So, after I took over or at least, said to take over maintainership of the Raspberry Pi build images originally produced by Michael Stapelberg in mid-2018, I pushed very few updates. Yes, there was some good and visible work, migrated the image-spec repository from GitHub to Salsa, ironed out several outstanding issues, and most important for me managed to get an image built and running for all Raspberry models below the Raspberry Pi 4 Today, I am happy to announce a very good step in the right direction, so I am now

Announcing raspi.debian.net! I have registered and set up an (unofficial!) site, raspi.debian.net, that should serve as a go-grab-it destination for regularly autobuilt images for the Raspberry Pi family. Of course, today you will get an early view of the site. I plan to fix the lack of https due to a mistake on my part WRT the processes at my hosting provider, do some testing in the hardware I have handy (and bless + gpg-sign some images as tested), migrate and update the information in the Debian Wiki, etc. Oh! And I hope to get good news on the Raspberry 4 front, as I know work is actively underway to achieve it.

I never thought I could finish a game which is completely linear, has hardly any interaction necessary, hardly any riddles, no fighting. What Remains of Edith Finch taught be differently. And it is amazing.
A friend recently pointed me at a blog about casual games, and surprisingly I found two games I have played on the list: Firewatch and The Witness. One of the other games on the list was What Remains of Edith Finch. This games was lurking in my Steam library for quite some time, and I realized I actually started playing it long ago, but only for a few minutes, before having given up, back then. What a failure I realized! The games plays completely in the now deserted house of the family Finch. The youngest member of the family returns with a key to the house and uncovers the stories of her family. This is about all that is happening in the game. And it is so well done that I couldn t stop playing (wouldn t it be for my daughter interrupting me), and leaves you with the feeling to replay as soon as possible. The graphics are very well done, beautiful scenery, lots of love to details. The story progresses by walking (completely linearly) through the house, and text fragments appearing around you, telling part of the story, small hints, little secrets, everything that makes up a tangible set of family memories.
Exploring the house filled with locked rooms sealed as shrines for the deceased members of the family, Edith uncovers one by one the final moments of her family members, a family seemingly cursed. In these stories the player dives into the world and playing the role of the family members, re-living events of the past.
As I wrote in the beginning don t expect fights, don t expect riddles, but be prepared for an emotional roller coaster, for a deep dive into a well written family history with lots of weird twists. An absolute great game with a playing time of around 2h.

Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots

Did you ever wish you could make scatter plots with cat shaped points? Now you can! - Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots

What is the best tool to use for drawing vector pictures? For me and probably for many others, the answer is pretty obvious: Illustrator, or, maybe, Inkscape.

A coloring book to help folks understand how SELinux works. - mairin/selinux-coloring-book

The EURion constellation (also known as Omron rings[1] or doughnuts[2]) is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of banknote designs worldwide since about 1996. It is added to help imaging software detect the presence of a banknote in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers. According to research from 2004, the EURion constellation is used for colour photocopiers but probably not used in computer software.[3] It has been reported that Adobe Photoshop will not allow editing of an image of a banknote, but in some versions this is believed to be due to a different, unknown digital watermark rather than the EURion constellation.[4][3]

This huge collection of non-scary optical illusions and fascinating visual phenomena emphasizes interactive exploration, beauty, and scientific explanation.

Generated photos are created from scratch by AI systems. All images can be used for any purpose without worrying about copyrights, distribution rights, infringement claims, or royalties.

Dokumentarfilm ber die Rangierer im Bahnhof Dresden-Friedrichstadt in der DDR aus dem Jahr 1984.

Il termine sardo femina accabadora, femina agabbad ra o, pi comunemente, agabbadora o accabadora (s'agabbad ra, lett. "colei che finisce", deriva dal sardo s'acabbu, "la fine" o dallo spagnolo acabar, "terminare") denota la figura storicamente incerta di una donna che si incaricava di portare la morte a persone di qualunque et , nel caso in cui queste fossero in condizioni di malattia tali da portare i familiari o la stessa vittima a richiederla. In realt non ci sono prove di tale pratica, che avrebbe riguardato alcune regioni sarde come Marghine, Planargia e Gallura[1]. La pratica non doveva essere retribuita dai parenti del malato poich il pagare per dare la morte era contrario ai dettami religiosi e della superstizione.

