A new RcppTOML release arrived on CRAN earlier today evening. RcppTOML brings TOML to R. TOML is a file format that is most suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAML though sadly these may be too ubiquitous now. TOML has been making inroads with projects such as the Hugo static blog compiler, or the Cargo system of Crates (aka packages ) for the Rust language. CRAN had sent us a note that the package no longer compiled under the [unreleased, of course, never change, BDR ;-) ] g++-11 compiler, but were kind enough to hint that it was only lacking an #include <limits>. These things happen: newer compilers are generally more strict, and that is generally a good things. (Last year this time we prepped code for the more stringent view on global variables under gcc-10. Earlier g++ version had similar demands to clarify include headers.) I set up a simple Docker contain with on Ubuntu 21.04 with g++-11, R, and Rcpp to build the package and make this change (which was of course also PR ed upstream at cpptoml), plus some other small ones that update the package since the last release roughly 18 months ago. We also switched CI use to the r-ci setup I should blog about a little more, removed a bashism and updated a few URLs. The bulleted list of changes in this version follows.

Changes in version 0.1.7 (2020-12-01)

• Add #include <limits> to header file, also contributed upstream, to permit compilation under the (unreleased) g++-11.
• Switch the simple cleanup script to sh.
• Switch CI use to r-ci for focal and bspm.
• Update several TOML URLs to https://toml.io/en/.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppTOML page page. Please use the GitHub issue tracker for issues and bugreports. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Music for these dark nights

I have recently become an OpenJDK Author. Practically this means I can query the Java Bug Database directly, and I can author Mercurial for committing to the relevant OpenJDK project myself, rather than needing sponsors in both cases. A small milestone but one I'm proud of! Thanks to my team members who have encouraged me and helped me by sponsoring and reviewing my work so far. Next step, Committer!

Another month worth of updates on KDE/Plasma in Debian has accumulated, so here we go. The highlights are: Plasma 5.19.5 based on Qt 5.15 is in Debian/unstable and testing, Plasma 5.20.4 is waiting to be uploaded soon to experimental, and my own builds at OBS have been updated to Plasma 5.20.4, Frameworks 5.76, Apps 20.08.3. OBS packages The OBS packages as usual follow the latest release, and currently ship KDE Frameworks 5.76, KDE Apps 20.08.3, and new, Plasma 5.20.4. The package sources are as usual (only the other-dep has disappeared, these packages are now all in Debian proper), for Debian/unstable: and the same with Testing instead of Unstable for Debian/testing. The latest update to 5.20.4 will probably need one or two install cycles due to missing Replaces. The reason is that the packages in OBS have been synced with the work we have done for the official Debian packages, and thus some files have moved between packages. Debian main packages After a few hiccups, the whole Plasma 5.19.5 stack has landed in Debian/testing, and we are working on an upload of 5.20.4 to Debian/experimental. This takes a bit, because we want to add infrastructure to automatically force all packages to be upgraded only together, so that there is no mix between old and new packages. This has shown quite some problems during the upgrade from 5.17 to 5.19 in testing. Also, I don t think Debian needs to do something else than everybody else by allowing to mix Plasma released. That said, I hope that we have an upload of 5.20 to experimental soon, followed by testing and an upload to unstable, so that it can migrate to testing in time for the freeze of Bullseye. Getting 5.20.5 into Bullseye is possible, but not guaranteed, not too much time between the release of 5.20.5 and proper freeze in Debian. But we will see. Enjoy.

Truth, Untruths and Education in India. I read this somewhat disturbing and yet pretty raw truth from foreign affairs. It took me quite a few days to not only digest but also say yes and see the same situation playing out in India. I have been seeing the discourse on Twitter and while a part of it is the equivalent of road rage, a huge part is a disconnect to not acknowledge and be civil. We may come to different conclusions from the same data but being civil seems to be difficult for a lot of people. One part is of course ego, where nobody wants to lose, but more than that are the plain comprehension issues. Most of the literature, good literature is unfortunately based in English.

And while we can have differing opinions of what constitutes good literature, for me it s books like Battle of Belonging,The:On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What it Means Shashi Tharoor. From what little I have understood, the book makes the case of civic nationalism which is far more inclusive than the narrow confines of patriotism. Now this begs the question when you have such books and many books which do tell you about different aspects of social, political and knowledge, why are so many people prone to disinformation in India similar to U.S. and probably other countries as well. One of the biggest reasons per-se is lack of education and quality education. When the number of graduates is less than five percent how do you expect that population to be able to take decisions in their economic self-interest? So sadly the understanding is ingrained from WhatsApp and there is no need to check from alternate sources. And just like Mr. Trump followers, they believe those versions to be the unvarnished truth. I do understand that no truth is immutable except for life and death. All others are imperfect unless it is validated by some sort of scientific validation behind it. At the same time, these truths may themselves be invalidated if a stronger scientific evidence establishes itself. This is the reason why hypothesis and facts themselves are challenged again and again. Sharing couple of examples below.

Nationalization of Banking, RERA and RCEP Most of the people want freedom of the banks i.e. private banking don t really know that private banking existed at a time in free India before they were nationalized and these banks failed at surprisingly regular intervals. Now it isn t as if this fact is hidden but it is not as popular as maybe some other facts or ideas. Now the Government in the center obviously doesn t want to share these facts as they want corporates in banking. And if that fact is known by many people it will be a huge setback to their plans. RBI failures have been to many to count. Even recent legislations like RERA and others which were supposed to bring relief to millions of potential homeowners has become a pawn in the hands of builders and this has been known. One of the interesting points of RCEP which is not so much in public domain is that RCEP would have a mere 4.5% duty on most products which will go down to 1.5% over a 20 year period. Now with India staying out of it, we have done two things. We have said that we will not be competitive even after 20 years of this which is the more damning part. And we will not take part in the growth that other countries will have due to this. Contempt Proceedings against Comic Artist because she has an opinion on SC The fall in SC and constitutional values grows day by day. The AG today consented to have contempt proceedings against a comic artist saying she insulted the SC. Gone are the days when an artist made fun of the PM, and she gave him a Padam Shri (one of the highest civilian honors) for his contributions. Then, even dissent or being cynical was looked as being a contribution to the national effort rather than today. This is the reason why India has been continuously falling in the Global Freedom of Expression Index. I have seen censoring many a time here. I, myself has been locked out of Wikipedia many times. Can you imagine, being locked out of Wikipedia which is perhaps one of the more neutral sites on the web. And then there was this wikibio thing, such a sad thing to happen. Guessing this is the future of the Indian interweb.

