also needs to say that the list of supported services in digiKam is by far longer than the one in Shotwell, but the main services (usual suspects) are supported in both.
Clear winner: Shotwell (but I haven t tested other upload services). Editing The editing capabilities of Shotwell are again very restricted: red eyes, resize, levels, .
digiKam here is more like a photo editor software with loads of tools and features. I haven t even explored all the options maybe I can get rid of GIMP, too?
Clear winner: digiKam Conclusions While I am still working with both, I actually would love to move completely to digiKam. I simply cannot stand the Gnome 3 philosophy of reducing functionality to a minimal for dummy users. There is a market for that, sure, but I am not one of it. Unfortunately, the missing Event support, and much more the completely minimal support for Piwigo sharing in digiKam is a big show stopper at the moment. Even after testing the upcoming digiKam 5.0 version for some time, I didn t see any improvement wrt to sharing. That leaves me with the only option to continue working with both programs, and hope to get a new bigger SSD before the current one runs out of space. Of course I could start hacking into the digiKam source maybe I do this when I have a bit more time to add proper Piwigo support.

For the last few months, it seems that my posts haven't been reaching the Planet Debian aggregator correctly. I timed the last two posts and they both arrived roughly 10 days late in the feed.

SNI issues At first, I suspected I was a victim of the SNI bug in Planet Venus: since it is still running in Python 2.7 and uses httplib2 (as opposed to, say, Requests), it has trouble with sites running under SNI. In January, there were 9 blogs with that problem on Planet. When this was discussed elsewhere in February, there were now 18, and then 21 reported in March. With everyone enabling (like me) Let's Encrypt on their website, this number is bound to grow. I was able to reproduce the Debian Planet setup locally to do further tests and ended up sending two (unrelated) patches to the Debian bug tracker against Planet Venus, the software running Debian planet. In my local tests, I found 22 hosts with SNI problems. I also posted some pointers on how the code could be ported over to the more modern Requests and Cachecontrol modules.

Expiry issues However, some of those feeds were working fine on philp, the host I found was running as the Planet Master. Even more strange, my own website was working fine!

INFO:planet.runner:Feed https://anarc.at/tag/debian-planet/index.rss unchanged

Now that was strange: why was my feed fetched, but noted as unchanged? For that, I found that there was a FAQ question buried down in the PlanetDebian wikipage which explicitly said that Planet obeys Expires headers diligently and will not get new content again if the headers say they did. Skeptical, I looked my own headers and, ta-da! they were way off:

$ curl -v https://anarc.at/tag/debian-planet/index.rss 2>&1   egrep  '< (Expires Date)'
< Date: Sat, 14 May 2016 19:59:28 GMT
< Expires: Sat, 28 May 2016 19:59:28 GMT

So I lowered the expires timeout on my RSS feeds to 3 hours:

root@marcos:/etc/apache2# git diff
diff --git a/apache2/conf-available/expires.conf b/apache2/conf-available/expires.conf
index 214f3dd..a983738 100644
--- a/apache2/conf-available/expires.conf
+++ b/apache2/conf-available/expires.conf
@@ -3,8 +3,18 @@
   # Enable expirations.
   ExpiresActive On
-  # Cache all files for 2 weeks after access (A).
-  ExpiresDefault A1209600
+  # Cache all files 12 hours after access
+  ExpiresDefault "access plus 12 hours"
+
+  # RSS feeds should refresh more often
+  <FilesMatch \.(rss)$>
+    ExpiresDefault "modification plus 4 hours"
+  </FilesMatch> 
+
+  # images are *less* likely to change
+  <FilesMatch "\.(gif jpg png js css)$">
+    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
+  </FilesMatch>
   <FilesMatch \.(php cgi)$>
     # Do not allow scripts to be cached unless they explicitly send cache

I also lowered the general cache expiry, except for images, Javascript and CSS.

Planet Venus maintenance A small last word about all this: I'm surprised to see that Planet Debian is running a 6 year old software that hasn't seen a single official release yet, with local patches on top. It seems that Venus is well designed, I must give them that, but it's a little worrisome to see great software just rotting around like this. A good "planet" site seems like a resource a lot of FLOSS communities would need: is there another "Planet-like" aggregator out there that is well maintained and more reliable? In Python, preferably. PlanetPlanet, which Venus was forked from, is out of the question: it is even less maintained than the new fork, which itself seems to have died in 2011. There is a discussion about the state of Venus on Github which reflects some of the concerns expressed here, as well as on the mailing list. The general consensus seems to be that everyone should switch over to Planet Pluto, which is written in Ruby. I am not sure which planet Debian sits on - Pluto? Venus? Besides, Pluto is not even a planet anymore...

Mike check! So this is also a test to see if my posts reach Debian Planet correctly. I suspect no one will ever see this on the top of their feeds, since the posts do get there, but with a 10 days delay and with the original date, so they are "sunk" down. The above expiration fixes won't take effect until the 10 days delay is over... But if you did see this as noise, retroactive apologies in advance for the trouble. If you are reading this from somewhere else and wish to say hi, don't hesitate, it's always nice to hear from my readers.

