Control freaks. You may have called people like this. Or you may have been called one yourself. Maybe you got angry. Or, on the contrary, you felt like being a control freak is a feature, because who would notice all these little details that are not exactly perfect if not you? This post is an attempt to deconstruct the term. Etymological considerations Control - from latin contra- rotulus - refers to the copy of an account register as a means of verification of the original register. So control is about keeping track, not making mistakes, i.e. it's about doing a perfect calculation. The meaning of control in our society is linked to authority, or to policing like in crowd control. What English calls an inspector, is a Kontrolleur in German or contr leur in French. The word is also linked to manufacturing, as in quality control. We also talk about being in control, which is linked to the desire of being autonomous, to be able to act on one's own account. Being in control can also designate a need to preserve one's own integrity: if I have integrity (in the sense of feeling whole), I can self-determine, which is the most fundamental requirement for having one's own identity. Freak - refers to someone who does not fit the norm. Calling someone a freak is per se problematic, because it blames a person for being atypical, abnormal. Freak is a word that, while pointing a finger at difference, at the same time denies people the right to be different and diverse. People can reappropriate such words to make it clear that not fitting the norm is a wanted expression of their diversity we can see that if we follow the history of the word queer for an example. Types of control freaking To me, being a control freak is mostly a feature, if it's about controlling my own life and my own effectiveness. Control freaking becomes troublesome when it's about controlling other people's effectiveness. And it becomes highly problematic when it's about controlling other people's lives. Controlling one's own life Having control over one's own life is a basic human need. In particular people who are part of minorities, people who face discrimination and oppression every day have an increased need for self-determination, and the need to see their existence and their identity acknowledged and accepted by the rest of the world. Too often do we experience that other people (generally the ones with privilege, or not facing the same oppression) try to own the narrative over our lives (1)(2). Calling this control freakish is missing the point, and is probably a sign of looking at it from a perspective of privilege. Controlling one's own effectiveness People produce things. People write code, make ceramics, or write texts, for example. People have a need to control their own effectiveness: they set up routines, product tests, documentation. This type of control is a feature, and can help to release better software, better texts, or perfectly burnt clay pots ultimately controlling one's own effectiveness helps to learn from one's mistakes and to improve routines over time. The grey zone The grey zone describes the zone in between wanting to control one's own effectiveness and wanting to control other people's effectiveness. Here we could situate the type of control freak who does not delegate tasks to others for fear of seeing them done differently then they had expected them to be done. This can be harmful particularly to the person who does not delegate: they can get overworked or burnt out. This type of control freakism might be linked to perfectionism. Controlling other people's effectiveness When we work with other people, our own effectiveness might get in the way of other people's effectiveness, or vice versa. Indeed, it happens - not only in work contexts - that people find themselves in setups in which mutual responsibilities and autonomies conflict with one another because one person is dependent on the other for making decisions or moving things forward as they see fit. (There is generally a relation of dependency between two conflicting parties that is worth looking at (3).) Add to this the fact that, when delegating a task, some people have a hard time also delegating the responsibility and autonomy needed to resolve the task. They lack trust that another person can also do the work, or want that person to do the work exactly in the same way they would do it. (In some cases this can be related to Founder's Syndrome and can result in organizations staying stuck with one or a small group of founders holding knowledge and power, and preventing the organization from growing. Page 11 in the booklet "Working with conflict in our groups" describes how such an informal hierarchy can come into being in grassroot groups.) The (perfectly valid) need behind this type of control freaking could be to make sure that a group of people builds a successful product, releases a fact-checked documentary, or creates a publication without mistakes. But controlling other people's effectiveness as a strategy to satisfy this need can create a non-cooperative climate in which people do not meet each other on eye level, but are dependent on each other, experience a lack autonomy, a break of boundaries, or sometimes feel authority to be overexerted. Acknowledging the need to build a good product, it is possible to create the appropriate strategies to guarantee that the involved people can meet each other on eye level: for example by clearly defining and documenting role-responsibility-accountability along with appropriate decision making processes, or by distributing leadership ( you should totally click on that link!), by looking at inclusive leadership models, by learning from past mistakes, by instating feedback cycles, by making boundaries between the direction of an organization and the day-to-day work clear. An organization I work with has the rule that people can make decisions for themselves if the decision only affects their work, while decisions that affect a team should be made with the team, and decisions that affect the organization as a whole need to be made at the organizational level. They call that a no-brainer, but in organizations with traditional hierarchies, or in grown grassroot environments that have never clearly defined and assigned responsibilities and accountabilities (aka "functional roles") this is not so obvious at all. Controlling someone else's life This type of control freak does not only desire to control their own life but for a reason or another wants to know and control what other people do, think (especially about the control freak), decide, or how they live. In some cases, this type of control freak might even want to force upon others things they should do as a way to be accepted by the control freak. It's what we call narcissism, harassment, abuse. It is unacceptable. Conclusion In summary, the distinctions I came up with in this post describe the boundaries along which control freakism takes hold of someone else's effectiveness or life and ultimately prevents them from self-determining. In German we have the word bergriffig which describes that someone is infringing someone else's boundaries they are over - grabbing, seizing, grasping, taking hold of. Which type of control freak are you, if any?

(1) Like when a West-Berliner in a round of 15 East Germans arrogantly talks about the time when the wall came down and tells the story that he could not go shopping between Thursdays and Sundays because the East Germans bought too many products in the supermarkets while this event marked an unimaginable rift in the biographies of 17 million East Germans, 15 of whom are sitting right in front of him. Thirty years after 1989, many of us are finally starting to question this publicly ( links in German language).

(2) Women experience it similary regularly, see Men Explain Things to me, a book by Rebecca Solnit.

(3) By the way, rather than having "recruited the wrong person" conflict may intrinsically arise as part of certain work relationships, simply due to the inter-dependencies of roles or workers, like in a delivery chain.

Theresa Kachindamoto - Wikipedia

Theresa Kachindamoto is the paramount chief, or Inkosi, of the Dedza District in the central region of Malawi. She has informal authority over more than 900,000 people. She is known for her forceful action in dissolving child marriages and insisting on education for both girls and boys.

Daryl Davis is no ordinary musician. He s played with President Clinton and tours the country playing burnin boogie woogie piano and sharing musical stylings inspired by greats like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. He s a highly respected and electrifying performer who is currently an integral member of The Legendary Blues Band (formerly

An undercover tracking program is revealing the toll of the e-waste trade.

