Search Results: "zed"

19 September 2006

Jorge Salamero Sanz: Errno Codes by Platform

I've found a very complete list of errno codes for a plenty flavours of unix here.

Jorge Salamero Sanz: Errno Codes by Platform

I've found a very complete list of errno codes for a plenty flavours of unix here.

Lucas Nussbaum: Of bounties, donations and summers of code influence on volunteer participation

Stuff like the Google Summer of Code, the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006, the Sourceforge donations system, or Dunc-Tank (an experiment to see how targeted fund raising can improve Debian) are generally considered a good ideas. However, experiments have shown that sometimes, paying volunteers decreases the overall participation. Luis Villa wrote about this a few months ago, and summarized like this:
When people do things for their own intrinsic goodness (i.e., for reasons other than payment), introducing payment can reduce the amount of invovement.
I urge you to read Luis Villa’s blog entry about this, and specifically the Motivation Crowding Theory: A Survey of Empirical Evidence paper.

Jeroen van Wolffelaar: Utrecht Bug Squashing Party

Tomorrow we'll have the first real-life meeting, together with Thijs Kinkhorst and dr. Bas Zoetekouw, to organize details about the upcoming Debian Bug Squashing party in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on the weekend of September 30th. As a study association, A-Eskwadraat has had Debian Developers for quite some time, from Bas since 2000 until our most recent addition, Thijs, but we've never organized a Debian event – yet. In 2002 though, there was a Mozilla 1.0 release party where also the release of woody was celebrated. The university has been supportive of the initiative, and is offering the location for free, as long as there are not too many people around that they feel the need for (expensive) security to be on-site 24h/day. For that reason, and also for food planning, please do subscribe yourself in wiki. If more than 25 people end up subscribing, we'll let you know how we'll arrange that. We're still not having a definitive deal with a sponsor, so don't know how flexible we are in this regard. At this moment, we've also got a handful of international attendees too, including Debian's "Second in Command", Steve McIntyre. I'm looking forward to it, and to meeting various Debian contributors (mostly again). See you in Utrecht!

Clint Adams: Draft Debian Code of Business Conduct

The following Code of Business Conduct ('the Code') has not been approved by the Board of Directors of Debian, SPI, or any U.N. committees: Debian and its subsidiary companies operate in many different markets and countries throughout the world. In most instances, we respect national laws and industry codes of conduct. We, the directors and employees of all companies under the Debian umbrella ('corrupt fuckers'), recognize our obligations to all who have a stake in our success including shareowners, clients, employees, and suppliers, unless those obligations run counter to our profitability; Information about our business shall be communicated clearly, and accurately in a non-discriminatory manner and in accordance with local regulations, unless doing so would impact negatively our profitability; We select and promote employees on the basis of their willingness to support our aims and their potential for profitability, without discrimination or concern for race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or scruples, as long as doing so would improve our profitability; We believe that the Debian mailing lists should be safe and civilized; we will not tolerate sexual harassment, discrimination or offensive behavior of any kind, which includes the persistent demeaning of individuals through words or actions, the display or distribution of offensive material, or the questioning of our integrity, unless such tolerance would improve our profitability; We will not use, possess or distribute illegal drugs or software, unless doing so would improve our profitability; We will treat all information relating to Debian's business, or to its clients, as confidential. In particular, 'insider trading' is expressly prohibited and confidential information must not be used for personal gain, unless such personal gain is acceptable to at least two of the persons involved; We will not knowingly create work which contains statements, suggestions or images offensive to general public decency and will give appropriate consideration to the impact of our work on minority segments of the population, whether that minority be by race, religion, national origin, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability or scruples, unless that minority can be safely ignored without damaging our bottom line; We will not for personal or family gain directly or indirectly engage in any activity which competes with companies within the Debian umbrella or with our obligations to any such company; We will not offer any items of personal inducement to secure business. This is not intended to prohibit appropriate entertainment, the making of occasional gifts of minor value, or any monetary contributions transferred through PayPal, unless the client has a policy which restricts this; No corporate contributions of any kind, including the provision of services or materials for less than the market value, may be made to politicians, political parties or action committees, without the prior written approval of the DPL and a clear assessment of the rate of return on the investment; and we will comply with all applicable local laws and regulations, and any other laws with an international reach, such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where relevant; We will disclose fully to the DPL the nature and all relevant details of inducements paid to us by external parties, whether or not such inducements affect our judgments and actions, and we will accord the DPL a percentage of such inducements for use in re-election campaigns or discretionary spending; When we engage in bookmaking, the standard vig should be 10%, and any exceptions should be appealed to the Racketeering Committee, a self-selecting committee with no external oversight; We will not NMU or hijack any packages if the maintainer is refusing to act on said packages as part of a negotiation for inducements; We will not underbid our colleagues in the midst of such negotiations; We will always assume that any inaction or incompetence is due to such negotiations, whether or not that has been disclosed, as it is often the wish of the persons involved to keep such dealings hush-hush; We will spout trite falsehoods such as We are all volunteers here , and At some point you just have to trust people , as a standard business practice; We will avoid sarcasm at all costs.