Review: The Oath, by Jeffrey Toobin

Publisher:	Anchor
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	June 2013
ISBN:	0-307-39071-3
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	298

Jeffrey Toobin is a legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker and plays a similar role for the intricacies of the legal system as popular science writers play for physics. I'd previously read and reviewed his The Nine, an excellent history of the Rehnquist Supreme Court. The Oath is half sequel and half extension, bringing the same analysis to the first four years of the Obama presidency and the appointments of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sequels to popular history books that are not explicitly multi-volume works are a tricky publishing niche. People expect them to stand alone; I doubt it would work to tell people "read The Nine before reading this book," and regardless, Toobin did not take that approach. But the court profiled in The Oath only differs by two justices than that in The Nine. There was therefore a fair bit of repetition, since Toobin felt obligated to repeat his profiles of the five members of the court he had already deeply analyzed in the previous book. He even retold the story of Sandra Day O'Conner leaving the court despite it falling outside the focus of this book. I think these 300 pages could have been 150 pages of additional material in The Nine if Toobin had started this project later. That said, if you enjoyed The Nine (and I very much did), this is more of the same. Toobin picks up with Obama's inauguration ceremony and a fascinating bit of legal trivia over the oath of office, and then provides a detailed profile of the Roberts court and the major decisions of the first four years of Obama's presidency. His discussion of the nomination process and Obama's judicial philosophy rang very true following the death of Scalia: Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland is exactly what one would predict from Toobin's discussion. And, as with the previous book, I discovered that I had a lot of misconceptions about both Sotomayor and Kagan that Toobin cleared up. He does a great job showing the complexities of the interplay between law, politics, apparently unlikely friendships (such as Scalia and Ginsburg), and the executive and judicial branch. Worth particular mention is Toobin's discussion of the office of Solicitor General of the United States. I had no idea the role it plays in Supreme Court decisions. If I had given it any thought at all, I would have assumed it was essentially a variation on White House Counsel crossed with the Attorney General's office. But it's quite a bit more than that, as Elena Kagan's profile shows. If you, like I, raised an eyebrow at Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court from Solicitor General, wondering if that was at all similar to Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers, this section will be very informative. White House Counsel and Solicitor General are very, very different positions. However, The Oath has one major drawback that The Nine didn't: it's partisan. Now, Toobin is a liberal, with a clear preference towards the progressive side of the court. This was also true in The Nine, and I don't think that's a serious problem. Everyone writes from a particular perspective; stating it is more honest than concealing it, and it's the reader's responsibility to weigh multiple sides. But I thought Toobin was largely fair to those he disagreed with in The Nine. Even Thomas received some defense against popular misconceptions. It probably helped that much of that book focuses on conservatives who became liberals as the court shifted, people like Sandra Day O'Conner for whom Toobin has clear respect. I commented in my review of the previous book that it didn't feel quite balanced, but it felt like Toobin was trying hard to be fair. The Oath does not give that same feeling. Toobin hates the direction of the Roberts court, hates most of its 5-4 decisions, and strongly disagrees with the judicial philosophies of both Roberts and Alito. But more than that, he is clearly dubious that they even have coherent judicial philosophies. Maybe that's a legitimate critique, maybe it's not; regardless, I don't think he proves his case. The tone of much of the book is disgusted and angry rather than deliberate and relentless. Where Toobin engages with the thought process of Alito or, particularly, Roberts, the primary focus is to disagree with it rather than explain it. This happens to match my own emotional reaction, but I doubt it will be persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with Toobin, and it hurts the quality of the history. I suspect this would have been a better book if Toobin had waited ten years before writing it (still covering the same time frame). Some distance from the subject helps provide a more complete and thoughtful history. But, of course, it likely wouldn't have sold as well. That said, one of the themes of this book is how the conservatives on the Roberts court are currently playing the role of radicals from the perspective of the judicial tradition, overturning settled case law and calling into question precedents that have been used to decide numerous cases. The liberals, in contrast, are currently mostly playing the role of conservatives: standing up for the principle of stare decisis, trying to maintain consistency with past decisions, trying to minimize disruptive change. Conservatives will argue (correctly) that this depends on one's time frame and that they're trying to overturn radical past decisions, but those radical decisions, whatever their merits, are now often more than fifty years into the past. I hadn't thought about the current Supreme Court ideological battles from that perspective and found it eye-opening. It also ties in well with Obama's judicial philosophy as Toobin presents it: preferring democracy, laws, and change from the ballot box, and with little appetite for controversial court decisions. Obama is a judicial conservative. He therefore favors the liberal wing as the court is currently constructed, but not because he has much appetite for pushing forward civil rights in the courts. This is not the book The Nine was. It's repetitive if you've read the previous book (which you should, as it's the better book of the two), and I thought Toobin's critical balance was off. But it has a lot of interesting things to say about Obama's approach to the law, how the executive branch interacts with the Supreme Court, and the philosophy and approaches of the newer justices on the court. Recommended, although not as strongly. Rating: 7 out of 10

Explaining G del s theorems to students is a pain. Period. How can those poor creatures crank their mind around a Completeness and an Incompleteness Proof I understand that. But then, there are brave souls using G del s theorems to explain the world of demons to writers, in particular to answer the question:

You can control a Demon by knowing its True Name, but why?