Stick figure by Sanitary Panels on SC

I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 4.5 hours from earlier months. I worked 11.5 hours this month, so I will carry over 9 hours to December. I continued working on backporting fixes for some less urgent security issues in Linux 4.9. I had to give up on some filesystem fixes as they caused regressions. The others have now been applied to the 4.9 stable branch at kernel.org. I updated the linux packaging branch for stretch to Linux 4.9.246, but haven't made a new package upload yet.

Here s my (fourteenth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 23rd month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/ Apart from doing a bunch of activities like attending KubeCon + RubyConf (blog to follow!), et al and simultaneously giving my undergrad exams, I did (relatively) more work than I had really anticipated! Here are the following things I did in Debian this month:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• slingshot-clojure (0.12.2-3) - Fix for bug #891311.
• clj-stacktrace-clojure (0.2.7-1) - New upstream version, v0.2.7, fixing bug #852249.
• golang-github-xo-terminfo (0.0~git20200218.454e5b6-2) - New package + source-only upload.
• golang-github-zyedidia-tcell (2.0.6-1) - New upstream version, v2.0.6.
• golang-github-zyedidia-clipboard (1.0.3-1) - New upstream version, 1.0.3.
• micro (2.0.8-1) - New upstream version, v2.0.8. Finally! \o/
• ruby-zeitwerk (2.4.2-1) - New upstream version, v2.4.2.

Other $things:

• Attended the Debian Ruby team meeting.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• FTP Trainee reviewing.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored phpmyadmin for William and libexif for Hugh.

---

Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my fourteenth month as a Debian LTS and fourth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 22.75 hours for LTS and 45.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(for ELTS, I worked for 5.25 hours last month, so I had to work for 39.75 (+1 extra) hours this month)
(also, I did over-work by 5.00 hours for LTS this month, but I ll re-compensate it later to avoid so much fuss!)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2425-1, fixing CVE-2020-25692, for openldap.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.44+dfsg-5+deb9u5.
• Issued DLA 2427-1, fixing CVE-2020-14355, for spice.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.12.8-2.1+deb9u4.
• Issued DLA 2428-1, fixing CVE-2020-14355, for spice-gtk.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.33-3.3+deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2429-1, fixing CVE-2020-28032, CVE-2020-28033, CVE-2020-28034, CVE-2020-28035, CVE-2020-28036, CVE-2020-28037, CVE-2020-28038, CVE-2020-28039, and CVE-2020-28040, for wordpress.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.7.19+dfsg-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2430-1, fixing CVE-2020-15238, for blueman.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.0.4-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2439-1, fixing CVE-2020-0452, for libexif.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.6.21-2+deb9u5.
• Issued DLA 2443-1, fixing CVE-2020-15166, for zeromq3.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.2.1-4+deb9u3.
• Issued DLA 2444-1, fixing CVE-2020-8037, for tcpdump.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.9.3-1~deb9u2.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 306-1, fixing CVE-2020-25692, for openldap.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.40+dfsg-1+deb8u7.
• Issued ELA 310-1, fixing CVE-2020-0452, for libexif.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 0.6.21-2+deb8u5.
• Issued ELA 311-1, fixing CVE-2020-8037, for tcpdump.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 4.9.3-1~deb8u2.
• Issued ELA 312-1, backporting a new upstream release, 2020d, for tzdata.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2020d-0+deb8u1.
• Issued ELA 313-1, fixing CVE-2020-15166, for zeromq3.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 4.0.5+dfsg-2+deb8u3.
• Prepared a debdiff for lxml (3.4.0-1+deb8u2) upload, which Emilio completed and rolled out later.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 26-10 until 01-10 and from 23-11 until 29-11 for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged openldap, python-cryptography, motion, nvidia-cuda-toolkit, samba, lxml, highlight.js, imagemagick, mongodb, poppler, wordpress, raptor2, and blueman.
• Marked CVE-2020-25659/python-cryptography as no-dsa for Stretch and Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-25713/raptor2 as postponed for Stretch and Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-27778/poppler as postponed for Stretch and Jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-5991/nvidia-cuda-toolkit as ignored for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-26566/motion as not-affected for Stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-26237/highlight.js as postponed for Jessie.
• Auto EOL ed libpam-tacplus, motion, blueman, openrc, webcit, wordpress, linux, nvidia-cuda-toolkit, spip, and wireshark for Jessie.
• Attended the sevent LTS meeting. Logs here.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

---

Until next time.
:wq for today.

