Firstly, please excuse the ugly formatting of this ultra-wide image on my blog, and I m sure the respective planets that I m on. po to is my first real node project, and I m planning to get it to a point where it makes email less painful then it otherwise is. The code s on my github, and I d like to thank Rick Waldron for his work in helping me, as well as Scott Wells for the name. For those wondering, po to is an Esperanto word meaning (according to wiktionary):

1. a public institution (usually government-run) to deliver mail, post
2. mail distribution in general
3. one s mail, collectively

The front-end s name is po tilo the suffix denotes tool such that po tilo means something like mail tool fitting! More to come

I'm blogging about this small configuration issue as it took me some time to figure out how to configure cupt and smart to solve this problem. The reason I'm playing with cupt and smartpm is that I'm working to compare again a number of package managers in debian against the state of the art cudf solvers using mpm, and I'm suffering quite a bit to configure my virtual environment. Last year I promised to revise and fix our results. I didn't forget my promise, but it seems it took longer then expected. Anyway, back to the main topic. The release-problem arises because the key used to sign sarge (that I'm using as baseline for my experiments) is long expired. If you try to retrieve sarge from archive.debian.org you will find that sarge is signed with the key A70DAF536070D3A1 and apt-get will complain loudly if you try to use an archive signed with an expired key.

cupt For cupt this is documented in the man page and there are a number of options to add either to /etc/apt/apt.conf to the the cupt own conf file. Then cupt will happily accept the sarge Packages file and let you run update.

cupt::cache::release-file-expiration::ignore "true";
cupt::update::check-release-files "false";
cupt::update::keep-bad-signatures "true";

smartpm For smart I could not found this information anywhere, but reading the source code (tnx good it's python !). To cut it short, you need to set the key trustdb to an empty value for a specific channel. On the command line you get something like : smart channel --set aptsync-614482cb2c7e08d5722af3498232ba52 keyring= --config-file=/root/var/lib/smart/config where aptsync-614482cb2c7e08d5722af3498232ba52 is the channel name corresponding to sarge in my conf. Since I'm using a simulated environment, I save the result of this option in a non-default config file in my chroot.

Dear Lazyweb,

is there a simple way to block some users who login with SSH to read /proc/<pid>/cmdline of processes they don't own? Or better yet: don't see these pids at all?

I know that there are PID namespaces, but they seem to require a special PID 1. Seems hard to get for a simple SSH login. (I wouldn't mind changing a user's shell. But brittle shell startup scripts wouldn't cut it.) systemd-nspawn wants to boot a full Linux distribution in a container and even then I'd be unsure how to wire it up so that it cannot be skipped. I wouldn't mind a read-only bind mount of the outermost Linux installation into a chroot environment, as long as the parent SSH process can get the user jailed into it securely. (No need for someone to be root in the chroot.)

I know that there are RBAC frameworks, but they're cumbersome to use. I don't need file labelling or path-based access control, as I do trust the Linux file permissions for this. I think SMACK wouldn't help here, AppArmor isn't really useable in Debian testing and TOMOYO is a tad crazy to use with its domain transitions through process invocations.

I bet that grsecurity would have something for me up its sleeve. But it's not in a Debian kernel. Even though I know how to compile my own kernel I'd only do that if everything else fails.

Thanks in advance for your help.

UPDATE: That was quick, thanks to everyone who participated! Vasiliy Kulikov came up with a kernel patch to my problem (a hidepid mount option for procfs) that landed in 3.3. I tested it with the kernel in experimental and it works just fine and as expected. With hidepid set to 1, it will still leak the process count and their euids and egids. With hidepid set to 2, you only see your own processes, unless you're root. For ps there's no visible distinction between the two. So to test it you can just invoke this as root on a host running 3.3+:

mount -o remount,hidepid=1 /proc

There's even a backport request in the Debian BTS to get the feature into the wheezy kernel (3.2).

Way before Debian, Launchpad bug tracking system just reached 1 million bugs reported with one "bug" reported against Edubuntu basically mentioning it should invade schools. What to say about this? Hard without being harsh towards my friends working in the Ubuntu "world", indeed. Still, I really think that here, too much noise kills signal and the LP BTS is often hardly usable. I counted up to 217 bugs reported against samba4 (which is, after all, not so widely used yet) just because it apparently has upgrading issues between pre 12.04 versions of Ubuntu and Oneiric. It indeed seems that some automated bug reporting is now active and whenever a user encouters an upgrade issue with a package, a bug is being reported. I guess this is somehow an opt-in system (I hope so..:-)) but the default is very clearly using it. This feature is apparently what caused the recent bump in number of bugs reported in LP, making them even less useful, particularly to Debian package maintainers. I'm sure there are tools to help dealing with that and I was already answered that work is in progress to change this (and use a dedicated website for such reports or something like this). But, still, that seems to be the scary side of popularity...the very same popularity that is slowly but constantly hiding the work we're doing in Debian to indirectly make Ubuntu popular. (moving to more general concerns) I know that things are not all black or all white, but it always saddens me to feel that slowly....but, again, constantly, more and more people tend to forget that Debian is behind Ubuntu, is the ground on which it is built and Ubuntu wouldn't exist without it. When doing work, a human need is to get reward for it...and we are getting less of it...slowly, but constantly. Don't take me wrong. I have many friends working directly for Ubuntu. Some paid by Canonical for this. Some really involved up to "top level" (yes, including the very very top level even if I killed him once). I don't want to throw offense on them. I don't even know if they can do something about what I'm expressing below. I would just have them (and others) know. Let's take an example. I recently activated a few languages in D-I (Burmese, Tibetan, Uyghur). I'm happy with that, this is something I'm doing for 8 years now. But all these new translators were indeed only interested in one thing : "have Ubuntu translated in their language". No offense intended, but they didn't really care about *Debian* being translated in their language. I think that some didn't even know what Debian is. In the same field, I am more and more "fighting" to keep the level of translation completeness in Debian (see my regular spa^W reports). In some way, I still succeed, but the price to pay is more and more and more personal investment and work. That's still working for the strong set of languages we support. That works much less for most others. When someone "disappears" (or just switches to some other priorities), it's more and more difficult to find someone else popping up. And, for the "strong set", something else is happening : work duplication. There are "strong" French, German, Italian, whatever, l10n teams in Debian.....and there are similar teams for Ubuntu. And, mostly, those do not really work together. And sometimes, this is kinda discouraging. So, seeing the explosion happening on what is, whatever we think or write, the "other side", is not somethnig that can make one entirely happy. And this is why I won't celebrate Launchpad's millionth bug report. Particularly when I see that millionth bug report not even ack'ing that this Edubuntu marvel is based on the grounds set by some pionneers many years ago in a few schools in Norway (hello, Petter and others). Yeah, sometimes sad. To balance this, let's release wheezy and have millions of people benefit from it without even knowing.