Alright the people have spoken and they want more cat genetics. So, I present to you all "Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial", feat. pics of many real life cats (for science, of course...this baby is Caterpillar).

Back in early 2018, the prrd package was introduced as release 0.0.1, uploaded to CRAN, and updated once as release 0.0.2. I have used it extensively for every CRAN release of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and possibly others. The idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development and is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the following (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in split byobu session). Since the two early releases, I made a few changes to e.g. the analysis of package checks and their summaries (but never pushed these) as well as a few usability enhancements. This release regroups these. The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.3 (2020-04-19)

• Extended functionality summarise() with optional use of package foghorn (Dirk)
• New scripts enqueueDepends, dequeueDepends and summmariseJobs (Dirk)
• Added tweaks and enhancements throughout (Dirk)
• The default queue location can now be set via options (Dirk)
• Meta-data on package, version and date is now stored, and shown on dequeue startup (Dirk)
• The README.md was clarified and improved (Dirk, Avraham Adler in #8, Robert Nuske in #10)

CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. See the aforementioned webpage and its repo for details. For more questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. 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.

The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Jonathan Carter! His term as project leader starts next Tuesday April 21st and expires on April 20th 2021. Of a total of 1011 developers, 339 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 page. Many thanks to Jonathan Carter, Sruthi Chandran and Brian Gupta for running. And special thanks to Sam Hartman for his service as DPL during these last twelve months!

To follow some older (as in two years) ARM assembler howto, I searched for a quick and dirty way to run a current Rasbian with qemu 4.2 on Debian/unstable. The end result are the following notes to get that up and running:

# Download a binary device tree file and matching kernel a good soul uploaded to github
wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress
wget https://github.com/vfdev-5/qemu-rpi2-vexpress/raw/master/vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb
# Download the official Rasbian image without X
wget -O raspbian_lite_latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest
unzip raspbian_lite_latest.zip
# Convert it from the raw image to a qcow2 image and add some space
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite.img rasbian.qcow2
qemu-img resize rasbian.qcow2 +2G
# start qemu
qemu-system-arm -m 2048M -M vexpress-a15 -cpu cortex-a15 \
 -kernel kernel-qemu-4.4.1-vexpress -no-reboot \
 -smp 2 -serial stdio \
 -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb -sd rasbian.qcow2 \
 -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext4 console=ttyAMA0,15200 loglevel=8" \
 -nic user,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22
# login at the serial console as user pi with password raspberry
sudo -i
# enable ssh
systemctl enable ssh
# resize partition and filesystem
parted /dev/mmcblk0 resizepart 2 100%
resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

Now I can login via ssh and start to play:

ssh pi@localhost -p 5555

So for me that is sufficient, I have network connectivity to install an editor, transfer files and can otherwise work with tmux to have some session multiplexing. Additional Notes

• Qemu supports a raspi2 machine, but this one does not support networking or USB for keyboard and mouse (in case you like to try the version with a desktop), but in general it works. You can extract the offical kernel and device tree file from the image and boot. But you're limited to the serial console as far as I could figure it out.
• Using the full Rasbian image with the vexpress-a15 machine works, but I got only a resolution of 640x480 out of it, so I decided that ssh access to the emulated machine is sufficient and easier to deal with.
• You've no ICMP available inside the qemu machine, so test your network connectivity with curl instead of ping.
• Many tutorials use the versatilepb machine, you can find a matching device tree file and kernel on github as well. The drawback here is that the machine supports only 256MB of RAM, so you're more constrained.
• Qemu flags change all the time, this works right now in April 2020 with qemu 4.2.