The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of names Fusion.io, Wise.io and Import.io are just a few examples. But who benefits from the sale of .io domains? Sadly, not the people who ultimately should.

FDA ban brings an end to decades-long battle against use of aversive therapy at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts

As a technologist, I've been wondering how I can help people with the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic. With the world entering the "exponential stage" (e.g. Canada, the USA and basically all of Europe), everyone should take precautions and limit practice Social Distancing (and not dumbfuckery). But this doesn't mean we should dig ourselves in a hole in our basement: we can still talk to each other on the internet, and there are great, and free, tools available to do this. As part of my work as a sysadmin, I've had to answer questions about this a few times and I figured it was useful to share this more publicly.

Just say hi using whatever First off, feel free to use the normal tools you normally use: Signal, Facetime, Skype, Zoom, and Discord can be fine to connect with your folks, and since it doesn't take much to make someone's day please do use those tools to call your close ones and say "hi". People, especially your older folks, will feel alone and maybe scared in those crazy times. Every little bit you can do will help, even if it's just a normal phone call, an impromptu balcony fanfare, a remote workout class, or just a sing-along from your balcony, anything goes. But if those tools don't work well for some reason, or you want to try something new, or someone doesn't have an iPad, or it's too dang cold to go on your balcony, you should know there are other alternatives that you can use.

Jitsi We've been suggesting our folks use a tool called "Jitsi". Jitsi is a free software platform to host audio/video conferences. It has a web app which means anyone with a web browser can join a session. It can also do "screen sharing" if you need to work together on a project. There are many "instances", but here's a subset I know about:

• https://meet.jitsi.org/ - the official one, might overload
• https://meet.mayfirst.org/ - Mayfirst non-profit cooperative, hosted in New York (see also their usage instructions)
• https://meet.greenhost.net/ - Greenhost, hosted in the Netherlands
• https://framatalk.org/ - Framasoft, a popular education network, hosted in France - note that Framasoft is struggling under load as basically everyone in France (including the public education network) seems to think they can all run on their servers all at once, they encourage you to run your own instance instead of using theirs
• another list of instances

You can connect to those with your web browser directly. If your web browser doesn't work, try switching to another (e.g. if Firefox doesn't work, try Chrome and vice-versa). There are also apps for desktop and mobile apps (F-Droid, Google Play, Apple Store) that will work better than just using your browser. Jitsi should scale for small meetings up to a dozen people.

Mumble ... but beyond that, you might have trouble doing a full video-conference with a lot of people anyways. If you need to have a large conference with a lot of people, or if you have bandwidth and reliability problems with Jitsi, you can also try Mumble. Mumble is an audio-only conferencing service, similar to Discord or Teamspeak, but made with free software. It requires users to install an app but there are clients for every platform out there (F-Droid, Google Play, Apple Store). Mumble is harder to setup, but is much more efficient in terms of bandwidth and latency. In other words, it will just scale and sound better. Mumble ships with a list of known servers, but you can also connect to those trusted ones:

• mumble.mayfirst.org - Mayfirst (see also their instructions on how to use it, hosted in New York city
• mumble.riseup.net - Riseup, an autonomous collective, hosted in Seattle (ask me if you need their password) not a public service
• talk.systemli.org - systemli, a left-wing network and technics-collective, hosted in Berlin

Live streaming If for some reason those tools still don't scale, you might have a bigger problem on your hands. If your audience is over 100 people, you will not be able to all join in the same conference together. And besides, maybe you just want to broadcast some news and do not need audio or video feedback from the audience. In this case, you need "live streaming". Here, proprietary services are Twitch, Livestream.com and Youtube. But the community also provides alternatives to those. This is more complicated to setup, but just to get you started, I'll link to:

• https://live.mayfirst.org/ - Mayfirst, based on Icecast and icecream, a web-based client, unfortunately non-free
• https://live.autistici.org/ - Autistici, an autonomous collective, hosted in Italy, based on Nginx and RTMP

For either of those tools, you need an app on your desktop. The Mayfirst instructions use OBS Studio for this, but it might be possible to hotwire VLC to stream video from your computer as well.

Text chat When all else fails, text should go through. Slack, Twitter and Facebook are the best known alternatives here, obviously. I would warn against spending too much time on those, as they can foment harmful rumors and can spread bullshit like a virus on any given day. The situation does not make that any better. But it can be a good way to keep in touch with your loved ones. But if you want to have a large meetings with a crazy number of people, text can actually accomplish wonders. Internet Relay Chat also known as "IRC" (and which oldies might have experienced for a bit as mIRC) is, incredibly, still alive at the venerable age of 30 years old. It is mainly used by free software projects, but can be used by anyone. Here are some networks you can try:

• http://webchat.freenode.net/ - the largest network, Freenode
• https://webchat.oftc.net/ - smaller network, used by the Debian oftc.net/)
• http://irc.indymedia.org/ - a relic of the almost defunct Indymedia network which I help operate

Those are all web interface to the IRC networks, but there are also a plenitude of IRC apps you can install on your desktop if you want the full experience.

Whiteboards and screensharing I decided to add this section later on because it's a frequently mentioned "oh but you forgot..." comment I get from this post.

• Big Blue Button - seems to check all the boxes: free software, VoIP integration, whiteboarding and screen sharing, works from a web browser
• CodiMD: collaborative text editor with UML and diagrams support
• Excalidraw: (collaborative) whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel

I'll also mention that collaborative editors, in general, like Etherpad are just great for taking minutes because you don't have that single person with the load of writing down what people are saying and is too busy to talk. Google Docs and Nextcloud have similar functionality, of course. Update, public Big Blue Button instances:

• https://bbb.jitsi.rocks/ - also a Jitsi redirector, https://jitsi.rocks/

BBB requires one user to register to start the conference, but once that's done, anyone with the secret URL can join.

Common recommendations Regardless of the tools you pick, audio and video streaming is a technical challenge. A lot of things happen under the hood when you pick up your phone and dial a number, and sometimes using a desktop, it can be difficult to get everything "just right". Some advice:

1. get a good microphone and headset: good audio really makes a difference in how pleasing the experience will be, both for you and your peers. good hardware will reduce echo, feedback and other audio problems. (see also my audio docs)
2. check your audio/video setup before joining the meeting, ideally with another participant on the same platform you will use
3. find a quiet place to meet: even a good microphone will pick up noises from the environment, if you reduce this up front, everything will sound better. if you do live streaming and want high quality recording, considering setting up a smaller room to do recording. (tip: i heard of at least one journalist hiding in a closer full of clothes to make recordings, as it dampens the sound!)
4. mute your microphone when you are not speaking (spacebar in Jitsi, follow the "audio wizard" in Mumble)

If you have questions or need help, feel free to ask! Comment on this blog or just drop me an email (see contact), I'd be happy to answer your questions.