Hey, thanks, Peter for the hint! Never heard of that option until you blogged about it. So, now I'm also ready to "tar taf", "tar xaf", "tar caf"..:-). Harder for me than you because I was used to "tar tfz" or "tar tfj"..:-) And I suspect that "tar taf" is prone to typos...we'll see.

For years, no decades, I've typed tar tzf something, tar xzf something. Except when someone annoying sent an uncompressed tar file and I had to then go and take out the z in the middle. Then came bzip2, and we learned tar tjf, tar xjf. OK, I could live with that. One emerging problem was that the tab completion now worked the wrong way around conceptually, because you had to pick and type the right letter first in order to see the appropriate set of files to unpack offered for completion. Then came lzma, which was (quick, guess?), tar tJf, tar xJf. And then there was lzop, which was too boring to get its own letter, so you had to type out tar -x --lzop -f. But lzma was short-lived, because then came xz, which was also J, because lzma was now too boring as well to get its own letter. Oh, and there is also the old compress, which is Z, and lzip, which I'd never heard of. But stop that. Now there is

 -a, --auto-compress
            use archive suffix to determine the compression program

This handles all the above compression programs, and no compression. So from now on, I always use tar taf and tar xaf. Awesome. The finger movements will be almost the same on QWERTY and AZERTY, and easier than before on QWERTZ. Actually, this option is already four years old in GNU tar. Funny I'd never heard of it until recently.

In this age of 3d accelerated desktops and all that fancy stuff, one does not expect practical innovation happening in the remote terminal emulation area. But it has just happened. It is called Mosh, a shorthand for "Mobile Shell". What does it do better than ssh we have learned to love?

• Less lag! Being UDP based, it is not prone to TCP congestion effects. Considering that voip, games and everything else latency critical has been UDP based, it is (almost) surprising that it wasn't done for interactive terminals before...
• Even less lag! Mosh provides local echo and line editing when the other side is not being responsive. To do this, mosh actually becomes a terminal emulator of it's own. This stuff is sweet on unstable 3G and conference wifi networks.
• Survives suspending. Resume your laptop and *bam* all your remote mutt and vim editors are still there instead of the "connection reset" you get from ssh.
• Roaming. Got another IP? Moved from wifi to ethernet to 3G? your sessions are still open! Another thing a TCP based protocol couldn't do easily...

It doesn't replace ssh, as it still borrows authentication from ssh. But that's cool, as you can keep your ssh authorized keys. Available in Debian unstable,testing and Backports today, and many other systems as well. Hopefully an Android client comes available soon, as the above mentioned advantages seem really tailored for android like mobile systems. Caveat: This is new stuff, and thus hasn't quite been proven to be secure.

Sparkleshare is a file sharing utility that keeps folders in sync on multiple computers in a similar fashion to the commercial and proprietary Dropbox. Sparkleshare recently released a Windows client, finally allowing me to start switching my co-workers at the Progressive Technology Project away from Dropbox. Overall, I'm very impressed. In particular, I appreciate the Sparkleshare authors' decision to build on top of existing tools (git for storage and revision control, ssh for transport, and ssh public key infrastructure for authorization and authentication). That means I don't have to learn new tools and protocols to debug and it means Sparkleshare can focus on the file sharing pieces. Despite my overall enthusiasm, I do have some serious concerns. Protecting your credentials A researcher found a startling security flaw in Dropbox - if you can copy a particular file from a user's computer to your own computer, you can impersonate them flawlessly, accessing all their Dropbox files without having to know the user's password. Unfortunately, Sparkleshare suffers from this same vulnerability if you use the default configuration. When you first install Sparkleshare, it creates a password-less ssh private/public key pair and then makes the public part easily accessible to you so you can add it to your server (or gitorious account, etc). Very convenient. But it also means that all an attacker needs to do is copy your private key (and your Sparkleshare configuration file) and they get complete control over your files. This problem is easily avoided. If you are running Linux or Mac OS X and you have your own key loaded in your ssh agent, Sparkleshare will happily use that key. So - simply by using your existing (presumably password-protected key) on your remote Sparkleshare servers, you can mitigate this problem. Sparkleshare will still load your Sparkleshare generated key, but if you don't provide that key with access to anything, no harm is done. Confirming each use of your key However... that leads to a new problem. If you are like me, your ssh agent is configured to ask for a confirmation every time your key is used. And, Sparkleshare regularly polls the remote git repository for changes. At best repeatedly clicking to confirm is tedious. At worst, it prevents you from intelligently rejecting malicious requests, thus defeating the whole purpose of the check. It is possible to launch Sparkleshare via ssh-agent in an environment in which you are not requiring the confirmation when Sparkleshare uses your key, but still requiring it for all other uses. However, given the trade offs, I've decided to add a password to my Sparkleshare provided ssh key rather than using my existing key: ssh-keygen -p -f ~/.config/sparkleshare/sparkleshare.jamie@progressivetech.org.key Now, I am prompted to enter my passphrase when I start Sparkleshare and don't have to confirm every use of the key. And, I continue to confirm each use of my main key. git was designed to store code, not documents Just because something is designed for one purpose doesn't mean it can't be used for another. However, there are a few limitations. Large files are one. git can handle files over 100MB, but may run into memory problems. I had to alter the git windowMemory setting, raising it higher than the size of the largest file. Another problem is disk space. Since git keeps full revision history on every machine, you have to download more data than just the files that are checked out. The more edits you make to a repository, the more disk space beyond what is checked out is needed (and deleting files won't help). Lastly, you can't use file modification times. With git, the file modification time will depend on when you checkout the files. With some fancy hook writing, you could tweak things so that the file modification date is the same as the commit date, but that still won't help you if you add an existing directory to Sparkleshare because all the files will have the same commit time. This "bug" has been reported to git and it has been rejected because mucking with the modification time of files can have bad results when you are using make to compile code. As Linus colorfully put it:

I'm sorry. If you don't see how it's WRONG to set a datestamp back to something that will make a simple "make" miscompile your source tree, 
I don't know what definition of "wrong" you are talking about.
It's WRONG.
It's STUPID.
And it's totally INFEASIBLE to implement.

Well, did I mention that git was designed for source code? No server validation Of all the problems I encountered, this one is by far the most serious. Perusing ~/.config/sparkleshare/debug.log is very informative. On a default installation, after you have added a project, you'll see:

19:32:27 [Fetcher][/home/jamie/SparkleShare/.tmp/bar] Fetching folder: ssh://foo@bar.org/foo/bar
19:32:27 [Fetcher] Disabled host key checking for bar.org

Wah. Once the project is added, whatever key fingerprint is given is stuffed into your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Host key checking is only disabled when you initially create the project, so if you connect to the proper server the first time, you are protected from subsequent man-in-the-middle attacks. However... if the initial fingerprint is wrong, your personal ssh configuration is now poisoned. This seems like a very bad idea. I've opened a debian bug to address it.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is J rgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year I will manage the department of technical documentation at a manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering. My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at home since 2006. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old computers in use. I answered: "Yes". Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in Bielefeld in December of 2006. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages for me as today. In the past there were advantages like:

• I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as they had little money to spent for computers and software.
• It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without cost.
• It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a server
• I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones came up in this way:

• Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software now.
• They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
• With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa for management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the interfaces used in the past.
• It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the different needs.
• The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
• More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the world and so the community, which is an very important part I think, is sharing knowledge and minds.
• Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

• There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even whole municipality areas.
• Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to politicians.
• Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily? I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools. My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS, rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me and the whole family. I probably forgot something. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different countries and areas all over the world.

When I wrote lvmsync late last year, I didn t realise I was being typecast. Before too long, I realised that the logic that I d implemented for lvmsync would also help me with a separate migration project I d been dreading getting the day job off VMware. Back in the early days of virtualisation, management made the decision to run VMware, for all the usual reasons ( commercially supported! , industry standard! , and so on). Unsurprisingly (to me, anyway) it didn t take too long for management to realise that it wasn t the best choice for us. When you ve got umpty-billion dollars to spend on hardware, software, and support, VMware might be the right option (although Amazon doesn t seem to think so). Anchor s company culture, on the other hand, is build around smart staff, simple systems over dumb staff, smart vendors , because no vendor is ever going to care about our customers as much as we do. So VMware was never going to work for us. Unfortunately, as happens all too often, once VMware was in place, there was very little motivation to get rid of it and move those customers onto the chosen replacement (that we were deploying all new customers on). I happen to think this is a terrible attitude in general one that makes life so much harder in the long term. I believe strongly in retrofitting old systems to keep them up-to-date with the current state of the art, and keeping technical debt under control. But, I wasn t running the show back when we stopped putting new customers on VMware, so the few VMware servers we had stayed around far longer than they should have. Recently, though, bad things started to happen. The VMware servers were starting to fall apart. The Windows machine we had to keep around to use the VMware management console started crapping out, and when the choice was between doing unspeakable things to Windows, and just ditching VMware well, it wasn t much of a choice. The only remaining question was how to do the migration off VMware with the least amount of downtime to our customers. I was really quite surprised that nobody out in Internet land appeared to have come up with a simple, robust tool to do this. Sure, some vendors had all-singing, all-dancing toolkits that cost ridiculous amounts of money, required you to install their agent on the machine involved, and promised the earth, but it all smelt of snakeoil and bullshit. In true hacker style, then, I decided to write something myself. The model I came up with mirrored lvmsync s quite closely because that one worked, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy to implement once I managed to reverse-engineer the file format (VMware has a PDF spec of a bunch of it s file formats, but whoever wrote it was enough of an evil genius to make it utterly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn t already know the file format, whilst making perfect sense to anyone who already does). The result: vmdksync. It is nothing but 80-odd lines of ruby whose sole purpose is to take a delta.vmdk file and write the changes that are stored in that file to a file or block device that is a copy of the flat.vmdk file that you can copy while the VM is still running (after you ve made a snapshot, of course). It helped me provide a painless migration path away from VMware, and I d be really pleased if it helped some other people do the same. Share and enjoy!