Review: Beyond the Galaxy, by Ethan Siegel

Publisher:	World Scientific
Copyright:	2016
ISBN:	981-4667-16-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	370

In the preface of this book, Ethan Siegel recounts his experience as a new college professor in 2009, thrilled to learn that he would be teaching the college's introductory astronomy class. The only disappointment was that he could not find a textbook that described astronomy the way that he wanted to teach it. Siegel did not want to simply describe the current astronomical understanding. He wanted to start at the beginning and tell a story. What questions did we start with? How did we answer them? What new questions did those answers provoke? I enjoyed Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math, but I'm even happier that she included in it a recommendation of Beyond the Galaxy as a good introduction to modern astronomy. I am completely in agreement with Siegel: Astronomy is interesting however it is described, but the best presentation for the interested lay person who does not intend to become a professional astronomy is chronological. (I feel the same way about physics and mathematics.) The narrative structure of scientific discovery draws me in every time. It's so satisfying to see our knowledge growing, breakthrough by breakthrough, only to meet the next puzzling inconsistency. It also is a natural fit for bringing someone up to speed on a field, since the history of the field starts with simpler questions and problems, and the complications of later discoveries build on the gaps left by earlier theories. Siegel tells that story well. Beyond the Galaxy starts with observations of seasonal changes in the path of the Sun through the sky and phases of the moon, quickly moves on to Eratosthenes's calculation of the circumference of the Earth, and continues at pace through early astronomy. The first chapter brings the reader up to the start of the 20th century, after which Siegel slows down and spends the remaining 10 chapters on the last 100 years: special and general relativity, the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, the inflationary period, and more. For me, this was perfect. The story of early astronomy and the fight over the heliocentric model of the universe is worth telling, but it's been told many times before and features prominently in history books outside of science classes. The weight of material in this book matched my interest: What new developments have there been after general relativity and the Big Bang theory? What inconsistencies are dark matter and dark energy explaining? What is the inflationary period and how did it modify the Big Bang theory? (My half-formed impression of this part of astronomy from news articles turned out to be almost entirely wrong.) And how do we know all of this? The question of how we know as much as we do about the early origins of the universe turned out to be far more interesting than I had realized. It's one of those pieces of science where, when given only the conclusions, it's hard to imagine how our theories could be as complete as they are. Siegel is a bit repetitive in how he talks about theory development and occasionally skims over the details to avoid getting too deep into techniques and math, but he does a great job explaining the predictions of a theory, the design of experiments to prove or disprove those predictions, and the implications for the boundaries of what we know. This is the first time someone has explained the theorized origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in sufficient detail that I was able to understand and internalize it. Dark matter and dark energy are the current topics of astronomy that get the most press, and the coverage of both is very good here. I was particularly fascinated by the link between dark matter and the superstructures of the universe that we've discovered. Astronomy does scale in a way that no other science can manage, and the scale of structure we've discovered and been able to map has gone up considerably since the last time I refreshed my astronomical knowledge. If you're looking for a math-light, comprehensive introduction to modern astronomy, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. That goes double if you, like me, prefer a chronological view of scientific discovery so that you can understand what questions people were trying to answer and how our understanding changed over time. One note on format: Astronomy being what it is, this book is very heavy on pictures. It is not at all suitable for a dedicated ebook reader. The Kindle tries, but the combination of a small screen and black and white e-ink fail miserably. I switched to reading on a tablet, and that was a far better experience. The Kindle app still struggles to put the figures next to the text that discusses them, but that's a typesetting problem that I often have with physical books as well. If you don't have a tablet and you aren't willing to read on a computer screen, you probably want a physical copy of this one (which, sadly, means academic textbook pricing). Rating: 8 out of 10

In Haskell (and many other functional languages) it's quite common for the implementation of a function to reference one less argument than the type signature declares:

g :: foo -> bar
g = length . reverse

Known as point-free style by proponents (and pointless style by opponents), the function definition is a list of other functions which are composed together to produce a composite requiring a single argument: the missing one. Sometimes I come across the opposite: a function with a type signature and a definition beginning in a way similar to this

f :: foo -> bar
f a b =  

That is, the type signature declares that the function accepts a single argument of type foo, but the definition is in terms of two arguments. Huh? What's going on is that bar is really a type synonym for another function. In other words

type bar = baz -> qux

So we can consider f to actually be

f :: foo -> baz -> qux

With this definition of bar, in the definition of f above, the second parameter b maps to the type baz. When I've encountered this, I strongly suspect what has happened is the function was originally written with the longer type signature, and later on the type synonym was declared and function signatures updated to use it. I'm not aware of anyone advocating for this style.