Steve McIntyre: Conference in Tenerife

After take#2 at the flight (*grin*) I got here last night. Met by Carlos at the airport in the south of Tenerife, then driven up to Santa Cruz in the north. We met up with a fair-sized group of the locals and went out for pizza. I'm happy to be here; the local people are bending over backwards to include me in conversation, despite my lack of Spanish. They seem to be a really friendly group. Then across to the university at La Laguna this morning. My 90-minute talk about Debian went very well, in front of 40 or so people. I don't normally like public speaking very much, but it helps a lot when I'm talking about something I know very well. People were clearly interested in knowing more about Debian, and asked some good questions at the end. The slides from my talk and some photos will appear on-line at some point when I find a decent net connection. For the rest of my time here, people have suggested a few touristy things to do, and have offered to show me around. My thanks to Ren , Carlos and the others - it's great to be here!

Jorge Salamero Sanz: Hello Debian Planet!

This is my first post in Debian Planet. Last sunday I was asigned an AM, zobel. He's a very helpful guy. It was a great birthday gift because I didn't expect to get an AM so fast, NM is know for being a long process. I've begun to work in the first steps of P&P questions already although I'm not going as fast I'd like because I've hitten by tons of TODO tasks just after finishing exams but I hope to get more involved in the Debian community and development quickly.

18 September 2006

Evan Prodromou: F te de la Vertu CCXIV

It's the Festival of Virtue today in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the first of the five wp:sansculottides, festival days at the end of the year just before the fall equinox. The day is dedicated to singing the praises of individuals who've shown especially good qualities. I'd probably start off with the great people involved in Wikitravel -- they've been hugely successful at self-organizing and creating an incredible collection of high-quality travel guides. I'm always amazed at the persistence and goodwill of this great group of unselfish and dedicated travellers. Another is the great local local Montreal Burning Man community, putting together Ignition 2006, the regional burn event here in Quebec. There are people coming out of the woodwork to make this a fun campout, and I'm really looking forward to the event next weekend. There's still a lot to do, but I think it's going great. Who else? The thousands of people making and sharing Open Source software and Open Content music, images, and text continue to astound me. When we're in the thick of it, it's hard to remember how generous and giving you have to be to dedicate time and energy to sharing Free Information with the world and with posterity. It is a saintly pursuit and it deserves praise and support. tags:

17 September 2006

Zak B. Elep: Software Freedom Day 2006 - Manila

Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too ;) I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts. I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom :D . In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches. Representative Teddy Casi o of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included ;) had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says all your base are belong to us’ ;) Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector. Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.

David Nusinow: Rock

Finally, after too long, I can indulge in the glory that is the internet and Debian infighting from the privacy of my own home.