Very impressive. Found at worldbuilding.stackexchange.com, pointed to me by a good friend. I dare to full quote author Cort Ammon (nothing more is known), to preserve this masterpiece. Thanks!!!!

---

Use of their name forces them to be aware of the one truth they can never know. Tl/Dr: If demons seek permanent power but trust no one, they put themselves in a strange position where mathematical truisms paint them into a corner which leaves their soul small and frail holding all the strings. Use of their name suggests you might know how to tug at those strings and unravel them wholesale, from the inside out! Being a demon is tough work. If you think facing down a 4000lb Glabrezu without their name is difficult, try keeping that much muscle in shape in the gym! Never mind how many manicurists you go through keeping the claws in shape! I don t know how creative such demons truly are, but the easy route towards the perfect French tip that can withstand the rigors of going to the gym and benching ten thousand pounds is magic. Such a demon might learn a manicure spell from the nearby resident succubi. However, such spells are often temporary. No demon worth their salt is going to admit in front of a hero that they need a moment to refresh their mani before they can fight. The hero would just laugh at them. No, if a demon is going to do something, they re going to do it right, and permanently. Not just nice french tips with a clear lacquer over the top, but razor sharp claws that resharpen themselves if they are blunted and can extend or retract at will! In fact, come to think of it, why even go to the gym to maintain one s physique? Why not just cast a magic spell which permanently makes you into the glorious Hanz (or Franz) that the trainer keeps telling you is inside you, just waiting to break free. Just get the spell right once, and think of the savings you could have on gym memberships. Demons that wish to become more powerful, permanently, must be careful. If fairy tales have anything to teach is, it s that one of the most dangerous things you can do is wish for something forever, and have it granted. Forever is a very long time, and every spell has its price. The demon is going to have to make sure the price is not greater than the perks. It would be a real waste to have a manicure spell create the perfect claws, only to find that they come with a peculiar perchance to curve towards one s own heart in an attempt to free themselves from the demon that cast them. So we need proofs. We need proofs that each spell is a good idea, before we cast it. Then, once we cast it, we need proof that the spell actually worked intended. Otherwise, who knows if the next spell will layer on top perfectly or not. Mathematics to the rescue! The world of First Order Logic (FOL, or herefter simply logic ) is designed to offer these guarantees. With a few strokes of a pen, pencil, or even brush, it can write down a set of symbols which prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that not only will the spell work as intended, but that the side effects are manageable. How? So long as the demon can prove that they can cast a negation spell to undo their previous spell, the permanency can be reverted by the demon. With a few more fancy symbols, the demon can also prove that nobody else outside of the demon can undo their permanency. It s a simple thing for mathematics really. Mathematics has an amazing spell called reductio ad infinitum which does unbelievable things. However, there is a catch. There is always a catch with magic, even when that magic is being done through mathematics. In 1931, Kurt G del published his Incompleteness Theorems. These are 3 fascinating works of mathematical art which invoke the true names of First Order Logic and Set Theory. G del was able to prove that any system which is powerful enough to prove out all of algebra (1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, 3 * 5 = 15, etc.), could not prove its own validity. The self referential nature of proving itself crossed a line that First Order Logic simply could not return from. He proved that any system which tries must pick up one of these five traits:

• Incomplete they missed a detail when trying to prove everything
• Incorrect They got everything, but at least one point is wrong
• Unprovable They might be right, but they can never prove it
• Intractable If you re willing to sit down and write down a proof that takes longer than eternity, you can prove a lot. Proofs that fit into eternity have limits.
• Illogical Throw logic to the wind, and you can prove anything!