Other ideas Inevitably, when I write a post like this, someone writes something like "I can't believe you did not mention APL!" Here's a list of tools I have not mentioned here, deliberately or because I forgot:

• Nextcloud Talk - needs access to a special server, but can be used for small meetings (less than 5, or so i heard)
• Jabber/XMPP - yes, I know, XMPP can do everything and it's magic. but I've given up a while back, and I don't think setting up audio conferences with multiple enough is easy enough to make the cut here
• Signal - signal is great. i use it every day. it's the primary way I do long distance, international voice calls for free, and the only way I do video-conferencing with family and friends at all. but it's one to one only, and the group (text) chat kind of sucks

Also, all the tools I recommend above are made of free software, which means they can be self-hosted. If things go bad and all those services stop existing, it should be possible for you to run your own instance. Let me know if I forgot anything, but in a friendly way. And stay safe out there. Update: a similar article from the good folks at systemli also recommends Mastodon, Ticker, Wikis and Etherpad. Update 2: same, at SFC, which also mentions Firefox Send and Etherpad (and now I wish I did).

Looking at the date I am posting this it will not come as a surprise that the season was not a strong one. For pre-opening I again booked a carving fresh-up workshop with Pure Boarding in Pitztal (November 21 to November 24). Since the resort extends to more than 3400m of atitude the weather can be harsh. This year we had strong southern winds and moved to Riffelsee for Saturday, which turned out to be a really nice resort. Natural snow turned out to be a rare commodity this year, but nevertheless I only rode at Diedamskopf where they rely on tnatural snow almost eclusively. They again managed to prepare quality slopes with natural snow. First day on snow was 15 December followed by a long pause until December 28. Having loads of unused vacation days I did three- or four-day work weeks in January and start of February whenever work (thanks, colleagues!) weather and conditions were nice. In hindsight this saved the season. Since resorts have closed yesterday or will close today due to COVID-19 I am missing out on riding in Warth/Salober in spring. While the number of a days is a low number, the quality of riding was still high. Health-wise jumper's knee has kept me from finally really improving on my backside turn. Well here is the balance-sheet, excluding pre-opening in Pitztal:

	2019/20	2018/19	2017/18	2016/17	2015/16	2014/15	2013/14	2012/13	2011/12	2010/11	2009/10	2008/09	2007/08	2006/07	2005/06
number of (partial) days	21	33	29	30	17	24	30	23	25	30	30	37	29	17	25
Dam ls	0	2	8	4	4	9	29	4	10	23	16	10	5	10	10
Diedamskopf	21	26	19	23	12	13	1	19	14	4	13	23	24	4	15
Warth/Schr cken	0	5	2	3	1	2	0	0	1	3	1	4	0	3	0
total meters of altitude	160797	296308	266158	269819	138037	224909	274706	203562	228588	203918	202089	226774	219936	74096	124634
highscore	9375	10850	11116	12245	11015	13278	12848m	13885m	13076m	10976m	11888m	11272m	12108m	8321m	10247m
# of runs	374	701	616	634	354	530	597	468	516	449	462	551	503	189	309

Since the beginning, the numpysane library provided a broadcast_define() function to decorate existing Python routines to give them broadcasting awareness. This was very useful, but slow. I just did lots of typing, and now I have a flavor of this in C (the numpysane_pywrap module; new in numpysane 0.22). As expected, you get fast C loops! And similar to the rest of this library, this is a port of something in PDL: PDL::PP. Full documentation lives here: https://github.com/dkogan/numpysane/blob/master/README-pywrap.org After writing this I realized that there was something similar available in numpy this whole time: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/c-api.generalized-ufuncs.html I haven't looked too deeply into this yet, but 2 things are clear: There's a design difference: the numpy implementation uses function callbacks, while I generate C code. Code generation is what PDL::PP does, and when I thought about it earlier, it seemed like doing this with function pointers would be too painful. I guess it's doable, though. And at least in one case, the gufuncs aren't doing the right broadcasting thing:

>>> a = np.arange(5).reshape(5,1)
>>> b = np.arange(3)
>>> np.matmul(a,b)
ValueError: matmul: Input operand 1 has a mismatch in
   its core dimension 0, with gufunc signature
   (n?,k),(k,m?)->(n?,m?) (size 3 is different from 1)

This should work. And if you do this with numpysane.broadcast_define() or with numpysane_pywrap, it does work. I'll look at it later to figure out what it's doing.

In times like these, it is natural to fear. Viruses, incompetent leadership, economic hardship, even death. But remember this:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers so many caring people in this world. Fred Rogers

This is so true. The examples are everywhere. Here in the United States, our federal government has been weak responding to COVID-19 but others have stepped up. Institutions big and small across the country are following the science and closing or taking other steps to slow the spread of coronavirus, even in areas it hasn t yet been detected, because this is the right thing to do. People are helping their neighbors, or giving up their favorite activities to do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19. I work for a company that s publicly-traded on the NYSE, and it shut down all its offices globally. And kept paying the janitors and other office staff. Some people are in a vulnerable place today. To them: remember the helpers. There are doctors and nurses, officials, neighbors the care, everywhere. To those that are able: be a helper. It doesn t take much to brighten someone s day. Maybe a phone call or video call. Maybe delivering groceries to a neighbor that s quarantined. Maybe acts of grace and understanding to the stressed people around you, trying their best to get by in the face of a lack of information and certainty. Maybe giving up some activities you enjoy, in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19, even if you personally aren t especially vulnerable. I am reminded of this quote, part of a story about a dying cancer patient: Don t forget that it doesn t take much to make someone s day.