You may have noticed that Drew Parsons has been delivering swift kicks to the junk of the idea that Debian ships old X software. Thanks to his tireless efforts, we've got all the X libs for 7.1 in unstable right now. The server is basically ready to go, and Steve "OMG I GOT A HACKERGOTCHI FINALLY!!!" Langasek is attacking the terrifying task of a mesa update to lay the final bit of groundwork for the server and drivers. We should be able to get the new server and drivers in unstable within a week, at which point the XSF enters the home stretch of cleaning and polishing for the release. There's tons of this that we have to do, but to be honest I'm amazed at how far we've come over the past year or two, and I'm sure that people will be happy with the packages we ship with etch.

For post-etch, there's bigger things (like World Peace) in store, but the whole XSF has worked really hard on this and I believe the effort shows.

16 September 2006

Erich Schubert: SELinux is like TPM

To a certain extend, SELinux is like TPM. On one hand, it can be used to increase security of your system a lot. On the other hand, it can be used to lock you out some more. Like from your Linux-running Motorola phone. (Note: this phone is not running SELinux, but some other LSM) The combination of both of course increases security even more. I was wondering if I should maybe starting using these on the next server I install. Make a mini boot system with an SSHD and use the TPM module to secure this boot system. Then whenever the system is booted, I connect via SSH to type in the passphrase to unlock the encrypted disks. So when some police decides to seize a TOR server, they'll not be able to read any of the data, even when they seize the complete hardware. The only attack vector (apart from breaking crypto) I see is that they use the TPM to decrypt the boot systems sshd key, and then setup a modified boot system to capture my passphrase. They'll probably need more time to set that up than me to be informed the server was seized (or wonder why it's down). They're not exactly prepared for such defensive measures, I guess. OTOH, I'm not planning to setup any server anytime soon, and for a laptop using an encrypted harddrive should be enough. Maybe add some extra SELinux policy to defend against software bugs and maybe keyloggers. Uwe Hermann just measured the overhead and to me this doesn't look very bad. I mean... it will still be much faster than my current laptop, and this laptop is fast enough for me 99.9% of the time.

15 September 2006

Martin-Éric Racine: Linux 15th anniversary conference - September 4th 2006, Helsinki, Suomi

I meant to blog something about this for the last 2 weeks but other things had precedence. Anyhow, before this becomes hopelessly outdated, I decided to simply paste my notes verbatim, as a bulleted list. Here they are:
  • Lots of Ubuntu stickers visible on laptops!
liw: how did it all start?
  • Main areas of progress have been documentation and user applications, then distributions.
  • Installation improved from manual boot sector hacking to full GUI tool.
  • Linus purposely avoids working for distributors to preserve his neutrality.
  • Major kernel developments took place between 1992-1994 i.e. ports to m68k, alpha, powerpc.
  • Acknowledgement of RMS and ESR contributions to the Free Software agenda.
Maddog: changing, ruling and saving the world.
  • While at Drexel university, a teacher told him "No one will ever make a living writing software". Nowadays, the comment is rephrased about free software.
  • Parallel with 15-year olds that code amazing stuff being used for special effects, medical research, forensics, etc.
  • Parallel with what a 15-year old can learn from previous generations, from own early mistakes, from siblings, from dealing with bullying, etc.
  • In some countries, 15 is the age of consent or passage to adulthood.
  • Creative Commons embodies a society that enables read-write interaction.
  • Linux is already outselling Apple on the desktop.
  • Linux is shipping on over 1/3 of new servers.
  • The thin client market is completely Linux-based.
  • Social Networking and Peer Mentoring foster a creation of acceptance.
  • Malaysia's Computer Science graduates are 70% women and, surprise, it is a Muslim country.
  • Free Software enables localization for niche markets; this is a software freedom.
  • A shoe manufacturer that Maddog met on a plane had a domino Windows license upgrading effect that made him miss a whole production cycle. No longer supported Windows versions had to be replaced with new computers ...On which their custom software did not work anymore, while they worked fine on older Windows releases offering a DOS shell. He wanted to know how he could switch to Free Software and finally rid himself from slavery to Microsoft's licensing schemes that often impose costly hardware upgrades by turning previous hardware investments into unsupported obsoleteness.
  • Driving new standards are: FSG, ODF.
  • Generating local jobs adapting Free Software for local needs. The same cannot happen with closed-source software, because we're stuck with the vendor's limited offering.
  • Showing examples of excellent source code is the best way to teach programming. This is easily done with Free Software; not so with closed-source software.
  • The key to Free Software: have fun!
  • Remember: Software Freedom Day
This was followed by presentations from local Finnish players in the Free Software field. One point of interest: Timo Jyrinki, who is the founder of the Finnish Ubuntu community, emphasized that contributing to Ubuntu really meant contributing to Debian. Videos are available (in Finnish, except for Maddog's presentation) on the server of the University of Helsinki. Sadly, the media format used is non-free... *sigh* When will they ever learn?