This month just went past way too fast, didn t get to all the stuff I wanted to, but managed to cover many essentials (not even listed here) that I ll cover in follow-up posts. In particular, highlights that I m thankful for are that we ve selected the final artwork for Bullseye. We ve also successfully hosted another two MiniDebConfs. One that was gaming themed, and a Brazilian event all in Portuguese! Videos are up on Debian s PeerTube instance (Gaming Edition Brazil) and on the DebConf video archive for direct download. Remember to take care of yourself out there! Physical safety is high on everyone s mind in these times, but remember to pay attention to your mental health too. It s ok if you won t hit all your usual targets and goals in these times, don t be too hard on yourself and burn out! 2020-11-01: Upload package gtetrinet (0.7.11+git20200916.46e7ade-2~bpo10+1) to Debian buster-backports. 2020-11-01: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-disconnect-wifi (26-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-02: Merge MR!2, MR!4 and MR!5 for zram-tools, follow 3-way merge closing MR!1 and MR!3. 2020-11-02: Upload package zram-swap (0.3.3-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #917643, #928439, #928443). 2020-11-02: Close live-installer bugs #646704 (fix released a few years ago already), #700642 (nothing left to fix), #835391 (unproducible on latest images), #847446 (graphical d-i installer no longer provided). #714710 (problem not present on latest installation media) 2020-11-02: File ROM for calcoo (#973638) no longer maintained upstream, GTK-2 only. 2020-11-03: Upload package bundlewrap (4.2.2-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-03: Upload package feed2toot (0.14-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-03: Upload package feed2toot (0.14-2) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-03: Upload package flask-autoindex (0.6.6-2) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-03: Upload package flask-caching (1.9.0-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-03: Upload package flask-restful (0.3.8-5) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-08: Upload package s-tui (1.0.2-2) to Debian unstable (Closes: #961534). 2020-11-09: Merge MR!1 for bluefish (remove old icon). 2020-11-10: Upload package bluefish (2.2.12-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-10: Upload package calamares (3.2.33-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-11: Upload package calamares-settings-debian (11.0.4-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-11-17: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-multiple-workspaces (22-1) to Debian-unstable. 2020-11-24: Sponsor package xmodem (0.4.6+dfsg-2) for Debian unstable (Python Team request). 2020-11-24: Sponsor package python-opentracing (2.4.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python Team request). 2020-11-24: Sponsor package python-css-parser (1.0.6-1) for Debian unstable (Python Team request). 2020-11-24: Review package buildbot (2.8.4-1) (Needs some more work) (Python Team request). 2020-11-24: Review package gbsplay (0.0.94-1) (Needs some more work) (Games Team request). 2020-11-24: Sponsor package goverlay (0.4.2-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request). 2020-11-24: Sponsor package lutris (0.5.8-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request). 2020-11-24: Review package mangohud (0.5.1-1) for Debian unstable (Needs some more work) (Games Team request). 2020-11-24: Sponsor package vkbasalt (0.3.2.3-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request). 2020-11-25: Sponsor package starfighter (2.3.3-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request). 2020-11-25: Sponsor package pentobi (18.3-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request). 2020-11-30: Sponsor package lutris (0.5.8-1) for Debian unstable (Games Team request) (New upload).

I now have four six-port Qotom systems and one four-port Qotom system in my rack. I have successfully verified that the newest of these is capable of pulling about 745Mbit/s of 1500-byte frames through the switch from six other hosts. I bet it will push data at the same rate. but I can t get iperf to distribute it over the LAG evenly. That s another problem for another day. I know it can handle six large streams at the same time, which is great.

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• visdom: fix license metadata
• webdl: ABC iView livestream support
• check-all-the-things: update AFL dep
• duck: more redirect/deletion phrases (1 2)
• devscripts: typo
• spelling dictionaries: codespell (1 2), lintian (1 2)
• Debian QA services: more usertags fixing (1 2 3)
• Debian package uploads: apt-listchanges read-edid
• Debian screenshots: removed wsjtx (Windows screenshot)
• Debian usertags: fix some more typos and mistakes
• Debian wiki pages: ConfigPackages, DebianBookworm, DebianEvents/internet/2020/MiniDebConfOnline2/DebCamp, DebianKernel/GitBisect, DebianMentorsFaq, DebianTrixie, Derivatives/CensusTemplate, Glossary, Lintian (Spec/LintianHarness, Tags (build-depends-on-python-dev-with-no-arch-any, Contributing, DB, Template, test)), Mobile, PulseAudio, qa.debian.org, Sahil%20Dhiman, Teams/ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList, timeshift, TroubleShooting, VMware
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: resources

Issues

• Crashes in lintian-brush, evince
• Non-distributable files in nmslib
• Silent failure in tweeper
• Usability issues in systemd
• Features in dctrl-tools, lintian, gedit translate plugin
• New versions of youtube-dl
• Incorrect case conversion in webext-debianbuttons
• Missing documentation in synaptic, samba
• Syntax error in yubico-piv-tool
• Warnings in samba-common-bin
• Packaging needed for darkreader

Review

• Spam: reported 175 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored acr
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved 2048 apparmor-notify apt-listdifferences apt-show-versions cataclysm-dda-curses ckb-next el-ixir growlight lazpaint-gtk2 lazpaint-qt5 nethack-console notcurses-bin pcsx2 performous-composer piu-piu projecteur puzzle-jigsaw ricochet setzer shotcut shotwell systray-mdstat tagainijisho tikzit vonsh wesnoth-1.14 wsjtx xsecurelock xserver-xorg-core
  • rejected mathgl (macOS), fceux (running proprietary game), photoflow (proprietary and problematic image), xserver-xorg-core (another package), xfce4-terminal (another XFCE package)
  • approved deletion of rpcbind (manual page)
  • rejected deletion of notcurses-bin (screenshots are versioned), gnome (Chromium is open source, the logo could be either), hashcat/onboard/knavalbattle/jack-keyboard/kcharselect (spam)

Administration

• Debian wiki: disable attachments due to security issue, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The visdom, apt-listchanges work and lintian-brush bug report were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

A new release of the inline package arrived on CRAN this evening and has already been shipped to Debian as well. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene proving an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still use by rstan and a number of other packages. One of those other packages is mkin, and its author Johannes Ranke overhauled the saving and re-loading of C functions part with a really well-done set of contributions. In the process we also added unit testing via the lovely tinytest, and changed to continuous integration setup to r-ci. See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in inline version 0.3.17 (2020-11-30)

• Unit testing is now supported via tinytest (Johannes in #15 addressing #14).
• CI was updated to use focal and run.sh from r-ci on Travis and GitHub Actions (Dirk)
• The writing and reading of compiled code was refactored and extended (Johannes in #16 fixing #13).
• Some minor problems related to CRAN checks and tests were corrected (Johannes and Dirk in #17, Johannes in #18, #19, #20).
• Small stylistic updates have been applied to some R and Rd files (Dirk).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during November 2020 (previous month):

• Merged a pull request from Jens Nistler for django-slack (my library which provides a convenient wrapper between projects using the Django and the Slack chat platform) to make it compatible with Celery version 5. [...]