A new version of RcppAPT our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like is now on CRAN. RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations. This new version corrects builds failures under the new and shiny Apt 2.0 release (and the pre-releases like the 1.9.* series in Ubuntu) as some header files moved around. My thanks to Kurt Hornik for the heads-up. I accomodated the change in the (very simple and shell-based) configure script by a) asking pkg-config about the version of pkg-apt and then using that to b) compare to a threshold value of 1.9.0 and c) setting another compiler #define if needed so that d) these headers could get included if defined. The neat part is that a) and b) are done in an R one-liner, and the whole script is still in shell. Now, CRAN being CRAN, I now split the script into two: one almost empty one not using bash that passes the omg but bash is not portable test, and which calls a second bash script doing the work. Fun and games The full set of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.0.6 (2020-03-14)

• Accomodate Apt 2.0 code changes by including more header files
• Change is backwards compatible and conditional
• Added configure call using pkg-config and package version comparison (using R) to determine if the define is needed
• Softened unit tests as we cannot assume optional source deb information to be present, so demo code runs but zero results tolerated

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. A bit more information about the package is available here as well as as 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.

A new release 0.2.16 of RInside arrived on CRAN and in Debian today. This comes almost exactly one year after the previous release 0.2.15. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp. This release brings one new feature, contributed by Lance Bachmeier (with some additional post-processing by me). It adds the ability to embed and call R from C programs and applications. The interface is more limited as we do not get Rcpp for automagic conversion. But this offers the door to a number of applications supporting plain C interface, and the new examples directory for example shows one for ruby. We may add others. The short list of changes since the last release were:

Changes in RInside version 0.2.16 (2020-03-12)

• RInside is now embeddable (with a reduced interface) from C applications thanks to Lance Bachmeier (who is now co-author) plus some polish by Dirk in #43)
• Added R_SESSION_INIIALIZED to list of excluded variables.
• Added simple diagnostics function to have a registered function.

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page, or to issues tickets at 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.

It has been close to a year now that I've incorporated my new company, Mergify. I've been busy, and I barely wrote anything about it so far. Now is an excellent time to take a break and reflect a bit on what happened during those last 12 months.

What problem does Mergify solve?Mergify is a powerful automation engine for GitHub pull requests. It allows you to automate everything and especially merging. You write rules, and it handles the rest.

Example of rule matching returned in GitHub checks

For example, let's say you want your pull request to be merged, e.g., once your CI passes and the pull request has been approved. You just write such a rule, and our engine merges the pull request as soon as it's ready.We also deal with more advanced use cases. For instance, we provide a merge queue so your pull requests are merged serially and tested by your CI one after another avoiding any regression in your code.Our goal is to make pull request management and automation easy. You can use your bot to trigger a rebase of your pull requests, or a backport to a different branch, just with a single comment.

Some people like to make bots talk to each other.

A New AdventureMergify is the first company that I ever started. I did run some personal businesses before, created non-profit organizations, built FOSS projects but I never created a company from scratch, even less with an associate.Indeed, I've chosen to build the company with my old friend Mehdi. We've known each others for 7 years now, and have worked together all that time on different open-source projects. Having worked with each other for so long has probably been a critical factor in the success of our venture so far.I had little experience sharing the founding seats with someone, and tons of reading seemed to indicate that it would be a tough ride. Picking the right business partner(s) can be a hard task. Luckily, after working so much time together, Mehdi and I both know our strengths and weaknesses well enough to be able to circumvent them. On the other hand, we both have similar backgrounds as software engineers. That does not help to cover all the hats you need to wear when building a company. Over time, we found arrangements to cover most of those equally between us.We don't have any magical advice to give on this. As in every relationship, communication is the key, and the #1 factor of success.

Getting UsersI don't know if we got lucky, but we got users and customers pretty early. We used a few cooperative projects as guinea pigs first, and they were brave enough to try our service and give us feedback. No repository has been harmed during this first phase!Then, as soon as we managed to get our application on the GitHub Marketplace, we saw a steady number of users coming to us.This has been fantastic as it allowed us to get feedback rapidly. We set up a form asking users for feedback after they used Mergify for a couple of weeks. What we hear is that users were happy, that the documentation was confusing and that some features were buggy or missing. We planned all of those ideas as our future work in our roadmap, using the principles we described a few months ago.

How we handle our roadmap for Mergify

Whatever you re building a company, a product, or a house a time comes where you need planning. Pushing random buttons to move forward does not work anymore. You need to take a step back to

Julien DanjouMergify

If you're curious, you can read this article.

We tried various strategies to get new users, but so far, organic growth has been our #1 way of onboarding new users. Like many small startups out there, we're not that good at marketing and executing strategies.We provide our service for free for open-source projects We are now powering many organizations, such as Mozilla, Amazon Web Services, Ceph and Fedora.

Working with GitHubWorking with GitHub has been complicated. When you build an application for a marketplace, your business is entirely dependent on the platform you develop for both in terms of features and quality of service.In our case, we hit quite many bugs with GitHub. Their support has mostly been fast to answer, but some significant issues are still opened months later. The truth is that the GitHub API could deserve more love and care from GitHub. For example, their GraphQL API is a work in progress for years and miss out many essential features.

GitHub service status is not always green.

We dealt and still deal with all those issues. It obviously impacts our operations and decreases our overall velocity. We regularly have to find new ways to sidestep GitHub limitations.You have no idea how we wished for GitHub to be open-source. The idea of not having access to their code and understand how it works is so frustrating that we publish our engine as an open-source project. That allows all of our users to see how it works and even propose enhancements.

Automate all the wayWe're a tiny startup, and we decided to bootstrap our company. We never took any funding. From the beginning, it has been clear to us that we had to think and act like we had no resources. We're built around a scarcity mindset. Every decision we make is based on the assumption that we basically are very limited in terms of money and time.We basically act like any wrong choice we do could (virtually) kill the company. We only do what is essential, we ship fast, and we automate everything.For example, we have built our whole operation about CI/CD systems, and pushing any new fix or feature in production is done in a matter of minutes. It's not uncommon for us to push a fix from our phone, just by reviewing some code or editing a file.

GrowthWe're extremely happy with our steady growth and more users using our service. We now manage close to 30k repositories and merge 15k pull requests per month for our users.That's a lot of mouse clicks saved!If you want to try Mergify yourself, it's a single click log-in using your GitHub account. Check it out!