7 September 2006

Wouter Verhelst: Web design

Proper web design seems to be something that is out of grasp of the majority of commercial web developers. My dad asked me for help with some particular website last week, and in the two minutes that I was looking at the site, I saw four errors:
  1. It only worked if you use IE, giving you a white empty page if you use a real browser. I thought the dark ages of "This site optimized for Internet Explorer" were over three centuries ago.
  2. When opened in IE, it started off with a useless intro. I wasn't even remotely impressed, neither was my dad. Especially not seen the fact that he had to jump through a number of hoops to get at this silly intro (IE is hidden away into obscurity on my dad's computer, since I don't want to have to deal with the incredible amount of security issues this sieve has)
  3. The first page given was a menu which is never repeated afterwards (hurray for continuity), and which uses mystery meat navigation.
  4. Last but not least, <li> items (or whatever they abused to implement the same thing) have their first sentence coloured in a certain kind of blue, with no underlining. <a> items are coloured in the exact same shade of blue, with no underlining (and no hover effects). So the only way to see that a piece of text is no hyperlink is by hovering your mouse over there and verifying whether the mouse pointer changes. Way to go!
I forgot what the exact URL of the website was. It's not very important, though.

6 September 2006

Steve Kemp: All my words are secondhand

Some semi-random photographs taken with the new camera. (resized to 800×600). I think I’m getting the hang of using the camera now, and will probably go back and attempt to understand the manual over the weekend. Talking of the weekend we have a Debconf 7 related meetup in Edinburgh. But still no real plan about what is going to happen …

5 September 2006

Clint Adams: An elephantesk-sized bag of scruples

All you silly people who think that AJ wants to release etch before it's ready because he's accepting bribes from large corporations, take note. Sven has deduced that the DPL's underhanded politicking is actually intended to delay etch indefinitely. Really, why would any corporation have any interest in Debian's release cycle? I can't possibly think of a single reason.

John Goerzen: Another Haskell Solution to Lars' Problem

Yesterday, I posted an 18-line solution to Lars' language problem. One problem with it was that it was not very memory-efficient (or time-efficient, for that matter). In other words, it was optimized for elegance.

Here is a 22-line solution that is much more memory-efficient and works well with his "huge" test case. Note to Planet readers: Planet seems to corrupt code examples at times; click on the original story to see the correct code.

import System.Environment
import Data.List
import Data.Char
import qualified Data.Map as Map
custwords = filter (/= "") . lines . map (conv . toLower)
    where iswordchar x = isAlphaNum x && isAscii x
          conv x = if iswordchar x then x else '\n'
wordfreq inp = Map.toList $ foldl' updmap (Map.empty::Map.Map String Int) inp
    where updmap nm word = case Map.lookup word nm of
                             Nothing -> Map.insert word 1 nm
                             Just x -> (Map.insert word $! x + 1) nm
freqsort (w1, c1) (w2, c2) = if c1 == c2
                                 then compare w1 w2
                                 else compare c2 c1
showit (word, count) = show count ++ " " ++ word
main = do args - getArgs
          interact $ unlines . map showit . take (read . head $ args) .
                     sortBy freqsort . wordfreq . custwords

The main change from the previous example to this one is using a Map to keep track of the frequency of each word.