If the demon wants itself to be able to cancel the spell, his proof is going to have to include his own abilities, creating just the kind of self referential effects needed to invoke G del s incompleteness theorems. After a few thousand years, the demon may realize that this is folly. A fascinating solution the demon might choose is to explore the incomplete solution to G del s challenge. What if the demon permits the spell to change itself slightly, but in an unpredictable way. If the demon was a harddrive, perhaps he lets a single byte get changed by the spell in a way he cannot expect. This is actually enough to sidestep G del s work, by introducing incompleteness. However, now we have to deal with pesky laws of physic and magics. We can t just create something out of nothing, so if we re going to let the spell change a single byte of us, there must be a single byte of information, its dual, that is unleashed into the world. Trying to break such conservation laws opens up a whole can of worms. Better to let that little bit go free into the world. Well, almost. If you repeat this process a whole bunch of times, layering spells like a Matryoska doll, you re eventually left with a soul that is nothing but the leftover bits of your spells that you simply don t know enough about to use. If someone were collecting those bits and pieces, they might have the undoing of your entire self. You can t prove it, of course, but its possible that those pieces that you sent out into the world have the keys to undo your many layers of armor, and then you know they are the bits that can nullify your soul if they get there. So what do you do? You hide them. You cast your spells only on the darkest of nights, deep in a cave where no one can see you. If you need assistants, you make sure to ritualistically slaughter them all, lest one of them know your secret and whisper it to a bundle of reeds, The king has horns, if you are familiar with the old fairy tale. Make it as hard as possible for the secret to escape, and hope that it withers away to nothingness before someone discovers it, leaving you invincible. Now we come back to the name. The demon is going to have a name it uses to describe its whole self, including all of the layers of spellcraft it has acquired. This will be a great name like Abraxis, the Unbegotten Father or Satan, lord of the underworld. However, they also need to keep track of their smaller self, their soul. Failure to keep track of this might leave them open to an attack if they had missed a detail when casting their spells, and someone uncovered something to destroy them. This would be their true name, potentially something less pompous, like Gaylord Focker or Slartybartfarst. They would never use this name in company. Why draw attention to the only part of them that has the potential to be weak. So when the hero calls out for Slartybartfarst, the demon truly must pay attention. If they know the name the demon has given over the remains of their tattered soul, might they know how to undo the demon entirely? Fear would grip their inner self, like a child, having to once again consider that they might be mortal. Surely they would wish to destroy the hero that spoke the name, but any attempt runs the risk of falling into a trap and exposing a weakness (surely their mind is racing, trying to enumerate all possible weaknesses they have). It is surely better for them to play along with you, once you use their true name, until they understand you well enough to confidently destroy you without destroying themselves. So you ask for answers which are plausible. This one needs no magic at all. None of the rules are invalid in our world today. Granted finding a spell of perfect manicures might be difficult (believe me, some women have spent their whole life searching), but the rules are simply those of math. We can see this math in non-demonic parts of society as well. Consider encryption. An AES-256 key is so hard to brute force that it is currently believed it is impossible to break it without consuming 3/4 of the energy in the Milky Way Galaxy (no joke!). However, know the key, and decryption is easy. Worse, early implementations of AES took shortcuts. They actually left the signature of the path they took through the encryption in their accesses to memory. The caches on the CPU were like the reeds from the old fable. Merely observing how long it took to read data was sufficient to gather those reeds, make a flute, and play a song that unveils the encryption key (which is clearly either The king has horns or 1-2-3-4-5 depending on how secure you think your luggage combination is). Observing the true inner self of the AES encryption implementations was enough to completely dismantle them. Of course, not every implementation fell victim to this. You had to know the name of the implementation to determine which vulnerabilities it had, and how to strike at them. Or, more literally, consider the work of Alfred Whitehead, Principia Mathematica. Principia Mathematica was to be a proof that you could prove all of the truths in arithmetic using purely procedural means. In Principia Mathematica, there was no manipulation based on semantics, everything he did was based on syntax manipulating the actual symbols on the paper. G del s Incompleteness Theorem caught Principia Mathematica by the tail, proving that its own rules were sufficient to demonstrate that it could never accomplish its goals. Principia Mathematica went down as the greatest Tower of Babel of modern mathematical history. Whitehead is no longer remembered for his mathematical work. He actually left the field of mathematics shortly afterwards, and became a philosopher and peace advocate, making a new name for himself there. (by Cort Ammon)

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 3rd and April 9th 2016: Media coverage Emily Ratliff wrote an article for SecurityWeek called Establishing Correspondence Between an Application and its Source Code - How Combining Two Completely Separate Open Source Projects Can Make Us All More Secure. Tails have started work on a design for freezable APT repositories to make it easier and practical to perform reproductions of an entire distribution at a given point in time, which will be needed to create reproducible installation- or live-media. Toolchain fixes Alexis Bienven e submitted patches adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in several tools: transfig, imagemagick, rdtool, and asciidoctor. boyska submitted one for python-reportlab. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330 brailleutils cglib3 gnugo libcobra-java libgnumail-java libjchart2d-java libjcommon-java libjfreechart-java libjide-oss-java liblaf-widget-java liblastfm-java liboptions-java octave-control octave-mpi octave-nan octave-parallel octave-stk octave-struct octave-tsa oar The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apt-listchanges/2.88 by Robert Luberda.
• cgal/4.8-1 by Joachim Reichel.
• erlang-bitcask/2.0.2+dfsg-1 by Nobuhiro Iwamatsu.
• geneweb/6.08+git20160228+dfsg-2 by Guillaume Brochu.
• glance/2:12.0.0~rc2-1 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gle-graphics/4.2.5-4 by Christian T. Steigies.
• maude uploaded by Andreas Tille, patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• psqlodbc/1:09.05.0100-3 by Christoph Berg.
• resource-agents/1:3.9.7-3 by Christoph Berg.
• vgabios/0.7a-6 by Reiner Herrmann.
• vim/2:7.4.1689-2 by James McCoy.
• xmhtml/1.1.10-2 by Graham Inggs with Reiner Herrmann's help.
• xscreensaver/5.34-2 uploaded by Tormod Volden, original patch by Sascha Steinbiss.

Several uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• rkward/0.6.5-1 uploaded by Thomas Friedrichsmeier, original patch by Philip Rinn.
• mailfilter/0.8.4-1 uploaded by Elimar Riesebieter, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• bind9/1:9.10.3.dfsg.P4-6 uploaded by Michael Gilbert, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• bzr/2.7.0- 3,4 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• samba/2:4.3.6+dfsg-2 uploaded by Mathieu Parent, fix by Jelmer Vernooij.
• fwupdate/0.5-3 by Mario Limonciello.
• paraview/5.0.1+dfsg1-1 by Anton Gladky.