• Created a pull request for the Emscripten LLVM-to-WebAssembly compiler to make the Document Object Model codes reproducible. [...]
• Added a link to my deprecated static analyser for Django to point to Richard Tier's Django Doctor. [...]

• As a board member of both the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest I attended their respective monthly meetings, including the bi-annual OSI multi-day "face-to-face" meetings.

Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The project is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter.
This month, I:

• Made further progress on an academic paper in collaboration with Stefano Zacchiroli that details the theoretical and practical workings of the reproducible builds distributed consensus scheme.
• Created an upstream pull request for the Emscripten LLVM-to-WebAssembly compiler to make DOM codes reproducible (with a number of followups). [...]
• In Debian:
  • I kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date. [...]
  • Submitted 11 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in amavisd-milter, armagetronad, emscripten, less.js, metakernel, open-iscsi, os-autoinst, python-biom-format, python-pairix, requirejs & sympow.
  • Sent a large number of followups to old bugs that had not been updated for some time (for example, #968700, etc.)
• Categorised a large number of packages and issues in the Reproducible Builds "notes" repository, including categorising three new toolchain issues: build_path_captured_by_pyuic5, build_path_captured_by_octave & build_path_captured_by_nim.
• Drafted, published and publicised last month's report as well maintained the Project's various social media accounts.

• Updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to clarify that SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is not Debian specific [...] and make a number of misc cosmetic changes [...][...].

I also made the following changes to diffoscope:

• Improvements:
  • Move the slightly-confusing behaviour if a single file is passed to diffoscope on the command-line to a new --load-existing-diff command. [...]
  • Ensure the new diffoscope-minimal package that was introduced by Mattia Rizzolo has a different short description from the primary diffoscope one. [...]
  • Refresh the long and short descriptions of all of the Debian packages. [...]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don't depend on radare2 in the Debian 'autopkgtests' as it will not be in bullseye due to security considerations. (#975313)
  • Avoid some incorrectly-formatted error messages. This was caused by diffoscope raising an artificial CalledProcessError exception in a generic handler. [...]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Add a comment regarding Java tests to aid diffoscope contributors who are not using Debian [...] and don't use the old-style super(...) call [...].

Debian I performed the following uploads to the Debian Linux distribution this month:

• python-django (2.2.17-1 & 3.1.3-1) New upstream releases.
• memcached (1.6.9+dfsg-1) New upstream release.

• lintian (2.101.0, 2.102.0, 2.103.0 & 2.104.0) New upstream releases.
• xtrlock (2.14) Mark an autopkgtest as 'superficial'. (#974491)
• bfs (2.1-1) New upstream release.
• splint (3.1.2+dfsg-3) Re-upload a previous QA upload of mine (3.1.2+dfsg-2) to ensure the package's transition to the testing distribution. (#974872)

I also filed a release-critical bug against the minidlna package which could not be successfully purged from the system without reporting a cannot remove '/var/log/minidlna' error. (#975372)

Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project, including:

• Investigated and triaged codemirror-js, glibc, jupyter-notebook, krb5, libhibernate3-java, raptor2, spice-vdagent & webcit.
• 'Frontdesk' duties, participating in mailing list discussions, attending the monthly meeting and organising LTS and ELTS frontdesk allocations for 2021.
• Issued DLA 2433-1 for the Bouncy Castle cryptography library to prevent an issue where attackers could obtain sensitive information due to observable differences in its responses to invalid input. (CVE-2020-26939)
• Issued DLA 2434-1 for the GNOME display manager (gdm3) where gdm3 detecting any users may have caused gdm3 to launch the initial system setup, permitting the creation of new users with superuser capabilities. (CVE-2020-16125)
• Issued DLA 2436-1 for the sddm display manager. Here, local and unprivileged users could create a connection to the X server. (CVE-2020-28049)
• Issued DLA 2437-1 & ELA-308-1 as it was discovered that there was a denial of service vulnerability in the MIT Kerberos network authentication system, krb5. The lack of a limit in an ASN.1 decoder could lead to infinite recursion and allow an attacker to overrun the stack and cause the process to crash. (CVE-2020-28196)
• Issued DLA 2438-1 and ELA-309-1 to prevent two heap overflow vulnerabilities in raptor2, a set of parsers for Resource Description Framework (RDF) files used in LibreOffice and other applications. (CVE-2017-18926)
• Issued DLA 2465-1 to correct filename sanitisation issues in a utility used to access PHP Pear, a distribution system for reusable PHP components. (CVE-2020-28948 & CVE-2020-28949)

You can find out more about the Debian LTS project via the following video:

Earlier this month Daniel, Lars and myself got together to discuss Bryan Cantrill s article Rust after the honeymoon. This is an overview of what keeps him enjoying working with Rust after having used it for an extended period of time for low level systems work at Oxide, we were particularly interested to read a perspective from someone who was both very experienced in general and had been working with the language for a while. While I have no experience with Rust both Lars and Daniel have been using it for a while and greatly enjoy it. One of the first areas we discussed was data bearing enums these have been very important to Bryan. In keeping with a pattern we all noted these take a construct that s relatively commonly implemented by hand in C (or skipped as too much effort, as Lars found) and provides direct support in the language for it. For both Daniel and Lars this has been key to their enjoyment of Rust, it makes things that are good practice or common idioms in C and C++ into first class language features which makes them more robust and allows them to fade into the background in a way they can t when done by hand. Daniel was also surprised by some omissions, some small such as the ? operator but others much more substantial the standout one being editions. These aim to address the problems seen with version transitions in other languages like Python, allowing individual parts of a Rust program to adopt potentially incompatible language features while remaining interoperability with older editions of the language rather than requiring the entire program to be upgraded en masse. This helps Rust move forwards with less need to maintain strict source level compatibility, allowing much more rapid evolution and helping deal with any issues that are found. Lars expressed the results of this very clearly, saying that while lots of languages offer a 20%/80% solution which does very well in specific problem domains but has issues for some applications Rust is much more able to move towards a much more general applicability by addressing problems and omissions as they are understood. This distracted us a bit from the actual content of the article and we had an interesting discussion of the issues with handling OS differences in filenames portably. Rather than mapping filenames onto a standard type within the language and then have to map back out into whatever representation the system actually uses Rust has an explicit type for filenames which must be explicitly converted on those occasions when it s required, meaning that a lot of file handling never needs to worry about anything except the OS native format and doesn t run into surprises. This is in keeping with Rust s general approach to interfacing with things that can t be represented in its abstractions, rather than hide things it keeps track of where things that might break the assumptions it makes are and requires the programmer to acknowledge and handle them explicitly. Both Lars and Daniel said that this made them feel a lot more confident in the code that they were writing and that they had a good handle on where complexity might lie, Lars noted that Rust is the first languages he s felt comfortable writing multi threaded code in. We all agreed that the effect here was more about having idioms which tend to be robust and both encourage writing things well and gives readers tools to help know where particular attention is required no tooling can avoid problems entirely. This was definitely an interesting discussion for me with my limited familiarity with Rust, hopefully Daniel and Lars also got a lot out of it!

Review: Nine Goblins, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Red Wombat Tea Company
Copyright:	2013
ASIN:	B00G9GSEXO
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	140

The goblins are at war, a messy multi-sided war also involving humans, elves, and orcs. The war was not exactly their idea, although the humans would claim otherwise. Goblins kept moving farther and farther into the wilderness to avoid human settlements, and then they ran out of wilderness, and it wasn't clear what else to do. For the Nineteenth Infantry, the war is a confusing business, full of boredom and screaming and being miserable and following inexplicable orders. And then they run into a wizard. Wizards in this world are not right in the head, and by not right I mean completely psychotic. That's the only way that you get magical powers. Wizards are therefore incredibly dangerous and scarily unpredictable, so when the Whinin' Nineteenth run into a human wizard who shoots blue out of his mouth, making him stop shooting blue out of his mouth becomes a high priority. Goblins have only one effective way of stopping things: charge at them and hit them with something until they stop. Wizards have things like emergency escape portals. And that's how the entire troop of nine goblins ended up far, far behind enemy lines. Sings-to-Trees's problems, in contrast, are rather more domestic. At the start of the book, they involve, well:

Sings-to-Trees had hair the color of sunlight and ashes, delicately pointed ears, and eyes the translucent green of new leaves. His shirt was off, he had the sort of tanned muscle acquired from years of healthy outdoor living, and you could have sharpened a sword on his cheekbones. He was saved from being a young maiden's fantasy unless she was a very peculiar young maiden by the fact that he was buried up to the shoulder in the unpleasant end of a heavily pregnant unicorn.

Sings-to-Trees is the sort of elf who lives by himself, has a healthy appreciation for what nursing wild animals involves, and does it anyway because he truly loves animals. Despite that, he was not entirely prepared to deal with a skeleton deer with a broken limb, or at least with the implications of injured skeleton deer who are attracted by magical disturbances showing up in his yard. As one might expect, Sings-to-Trees and the goblins run into each other while having to sort out some problems that are even more dangerous than the war the goblins were unexpectedly removed from. But the point of this novella is not a deep or complex plot. It pushes together a bunch of delightfully weird and occasionally grumpy characters, throws a challenge at them, and gives them space to act like fundamentally decent people working within their constraints and preconceptions. It is, in other words, an excellent vehicle for Ursula Vernon (writing as T. Kingfisher) to describe exasperated good-heartedness and stubbornly determined decency.

Sings-to-Trees gazed off in the middle distance with a vague, pleasant expression, the way that most people do when present at other people's minor domestic disputes, and after a moment, the stag had stopped rattling, and the doe had turned back and rested her chin trustingly on Sings-to-Trees' shoulder. This would have been a touching gesture, if her chin hadn't been made of painfully pointy blades of bone. It was like being snuggled by an affectionate plow.

It's not a book you read for the twists and revelations (the resolution is a bit of an anti-climax). It's strength is in the side moments of characterization, in the author's light-hearted style, and in descriptions like the above. Sings-to-Trees is among my favorite characters in all of Vernon's books, surpassed only by gnoles and a few characters in Digger. The Kingfisher books I've read recently have involved humans and magic and romance and more standard fantasy plots. This book is from seven years ago and reminds me more of Digger. There is less expected plot machinery, more random asides, more narrator presence, inhuman characters, no romance, and a lot more focus on characters deciding moment to moment how to tackle the problem directly in front of them. I wouldn't call it a children's book (all of the characters are adults), but it has a bit of that simplicity and descriptive focus. If you like Kingfisher in descriptive mode, or enjoy Vernon's descriptions of D&D campaigns on Twitter, you are probably going to like this. If you don't, you may not. I thought it was slight but perfect for my mood at the time. Rating: 7 out of 10