4 September 2006

Biella Coleman: On Mole-ville, a Public Service Announcement, and the Internet.

In a recent post I mentioned that my scalp is adorned with 14 titanium staples. While some may think that I have them because an odd accident incurred during my recent move, I have them because I live in mole-ville and some of them were causing a small disturbance in the hood. Living here means I have a lot of moles on my body and well, these little masses of brown pigment, while they can be somewhat attractive, and unproblematic, can be unruly creatures that can change on short notice and cause a lot of problems. Now I usually don’t blog about personal things like my moles, but I thought it is worth writing about this as a public service announcement… So if there are any other readers who live in a crowded mole-ville, this is little reminder to check up on your moles, sooner than later. I have never had a problem with my moles and there is no history of problems in my family but I do have more than the average number of them. In fact, anyone who has met me knows this because they are all over my face, and there is one distinct one, under my left eye that is shaped like a tear, and often mistaken for dirt, more graciously as a tattoo, and most oddly as that black stuff that football players smear under their eyes. About a year ago, after one of my friends was diagnosed with melanoma (thankfully he is ok), I started checking my moles more frequently and did a full check at the dermatologist. All was ok and when I went to another dermatologist in February, all looked good. Then this summer, as I was running my hands through my hair, I felt a mole and started obsessing over it. I was pretty sure I did not have it a year ago as it was not on my chart and if was, it was probably flat and since I could feel it, it had changed, which is not a good sign… I was traveling most of the summer and it was first in South Africa where I had it checked in a fancy dermatological office in Durban. They dermatologist took a close look and said, looks fine but have it removed because you can’t track it. That made me feel a lot better so I enjoyed the rest of my time there and then as soon as I got back I saw a RN at a dermatology office in NJ (it is near to impossible to get a derm appointment without a month’s wait in the US but since they had RNs, I could see someone quick.. More on this in a second). This person also confirmed what the dermatologists in SA had said but also decided to remove it because I could not track it. A week later a pathology report came back that showed it was dysplastic and that the cells were changing, and thus considered abnormal. Some dermatologists consider this as pre-cancerous, some don’t, but it seems to be that there is more likelihood that this type of mole can turn into cancer. So the “treatment” is a full excision where they remove 1cm all around the mole. I got word of the report around the 8th of August and the only time they could fit me in for surgery was the 25th, a day after I was supposed to leave for Edmonton, which changed my moving plans (and explains why I arrived here so late, making getting my stuff complicated given school is in session and parking is tight). I then scheduled an appointment for a a full body check and removed another mole that once biposed was confirmed as dysplastic and though not as abnormal as the other, the recommendation was to also remove the surrounding dermis. Now, when I called the surgical coordinators, they could not fit me in another time slot to expand my appointment for 2 surgeries because they were “full” even though I explained I was moving away from the U.S. They said that it was up to the surgeon to decide whether to operate on the second area and since I was leaving to Canada the NEXT day, he would probably agree but no guarantees.