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

• #819883 on debootstrap by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to sort the archive members.
• #819885 on chktex by Sascha Steinbiss: use the time of latest debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp.
• #819915 on kannel by Alexis Bienven e: use the time of latest debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp.
• #819921 on basket by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from debug info.
• #819965 on openarena-data by Alexandre Detiste: normalize file permissions before creating .pk3 archive.
• #820016 on gabedit by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files used to build the executable.
• #820032 on bibledit-gtk by Alexis Bienven e: remove useless included Makefile.
• #820072 on synfig by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from info output.
• #820148 on autopkgtest by Alexis Bienven e: fix install order to cope with locales with case insensitive globbing.
• #820152 on anope by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from the version string.
• #820179 on aodh by Alexis Bienven e: remove build date from the documentation.
• #820183 on cython by Alexis Bienven e: add support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #820194 on nasm by rain1: sorts keys when traversing hash tables used to build the documentation.
• #820226 on chrony by Alexis Bienven e: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to preset the ntp_era_split parameter.
• #820457 on recode by Alexis Bienven e: use system help2man.
• #820522 on gtkspell by Alexis Bienven e: force shell to /bin/sh in example Makefile.

Other upstream fixes Alexander Batischev made a commit to make newsbeuter reproducible. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• An architecture agnostic summary has been added to the reproducible-tracker.json by Valerie Young to make it easy to parse whether a package is unreproducible anywhere.
• To find more reproducibility issues a new variation was added to the i386 builders, so that one build is done using a 32 bit kernel (686-PAE) and the other build is using a 64 bit kernel (amd64). (h01ger)
  • Niko Tyni was the first to notice a bug due to this: #821182 perl: embeds kernel architecture information
• The 2nd builds are now done in fr_CH on amd64, de_CH on i386 and it_CH on armhf. (h01ger)
• The variation table has been updated to reflect the recent changes and various small bugs have been fixed. (h01ger)

Package reviews 93 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 21 updated in the previous week. 12 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and Ximin Luo. With the departure of Lunar as a full-time contributor, Reproducible Builds Weekly News (this thing you're reading) has moved from his personal Debian blog on Debian People to the Reproducible Builds team web site on Debian Alioth. You may want to update your RSS or Atom feeds. Very many thanks to Lunar for writing and publishing this weekly news for so long, well & continously!

Let's see if I can scrounge through all of my now-organized directories of ebooks and figure out what I haven't recorded here yet. At least the paper books make that relatively easy, since I don't shelve them until I post them. (Yeah, yeah, I should actually make a database.) Hugh Aldersey-Williams Periodic Tales (nonfiction)
Sandra Ulbrich Almazan SF Women A-Z (nonfiction)
Radley Balko Rise of the Warrior Cop (nonfiction)
Peter V. Brett The Warded Man (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook Vol. 2 (nonfiction)
Dave Duncan West of January (sff)
Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software (nonfiction)
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (nonfiction)
Andrew Groen Empires of EVE (nonfiction)
John Harris @ Play (nonfiction)
David Hellman & Tevis Thompson Second Quest (graphic novel)
M.C.A. Hogarth Earthrise (sff)
S.L. Huang An Examination of Collegial Dynamics... (sff)
S.L. Huang & Kurt Hunt Up and Coming (sff anthology)
Kameron Hurley Infidel (sff)
Kevin Jackson-Mead & J. Robinson Wheeler IF Theory Reader (nonfiction)
Rosemary Kirstein The Lost Steersman (sff)
Rosemary Kirstein The Language of Power (sff)
Merritt Kopas Videogames for Humans (nonfiction)
Alisa Krasnostein & Alexandra Pierce (ed.) Letters to Tiptree (nonfiction)
Mathew Kumar Exp. Negatives (nonfiction)
Ken Liu The Grace of Kings (sff)
Susan MacGregor The Tattooed Witch (sff)
Helen Marshall Gifts for the One Who Comes After (sff collection)
Jack McDevitt Coming Home (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Red-Rose Chain (sff)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Winter Long (sff)
Marc Miller Agent of the Imperium (sff)
Randal Munroe Thing Explainer (graphic nonfiction)
Marguerite Reed Archangel (sff)
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (sff)
K.J. Russell Tides of Possibility (sff anthology)
Robert J. Sawyer Starplex (sff)
Bruce Schneier Secrets & Lies (nonfiction)
Mike Selinker (ed.) The Kobold Game to Board Game Design (nonfiction)
Douglas Smith Chimerascope (sff collection)
Jonathan Strahan Fearsome Journeys (sff anthology)
Nick Suttner Shadow of the Colossus (nonfiction)
Aaron Swartz The Boy Who Could Change the World (essays)
Caitlin Sweet The Pattern Scars (sff)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers I (nonfiction)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers II (nonfiction)
Jeffrey Toobin The Run of His Life (nonfiction)
Hayden Trenholm Blood and Water (sff anthology)
Coen Teulings & Richard Baldwin (ed.) Secular Stagnation (nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Book of the Wombat 2015 (graphic nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Digger (graphic novel) Phew, that was a ton of stuff. A bunch of these were from two large StoryBundle bundles, which is a great source of cheap DRM-free ebooks, although still rather hit and miss. There's a lot of just fairly random stuff that's been accumulating for a while, even though I've not had a chance to read very much. Vacation upcoming, which will be a nice time to catch up on reading.