Farmer Protests While I was hoping to write about RCEP exclusively, just today farmer protests have happened against three farm laws which had been passed by our Govt. about a month ago without consulting anybody. The bills benefit only big business houses at the cost of farmers. This has been amply shared by an open letter to one of the biggest business house which will benefit the most. Now while that is a national experience and what it tells, let me share, some experience from the State I come from, Maharashtra. About 4-5 years back Maharashtra delisted fruit and vegetables from the APMC market. But till date, the APMC market is working, why, the reasons are many. However, what it did was it forced the change to sugarcane, a water guzzling crop much more than previously. This has resulted in lowering the water table in Maharashtra and put them more into debt trap and later they had to commit suicide. Now let us see why the Punjab farmers have been so agitated that they are walking all the way to Delhi. They are right now, somewhere between Haryana-Delhi border. The reason is that because even their experiments with contract farming have not been good. This is why they are struggling to go to Delhi to make their collective voices heard and get the farm bills rolled back. Even the farmers from Gujarat were sued, but because of elections were put back, the intentions though are clear. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and for sugarcane and that too by Bajaj Company. At the end of the day, the laws made by the Govt. leaves our farmer at the mercy of big corporations. It is preposterous to believe that the farmer, with their small land holdings will be able to stand up to the Corporation. Add to that, they cannot go to Court. It is the SDM (Sub-Divisonal Magistrate) who will decide on the matters and has the last word. If this is allowed, in a couple of years there will be only few farmers or corporations who would have large hand-holdings, and they would be easily co-opted by the Government in power. Just in A gentleman who turned off water cannon being shot at farmers has been charged for murder Currently, the Government procures rice in vast quantities and the farmers are assured at least some basic income, in the states of Punjab and Haryana

Procurement of Rice by Various States

Recently there was also an article in Indian Express which shares the farmer s apprehensions and does share that it s a complex problem with no easy solutions. The solution can only be dialogue between the two parties. This was also shared by Vivek Kaul, who is far more knowledgable than me on the subject and made a long read on the subject.

The Canada Way Recently, while sparring on the Internet, came to know of the Canada way. Here, the Government makes the farmer a corporation and the Government helps them. But the Canada way seems to largely work as the Canadian Government owns the majority of the lands in question. And yes, Indians have benefited from it but that is also due to a. the currency differential between Canadian dollar and Indian Rupee and the 99-year land lease. There may be other advantages that the Canadian Government bestows and that is the reason possibly that most Punjabi farmers go to Canada and UK to farm. While looking at it, I also came across the situation in the United States and it seems the situation there seems to be becoming even more grim.

RCEP RCEP stands for Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. We were supposed to be part of this partnership. Now why didn t we join, for two reasons, our judicial infrastructure is the worst. It took 8 years to decide on a tax retrospective case (Vodafone) and that too finally outside India. And that decision, by no means an end. The other thing is all those who have joined RCEP have lesser duties, tariffs then India. What this means is that they are much more competitive than India. While there is fear that perhaps that China may take over its assets as it has done with few countries around the world, the opportunity for those countries was too good to pass up even with the dangers. But, then even India has taken loans from the Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB) Bank where China is the biggest shareholder. So it doesn t make sense to be insecure on that front. And again, it is up to India or any other sovereign country to decide to take loans from some country, some multilateral organization or any other way and on what terms.

What China has done and doing is similar to what IMF (being used primarily by the United States) had done in its past. The only difference is that time it was the United States, now it is China. America co-opted Governments, and got assets, China doing the same, no difference in tactics, more or less the same. There has also been a somewhat interesting paper which discusses how the RCEP may unfold in different circumstances. In short, it tells that the partners will benefit, some more than others. It also does compare the RCEP to CPTPP (The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). While the study is a bit academic in nature as the United States has walked out and the new president-elect Joe Biden hasn t made any moves and is unlikely to make any moves as there is deep divide and resentment about multilateral trade partnerships domestically within the United States. This news and understanding was quite shocking to me as it shows that unlike the United States of the past, which was supposed to be a beacon of capitalism and seemed to enjoy capitalism, it seems to be an opportunist only. There is also this truth that under Biden, there is only so many things on which he would need and can spend his political capital on.

Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats

As can be seen, economy at least for the democrats, this time around is pretty far round the corner. He has a host of battles and would have to choose which to fight and which to ignore. In the end, we are left to our own devices. At the moment, India does not know when it s economy will recover

PTI News, Nov 27, 2020

There has been another worrying bit of news, now all newspapers will need to get some sort of permission, certification from Govt. of India about any news of the world. This is harking back on the 1970 s, 1980 s era