So of course, I wanted the stuff out because I was not sure how to go about getting the procedure done in Canada. My insurance does kick in the second I sign up and there is no Bull-Sh*t pre-existing clause stuff here but because I could not get an appointment in time, I would probably have to go to a medicenter that performed these operations and not all do. Though I was confident I could get it done eventually, it would take a lot of inquiring and after a 7 day drive and all that follows a big move, I decided it was not the thing I wanted to do. So I got to the office early on the 25th and one of the first things that comes out of my mouth when I saw the nurse was that I was leaving the next day to Canada and I did not know when I could get care there. Of course the first phrase that pops to mind for many Americans when you say Canada and health care is “socialized medicine” which most people in the U.S. associate with bad healthcare and long waits. Now on the one hand, I have to admit I, to some degree, share those fears, which is one of the reasons I wanted the extra dermis removed asap. On the other hand, I think that the claim is a big fat red herring because in fact for many Americans, they *do* have to wait a long time for many procedures (dermatology is classic for this, and even my first procedure took a 3 week wait and if I wanted to schedule the second one, it would have taken 5 weeks) or worse, they have no insurance, which KEEPS many people from going to a doctor in the first place. So American medicine is not necessarily “fast track” and in a dual sense: in the literal sense because HMO healthcare is like socialized medicine with capitalist prices, and because many people without insurance also probably avoid the doctors until they are in bad shape… And even though I have insurance, they would not pre-approve anything as I am in some awful pre-existing clauses because my insurance had lapsed for 2 months this year. And even though I have never had a problem with a mole in my life and did not even see one doctor in the 6 months before I got my insurance (which is when the pre-existing diagnosis would pertain to) and even saw a dermatologist in my HMO network in February who found nothing wrong, the insurance wants to make sure to add as many roadblocks as possible in the hopes of never paying up. Great. Now I am very grateful the nurse at the derm office proceeded to get the doctor to perform the 2nd surgery and he also was more than ok to do it. I wanted to give them big fat hugs after the procedure but you know, you just don’t do that type of move in your blue robe after the surgery. Before the surgery I naturally “hit” the net to gather a lot of information on moles, cancer etc… I join the millions around the world who–for better or for worse–use the Internet to supplement (some I am sure supplant) their doctor’s medical advice. In fact, a key part of my second project on psychiatric survivors looks at how patient communities are building a sphere of amateur but expert medical knowledge exchange. It is an enormous sphere of vibrant peer-to-peer knowledge production but one that many are uncomfortable portraying as such because it involves a lot more risks and ambiguities than exchange knowledge about, you know, how to get your blue tooth working…. But if we bracket the realm of alternative remedies (which admittedly is a HUGE part of this type of exchange), I think in fact, patients are pretty savvy and are engaging in risk-averse behavior by going on the net and illness forums. A lot of what is exchanged are warnings about side-effects, detailed accounts of experiences with procedures, and yet a lot of red flag raising that one’s experience may not match another persons but may be still helpful. It is a lot of information that often may be missed during the exchange with the doctor and derives from what is another type of expert knowledge: one’s bodily experiences with medicine, illness, and other related procedures. But I have to say that when researching melanoma and moles on the Internet, I was somewhat stumped. There is just too much variation out there to make informed judgments and abnormal but non-malignant moles have the same characteristics as melanomas. The Internet, in this case, seemed helpful to provide some baseline information and then just served to freak me out more than necessary so I turned away for the time being. For now I am just adjusting to the staples, which come out in another week. The procedure did not hurt much but the first week after the removal my head was much more sore than I had expected. Not so fun when on a marathon road trip, which is finally over!