Do you wish, like I do, you could edit collaboratively in Vim? This feature is number 10 on the Vim voting page, so it seems I m not alone. How about Pentadactyl coupled with any of the existing web-based collaborative editors, such as Etherpad? OK, so it s not quite Vim, and there are some rough edges to this particular pairing, but I m finding it s good enough for my needs. It even gives me a Vim-like editing experience while other participants use the default Etherpad editor. Yes, I know about whiteboard.debian.net, but for the past three years I have been using a single instance of Etherpad with my family to maintain a shopping list to which we all make contributions. First of all, that s not a Debian activity, so to make the switch, I d need to make a personal clone of the service for our personal use. But more importantly, we find Etherpad features such as colours for different participants and the timeline are just too useful to give up on. On the other hand, the less the web editor interferes with your web browser s default textarea behaviour, the easier time Pentadactyl is going to have. Indeed, I asked on #pentadactyl @ irc.oftc.net about some problems I was having and I was told flat out that Pentadactyl does not work with graphical web editors. So, you may wish to use another web-based collaborative editor for this reason. That being said, I did learn a few things about helping Pentadactyl get along better with Etherpad, so if you would like to try it yourself, read on. The key to getting started was to enter text edit mode within the textarea with <C-t>. For the most part, this behaves like Vim normal mode . I am still learning, but many basic motion and editing keys behave just as they would in Vim. Fantastic! However, the moment I tried to :undo I hit my first problem. Using the latest release version of Pentadactyl (1.0rc1 at time of writing), pressing "u" to :undo produced no visible result. I tried the latest daily build as well, and only saw a marginally more helpful "Node not found" error message displayed in the status area. But it turns out you can use passthrough mode to use the textarea s own undo. Just :tmap u <C-v><C-z> and we re back in business again. I m still experimenting with this setup, so the jury s still out on whether I ll stick with it, or whether the remaining incompatibilities between Pentadactyl and Etherpad will drive me nuts. But it looks promising. Clearly, judicious use of :autocmd to always start in text edit mode and bind that undo key whenever I enter the site will help make the experience even better. If you try it out yourself, I d love to hear how things went for you. Or if you have found an even better solution that works for you, do share.

Recently an ex-colleague of mine changed jobs and suggested that I write something about the pros and cons of working from home. I've thought about this subject, off and on, for a few years and frustratingly I think most of the pros and the cons are the same:

• When you work from home you're working from home.

I live in a two-bedroom flat in Edinburgh. (Having just spent thousands on a new bathroom I don't expect I'll be moving any time soon. A rough budget of 40-50,000 would let me convert my attic into two/three rooms. So there is growth potential!) In my flat I have made one of the bedrooms an office. The office contains:

• A huge desk with two PCs, and two telephones on it.
• Several book-cases.
• A wall-mounted fan.
• Very little else.

One PC is for work. One PC is for me. One phone is for work. One phone is my own. Every working day I switch on the work router, the work phone, the work PC around 09:30. I then work, taking a lunch-break between either 12:00-13:00 or 13:00-14:00, until 18:00 at which point I switch off the work toys. I ignore my personal PC during the working day with the exception that it is the source of my music. I can reach across and hit the appropriate multi-media keys to select Play/Pause/Next Track/Previous Track/Volume Up/Volume Down. (When thenever the work-phone rings the first ring is ignored as I scramble to hit "Mute" or "Pause"..!) So what are some of the advantages/drawbacks? Well I'm at home. So the environment is one that I've made myself, and enjoy. The music is mine. The colour-scheme is mine. The pictures on the walls are mine. I have a Steve-loving chair. There is no soulless air-conditioning, no horrible cubicles, and no noisy people talking. The downside? No people talking. If I didn't leave my house at lunchtime I'd speak to zero people face to face in an average working day. That took a while for me to notice, but it is not nice. Since I work from home "the commute" takes seconds. I tend to get out of bed and wander straight to the desk. I'll work non-stop, then get dressed around lunchtime so that I can go out for lunch. Hail, Rain, Snow, or Sunshine I leave the house for lunch every single day (unless waiting for an atypical delivery). Because if I didn't I'd have no human contact. In the afternoon if it is a nice day I'll get undressed again, because I can, so why the hell not? Providing you're focussed working from home has several advantages that I can think of - I've no qualms about setting the washing machine going before I start work knowing that I can "spare" five minutes to empty it later in the day. Similarly I've no concern about ordering (even large) items, because I know what time the postman comes, and I know I'm never going to be out and miss a delivery. When I first started working from home I had a laptop instead of a PC and there were mornings when I worked, lazily, from my bed, or from my sofa whilst watching TV. That didn't last for long because I just didn't do a good job. I think I got away with it in the sense that I don't think people noticed, but I expect if it had lasted for longer it would have been quickly apparent. I stopped because the line was blurring between "home life" and "work life". Having a dedicated working area is essential in keeping me focussed. I don't do "home things" when I'm in "work time" - with very rare exceptions. Yes I wander around and pace if I'm thinking, yes I make more tea and coffee than I would in a real office, and yes I might open windows, phone a friend, read my gas meter, washup dishes, or similar as I'm "making coffee". But on the whole it only works if I work when I'm working. I could save money by using my work-internet instead of paying for personal-internet, but keeping the two links separate is another way of being focussed. I don't do "dodgy" things on the internet, on the whole (haha), but if I do I'd want to be damn sure that that was via my link and not the work-link - and having two PCs and two network links I know that is the case. There have been times when the work link has broken and I've used my personal link + openvpn to continue working, or at the very least re-join our internal chatroom and say "Internet down, brb". As a system administrator there are times when I have to do things either early in the morning, late at night, or even during a weekend. I guess a final advantage is that this is not a struggle - providing I don't schedule such operations at times when I'm in the pub, meeting friends, or taking pictures of cute strangers, it isn't a struggle to say "I'll do this after 8pm tonight", or set the alarm early. No long walk to an office, and if I've already got food cooking for my tea I can eat it nearby whilst still configuring things and testing sites/services/machines. So pros: I'm in my own environment, I don't worry about receiving parcels, meter-readings, and have wonderfully pleasant music all day. Ancillory bonuses are really side-effects of being in my environment: I have my good coffee, my nice cups, I can eat food I enjoy. etc, etc. Cons: You must be dedicated. You must be focussed lest you give in to temptation and cease working for minutes/hours at a time. You lose part of your home space - I can't turn this room into a childrens bedroom, for example. Nothing earth-shattering. I've done this for five years now, and although I was a little skeptical initially I thought "Why not?" It has worked out well and I think if I ever did need to leave my current position I'd have no hesitation about working from home in the future. Finally it has to be said that when I've had partners in my life they've traditionally been the type to wake up later than me. I get significant brownie points for being able to wake them up around 10/11AM with a cup of hot coffee & breakfast in bed every morning. By virtue of having a separate space I can close the door and not be disturbed by them walking around. I'm sure I've forgotten things - but as an initial pass the benefits and disadvantages of working from home are the same: You're in your own house. ObQuote: "Explorers in the further regions of experience." - HellRaiser