Once a year folks interested in Netfilter technologies gather together to discuss past, ongoing and future works. The Netfilter Workshop is an opportunity to share and discuss new ideas, the state of the project, bring people together to work & hack and to put faces to people who otherwise are just email names. This is an event that has been happening since at least 2001, so we are talking about a genuine community thing here. It was decided there would be an online format, split in 3 short meetings, once per week on Fridays. I was unable to attend the first session on 2020-11-06 due to scheduling conflict, but I made it to the sessions on 2020-11-13 and 2020-11-20. I would say the sessions were joined by about 8 to 10 people, depending on the day. This post is a summary with some notes on what happened in this edition, with no special order. Pablo did the classical review of all the changes and updates that happened in all the Netfilter project software components since last workshop. I was unable to watch this presentation, so I have nothing special to comment. However, I ve been following the development of the project very closely, and there are several interesting things going on, some of them commented below. Florian Westphal brought to the table status on some open/pending work for mptcp option matching, systemd integration and finally interfacing from nft with cgroupv2. I was unable to participate in the talk for the first two items, so I cannot comment a lot more. On the cgroupv2 side, several options were evaluated to how to match them, identification methods, the hierarchical tree that cgroups present, etc. We will have to wait a bit more to see how the final implementation looks like. Also, Florian presented his concerns on conntrack hash collisions. There are no real-world known issues at the moment, but there is an old paper that suggests we should keep and eye on this and introduce improvements to prevent future DoS attack vectors. Florian mentioned these attacks are not practical at the moment, but who knows in a few years. He wants to explore introducing RB trees for conntrack. It will probably be a rbtree structure of hash tables in order to keep supporting parallel insertions. He was encouraged by others to go ahead and play/explore with this. Phil Sutter shared his past and future iptables development efforts. He highlighted fixed bugs and his short/midterm TODO list. I know Phil has been busy lately fixing iptables-legacy/iptables-nft incompatibilities. Basically addressing annoying bugs discovered by all ruleset managers out there (kubernetes, docker, openstack neutron, etc). Lots of work has been done to improve the situation; moreover I myself reported, or forwarded from the Debian bug tracker, several bugs. Anyway I was unable to attend this talk, only learnt a few bits in the following sessions, so I don t have a lot to comment here. But when I was fully present, I was asked by Phil about the status of netfilter components in Debian, and future plans. I shared my information. The idea for the next Debian stable release is to don t include iptables in the installer, and include nftables instead. Since Debian Buster, nftables is the default firewalling tool anyway. He shared the plans for the RedHat-related ecosystem, and we were able to confirm that we are basically in sync. Pablo commented on the latest Netfilter flowtable enhancements happening. Using the flowtable infrastructure, one can create kernel network bypasses to speed up packet throughput. The latest changes are aimed for bridge and VLAN enabled setups. The flowtable component will now know how to bypass in these 2 network architectures as well as the previously supported ingress hook. This is basically aimed for virtual machines and containers scenarios. There was some debate on use cases and supported setups. I commented that a bunch of virtual machines connected to a classic linux bridge and then doing NAT is basically what Openstack Neutron does, specifically in DVR setups. Same can be found in some container-based environments. Early/simple benchmarks done by Pablo suggest there could be huge performance improvements for those use cases. There was some inevitable comparison of this approach to what others, like DPDK/XDP can do. A point was raised about this being a more generic and operating system-integrated solution, which should make it more extensible and easier to use. Stefano Bravio commented on several open topics for nftables that he is interested on working on. One of them, issues related to concatenations + vmap issues. He also addressed concerns with people s expectations when migrating from ipset to nftables. There are several corner features in ipset that aren t currently supported in nftables, and we should document them. Stefano is also wondering about some tools to help in the migration. A translation layer like there is in place for iptables. Eric Gaver commented there are a couple of semantics that will not be suitable for translation, such as global sets, or sets of sets. But ipset is way simpler than iptables, so a translation mechanism should probably be created. In any case, there was agreement that anything that helps people migrate is more than welcome, even if it doesn t support 100% of the use cases. Stefano is planning to write documentation in the nftables wiki on how the pipapo algorithm works and the supported use cases. Other plans by Stefano include to work on some optimisations for faster matches. He mentioned using architecture specific instruction to speed up sets operations, like lookups. Finally, he commented that some folks working with eBPF have showed interest in reusing some parts of the nftables sets infrastructure (pipapo) because they have detected performance issues in their own data structures in some cases. It is not clear how to best achieve it, how to better bridge the two things together. Probably the ideal is to generalize the pipapo data structures and integrate it into the generic bitmap library or something which can be used by anyone. Anyway, he hopes to get some more time to focus on Netfilter stuff begining with the next year, in a couple of months. Moving a bit away from the pure software development topics, Pablo commented on the netfilter.org infrastructure. Right now the servers are running on gandi.net, on virtual machines that are being basically donated to us. He pointed that the plan is to simplify the infrastructure. For that reason, for example, FTP services has been shut down. Rsync services have been shut down as well, so basically we no longer have a mirrors infrastructure. The bugzilla and wikis we have need some attention, given they are old software pieces, and we need to migrate them to be more modern. Finally, the new logo that was created was presented. Later on, we spent a good chunk of the meeting discussing options on how to address the inevitable iptables deprecation situation. There are some open questions, and we discussed several approaches. From doing nothing at all, which means keeping the current status-quo, to setting a deadline date for the deprecation like the python community did with python2. I personally like this deadline idea, but it is perceived like a negative push by other. We all agree that the current do nothing approach is not sustainable either. Probably the way to go is basically to be more informative. We need to clearly communicate that choosing iptables for anything in 2020 is a bad idea. There are additional initiatives to help on this topic, without being too aggressive. A FAQ will probably be introduced. Eric Garver suggested we should bring nftables front and center. Given the website still mentions iptables everywhere, we will probably refresh the web content, introduce additional informative banners and similar things. There was an interesting talk on the topic of nft table ownership. The idea is to attach a table, and all the child objects, to a process. Then, we prevent any modifications to the table or the child objects by external entities. Basically, allocating and locking a table for a certain netlink socket. This is a nice way for ruleset managers, like firewalld, to ensure they have full control of what s happening to their ruleset, reducing the chances for ending with an inconsistent configuration. There is a proof-of-concept patch by Pablo to support this, and Eric mentioned he is pretty much interested in any improvements to support this use case. The final time block in the final session day was dedicated to talk about the next workshop. We are all very happy we could meet. Meeting virtually is way easier (and cheaper) than in person. Perhaps we can make it online every 3 or 6 months instead of, or in addition to, one big annual physical event. We will see what happens next year. That s all on my side!

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 162. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

In honour of Diego Maradona (RIP), this morning's cobweb-shifter is New Order's "Touched by the Hand of God"

Gradle and Kotlin in Debian Few months back, I was looking at where Gradle and Kotlin were in Debian. They still seem to be a work in progress. I found the Android-tools salsa repo which tells me the state of things. While there has been movement on both, a bit more on Kotlin, it still seems it would take a while. For kotlin, the wiki page is most helpful as well as the android-tool salsa kotlin board page . Ironically, some of the more important info. is shared in a blog post which ideally should also have been reflected in kotlin board page . I did see some of the bugs so know it s pretty much dependency hell. I can only congratulate and encourage Samyak Jain and Raman Sarda. I also played a bit with the google-android-emulator-installer which is basically a hook which downloads the binary from google. I do not know what the plans are, but perhaps in the future they also might be build locally, who knows. Just sharing/stating here so it s part of my notes whenever I wanna see what s happening

Women in India I am sure some of you might remember my blog post from last year. It is almost close to a year 2020 now and the question to be asked is, has much changed ? After a lot or hue and cry the Government of India shared the NCRB data of crimes against women and caste crimes. The report shared that crimes against women had risen by 7.3% in a year, similarly crimes against lower castes also went by similar percentage . With the 2020 pandemic, I am sure the number has gone up more. And there is a possibility that just like last year, next year the Government would cite the pandemic and say no data. This year they have done it for migrant deaths during lockdown , for job losses due to the pandemic and so on and so forth. So, it will be no surprise if the Govt. says about NCRB data next year as well. Although media has been showing some in spite of the regular threats to the journalists as shared in the last blog post. There is also data that shows that women participation in labor force has fallen sharply especially in the last few years and the Government seems to have no neither idea nor do they seem to care for the same. There aren t any concrete plans to bring back the balance even a little bit.