Branden Robinson: Update on Debian Security Infrastructure and Personnel

Since I got back from the Oldenburg Linux Developers' conference, I've had my attention on our security infrastructure. Despite only being there for one and a half days thanks to a badly delayed trans-Atlantic flight, I found the conversations and collaborative spirit heartening. The bad news is that what I had planned for a writeup got rendered obsolete soon after I returned to the United States. Things have been changing rapidly, but mostly for the better. We've got three machines in the DNS rotation for security.debian.org now, which is superior to the one we had before (you can use the command dig security.debian.org to inspect the DNS record). My thanks go to our security and system administration teams for recovering from the recent overload problem provoked by an xfree86 package security update. Being somewhat familiar with that package, I can understand how its large size combined with Debian's ever-growing userbase starved the security host of bandwidth. Secondly, while I was in Oldenburg, Joey Schulze gave me a lot of insight into what a challenge one particular package is — the thing sucks up at least half of his time, dwarfing all other stable security update efforts. You've probably guessed that this package is the Linux kernel. Due in part to its success, and in part due to OS kernels being inherently attractive exploitation targets, the Linux kernel is getting a significant amount of scrutiny from a security perspective. Taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an example, we can see two advisories in the past two weeks: one on 28 September and one on 5 October. The one on 28 September addressed eighteen (18) different vulnerabilities as catalogued by MITRE's CVE project, and the one on 5 October — that's one week later — addressed fourteen (14) vulnerabilities, of which eight (8) were distinct from the previous advisory. (There was some overlap because the earlier advisory was for Red Hat's Linux 2.4.x kernel series, and the latter was for the 2.6.x series.) Those Debian developers who have ever handled a security vulnerability in one of their own packages can likely imagine the labor burden this is. Then reflect that Debian ships and supports a lot more Linux kernel trees than Red Hat does — this only magnifies the problem. The good news is that a team of developers focused on stable kernel security updates has been established. One of its members said to me today that he has seen a "very positive increase in kernel-related security activity". It is too soon to declare this problem resolved, but I perceive no lack of talent or dedication on the part of our developers. I am there to assist them in resolving the organizational and workflow issues so that our users can see the fruits of their energy directly. Similarly, I'm interested to see how the security.debian.org round-robin arrangement holds up after a reasonable period of real-world loads, particularly since I expect kernel package updates to sock the machines about as badly as an X Window System update. These issues are not over and done with, so an announcement declaring these problems vanquished would be premature. At the same time, the developers and users at large need to know whether or not people have their attention on them. I am wary of leaders or managers who declare issues resolved too soon, or proclaim optimism that later turns out to be unfounded, and have sought to avoid this vice. I apologize if I have tacked too far in the opposite direction. I perceive progress in this area. Let me know what you think, what you need to see, and by what metrics you measure progress and accomplishment on the security front. You can reach me at leader@debian.org (the address is already blitzed with so much spam there seems little sense in obfuscating it). (After getting some feedback on this entry, it's my intention to post it with any applicable revisions to the debian-devel-announce mailing list; please take this opportunity to "patch" this "beta", if you're so inclined.)

Branden Robinson: Destination: Oldenburg, Mission: Security, Java, and a bit of odd old hardware