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since the day of its release was the HP Pre 3, running WebOS and whilst I still have a soft spot for the OS, the Pre 3 was simply too buggy for me to use full time. The main issue is that I use my phone as an MP3 player in the car but the Pre 3 would pause playback at the end of a track every half dozen tracks or so making it impossible to drive the 85 miles to work without needing to root around in the armrest and poke a touchscreen. Not something I really want to do whilst moving and ultimately too big a papercut to deal with. So, come the new year, I moved on to my next device, a Nokia N9 running MeeGo Harmattan. Ultimately, this was an even bigger failure for me than the Pre 3 was, and I lasted maybe two weeks with it before giving up and going back to the HP. Beyond massive usability errors in the software (especially the braindead unkillable pop-up demanding Internet access, even when none is available), the worst for me was how it handled the MP3 player task. My usual way of working is to have the phone hooked up to the stereo with a 3.5mm jack, and the car switches to headset Bluetooth profile to handle calls this is pretty common on cars too old to support A2DP profile (Stereo music-capable headphones). WebOS and Android are fine with this but not the N9. The N9, instead, will output all audio through the last connected audio device, regardless of how much that might not be helpful. Get in car, start music playing, plug in cable, start engine and it plays audio for about three seconds before the Bluetooth connects, and it switches to outputting music via the Headset bluetooth profile (not something that my car can do). Unplug and replug the cable, and music works but incoming calls are silent until I disconnect the 3.5mm jack, as it outputs the headset audio through the headphone socket. I just couldn t deal with this big a step back from WebOS as far as my workflow goes, and gave up. So, where next? Well, a funny thing happened a co-worker with generally very good instincts regarding consumer electronics usability told me that his housemate had just bought a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (the WP7-based cousin to the N9) and loved it. Enough that said co-worker was considering getting one himself. This was a very strange thing to hear, especially from an iPhone owner, about a Microsoft product. I d been generally interested in WP7 on an academic level for a while, but to hear that degree of praise of the actual product was interesting. Also interesting, and roughly simultaneous, was seeing Sajid Anwar s reverse engineering of the proprietary Zune file transfer protocol go from theory into an actual set of libmtp patches. So if the capability to use Banshee to transfer music on is here or near and it can t be as braindead as Harmattan when it comes to headphone/bluetooth behaviour, then why not jump ship and squeeze a handset out of Orange? About a week after my co-worker replaced his iPhone with a Lumia 800, I bought one too. So where to begin? Well, I ll begin at the start: WP7 is a joy to use. It really just is. It s the first mobile OS to try something radically different in the UI department for years. Everyone else these days (especially Android) builds iPhone rip-offs to varying degrees, and even the iPhone interface has a lot in common with the old old OLD interfaces found on the dumb Nokia phones of the 1990s. WP7 has an interface which provides just the right level of passively visible information and interactivity, and manages to do it with an elegance that no Android home screen filled with widgets will ever manage. The uncluttered screens are easy to read, and the Metro usability paradigms are trivial to pick up and learn. Without a doubt I d recommend WP7 to friends and family from a usability perspective, and the Microsoft engineers and designers responsible for cooking up the WP7 interface are worthy of praise. And I m not the only one saying this Apple co-founder Steve Woz Wozniak recently came out with a similar line. That s the good. There s also some bad, make no mistake. I m going to cover all the reasons WP7 sucks over several paragraphs. But overall, a smartphone is a device which I expect to suck the question is how bad the suck is, and whether it gets in the way of me using the device for what I need at the time. Moreso than MeeGo, moreso than Android, and even WebOS (and I m still a big WebOS fan), WP7 has more good points than bad points. But there s still some room for improvement, and some room for caution and since I know there are a few Microsoft folks following me on Twitter, I m going to go over my prescription for continued platform success. Oh, one more thing before I start: I know WP7 isn t Free Software. As an end user, I really don t care about that. I just want something that works something I didn t get from WebOS and Harmattan, both of which are primarily Free Software stacks. I m not saying there s a causal relationship there, or that a mobile OS can t be both Free Software and good just that as an end user, my favourite platform right now is non-Free. Take from that whatever you like. It s also vitally important, as Free Software folks, never to lose sight of what the other players in the market are up to. If you can t objectively assess why people are using a proprietary option by using it & recognising its good points (i.e. what to steal & what to improve) then you can t hope to win over users. So. WP7 s downsides in detail. In-place updates. Seriously guys, even Apple can manage this now. Why can t Windows Phone? I understand that making backups is smart and all updates come with a mandatory backup but I really shouldn t be tied to a PC to update a post-PC device. Also, those backups are useless, since they cannot be restored onto replacement devices in the case of failure or theft, so fix that too. Update all the things. An iPhone sold in June 2009 still has access to the latest iOS releases. Android phones are notorious for shipping with an outdated version of the OS, then getting at most one major update over the phone s lifetime (usually the device is abandoned by its manufacturer within months of release). Which camp does Microsoft want to align with, there? Every Windows phone 7 device released should receive Windows Phone 8, even with some features disabled. Anything less is punishing every existing customer, in the hope that you ll attract new ones not a winning strategy for a fringe platform whose biggest evangelists are its users. Fix IMAP. IMAP isn t hard. Yet WP7 never seems to work properly with a subset of my mail, never showing the message body & just saying Downloading forever. Fix it. Bing sucks. Bing s search results are terrible. Either do something to make them bearable, or allow me to pick which search engine I get when I hit the search button. A Google live tile isn t the same thing. Make killing apps easier. I know you stole the WebOS card view for multitasking (hold the back button) please also steal the WebOS ability to close apps. I don t want to have to go into an app and bash back repeatedly until it quits. This is particularly annoying for Internet Explorer. Make reinstalling apps easier. If I want to install every app I previously had installed on a new device, without restoring a backup, this should be easy. There are third party apps which try to plug this gap. Find a way to support copyleft. I d like to port a few C# apps to WP7, but because they re LGPL, I can t. The code s copyright holders would have no issue with their code being on WP7, as long as end users have a mechanism to replace the libraries, so why not find a way to allow this? e.g. when compiling an app, let me mark a library as user-replaceable , then allow for some mechanism where an end user can replace those assemblies with their own version. Let me use multiple Google calendars. WP7 only lets me add/see appointments on my default Google calendar. I want to add/see things on my wife s calendar, which is shared with me. WebOS can do this. MTP-Z is the devil. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my camera device, to transfer a photo off. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my MP3 player to transfer a photo on. Let s be honest, the only reason for MTP-Z is to enforce DRM on Zune-rented music tracks and honestly, there s no good reason to require MTP-Z for *all* communications if all you want to do is protect one folder or file extension. Now, since MTP-Z theoretically forces me to use Zune for many tasks better handled by other apps, now I get to write multiple criticisms of Zune s desktop app and as long as MTP-Z is enforced, every Zune failing is a Windows Phone failing too. Zune: Support Windows codec infrastructure, and transcode where needed. Windows Media Player can play Ogg Vorbis files. No, not out of the box, but if one installs the required codecs. Zune should support the same files as WMP if you want to ensure people don t try to copy files to a portable device which are not supported on that device, then you should have an API in place to allow for pluggable seamless transcoding of files as required Banshee allows me to do this (e.g. to copy files I have as .flac to devices which do not support it). Zune: Search my tracks, not the web. Zune s searching is terrible it doesn t do as-you-type searches, and when I hit enter, matches from my collection are given a tiny little space compared to matches from the Zune music store. Let me easily pick the track I feel like listening to, don t make it a chore Zune: Let s solve metadata together. I absolutely love how nicely the Zune app on desktop and on phone shifts as appropriate to the currently playing artist (e.g. changing the lock screen to an image of the artist in question). However, Zune doesn t make it obvious how to set an album s metadata to support this, and it s particularly frustrating when it s a minor difference of spelling causing a track not to get the nice treatment e.g. UNKLE versus U.N.K.L.E. . Either start making heavy use of audio fingerprinting services like MusicBrainz to fill in metadata, or allow me to search for fully supported artists when filling in track metadata Zune: Random playlists are useless on devices. I like smart playlists. In Banshee, I have one to pick 12GB of random tracks, which I can sync to my phone. I can t do this with Zune. If I try to just sync all my random music to my phone, it errors out due to lack of space. If I have a random playlist, the random selection changes multiple times during a sync resetting the sync, wiping out half the tracks that were transferred on, and starting again. As a result, the sync goes on for literally hours, never ending up with more than a gig or so of tracks on the phone. Random playlists should be freezable, so I can transfer them to my device in peace, then get a new random selection when I want. So, that s my list of miserable failure and it s still a less painful list than any other mobile OS I ve used. Perhaps one day Android will approach being usable, perhaps Blackberry s BBX will actually appeal to human beings rather than corporate IT managers, and perhaps Mozilla s delightfully named Boot to Gecko will get some traction. Who knows. All I know is, My Lumia 800 is the best phone I think I ve ever owned, and it s important for anyone working in the mobile space to understand why.