Few Court judgements But all hope is not lost. There have been a couple of good judgements, one from the CIC (Chief Information Commissioner) wherein in specific cases a wife can know salary details of her husband, especially if there is some kind of maintenance due from the husband. There was so much of hue and cry against this order that it was taken down from the livelaw RTI corner. Luckily, I had downloaded it, hence could upload and share it. Another one was a case/suit about a legally matured women who had decided to marry without parental consent. In this case, the Delhi High Court had taken women s side and stated she can marry whom she wants. Interestingly, about a week back Uttar Pradesh (most notorious about crime against women) had made laws called Love Jihad and 2 -3 states have followed them. The idea being to create an atmosphere of hate against Muslims and women have no autonomy about what they want. This is when in a separate suit/case against Sudharshan TV (a far-right leaning channel promoting hate against Muslims) , the Government of India itself put an affidavit stating that Tablighis (a sect of Muslims who came from Malaysia to India for religious discourse and assembly) were not responsible for dissemination of the virus and some media has correctly portrayed the same. Of course, those who are on the side of the Govt. on this topic think a traitor has written. They also thought that the Govt. had taken a wrong approach but couldn t tell of a better approach to the matter. There are too many matters in the Supreme Court of women asking for justice to tell all here but two instances share how the SC has been buckling under the stress of late, one is a webinar which was chaired by Justice Subramaniam where he shared how the executive is using judicial appointments to do what it wants. The gulf between the executive and the SC has been since Indira Gandhi days, especially the judicial orders which declared that the Emergency is valid by large, it has fallen much more recently and the executive has been muscling in which have resulted in more regressive decisions than progressive.

This observation is also in tune with another study which came to the same result although using data. The raw data from the study could give so much more than what has been shared. For e.g. as an idea for the study, of the ones cited, how many have been in civil law, personal law, criminal or constitutional law. This would give a better understanding of things. Also what is shocking is none of our court orders have been cited in the west in the recent past, when there used to be a time when the west used to take guidance from Indian jurisprudence sometimes and cite the orders to reach similar conclusion or if not conclusion at least be used as a precedent. I guess those days are over.

Government giving Corporate ownership to Private Sector Banks There was an Internal Working Group report to review extant ownership guidelines and Corporate Structure for Indian Private Sector Banks. This is the actual title of the report. Now there were and are concerns about the move which were put forth by Dr. Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya. While Dr. Rajan had been the 23rd Governor of RBI from 4th September 2013 to 4th September 2016. His most commendable work which largely is unknown to most people was the report A hundred small steps which you buy from sage publications. Viral Acharya was the deputy governor from 23rd January 2017 23rd July 2019. Mr. Acharya just recently published his book Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India which can be bought from the same publication house as well. They also wrote a three page article stating that does India need corporates in banking? More interestingly, he shares two points from history both world war 1 and world war 2. In both cases, the allies had to cut down the businesses who had owned banks. In Germany, it was the same and in Japan, the zaibatsu s dissolution, both of which were needed to make the world safe again. Now, if we don t learn lessons from history it is our fault, not history s. What was also shared that this idea was taken up in 2013 but was put into cold-storage. He also commented on the pressure on RBI as all co-operative banks have come under its ambit in the last few months. RBI has had a patchy record, especially in the last couple of years, with big scams like ILFS, Yes Bank, PMC Bank, Laxmi Vilas Bank among others. The LVB Bank being the most recent one. If new banking licenses have to be given they can be given to good NBFC s who have been in the market for a long time and have shown maturity while dealing with public money. What is the hurry for giving it to Corporate/business houses ? There are many other good points in the report with which both Mr. Rajan and Mr. Acharya are in agreement and do hope the other points/suggestions/proposals are implemented. There was and is an interesting report by Reserve Bank of India called financial sector legislative reforms commission report volume 1 . If and when it gets deleted from RBI, I have put up a copy at my WordPress account, so we shall always have one. Interestingly, while looking through the people who were part of the committee was a somewhat familiar name Murmu . This is perhaps the first time you see people from a sort of political background being in what should be a cut and dry review which have people normally from careers in finance or Accounts. It also turns out that only one person was in favor of banks going to corporates, all the rest were against. It seems that the specific person hadn t heard the terms self-lending , connected-lending and conflict of interest. One of the more interesting comments in the report is if a corporate has a bank, then why would he go to Switzerland, he would just wash the money in his own bank. And if banks were to become to big to fail like it happened in the United States, it would be again private gains, public losses. There was also a Washington Post article which shares some of the reasons that Indian banks fail. I think we need to remind ourselves once again, how things can become
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gK3s5j7PgA

Positive News at end At the end I do not want to end on a sour notes, hence sharing a YouTube channel of Films Division India where you can see of the very classic works and interviews of some of the greats in Indian art cinema.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmsDivision/videos Also sharing a bit of funny story I came to know about youtube-dl, apparently it was taken off from github but thanks to efforts from EFF, Hackernews and others, it is now back in action.

Grabbing screenshot. I wanted to know the size of screenshot generated by canvas.toDataURL so I wrote a web app that just measures the size at 60fps because I could. From output I can see webp: 19087 png: 115818 jpg: 115818, so I figured webp is really good at this, or maybe chrome is really good at using webp. and png and jpg look like they are the same size... hmm.. why? UPDATE: image/jpg generated png and image/jpeg generated jpeg.