On Friday afternoon I'll be arriving in Oldenburg, Germany, for the eleventh annual Linux developers' conference. Historically, this conference has had a strong focus on non-x86 ports of the Linux kernel, boot loader development, the GNU toolchain, and so forth. At long last, it looks like this may be my opportunity to get my Macintosh Quadra 840AV out of mothballs and back into commission, thanks to Wouter Verhelst. I should be able to fit it into my luggage if I don't bring many clothes... :-) This year, however, in addition to that, a couple of mini-conferences are being piggybacked onto the Oldenburg meeting. These include the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam and the Debian Security Summit. The Java programming language is a divisive issue in the Free Software community, and has a degree of controversy that sets it apart from the usual language wars. The dominant factor in this controversy stems from what Richard Stallman refers to as the Java trap; with the specifications controlled, and the reference implementation kept unavailable on DFSG-free terms by, an industry consortium dominated by large corporations, a Free Software hacker might fear that using Java will consign them to either having to compromise their principles by using non-free class libraries (for example), or being doomed to chase the taillights of standards that could conceivably be tailored to disadvantage competitors. (Java is not alone in this respect; many people fear that Microsoft's .NET, despite being openly standardized through ISO/IEC, will in actuality be completely controlled by Microsoft.) Despite this peril, Java is attractive to GNU/Linux-using organizations. The Free Standards Group, developers of the Linux Standard Base, has received inquiries about a Free Java standard and implementation from organizations already committed to GNU/Linux. In my job, I've encountered an interest in Java from several customers and prospects. Intriguingly, these institutions are, by and large, very much aware of the Java Trap. They like the language, and are not strong advocates of Free Software, but they too are worried about vendor lock-in. They've seen the success of community-driven development as GNU/Linux moves from strength to strength, claiming territory formerly held by Microsoft and proprietary versions of Unix. Even if I can't persuade a customer to adopt a Free Java stack, I can exhort them to only code against Java standards that have seen a free implementation. That way, their development bets are hedged against any "madman theory" of the controlling vendor. Furthermore, this way they only code to standards that are seeing independent implementations, and they leave their engineers free to switch between varieties of development kit. Engineers like flexibility because it enables them to work more efficiently; sales people, marketing personnel, and strategists like efficient engineers because they make a firm more nimble. That's where the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam comes in. Free Software Java enthusiasts want to see their implementations fully mature, and are working hard to make it so. The Free Software community has the opportunity to make its Java implementation not just an available alternative, but a compelling alternative to the proprietary ones on technical as well as licensing grounds. The recent release of GNU Classpath 0.18 shows just how vigorously this opportunity is being seized. Having mature software is only half the battle, however; that software has to be coherently put together and easy for the user and developer to manipulate. For many of these folks, it's not enough just to have good, Free Java virtual machines (like Kaffe and SableVM), class libraries (GNU Classpath), compilers and interpreters (gcj and gij, respectively, from the GNU Compiler Collection), and application servers (Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, and JOnAS, among others). They also want these technologies to be mutually integrated and easy to install and use. Good software and good packaging complement each other to drive adoption of the technology, and that's what the DevJam is all about. I'm glad to see that representatives of Debian's Java packaging team will be joining not just upstream authors, but their counterparts at Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo in furtherance of this goal. I've approved a budget of EUR 2000, which Petter Reinholdtsen will administrate, to support the expenses of Debian's participation in the DevJam. We've received 1500 USD in sponsorship of this event from a corporate sponsor that chooses to remain anonymous. The other mini-conference I'll be attending is the Debian Security Summit. We're bringing together the heads of our Stable Security and Testing Security teams — the two Joeys, Joey Schulze and Joey Hess, as well as a bevy of other security-minded people, with the goal of revitalizing and streamlining our security processes. Several members of the Stable Security Team have gone dormant over the past several months (or longer), leaving an increasingly small number people to handle, as of Sarge's release, not one but two stable releases. This is because we do not terminate security support for our previous stable release (in this case, Woody), until some time has passed. We've had other challenges on the security front. We had what amounted to a security support hiatus for about three weeks in June, which caused much consternation. More recently, klecker.debian.org, which provides the security.debian.org has suffered some occasional availability problems, and it hasn't always been clear what's caused them. It's my understanding that we have new hardware in place that can serve in a backup, supplemental, or failover capacity. The general feeling at DebConf 5 was that our security apparatus was in need of attention to make sure it keep pace with the demands being placed on it. I've been in fruitful contact with Joey Schulze, Steve Kemp, and others over the past several weeks, and I look forward to a productive few days.

Dann Frazier: The *real* reason d-i is busted w/ (some?) cciss controllers + ramblings on stable kernel updates

I recently blogged about how fixing d-i on cciss was just a matter of backporting a new version of the driver. Well, I was full of shit. Turns out my test case will give a false positive sometimes - oops. Anyway, the real fix requires backporting two fixes. Hopefully we can get this fix into a sarge point release at some point. On that note, I've started usertagging bugs that I think should go into a sarge kernel point release, should we ever do one (Note: the kernel team/stable release manager haven't discussed what is/is not acceptable in a stable kernel update, so this is just a wishlist at this point.) In my opinion, any localized fix that has already gone upstream and can be easily tested should be permitted. I'd really like to put driver updates in that category, but that opinion maybe tainted by my day job. We maintain a branch of the sarge d-i stack that has a side-goal of adding support for new HP hardware. We keep it as close to sarge as possible (backporting drivers to 2.6.8, for example) with the hope of pushing as much as possible into a sarge point release. Thanks to Andrew Patterson it has pretty recent cciss & fusion drivers. If there is interest, I could probably start posting these somewhere public.

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