I m working on trying to get a Qualcomm IPQ8064 device working properly. I d got as far as an extremely hacked up chain of networking booting and the serial console working, so the next stage was to try and get a basic userland in place to try and make poking things a bit easier. While I have a cross-compiling environment all setup (that s how I m building my kernels) I didn t really want to get into something complicated just to be able to poke around sysfs etc. I figured I could use a static BusyBox in an initramfs. I was right, but there were a couple of hiccups along the way so I m writing it up so I remember next time. First, I cheated and downloaded a prebuilt static binary from https://busybox.net/downloads/binaries/ (very convenient, thanks) - the IPQ8064 is a dual core ARMv7 so I used busybox-armv7l. There were various sites with init scripts to go along with this; I ended up with a variation of Star Brilliant s gist:

Minimal init script

#!/bin/busybox sh
busybox mkdir -p /dev /etc /proc /root /sbin /sys /usr/bin /usr/sbin
busybox mount -t proc proc /proc
busybox mount -t sysfs sys /sys
busybox mount -t devtmpfs dev /dev
echo Starting up...
echo ttyMSM0::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyMSM0 115200 vt100 >> /etc/inittab
echo Login with root and no password. > /etc/issue
echo >> /etc/issue
echo root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh > /etc/passwd
busybox mdev -s
busybox --install
hostname localhost
ip link set lo up
echo 5 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
exec /linuxrc

busybox and the init script aren t sufficient. If you have any problems then you re going to want a console device. Otherwise you ll do what I did, forget to change one of the tty references in the script to the right device, and spend too long trying to figure out why you re not getting any output as soon as you start running userspace. It turns out that CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT isn t sufficient for the initramfs (the Kconfig help even tells you that). So I need to create a /dev/console device file inside the initramfs too. And I don t build as root (and you shouldn t either) which makes creating a device node hard. It s ok though, because the Linux kernel doesn t need you to be root to build it, and it has a default initramfs with a console device in it. This is helpfully generated using usr/gen_init_cpio, which takes a file defining what you want to put in the cpio file that becomes your initramfs. I used the following:

Minimal initramfs creation file

# Simple busybox based initramfs
dir /dev 0755 0 0
nod /dev/console 0600 0 0 c 5 1
dir /root 0700 0 0
dir /bin 0755 0 0
dir /sbin 0755 0 0
file /init basic-init 0755 0 0
file /bin/busybox busybox-armv7l 0755 0 0

All that then needs to be done is linux/usr/gen_init_cpio initramfs.list > initramfs.cpio and the resulting initramfs.cpio is suitable for inclusion in your kernel. The precompiled binaries have a lot of stuff enabled, which makes for a pretty useful debugging environment with fairly minimal work.

If you never heard of the 10x engineer myth, it's a pretty great concept. It boils down to the idea where an engineer could be 10x more efficient than a random engineer. I find this fantastically twisted.Last week, I sat and chat with Alexis Monville in Le Podcast a podcast that equips you to make positive change in your organization. We talked about that 10x Engineer myth, and from there we digressed on how to grow your career and handle the different aspects of it.This was a very interesting exchange. Alexis is actually going to publish a new book next month (May 2020) entitled I am a Software Engineer and I am in charge.

Lucky me, this week, I had the chance to be able to read the book before everybody else which means I actually read after our recording. I understood why Alexis said that a lot of what I was talking about during our podcast resonated with him. I send a detailed review of the book to Alexis and Michael if you're curious. I'm definitely recommending this book if you want to stop complaining about your job and start understanding how to pull the strings.I wish I had this book available 10 years ago!