Currently the big news issue is all about how to respond to Coronavirus. The summary of the medical situation is that it s going to spread exponentially (as diseases do) and that it has a period of up to 6 days of someone being infectious without having symptoms. So you can get a lot of infected people in an area without anyone knowing about it. Therefore preventative action needs to be taken before there s widespread known infection. Governments seem disinterested in doing anything about the disease before they have proof of widespread infection. They won t do anything until it s too late. I finished my last 9-5 job late last year and hadn t got a new one since then. Now I m thinking of just not taking any work that requires much time spend outside home. If you don t go to a workplace there isn t a lot you have to do that involves leaving home. Shopping is one requirement for leaving home, but the two major supermarket chains in my area (Coles and Woolworths) both offer home delivery for a small price so that covers most shopping. Getting groceries delivered means that they will usually come from the store room not the shop floor so wouldn t have anyone coughing or sneezing on them. If you are really paranoid (which I aren t at the moment) then you could wear rubber gloves to bring the delivery in and then wash everything before using it. It seems that many people have similar ideas to me, normally Woolworths allows booking next-day delivery, now you have to book at least 5 days (3 business days) in advance. If anyone needs some Linux work done from remote then let me know. Otherwise I ll probably spend the next couple of months at home doing Debian coding and watching documentaries on Netflix.

If you have to choose one year when you won't fly, this year, 2020, is the one to choose. Why? Because CORSIA. What the heck is CORSIA? CORSIA is not a novel virus, but "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation". In a nutshell, the aviation industry says they will freeze their co2 emissions from growing. Actually, aviation emissions are still going to grow. The airlines will just pay someone else to reduce emissions with the same amount aviation emissions rise - the "Offsetting" word in CORSIA. If that sounds like greenwashing, well it pretty much is. But that was expected. Getting every country and airline abroad CORSIA would not have been possible if the scheme would actually bite. So it's pretty much a joke. What does it have to do with *this* Year? The first phase of CORSIA will start next year, so the emissions are frozen to year 2020 levels. Due to certain recent events, lots of flights have already been cancelled - which means the reference year aviation emissions are already a lot less than the aviation industry was expecting. By avoiding flying this year, the aviation emissions are going to be frozen at an even lower level. This will increase cost of co2 offsetting for airlines, and the joke is going to be on them. So consider skipping business travel and taking your holiday trip this year with something else than a plane. Wouldn't recommend a cruise ship, tho...

Just like we did for Debian 7 Wheezy, some of the paid Debian LTS contributors will continue to maintain Debian 8 Jessie after its 5 years of support as part of Freexian s Extended LTS service. This service works differently than regular LTS:

• only the packages used by the sponsors are supported;
• the updates are provided in an external repository managed by Freexian so that Debian teams can bury Debian 8 Jessie and move on;
• the cost of the service for each sponsor is evaluated each semester based on the number of packages that they want to see supported and the number of other sponsors with similar needs;
• a limited set of architectures is supported (usually only amd64 and i386, but for Jessie it might be that we end up supporting armel due to a sponsor requesting it).

Some packages will not be supported:

• linux 3.16 (instead we will likely continue to maintain the linux-4.9 backport from Debian 9 stretch)
• openjdk-7 (its EOL is on June 2020), we might maintain a backport of openjdk-8 if there s demand for it
• tomcat7 will only be supported until its EOL in March 2021
• this list might be expanded over time when we discover issues rendering security support infeasible on some packages

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 us. We re building a list of potential sponsors right now and we expect to provide cost estimations at the end of the month.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

I was slow to start using twitter, but found it a lot of fun. Often it would be useful at times when websites were slow; I'd hop to the website and search "edinburgh network", "github down", or "helsinki outage" and find live updates as people disclosed problems before the appropriate companies updated their status pages. I've found a lot of useful information, in near real-time, over the past few years. For example I remember hearing a loud explosion a few years back and had no idea what it was. Turns out it was an electrical substation catching fire nearby. Anyway recently I've been getting a lot of fake notifications, things that aren't real:

• In case you missed XXX's tweet.

You can't disable these notifications, the only thing you can do is click "see less often". For a couple of days I did that every time I saw them, to no avail. So I'm done. I've removed references to my account anywhere I could spot them, and I've signed out for good. (I read twitter on my desktop 99% of the time, though I did use my mobile phone to make posts, especially when images/pictures were involved.) I've not deleted my account, but I'd uninstalled the application and deleted the entry from my password-store. No doubt in a few years they'll delete my account, though they seem to have recently backtracked on their attempts to nuke inactive accounts.

I have a Raspberry Pi at my parents home. They have internet access via some ISP using Carrier Grade NAT (CGN). Hence their home router is not reachable via IPv4 from the outside, they do have IPv6 and the devices can also be made accessible via IPv6 via the local router. Did that, was able to access my Raspberry Pi over IPv6 and SSH from the outside. So doing backup of that Raspberry Pi with BackupPC from the outside was a walk in the park. Unfortunately the IPv6 prefix seems to change occasionally and the router only allows to configure explicit IPv6 addresses in firewall rules so after a prefix change the configured rules no more match the devices IPv6 addresses. Meh. So there were multiple possibilities to work around these restrictions and access a devices behind the router:

• Using a permanent VPN connection, e.g. OpenVPN.
• Using a software defined network (SDN), e.g. ZeroTier.
• Enabling a Tor Hidden Service to access the device via SSH and Tor.

Enabling a Tor Hidden Service for port 22 is a no-brainer and was done most quickly (actually it already was in place as I already suspected that an IPv6 prefix change might happen) and I so far was too lazy to replace it with something more proper. But my backup was relying on direct SSH access via IPv6. So I needed to get that working over Tor, too. Here s what was needed for the host named sherpa (named after the Fiberfab Sherpa) to be backed up via Tor:

• Make sure the folloing packages are installed on the BackupPC server:
  • netcat-openbsd (netcat-traditional might work, too, but then needs different commandline options)
  • ssh-tools for ssh-ping
  • tor (of course :-)
• Add these lines to ~backuppc/.ssh/config:

  Host sherpa_via_tor
          Hostname abcdefghijklmnop.onion
          ProxyCommand /bin/nc.openbsd -X 5 -x localhost:9050 %h %p
  

  These lines basically configure an alias hostname for ssh which then connects via SOCKS5 to the Tor daemon instead of doing DNS lookup and connection itself. It also configures the actual hostname (a Tor .onion hostname) to connect to.
• Add the following lines to /etc/backuppc/sherpa.pl:

  $Conf ClientNameAlias  = 'sherpa_via_tor';
  $Conf PingCmd  = '/usr/bin/ssh-ping -c 1 $host';
  $Conf NmbLookupFindHostCmd  = "";
  

  These lines configure a few things in BackupPC:
  • Use the hostname alias declared in .ssh/config.
  • Use ssh-ping instead of standard ping as command to test connectivity. (ICMP neither works over SOCKS5 nor over Tor. And we configured the connection only for SSH anyways.)
  • Don t try to do any DNS lookups on the given hostnames. (Otherwise you ll get error messages like Can t find host sherpa_via_tor via netbios in BackupPC s per-host log files.)