I am so glad that we managed to complete this project. Roland and I have spent countless hours on this book since December, both for the translation itself and also for all the things that we tend to forget: a nice book cover, a great book layout for the print version, coordinating the work of reviewers, registering as an editor to get an ISBN, etc. I think I will come back to this in a future article because some parts of the story are interesting. In the mean time, enjoy the DFSG-free Debian Administrator s Handbook:

• get it from unstable with apt-get install debian-handbook;
• browse the online version;
• get the paperback or the ebook (available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI);
• grab the sources with git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/debian-handbook/debian-handbook.git and contribute a translation

Check out the official announce (there s a discount for early buyers of the paperback).

12 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Just got bitten by this, so note to self:

• the pbuilder image might have installed iproute automatically, due to isc-dhcp-client dependency, so it's not an entirely clean build environment
• if you have a source package which generates both an arch:any and an arch:all package, make sure to test building all packages and only the binary one(s), via pbuilder --binary-arch; otherwise you might get surprises due to Build-Depends-Indep being pulled in by default

Yes, I'm talking about Debian bug #671981. Fun!

The Online Photographer has a meta-article on some discussion in the photography world. Summary: someone wrote an opinion piece on one site, and people on the discussion forum of another site got his name wrong, possibly repeatedly. And the quality of the discussion went down from there. The quality of the discourse of free software development is frequently of some concern. Debian has a reputation as being a host to, er, particularly vigorous discussions. That reputation is not unwarranted, but, I think, we've improved a lot since 2005. The problem is hardly restricted to Debian, however. How can we improve this? I don't know. As a community, I'm not even sure we agree what the problems are. Here's my list.