Today at the ACLU, we released a whitepaper discussing how to evaluate some novel cryptographic schemes that are being considered to provide technology-assisted contact-tracing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The document offers guidelines for thinking about potential schemes like this, and what kinds of safeguards we need to expect and demand from these systems so that we might try to address the (hopefully temporary) crisis of the pandemic without also creating a permanent crisis for civil liberties. The proposals that we're seeing (including PACT, DP^3T, TCN, and the Apple/Google proposal) work in pretty similar ways, and the challenges and tradeoffs there are remarkably similar to Internet protocol design decisions. Only now in addition to bytes and packets and questions of efficiency, privacy, and control, we're also dealing directly with risk of physical harm (who gets sick?), society-wide allocation of scarce and critical resources (who gets tested? who gets treatment?), and potentially serious means of exercising powerful social control (who gets forced into quarantine?). My ACLU colleague Jon Callas and i will be doing a Reddit AMA in r/Coronavirus tomorrow starting at 2020-04-17T19:00:00Z (that's 3pm Friday in TZ=America/New_York) about this very topic, if that's the kind of thing you're into.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In March, 252 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 16.0h (out of 14h assigned and 2h from February).
• Ben Hutchings did 12.25h (out of 20h assigned and 0.75h from February), thus carrying over 8.5h to April.
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Dylan A ssi did 6h (out of 6h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 19.5h (out of 30h assigned and 6.75h from February), thus carrying over 17.25h to April.
• Hugo Lefeuvre gave back the 12h he got assigned.
• Markus Koschany did 10h (out of 30h assigned and 18.75h from February), thus carrying over 38.75h to April.
• Mike Gabriel did 10.25h (out of 8h assigned and 2.25h from February).
• Ola Lundqvist did 6h (out of 12h assigned and 2.5h from February), thus carrying over 8.5h to April.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 6.25h (out of 8h assigned), and gave back the remaining 1.75h.
• Sylvain Beucler did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 24h (out of 24h assigned).

Evolution of the situation March was a strange month for many people all over the globe. Here we ll just express our hopes that you are and will be well! LTS gained a new contributor in March, Anton Gladky, however he then decided to become active later this year. Similarly Hugo Lefeuvre notified us that he ll be inactive in April. In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. Hurry up: the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than three months! The security tracker currently lists 25 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 23 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 55 months)
• GitHub (for 45 months)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 22 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• Blablacar (for 70 months)
• Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 65 months)
• Linode (for 59 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 49 months)
• Plat Home (for 48 months)
• University of Oxford (for 4 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• The Positive Internet Company (for 71 months)
• Domeneshop AS (for 70 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 64 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 56 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 56 months)
• Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 49 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 39 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 33 months)
• CINECA (for 23 months)
• Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 17 months)
• Cloudways Ltd (for 6 months)
• Dinahosting SL (for 4 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 71 months)
• Evolix (for 70 months)
• MyTux (for 70 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 67 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 67 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 66 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 65 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 65 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 64 months)
• NUMLOG (for 64 months)
• WinGo AG (for 63 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 59 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 57 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 54 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 52 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 46 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 46 months)
• Tesorion (for 46 months)
• Bearstech (for 38 months)
• LiHAS (for 38 months)
• People Doc (for 34 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 32 months)
• Supagro (for 28 months)
• Demarcq SAS (for 26 months)
• TrapX Security (for 23 months)
• Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 12 months)
• TouchWeb SAS (for 4 months)
• SPiN AG

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People complained that my laptop sound was buzzy, so I bought a proper microphone (thanks to mdw for advice, and loan of some kit). Proper microphones come with a holder that accepts a screw from your microphone stand. In my case, 3/8" "BSW" - similar to 3/8" US standard "coarse" (or if you unscrew a supplied insert, a special 27tpi 5/8" UNS). I don't have a microphone stand and I didn't want to buy one. I have two camera tripods - a small one and a big one. My camera tripods have 1/4" coarse (20tpi) UNC screws. Also, we have a 3D printer at home. And nowadays you can download a configurable screw thread from the internet. So I made myself an adapter. After a few iterations I have a pretty good object which can be used to fit my new microphone to either camera tripod. (I found that a UNC thread was close enough to fit the microphone's BSW.) Of coure, this is Open Hardware and the (short) source code is available. (To build it you'll want to git clone to get the included files.) Pictures below the cut. The flange at the bottom is because tripods usually have a soft top which is supposed to stop scratching the camera; a narrow hexagonal base would make gouges, hence the wide base. ( Read more... )

comments

Debian.org added support for DKIM in 2020. To configure this on my side, I had to do the following, on top of my email configuration.