Last night I got back from spending around 5 days in the Bay Area for Spring Break. I stayed in a hostel in downtown SF for three nights and then I stayed with a friend who is doing a PhD at Stanford. When initially planning this trip my aim was just to visit somewhere interesting on the west coast of the continental United States. I chose the Bay Area because I wanted to get my PGP key signed by some Debian Developers and that area has a high concentration of DDs, and because I wanted to see my friend at Stanford. But in the end I liked San Francisco a lot more than expected to and am very glad that I had an opportunity to visit. The first thing that I liked was how easy it seemed to be to find people interested in the same kind of tech stuff that I am. I spent my first afternoon in the city exploring the famous Mission district, and at one point while sitting in the original Philz Coffee I found that the person sitting next to me was running Debian on her laptop and blogs about data privacy. We had an discussion about how viable OpenPGP is as a component of a technically unsophisticated user s attempts to stay safe online. Later that same day while riding the subway train, someone next to me fired up Emacs on their laptop. And over the course of my trip I met five Debian Developers doing all sorts of different kinds of work both in and outside of Debian, and some Debian users including one of Stanford s UNIX sysadmins. This is a far cry from my day-to-day life down in the Sonoran Desert where new releases of iOS are all anyone seems to be interested in. Perhaps I should have expected this before my trip, but I think I had assumed that most of the work being done in San Francisco was writing web apps, so I was pleased to find people working on the same kind of things that I am currently putting time into. And in saying the above, I don t mean to demean the interests of the people around me in Arizona for a moment (nor those writing web apps; I d like to learn how to write good ones at some point). I m very grateful to be able to discuss my philosophical interests with the other graduate students. It s just that I miss being able to discuss tech stuff. I guess you can t have everything you want! One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don t have knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular, low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn t be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a company that it is hard to get hired by. I don t mean that doing exactly what he s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with. Moving on from tech, I enjoyed the streets of San Francisco, and the Stanford campus. San Francisco is fantastically multicultural though with clear class and wealth divisions. A very few minutes walk from the Twitter headquarters with its tech bros , as the maths PhD students I met at Stanford call them, are legions of the un- and barely-employed passing their time on the concrete. I enjoyed riding one of the old cable cars through the aesthetically revealing and stark combination of a west coast grid system on some very steep hills. I was fortunate to be able to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on a perfectly clear and mist-free day. Meeting people involved with Debian and meeting my old friend at Stanford had me reflecting on and questioning my life in the desert even more than usual. I try to remind myself that there is an end date in sight and I will regret spending my time here just thinking about leaving. I sometimes worry that I could easily find myself moving to the big city London, San Francisco or elsewhere and letting myself be carried by the imagined self-importance of that, sidelining and procrastinating things that I should prize more highly. I should remember that the world of writing software in big cities isn t going away and my time in the desert is an opportunity to prepare myself better for that, building my resistance to being swept away by the tides of fashion.

About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian, this time also with an update to biber to accompany the updated version of biblatex. This will be (probably) the last upload before TeX Live 2015 gets frozen in preparation for 2016. After the freeze there will be some time of piece, and updates will got to experimental with the new binaries. From the list of updated and new packages I want to mention that biblatex has been updated together with biber, and most biblatex styles should already by updated to work with the new biblatex, too. From the new packages one has in particular caught my attention: prooftrees. As I am writing a lot of proofs in my research, I am happy to see new package dealing with this, especially because this package is built on top of the excellent package forest (which in turn uses tikz), allowing for very compact proofs. Updated packages aastex, abntex2, academicons, acro, amsmath, animate, archaeologie, asciilist, babel, babel-french, babel-friulan, babel-russian, babel-spanish, beamertheme-metropolis, bibexport, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-bookinarticle, biblatex-caspervector, biblatex-chem, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gost, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-nature, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-phys, biblatex-publist, biblatex-realauthor, biblatex-science, bxjscls, cabin, caption, cbfonts-fd, celtic, chemmacros, computational-complexity, crimson, csplain, datetime2-english, diagbox, disser, droit-fr, dtk, dvips, ejpecp, emisa, factura, fibeamer, fithesis, forest, gost, hobby, hyperxmp, inconsolata, lualatex-math, mandi, mcf2graph, media9, nameauth, ocgx2, parades, pdftex, pkuthss, poetrytex, ptex, reledmac, roundrect, showhyphens, siunitx, spath3, splitindex, suftesi, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texinfo, texlive-scripts, thuthesis, titlesec, turabian-formatting, unicode-data, uptex, velthuis, venndiagram, xassoccnt, xint, xsavebox. New packages beamercolorthemeowl, bibletext, cochineal, formation-latex-ul, gobble, keyvaltable, lroundrect, luatex85, mathpartir, miama, multidef, parades, pgfornament, prooftrees, visualpstricks, visualtikz, xsavebox, ycbook. Enjoy.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 28th and March 5th:

Toolchain fixes

• Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.27 that forces generated gemspecs to use the date from debian/changelog.
• Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.28 that forces generated gemspecs to have their contains file lists sorted.
• Robert Luberda uploaded ispell/3.4.00-5 which make builds of hashes reproducible.
• C dric Boutillier uploaded ruby-ronn/0.7.3-4 which will make the output locale agnostic. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Markus Koschany uploaded spring/101.0+dfsg-1. Fixed by Alexandre Detiste.