• unshakeable, dogmatic opinions; an unwillingness to consider others' points of view or their justifications; willful ignorance of anything that contradicts with the way one wants things to be; an uncompromising, winner-takes-all, last-poster-wins attitude to debates; in short, a lack of respect for anyone who isn't on one's own side
• an (unintended?) emphasis on discussion speed, leading to short missives, written quickly, without much thought, and without giving even a glimpse of how the conclusion or opinion was formed; this further leads to discussions that are hard to follow, because there are so many messages to read (the total word count would probably be about the same if everyone only wrote one or two essays)
• few good ways of dealing with bad behavior, unless it fits into some clear categories of bad behavior; no clear community consensus of what is acceptable behavior, outside of a small core that is obvious (there's probably several PhD's worth of reasons for this, and it's not just because of "geeks don't understand social interaction" or "everyone is from a different cultural background")

Insults, personal attacks, and other such outrageously bad behavior is uncommon. It crosses the line so clearly it becomes easy to deal with; I don't think handling this needs much attention. What can we do about this? I'm not sure. I have, for the time being, abandonded Debian mailing lists as a way to influence what goes on in the project, but that's just a way for me to clear some space in my head and time in my day to actually do things. My pet hypothetical solution of the day is that mailing lists might raise the quality of the debates by limiting the number of messages written by each person per day in each thread. This might, I think, induce people to write with more thought and put more effort into making each message count.

Just posted to d-d-a, here is the monthly report about my DPL activities.

---

Dear project members,
last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April. Highlight: call for DPL helpers Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign, there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for help. If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please let me know. Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load. Ongoing discussions A big topic of last month has been the proposal by Francesca Ciceri to publish a diversity statement for the Debian Project. After a lively discussion on -project, we reached consensus on a text, and I've been happy to help with that. To finalize statement publication we now need to vote on it with a GR. I've helped drafting a corresponding GR proposal that has already been posted to -vote by Francesca. A final one, looking for seconds, will be posted there soon. Wrapping up March discussions on a revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo, I've announced my intention to finalize the agreement and have done so shortly thereafter. The Iceweasel maintainer has deployed the corresponding search engine query string and other web browser maintainers could do the same, if they want to. In April I've also spent some time to move forward the long running conflict on Python maintenance, reported to the tech-ctte more than 2 years ago. With the help of people on the -python mailing list, I've now submitted to the tech-ctte an up to date list of potential maintenance teams. I hope the tech-ctte now have all the information needed to come to a decision. Speaking of which, I'm also discussing with tech-ctte members the possibility of having periodic ctte meetings; the idea is to ensure that outstanding issues are periodically reassessed, improving the reliability of tech-ctte decision times. I've also discussed at length with members of the pkg-multimedia-maintainers team the relationships with the unofficial debian-multimedia.org (d-m.o) repository, that have been a cause of tension for Debian multimedia users and maintainers for quite some time. On behalf of the team and of the Project I've now reached out to the d-m.o maintainer, hoping to come to some sort of amicable agreement on which packages belong where. Hardware replacement As anticipated in last report, I've started approving hardware purchases to implement the yearly hardware replacement plan prepared by DSA. During April I've approved requests to buy servers to replace the machines running the bugs-master, bugs-mirror, and UDD services. The total expected expenditure is about 15'000 USD. Communication I've delivered my classic Debian "18^W 19 years" talk at UNIVPM, a polytechnic university in center Italy; slides are available. I've then been contacted by people from the European Synchrotoron in Grenoble who, beside having recently migrated their infrastructure to Debian, are looking into organizing a workshop on Debian usage for large science facilities. I've been happy to help out providing a list of potential topics and speakers for the event. Also as anticipated last month, the Debian Project has been present at the OpenStack summit. Loic Dachary has represented Debian at the event and provided a nice report about his experience there. Speaking of which, I've also coordinated a news release about the availability of cloud technologies in Wheezy, taking the chance to point out the relationships between what Debian stands for and the ability to deploy your own private cloud. Sprints April has been a rather calm month on the sprint front, with the notable exception of the I18n team who is organizing a sprint for June in Paris. Miscellanea

• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now started and for Debian is already quite a success. Wrt last year we doubled the number of student applications and we jumped from 9 to 15 approved projects. More details about Debian in GSoC have been posted by Ana. I encourage all of you to take the chance of GSoC to bond with students and show them how nice is the Debian community to work with: that's the prime trait we need to exhibit to make sure we'll always have enough volunteers to run the Debian Project.
• The one month notice before opening up LDAP dnsZoneEntry has expired and the field has now been opened by DSA. Practically, this means that the full listing of *.debian.net entries can now be queried publicly via LDAP. If anyone would be so kind to provide a script that does so and produce a nice looking HTML index, we can now publish it somewhere and replace the perennially out of date wiki index

Thanks for reading thus far,
HDH! (Happy Debian Hacking)

---

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for April is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201204