1. add this line to /etc/opendkim/signing.table:

   *@debian.org marcos-debian.anarcat.user
   

2. add this line to /etc/opendkim/key.table:

   marcos-debian.anarcat.user debian.org:marcos-debian.anarcat.user:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos-debian.anarcat.user.private
   

   Yes, that's quite a mouthful! That magic selector is long in that way because it needs a special syntax (specifically the .anarcat.user suffix) for Debian to be happy. The -debian string is to tell me where the key is published. The marcos prefix is to remind me where the private is used.
3. generate the key with:

   opendkim-genkey --directory=/etc/opendkim/keys/ --selector=marcos-debian.anarcat.user --domain=debian.org --verbose
   

   This creates the DNS record in /etc/opendkim/keys/marcos-debian.anarcat.user.txt (alongside the private key in .key).
4. restart OpenDKIM:

   service opendkim restart
   

   The DNS record will look something like this:

   marcos-debian.anarcat.user._domainkey   IN  TXT ( "v=DKIM1; h=sha256; k=rsa; "
   "p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAtKzBK2f8vg5yV307WAOatOhypQt3ANQ95iDaewkVehmx42lZ6b4PzA1k5DkIarxjkk+7m6oSpx5H3egrUSLMirUiMGsIb5XVGBPFmKZhDVmC7F5G1SV7SRqqKZYrXTufRRSne1eEtA31xpMP0B32f6v6lkoIZwS07yQ7DDbwA9MHfyb6MkgAvDwNJ45H4cOcdlCt0AnTSVndcl"
   "pci5/2o/oKD05J9hxFTtlEblrhDXWRQR7pmthN8qg4WaNI4WszbB3Or4eBCxhUdvAt2NF9c9eYLQGf0jfRsbOcjSfeus0e2fpsKW7JMvFzX8+O5pWfSpRpdPatOt80yy0eqpm1uQIDAQAB" )  ; ----- DKIM key marcos-debian.anarcat.user for debian.org
   

5. The "p=MIIB..." string needs to be joined together, without the quotes and the p=, and sent in a signed email to changes@db.debian.org:

   -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
   dkimPubKey: marcos.anarcat.user MIIB[...]
   -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
   [...]
   

6. Wait a few minutes for DNS to propagate. You can check if they have with:

   host -t TXT marcos-debian.anarcat.user._domainkey.debian.org nsp.dnsnode.net
   

   (nsp.dnsnode.net being one of the NS records of the debian.org zone.)

If all goes well, the tests should pass when sending from your server as anarcat@debian.org.

Testing Test messages can be sent to dkimvalidator, mail-tester.com or check-auth@verifier.port25.com. Those tools will run Spamassassin on the received emails and report the results. What you are looking for is:

• -0.1 DKIM_VALID: Message has at least one valid DKIM or DK signature
• -0.1 DKIM_VALID_AU: Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from author's domain
• -0.1 DKIM_VALID_EF: Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from envelope-from domain

If one of those is missing, then you are doing something wrong and your "spamminess" score will be worse. The latter is especially tricky as it validates the "Envelope From", which is the MAIL FROM: header as sent by the originating MTA, which you see as from=<> in the postfix lost. The following will happen anyways, as soon as you have a signature, that's normal:

• 0.1 DKIM_SIGNED: Message has a DKIM or DK signature, not necessarily valid

And this might happen if you have a ADSP record but do not correctly sign the message with a domain field that matches the record:

• 1.1 DKIM_ADSP_ALL No valid author signature, domain signs all mail

That's bad and will affect your spam core badly. I fixed that issue by using a wildcard key in the key table:

--- a/opendkim/key.table
+++ b/opendkim/key.table
@@ -1 +1 @@
-marcos anarc.at:marcos:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos.private
+marcos %:marcos:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos.private

References

• Ubuntu documentation
• Debian wiki
• linode tutorial, also recommends rotating keys every 6 months
• jak-linux: uses rspamd instead of opendkim, and PostSRSd
• Gio's tutorial

This is a copy of a subset of my more complete email configuration.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in April) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. I am sure I am not the only one who will remember March 2020 in the future as a month nobody was really fond of. I was mostly occupied with non-Debian work and managed to get ill in the same week I wanted to celebrate my birthday but it didn t matter anyway because of ehm quarantine and social distancing. Maybe next year March will be great again.
Debian Games

• I was notified by Minetest upstream that Debian did not build the game with CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release or that we simply missed the -DNDEBUG compiler flag which in turn could cause some unexepected runtime errors. I quickly fixed the problem and backported the change to buster-backports. There is another pending merge request about build-depending on libspatialindex-dev. I was told it will speed up some processes on the server side, so I wanted to give it a try.
• I fixed RC bug #954722 in spring, the RTS game engine. A change in GCC caused yet another FTBFS but was rather easy to fix.
• I sponsored jag and runescape for Carlos Donizete Froes. Despite being such a trivial helper script for downloading the runescape launcher, the latter caused some controversy. Now it looks like all problems can be resolved and I expect another upload with bug fixes in April.
• Last but not least I packaged a new upstream release of extremetuxracer, the racing game with Tux for all the family.