That s it basically. Of course you also need to have the SSH public host key in the .ssh/known_hosts file also for the .onion hostname. And the Tor Hidden Service needs to be configured on the target device. But that s left as exercise for the reader. There s a lot of documentation about that on the internet, including slides and video recordings of talks and live demos I gave about this topic in German. Ah, and in case you might think that s unfair and misuse of the resources of the Tor Project: No, I explicitly asked and they said more or less any additional traffic helps to make it more difficult to analyse Tor traffic or to track Tor users and is hence welcome. Addendum: The last direct full backup of that Raspberry Pi (5.5 GB) took around 32 minutes. The first full backup over Tor (8.7 GB) took 341 minutes. Seems much slower, but there might be other factors as well: Most backups which ran last night were running at only 0.85 MB/s to 1 MB/s, probably because too many backups were running in parallel after a recent backup server downtime with file system check the backup server was probably the bottleneck. The backup of the Raspberry Pi over Tor ran at 0.42 MB/s, so about half the speed of the other backups. (Will probably add some more notes if I have more statistics over time.)

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in March) 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. Debian Games

• The games team received a lot of FTBFS bug reports due to a recent change in SDL2. (#951087) Many games that relied on the FindSDL2.cmake macro suddenly stopped building from source. Simon McVittie, who analyzed the situation, provided some helpful fixes for the problem. Ideally all affected packages and SDL2 should be fixed. I applied his patch for blockattack (#951943) and came up with similar patches for megaglest (#951959) and spring (#951974), pekka-kana-2 (#952049) was fixed by Simon and Carlos again.
• I updated clanlib, an older SDK for game development, fixed a Perl build failure and applied patches to make cross-builds and reproducible builds possible.
• I backported the latest version of Minetest, 5.1.1, to buster-backports.
• Morris was ported to GSetting by Yavor Doganov and Reiner Herrmann ported it to the signals2 boost library (well done folks!) while I was tying all things together.
• Freecol, a remake of the old Colonization received some love too. I could fix a build failure, create a valid appdata file and apply upstream s patch to address CVE-2018-1000825.
• I packaged new upstream releases of freeciv, freeorion and armagetronad.
• ufoai: I fixed a build failure caused by an upgrade to the mxml 3.x library. There is another issue with the old and soon to be removed gtksourceview2 library which the map editor relies on for some specific functions. I suppose the only way is to disable the functionality or to disable the editor alltogether. The game itself is not affected.
• I sponsored an improved version of mupen64plus-qt for Dan Hastings, an RC fix for widelands by Juhani Numminen and
• reviewed opensurge and surgescript for Carlos Donizete Froes. The former retro platformer opensurge is still missing from Debian and would be a nice addition to the games section. There is still some kind of runtime problem / shared library error and more work is required to make progress here.

Debian Java

• This month I packaged new releases of jboss-threads, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-jr, intellij-annotations, jboss-modules and libpdfbox2-java.

Misc

• After we received new bug reports for ublock-origin, this time because of sandboxing limitations in Chromium, I decided to revert back to two different binary packages, one for Firefox and one for Chromium. This will avoid any sandboxing problems due to the previous use of symlinks. The new version 1.25.0 is currently waiting in NEW.
• Instead the update of privacybadger to version 2020.2.19 and binaryen was much more straightforward.

Debian LTS This was my 48. 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:

• DLA-2133-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 3 CVE.
• DLA-2138-1. Issued a security update for wpa fixing 1 CVE.
• Worked on a security update for squid3 that is not finished yet.

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 21. month and I have been paid to work 8 hours on ELTS.

• ELA-217-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE. I investigated CVE-2019-17569 and found that it did not affect the version in Wheezy because the refactoring and thus the regression happened in a later version. I worked on CVE-2020-1938, a possible remote code execution vulnerability regarding the AJP protocol. After I had backported the initial upstream patch, I discovered that more and more changes to the code were required which I found to be too intrusive eventually. Since the AJP port is disabled by default in Debian and the scenario of an untrusted user/service like mod_jk and Apache 2 seems unlikely, I opted for not making those changes.
• Created a script to display which supported source packages are embedded into other supported packages and to show the embedded code copies in supported packages. There will be another script for LTS that behaves slightly different but it will also help to highlight CVE in embedded-code-copies in LTS and Debian packages in general.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

I have worked a bit on the fonts I use recently. From the main font I use every day in my text editor and terminals to this very website, I did a major and (hopefully) thoughtful overhaul of my typography, in the hope of making things easier to use and, to be honest, just prettier.

Editor and Terminal: Fira mono This all started when I found out about the Jetbrains Mono font. I found the idea of ligatures fascinating: the result is truly beautiful. So I do what I often do (sometimes to the despair of some fellow Debian members) and filed a RFP to document my research. As it turns out, Jetbrains Mono is not free enough to be packaged in Debian, because it requires proprietary tools to build. I nevertheless figured I could try another font so I looked at other monospace alternatives. I found the following packages in debian:

• fonts-firacode: ligatures
• fonts-hack: no ligatures
• fonts-hermit: no ligatures, smaller
• fonts-monoid: ligatures, feels much "thinner" than jetbrains

Those are also "programmer fonts" that caught my interest but somehow didn't land in Debian yet:

• sudo: personal project, no ligatures
• Iosevka: ligatures, multilingual
• Adobe's source code pro: WNPP

Because Fira code had ligatures, i ended up giving it a shot. I really like the originality of the font. See, for example, how the @ sign looks when compared to my previous font, Liberation Mono:

Liberation Mono

Fira Mono

Interestingly, a colleague (thanks ahf!) pointed me to the Practical Typography post "Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no", which makes the very convincing argument that ligatures are downright dangerous to programming environment. In my experiences with the fonts, it was also not always giving the result I would expect. I also remembered that the Emacs Haskell mode would have this tendency of inserting crazy syntactic sugar like this in source code without being asked, which I found extremely frustrating. Besides, Emacs doesn't support ligatures, unless you count such horrendous hacks which hack at the display time. That's because Emacs' display layer is not based on a modern rendering library like Pango but some scary legacy code that very few people understand. On top of the complexity of the codebase, there is also resistance in including a modern font. So I ended up using Fira mono everywhere I use fixed-width fonts, even though it's not packaged in Debian. That involves the following configuration in my .Xresources (no, I haven't switched to Wayland):