A client just lent me a new Mac Mini with OS/X Lion to play with. I think it s interesting to compare it with regular PCs running Linux. Hardware The Mac Mini is tiny. It s volume can be compared to that of a laptop. The entire outside apart from the base is made from aluminium which helps dissipate heat, it s not as effective as copper but a lot better than plastic. The ports on the system are sound input/output, 4*USB, Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt (replacement for Firewire), SDXC, and HDMI. It ships with a HDMI to DVI-D adapter which is convenient if you have an older monitor (or if you have a recent monitor but no HDMI cable as I do). To open the case you unscrew the bottom, this is much like opening a watch. Also like opening a watch it s not particularly easy to screw it back on tightly, I will probably return the Mac Mini without managing to completely screw the base in. The hardware is very stylish and intricately designed, what we expect from Apple. It s also quiet. In every way it s a much better system than the workstation I m using to write this blog post. The difference of course is that this workstation was free and the Mac Mini cost just over $1000 including the RAM upgrade. A Mac Mini could be a decent Linux workstation and if I see one about to be recycled I ll be sure to grab it! Installation The Mac OS comes pre-installed so I didn t get to do a full installation. When I first booted it up it asked me if I wanted to migrate the configuration from an existing server, I don t know how well this works as I don t have a second Mac system but the concept is a good one. Maybe having full support for such a migration process would be a good release goal for a Linux distribution. After determining that the installation is a fresh one I was asked for a mac.com email address or other form of registration. I skipped this step as I don t have such an email address, but it could be useful. Red Hat has Kickstart to allow configuration of an OS install based on a file from a server (via NFS or HTTP). Debian supports preseeding to take OS configuration options from a file at install time [1] and the same option can be used for later stages of OS autoconfiguration. One thing that would be really useful is to allow the user to enter a URL for configuration data for an individual account or for all accounts, so someone with an account on one workstation could upload the configuration (which would be either encrypted or sanitised to not have secret data) and then download it when first logging in to a new system. I can easily take a tar archive of my home directory to a new system, but people like my parents don t have the skill to do that. One of the final stages of system configuration was to identify the keyboard. The system asked me to press the key to the right of the left shift key and then the key to the left of the right shift key and then offered me three choices of keyboard. That was an interesting way of reducing the list of possible keyboards offered to the user and thus preventing the user from selecting one that is grossly incorrect. Cloud Storage When first logging in I was asked for an iCloud [2] login. iCloud doesn t seem like a service that should be trusted, it s based in the US and has been designed to facilitate access by government agencies. Ubuntu One [3] is a similar service that is run by a more reputable organisation, but the data is still stored by Amazon (a US corporation) which seems like a security risk. Ubuntu One isn t in Debian (which is strange as Ubuntu is based on Debian) so it was too much effort for me to determine whether it encrypts data in a way that protects the users against US surveillance. The cost of Ubuntu One storage is $4 per month with music streaming. A better option is to use a self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [4]. A cheap server from someone like Hetzner (E49 per month for 3TB of RAID-1 storage) [5] is a good option for OwnCloud hosting. A cheap Hetzner server is about $US64 per month (at current conversion rates) which is equivalent to about 16 users of Ubuntu One for music streaming. So if 20 people shared a Hetzner server they could save money when compared to Ubuntu One while also getting a lot more storage. I ve got about 300G of unused disk space on the Hetzner server that hosts my blog and when the system is migrated to a newer Hetzner server with 3TB disks it will have 2.5TB of unused space, I could store a lot of cloud data in that! The main features of iCloud and Ubuntu One seem to be distribution of random data files (anything you wish), streaming music to various playing systems, and copying pictures from phones as soon as they are taken. These are all great features but it s a pity that they don t appear to support distributed document storage. Apple Pages apparently allows documents to be immediately saved to the cloud. I d like to be able to save a file with Libre Office at home and then access it from my netbook using the cloud, of course that would require encryption for secret files but that s not so hard to do. One advantage with such distributed storage is that when combined with offline-IMAP for email it would almost entirely remove the need for backups of the desktop systems I maintain for my relatives. I could have all their pictures and documents go to the cloud and all their email stay on the server so if their desktop PC dies I could just give them a new PC and get it all back from the cloud! OwnCloud supports replication, so if I got two servers I would be covered against a server failure. But I think that for a small server with less than a dozen users it s probably better to just take some down-time when things go wrong and do regular backups to an array of cheap SATA disks. App Store Apple has an App Store in the OS. The use of such a store on a desktop OS is a new thing for me. It s basically the same as the Android Market (Google Play) but on the desktop. I think that there is a real scope for an organisation such as Canonical to provide such a market service for Linux. I think that there is a lot of potential for apps to be sold for less than $10 to a reasonable number of Linux users. A small payment would be inconvenient for the seller if they have to interact with the customer in any way and also inconvenient for the buyer if they are entering all their credit card details into a web site for the sale. But for repeat sales with one company being an intermediary it would be convenient for everyone. A market program for a desktop Linux system could provide a friendly interface to selecting free apps from repositories (for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or other distributions) and also have the same interface used for selecting paid applications. Conclusion This isn t much of a review of Apple OS/X or the Mac Mini. Thinking about ways of implementing the best features of Lion on Linux is a lot more interesting. I admire Apple in the same way that I admire sharks, they are really good at what they do but they don t care about my best interests any more than a hungry shark cares about me. Update I got the currency conversion wrong in the first version of this article. It seems that to save money via a shared Hetzner server instead of Ubuntu One about 20 users would be needed instead of 10. But that s still not too many and would still give a lot more storage. It would be a little more difficult to arrange though, probably anyone who is seriously into computers knows 10 people who would want to share such a service (including people like their parents who want things to just work and don t understand what s happening). But getting 20 people would be more difficult.

• [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icloud
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_One
• [4] https://owncloud.com/
• [5] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

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I attended a hackfest for the alleged purpose of furthering data transparency and other such entertainment. I expected a full-blown circus of idiocy based on the lead-up: instructions to sign up to websites for the purpose of Centralizing things, downloading iPhone SDKs, and other blatant evidence of Not Actually Getting It At All. Imagine my surprise when I get to the registration desk and they offer me a photography opt-out. Now everyone knows that privacy opt-outs don't work; either they're ineffective or they are effective at a cost far greater than anyone should pay, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. So I received a badge advertising my first name and the fact that I was unwilling to be photographed. Spoiler alert: I was photographed at least six times. I have now cleverly changed my hairstyle so that no one can recognize me. After people had arrived and rubbed elbows and consumed things, the grand dignitaries took the stage for spectacles of egoism so great that relativity made Dan Kaminsky look almost like a humble and reasonable human being. This was succeeded by some organizing, coding, and ridiculousness. The group I landed in contained two employees of the advertising industry and one of the U.S. government. There was also someone I refer to as "ultracompetent astronut". Some things that were apparent: people

• really don't understand the issues
• don't care about or understand licensing
• are prone to insistent on the necessity of Github even when they don't know how to use it
• don't see why opt-outs are inherently flawed
• are perfectly willing to trade in their privacy for minimal return
• are sometimes willing to trade their privacy for different privacy
• insist that I should write in Python even when it turns out that I could have been using a real language
• still think that the threat model is only about what information you leak or choose to divulge about yourself, and not about other people informing on you.