Debian Java

• I worked on new releases of wildfly-common, undertow, jboss-threads, jboss-xnio, libsmali-java and apktool.
• I uploaded a security update of checkstyle to Stretch and Buster and prepared another point update for Buster to fix a bug in el-api, websocket-api and jsp-api when libservlet3.1-java was upgraded from Stretch to Buster.
• A missing jar file on the CLASSPATH in commons-configuration2 made mediathekview and other packages FTBFS (#955755) but it also motivated me to remove the unnecessary update check in MediathekView on every startup because it may take a while until I can upgrade this program again.
• I also applied a patch by Bas Couwenberg for OpenJFX to fix a FTBFS bug due to the -Werror=deprecated-declarations flag.

Misc

• While I am still waiting for ublock-origin being processed in the NEW queue, I packaged the latest version of another browser addon, https-everywhere.

Debian LTS This was my 49. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 10 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• I worked on Tomcat 8 in Jessie and prepared patches for CVE-2020-1938, CVE-2020-1935 and CVE-2019-17563. I am working together with Abhihith PA who is currently reviewing them. Especially CVE-2020-1938 requires careful attention because of new options to secure the AJP port and protocol. In contrast to Wheezy, Tomcat in Jessie will be supported at least for another year, so it makes sense to apply the upstream changes for hardening the setup.
• I prepared another Tomcat 8 update for Stretch which will be released this month.

ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 22. month and I have been paid to work 9 hours on ELTS.

• I investigated all identified source packages from last month. They are supported but embed external software, sometimes affected by unfixed security vulnerabilities. After a closer inspection I discovered that most packages were either affected only by minor issues, which did not warrant an extra update, or they were not even affected at all because they linked against system libraries. However zlib, apache2 and php5 contained embedded and unfixed code copies of expat and file and zlib s miniunzip program was still prone to a directory traversal attack. I fixed the latter in ELA-222-1. The apache2 update will follow shortly and there is ongoing work for PHP5 anyway which allows us to fix the latest reported vulnerabilites and address the embedded code copy issues together in one update.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

TLDR: setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl and become a happier programmer.
The case for QWERTY for European ProgrammersIf you re working on Unix / Linux, or C based programming languages, it can make sense to switch to the qwerty(us) keyboard layout. Why ?
Unix, C, Perl, Java, and most of programming languages have been conceived on QWERTY keyboards.
So when the designers choose special characters to use for the language synthax, they simply choose what was easy to access on their own keyboard. This has been historically documented for the vi editor.

To give an example, using an Unix shell you have to type the dot . and slash / symbols quite often to navigate the filesystem. The two keys producing these symbols, are nicely aligned on a QWERTY layout and do not require a key combination to be entered. So you can quickly enter something like ../.. using a single hand.
Now using a QWERTZ layout, like in Germany / Austria, you have the . symbol easily accessible, but you need to combine two keys ( Shift + 7 ) to get a / .
And if you are a poor soul using an AZERTY layout, to get the . and / symbol you need each time a key combo.
The need of key combos is bad not only for speed (multiple keys to lookup) but also for usability, as you have to stretch your fingers to reach the key if using a single hand, provoking repetitive strain injury. You might be smiling but this is commonly known amongst Emacs Users, due to the prominent use of commands using Ctrl and Alt combos, and led to the creation of an Emacs Ergonomic wiki.

This goes as well for many symbol commonly used in programming languages, think for instance about the semicolon ; for terminating a statement, the [ , and ] symbols for defining an array, and the backslash \ for escaping.
All these keys are accessible via a single keypress on qwerty and require key combos on qwertz and azerty. No wonder Linux, Minix and BSD were invented on non-azerty layouts: in France we were still busy typing the path to the source code, when in other parts of the world people already had the file open in their editor.
You don t need to throw away your existing keyboards when learning the qwerty (us) layout: for a couple of euros, you can find on ebay alternate keys stickers to put on your laptop.
Accessing keys with diacritics with the AltGr International variantNow if you want to switch to a qwerty keyboard layout, and you re French or German, you might wonder how to access the characters with diacritics, the and of French and and of German.
Fortunately there is a very clever keyboard variant for the us layout who uses the AltGr key, to make all these keys accessible, just hiding them behind the AltGr key.
Need ? that s just AltGr + e away. Needs ? That s just AltGr + , Needs ? AltGr +p
See the coolness of that ? You can type all international diacritics in an easy way, and there are even keyboard stickers for that too.