! font settings
Emacs*font: Fira mono
rofi*font: Fira mono 12
! Symbola is to get emojis to display correctly, apt install fonts-symbola
!URxvt*font: xft:Monospace,xft:Symbola
URxvt*font: xft:Fira mono,xft:Symbola

I also dropped this script in ~/.local/share/fonts/download.sh, for lack of a better way, to download all the fonts I'm interested in:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -u
wget --no-clobber --continue https://practicaltypography.com/fonts/charter.zip
unzip -u charter.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif-pro/releases/download/3.001R/source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
unzip -u source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases/download/3.006R/source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
unzip -u source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro/releases/download/2.030R-ro%2F1.050R-it/source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
unzip -u source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue -O Fira-4.202.zip https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/archive/4.202.zip   true
unzip -u Fira-4.202.zip

Update: I forgot to mention one motivation behind this was to work around a change in the freetype interpreter, discussed in bug 866685 and my upgrades documentation.

Website: Charter That "hell no" article got me interested in the Practical Typography web book, which I read over the weekend. It was an eye opener and I realized I had already some of those concepts implanted; in fact it's probably after reading the Typography in ten minutes guide that I ended up trying Fira sans a few years ago. I have removed that font since then, however, after realising it was taking up an order of magnitude more bandwidth space than the actual page content. I really loved the book, so much that I actually bought it. I liked the concept of it, the look, and the fact that it's a living document. There's a lot of typography work I would need to do on this site to catchup with the recommendations from Matthew Butterick. Switching fonts is only one part of this, but it's something I was excited to work on. So I sat down and reviewed the free fonts Butterick recommends and tried out a few. I ended up settling on Charter, a relatively old (in terms of computing) font designed by Matthew Carter (of Verdana fame) in 1987. Charter really looks great and is surprisingly small. While a single version of Fira varies between 96KiB (Fira Sans Condensed) and 308KiB (Fira Sans Medium Italic), Charter is only 28KiB! While it's still about as large as most of my articles, I found it was a better compromise and decided to make the jump. This site is now in Serif, which is a huge change for me. The change was done with the following CSS:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, body  
    /* 
     * Charter: Butterick's favorite, freely available, found on https://practicaltypography.com/free-fonts.html
     * Palatino: Mac OS
     * Palatino Linotype: Windows
     * Noto serif: Android, packaged in Debian
     * Liberation serif: Linux fallback
     * Serif: fallback
     */
    font-family: Charter, Palatino, "Palatino Linotype", "Noto serif", "Liberation serif", serif;
    /* Charter is available from https://practicaltypography.com/charter.html under the liberal Bitstream license */
 

I have also decided to outline headings by making them slanted, using the beautiful italic version of Charter:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5  
    font-style: italic;
 

I also made the point size larger, if the display is large enough:

/* enlarge body point size for charter for larger displays */
@media (min-device-width: 750px)  
    body  
        font-size: 20px;
        line-height: 1.3; /* default in FF is ~1.48 */
     
 

Modern display (including fonts) have a much higher resolution and the point size on my website was really getting too small to be readable. This, in turn, required a change to the max-width:

#content  
    /* about 2.5 alphabets with charter */
    max-width: 35em;
 

I have kept the footers and "UI" elements in sans-serif though, and kept those aligned on operating system defaults or "system fonts":

/* some hacking at typefaces to get some fresh zest in here
 * fallbacks from:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_Microsoft_Windows
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_macOS
 */
.navbar, .footer  
    /*
     * Avenir: Mac, quite different but should still be pretty
     * Gill sans: Mac, Windows, somewhat similar to Avenir (indulge me)
     * Noto sans: Android, packaged in Debian
     * Open sans: Texlive extras AKA Linux, packaged in Debian
     * Fira sans: Mozilla's Firefox OS
     * Liberation sans: Linux fallback
     * Helvetica: general fallback
     * Sans-serif: fallback
     */
    font-family: Avenir, "Gill sans", "Noto sans", "Open sans", "Fira sans", "Liberation sans", Helvetica, sans-serif;
    /* Fira is available from https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/ under the SIL Open Font License */
    /* alternatively, just use system fonts for "controls" instead:
    font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
    gitlab uses: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Noto Sans", Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"
    */
 

I've only done some preliminary testing of how this will look like. Although I tested on a few devices (my phone, e-book tablet, an iPad, and of course my laptop), I fully expect things to break on your device. Do let me know if things look better or worse. For future comparison, my site is well indexed in the Internet Wayback Machine and can be used to look at the site before the change. For example, compare the previous article here with its earlier style. The changes to the theme are of course available in my custom ikiwiki bootstrap theme (see in particular commits 0bca0fb7 and d1901fb8), as usual. Enjoy, and let me know what you think! PS: I considered just setting the Charter font in CSS and not adding it as a @font-face. I'm still considering that option and might do so if the performance cost is too big. The Fira mono font is actually set like this for the preformatted sections of the site, but because it's more common (and it's too big) I haven't added it as a font-face. You might want to download the font locally to benefit from the full experience as well. PPS: As it turns out, an earlier version of this post featured exactly that: a non-webfont version of Charter, which works fine if you have a good Charter font available. But it looks absolutely terrible if, like many Linux users, you have the nasty bitmap font shipped with xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi. So I fixed the webfont and it's unlikely this site will be able to load reasonably well in Linux until those packages are removed or bitmap font rendering is disabled.

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Your friends and colleagues are talking about something called Bayes s Theorem or Bayes s Rule, or something called Bayesian reasoning. They sound really enthusiastic about it, too, so you google and find a web page about Bayes s Theorem and... It s this equation. That s all. Just one equation. The page you found gives a definition of it, but it doesn t say what it is, or why it s useful, or why your friends would be interested in it. It looks like this random statistics thing. Why does a mathematical concept generate this strange enthusiasm in its students? What is the so-called Bayesian Revolution now sweeping through the sciences, which claims to subsume even the experimental method itself as a special case? What is the secret that the adherents of Bayes know? What is the light that they have seen? Soon you will know. Soon you will be one of us. While there are a few existing online explanations of Bayes s Theorem, my experience with trying to introduce people to Bayesian reasoning is that the existing online explanations are too abstract. Bayesian reasoning is very counterintuitive. People do not employ Bayesian reasoning intuitively, find it very difficult to learn Bayesian reasoning when tutored, and rapidly forget Bayesian methods once the tutoring is over. This holds equally true for novice students and highly trained professionals in a field. Bayesian reasoning is apparently one of those things which, like quantum mechanics or the Wason Selection Test, is inherently difficult for humans to grasp with our built-in mental faculties. Or so they claim. Here you will find an attempt to offer an intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning an excruciatingly gentle introduction that invokes all the human ways of grasping numbers, from natural frequencies to spatial visualization. The intent is to convey, not abstract rules for manipulating numbers, but what the numbers mean, and why the rules are what they are (and cannot possibly be anything else). When you are finished reading this, you will see Bayesian problems in your dreams.