Ximin Luo resubmitted the patch adding the --clamp-mtime option to Tar on Savannah's bug tracker. Lunar rebased our experimental dpkg on top of the current master branch. Changes in the test infrastructure are required before uploading a new version to our experimental repository. Reiner Herrmann rebased our custom texlive-bin against the latest uploaded version.

Packages fixed The following 77 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: asciidoctor, atig, fuel-astute, jekyll, libphone-ui-shr, linkchecker, maven-plugin-testing, node-iscroll, origami-pdf, plexus-digest, pry, python-avro, python-odf, rails, ruby-actionpack-xml-parser, ruby-active-model-serializers, ruby-activerecord-session-store, ruby-api-pagination, ruby-babosa, ruby-carrierwave, ruby-classifier-reborn, ruby-compass, ruby-concurrent, ruby-configurate, ruby-crack, ruby-css-parser, ruby-cucumber-rails, ruby-delorean, ruby-encryptor, ruby-fakeweb, ruby-flexmock, ruby-fog-vsphere, ruby-gemojione, ruby-git, ruby-grack, ruby-htmlentities, ruby-jekyll-feed, ruby-json-schema, ruby-listen, ruby-markerb, ruby-mathml, ruby-mini-magick, ruby-net-telnet, ruby-omniauth-azure-oauth2, ruby-omniauth-saml, ruby-org, ruby-origin, ruby-prawn, ruby-pygments.rb, ruby-raemon, ruby-rails-deprecated-sanitizer, ruby-raindrops, ruby-rbpdf, ruby-rbvmomi, ruby-recaptcha, ruby-ref, ruby-responders, ruby-rjb, ruby-rspec-rails, ruby-rspec, ruby-rufus-scheduler, ruby-sass-rails, ruby-sass, ruby-sentry-raven, ruby-sequel-pg, ruby-sequel, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-slack-notifier, ruby-symboltable, ruby-timers, ruby-zip, ticgit, tmuxinator, vagrant, wagon, yard. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• air-quality-sensor/0.1.4-1 uploaded by Benedikt Wildenhain, fixed upstream, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-4 by Guillem Jover.
• fldigi/3.23.08-1 by Kamal Mostafa.
• fltk1.1/1.1.10-22 by Aaron M. Ucko.
• freeimage/3.17.0+ds1-2 by Ghislain Antony Vaillant.
• gimagereader/3.1.2+git368fa8f-2 by Philip Rinn.
• ginkgocadx/3.7.5-1 by Gert Wollny, fixed upstream.
• jadetex/3.13-17 by Norbert Preining.
• opensips/2.1.2-1 by Razvan Crainea.
• ruby-sqlite3/1.3.11-2 uploaded by C dric Boutillier, original patch by Lunar.
• runawk/1.6.0-2 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• systraq/20160303-1 by Joost van Baal-Ili .

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

• auto-multiple-choice/1.2.1-4 by Georges Khaznadar.
• avfs/1.0.3-1 uploaded by Michael Meskes, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• console-setup/1.138 uploaded by Anton Zinoviev, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• gromacs/5.1.2-1 by Nicholas Breen.
• mrrescue/1.02c-2 by Alexandre Detiste.
• usb-modeswitch-data/20160112-2 by Didier Raboud.

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

• #816209 on elog by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.
• #816214 on python-pip by Reiner Herrmann: removes timestamp from generated Python scripts.
• #816230 on rows by Reiner Herrmann: tell grep to always treat the input as text.
• #816232 on eficas by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.

Florent Daigniere and bancfc reported that linux-grsec was currently built with GRKERNSEC_RANDSTRUCT which will prevent reproducible builds with the current packaging.

tests.reproducible-builds.org pbuilder has been updated to the last version to be able to support Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Conflicts-Arch. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New package sets have been added for Subgraph OS, which is based on Debian Stretch: packages and build dependencies. (h01ger) Two new armhf build nodes have been added (thanks Vagrant Cascadian) and integrated in our Jenkins setup with 8 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger)

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.016-1 was released on Sunday 28th. It will now normalize the POT-Creation-Date field in GNU Gettext .mo files. (Reiner Herrmann) Several improvements to the packages metadata have also been made. (h01ger, Ben Finney)

Package reviews 185 reviews have been removed, 91 added and 33 updated in the previous week. New issue: fileorder_in_gemspec_files_list. 43 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb, Martin Michlmayr, and gregor herrmann.