Now how to access to this layout of wonder ?
You can configure the layout and variant in Xorg, in debian/ubuntu that would be entering in /etc/default/keyboard

XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT="altgr-intl"

After restarting the X server, you can check that the settings have been applied with

setxkbmap -print -verbose 10

If using Gnome, you can also set the keyboard layout and variant by changing the schema org.gnome.desktop-inputsources, which will override the desktop-agnostic settings of /etc/default/keyboard.
For this you can either call

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources "[('xkb', 'us+altgr-intl')]"

or navigate with the gui tool dconf-settings to org.gnome.desktop-inputsources and set the value there.

If you want to further improve your keyboard layout, you can also have a look at swapping Ctrl and Alt, as described here (French language article) Happy hacking !

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 706 other packages on CRAN. A new upstream release 9.860.2 of Armadillo was just released. The theme of convergence continues; the previous release increased the minor from 800 to 850, now we are at 860. We first wrapped this up as version 0.9.859.1.0, but it turned out to have been held back by a buglet between R 4.0.0 and Rcpp which the recent patch release fixed (along with other woes on old R or non-CRAN-alike macOS). It then turns out that the new (upstream) version 9.860.1 had a minor bug which I missed as I reverse-depends checked the prior version. Doh. My thanks, as always, to CRAN for spotting this. The fix was added upstream and we have 9.860.2 as RcppArmadillo 0.9.860.2.0. Changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.860.2.0 (2020-04-13)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.860.2 (Roasted Mocha Fix)
  • Added powmat()
  • Faster access to columns in sparse submatrix views
  • Faster handling of relational expressions by accu()
  • Faster handling of sympd matrices by expmat(), logmat(), sqrtmat()
  • Workaround for save/load issues with HDF5 v1.12
• Vignettes are now pre-made and include (#285)
• Two test files are now skipped on 32-bit Windows

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. 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.

A minor routine update 0.0.4 of gettz arrived on CRAN overnight. gettz provides a possible fallback in situations where Sys.timezone() fails to determine the system timezone. That happened when e.g. the file /etc/localtime somehow is not a link into the corresponding file with zoneinfo data in, say, /usr/share/zoneinfo. Since the package was written (in the fall of 2016), R added a similar extended heuristic approach itself. This release adds registration of the compiled routine via R_registerRoutines() and R_useDynamicSymbols(), adds .registration=TRUE to useDynLib() in NAMESPACE, and uses an unquoted symbol in .Call(). Two new badges were added to the README.md as well. And as in the previous release in 2016: No new code, or new features. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the gettz page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. 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.

In a previous job I wrote some simple utilities which were helpful for continuous-integration pipelines. Most of these were very very simple, for example:

• Find all *.json files, and validate them.
• Find all *.yaml files, and validate them.
• Run all the tests in a given directory, execute them one by one.
  • But stop if any single test failed.
  • run-parts does this on Debian GNU/Linux systems, but on CentOS there is no -exit-on-error flag.
  • Which is the sole reason I had to re-implement that tool. Sigh.
• Parse PHP-files and look for comments that were bogus.
  • I mentioned this in the past.

Each of these simple tools were run of the mill shell-scripts, or simple binaries. I've been putting together a simple deployable tool which lets you run them easily, so here it is:

• https://github.com/skx/sysbox/

The idea is that you install the tool, then run the commands by specify the appropriate sub-command:

sysbox validate-yaml [path/to/find/files/beneath]

Of course if you symlink validate-yaml to sysbox you don't need to prefix with the name - so this is just like busybox in this regard. Might be interesting to some.

" 'Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.' I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked something like this: I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: 'Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?' My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this: The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exup ry from the Corona Fun with Statistics department at Worldometers (source, archive.org link)