Continuiamo a lavorare, studiare, socializzare grazie a Jitsi Meet

Here s my (fifth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in Debian this February.

Debian LTS This was my fifth month as a Debian LTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 20.00 hours and worked on the following things:

CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2095-1, fixing CVE-2020-7040, for storebackup.
  Details here:

  storeBackup.pl in storeBackup through 3.5 relies on the /tmp/storeBackup.lock pathname, which allows symlink attacks that possibly lead to privilege escalation.

  For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 3.2.1-1+deb8u1.
  Furthermore, sent the patch for the security update for Stretch and Buster to the maintainer.
• Issued DLA 2113-1, fixing CVE-2020-8631 and CVE-2020-8632 for cloud-init.
  Details here:

  For CVE-2020-8631, in cloud-init, relies on Mersenne Twister for a random password, which makes it easier for attackers to predict passwords, because rand_str in cloudinit/util.py calls the random.choice function.

  For CVE-2020-8632, in cloud-init, rand_user_password in cloudinit/config/cc_set_passwords.py has a small default pwlen value, which makes it easier for attackers to guess passwords.

  For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 0.7.6~bzr976-2+deb8u1.
• Issued DLA 2116-1, fixing CVE-2015-9542, for libpam-radius-auth.
  Details here:

  A vulnerability was found in pam_radius: the password length check was done incorrectly in the add_password() function in pam_radius_auth.c, resulting in a stack based buffer overflow.

  This could be used to crash (DoS) an application using the PAM stack for authentication. For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 1.3.16-4.4+deb8u1.
• Issued DLA 2127-1, fixing CVE-2019-10785, for dojo.
  Details here:

  dojox was vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting. This was due to dojox.xmpp.util.xmlEncode only encoding the first occurrence of each character, not all of them.

  For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 1.10.2+dfsg-1+deb8u2.
• Whilst Dylan issued DLA 2120-1, fixing CVE-2020-8130, for rake, I, with the Ruby team hat on, fixed the same issue for Stretch and Buster via proposed-updates.
  This CVE was fixed via 10.5.0-2+deb9u1 and 12.3.1-3+deb10u1 respectively.

Other LTS Work:

• Triaged cloud-init, slirp, libpam-radius-auth, dojo, and qemu.
• Triaged CVE-2020-1711 and CVE-2020-8608 with more precision and discussed the details with Ola.
• Started working on rrdtool for CVE-2014-6262.

---

Debian Work This was a great month! MiniDebCamp -> FOSDEM -> Ruby Sprints. Blog post soon :D
In the month of February, I did a lot of Debian work. // given limited time in March, this section is yet to be updated.

---

One exciting blog post coming very soon. Until next time.
:wq for today.

Last night, a series of forged emails was sent to a number of places around the Debian, Ubuntu and Free Software communities. The meat of the mail was a fake message from me to debian-private with the subject "DebConf19 Diversity Girls." I didn't write such a message.
I view this message as the latest installment in a campaign of attacks on Debian that attempt to undermine the project and take up the time of our members.
I was expecting something like this: yesterday, I banned Daniel Pocock from the project.There's been a pattern of related events over the past year and a half:

• Confrontational messages from Daniel that do not stop even when moderators of the discussion forum ask him to stop.
  
• Anonymous messages that expand on the points Daniel has been making accusing people and organizations of misconduct
  
• Without claiming authorship of these anonymous messages, Daniel quickly expands on the messages in his blogs and goes forward assuming these anonymous claims are true
  
• Use of mechanisms described on Daniel's websites to bypass moderation of community forums and other mechanisms designed to reach people who are not interested in the communication on the part of Daniel and the anonymous messages
  
• And now, forged emails
  

This campaign involves a lot of activities hurtful to members of our community. The "DebConf19 Diversity Girls" message was no exception. It alleges misconduct on the part of members of our community. Through the #metoo movement we've seen countless examples of victims standing up, demanding to be acknowledged and demanding that abusers are held accountable. That's not what is happening here. This message combines half-truths with a shocking presentation to damage Debian. It does not work to improve Debian. It is not championing the cause of someone trying to get redress for wrongs done to them.
I reject this approach and the intent behind this forged message and the broader campaign that it fits into.


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However, I also feel it is important to reassure everyone that Debian is committed to creating a safe and welcoming community. We take concerns about misconduct seriously. We particularly encourage anyone who has concerns about their safety in the debian community or concerns about how they are treated to talk to us. I am available as the project leader. Our community team is available. We will work to understand and resolve your concern.
While I think the presentation was hurtful and inappropriate, I also do acknowledge that personal conflict of interest is something that we all should be aware of. When we are taking on roles that have power within the project, we can create situations where we need to be extra careful to respect people's boundaries. There are cases where a personal conflict of interest may prevent us from being in certain personal relationships while also acting in a role within the project that could affect those relationships.
I think we are already generally aware of these issues. Even so, as we continue to build a community that does a better job respecting its members and their boundaries, it benefits us to continue to refine our approach to important issues like conflict of interest. Sometimes that will involve awareness. Sometimes that will involve crafting more clear policies around the issues. It does not involve vague accusations spammed to the entire Free Software community. If I were actually writing a message on these topics, it would look a lot more like the paragraph above than the message forged in my name.

Self-handicapping - Wikipedia

Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem.[1] It was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas,[2] according to whom self-handicaps are obstacles created, or claimed, by the individual in anticipation of failing performance.[3]

Learned Helplessness is behaviour exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused from the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness: discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented. Upon exhibiting such behavior, the subject was said to have acquired learned helplessness.[1][2] Over the past few decades, neuroscience has provided insight into learned helplessness and shown that the original theory actually had it backwards: the brain's default state is to assume that control is not present, and the presence of "helpfulness" is what is actually learned.[3]

One of the "classics" of Magic literature. Stuck In The Middle With Bruce by John F. Rizzo.