Misc. After merging the patch from Dhiru Kholia adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in rpm, Florian Festi opened a discussion on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list about reproducible builds. On March 4th, Lunar gave an overview of the general reproducible builds effort at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia.

A very nice new update to the gtrendsR package by Philippe and myself is now avilable via CRAN. I had only blogged about the initial 1.3.0 release, and we have added a whole slew of new features and fixes. Philippe rewrote a lot of the parsing to make it more robust to different encodings, and to add other features. So in no particular order, we can now sub-group by regions more finely, withstand various misfeatures in returned data sets, generally do better on connections, and more --- and also allow for intra-day, daily and weekly queries! That last part is pretty fun. Here is the code I ran last Saturday to look at the query for Donald Drumpf, a name brought to us via a beautiful John Oliver episode worth watching which ran about nine days ago. So last Saturday, when we were still within the seven day window, I ran

library(gtrendsR)
dp <- gtrends("Donald Drumpf", res="7d")
plot(dp) + ggplot2::ggtitle("The Drumpf") + ggplot2::theme(legend.position="none")

which resulted in the following chart which highlights another nice feature: the ggplot2 object created by the plotting function is returned, so we can locally modify and tune it. Here we set a title and suppress the default legend. As I had not blogged about the interim bug-fix releases 1.3.1 and 1.3.2, here is the set of NEWS entries for the last three releases:

gtrendsR 1.3.3

• A ggplot2 object can now be returned for further customization. plot(gtrends("NHL")) + ggtitle("NHL trend") + theme(legend.position="none")
• Support for hourly and daily data (#67). For example, it is now possible to have hourly data for the last seven days with gtrends("nhl", geo = "CA", res = "7d"). Use ?gtrends for more information about the time resolution supported by the package.
• Support for categorties (#46). Ex.: gtrends("NHL", geo = "US", cat = "0-20") will search only in the sport category.
• Some countries (ex: Hong Kong) were missing from the list (#69).
• Various typos and documentation work.

gtrendsR 1.3.2

• Added support for sub-countries (#25). Ex.: gtrends("NHL", geo = "CA-QC") will return trends data for Qu bec province in Canada. The list of supported sub-countries can be obtained via data(countries).
• Data parsing should work for any data returned by Google Trends (i.e. countries independent).
• Better support for queries using keywords in different languages (#50, #57). Ex.: gtrends(" ", geo = "TW")
• Now able to specify up to five countries (#53) via gtrends("NHL", geo = c("CA", "US"))
• Fixing issue #51 allowing UK-based queries via geo = "GB"

gtrendsR 1.3.1

• Fixing issue #34 where connection verification was not done properly.
• Now able to use more latin character in query. For example: gtrends("montr al").
• Can now deal with data returned other than in English language.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the gtrendsR repo where questions, comments etc should go via the issue tickets system.

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

Edited 2016-03-08: Corrected code snipped and one grammar instance

I have been in some adventures with a group of friends for a couple of years now. We call ourselves Los Extraviaos (a quick translation to english is perhaps The Wanderers).

We like nature adventures. During summer we use to do water adventures (like rivers trekking, waterfall climbing, snorkeling, canyoning, rafting, kayaking and so on). During winter and spring, we use to do trekking, hiking and mountaineering (low altitudes, keep reading).

For this sport season, one of our main milestones is to climb the second most prominent mountain in Spain: Mulhacen, with 3.479 m over sea level, during summer (June).
From an alpinist point of view, this isn't a very big deal, since most of the mountain's snow and ice is completely melted and the altitude is not that high.
However, from our amateur mountaineering point of view we will be taking a lot of kilometres to walk and a lot of elevation gain uphill (almost 1.600 m), which is in fact a thing to take into account.
Anyway, Mulhacen is considered 'high mountaineering' and all cautions should be taken both during preparation/training and during the climbing of the mountain itself.

To train our bodies and minds we are climbing lower mountains. We have climbed 3 or 4 already, and will continue to climb more in upcoming moths until we go to Mulhacen.
Also, it's important to climb mountains in different weather conditions. We need to train how to overcome wind, snow, storm, cold, night situations. The way we learn most is facing new, challenging situations.

We started by going to the summit of 'El Aljibe', 1.094 m over sea level, with about 500 m elevation gain uphill during 13 km.
This time, the weather was very windy. A video of the summit moment:


A pic of the group:


Next was the 'Torrecilla' peak. The summit is at 1.919 m over sea level, with about 900 m elevation gain uphill during 15 km.
This time we faced a snowy trekking.
Here a music video of that day:


The Torrecilla peak is in fact challenging with snow, so we went a second time, with even more snow and wind:


This second time we faced winds of 70km/h which, due to wind-chill, resulted in a very cold day.

We also went to Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park, in a hard trekking under snowfall:


This time we walked about 15 km with about 500m elevation gain uphill, while enjoying this kind of environment:


What's next: more mountains! We plan to reach 2.069 m over sea level next week in 'La Maroma' and keep doing steep trekking in upcoming months until we go in June to Mulhacen.

It should be very funny to do some FLOSS contribution from the summit of a mountain. Do you know of someone who did that?