Search Results: "ana"

15 August 2026

Russell Coker: Hacked by Chinafans

What Happened On 2026/08/10 at 2:11 am Australian eastern standard time (2026/08/09 16:11 UTC) someone created a post titled Hacked by Chinafans on my documents blog [1]. The person in question created an account named 67965e42a3c3 on that site with the email address 67965e42a3c3@google.com associated with it (I tried emailing that address and it bounced). At 04:28:41am Australian eastern standard time (18:28 UTC) I was sent an email titled Have you been hacked by a reader of my blogs who subscribed to the RSS feed of my documents blog (a blog that I never expected anyone to read by RSS). Along the lines of the wisdom of crowds should we have the unexpected observation and problem reporting of crowds ? I appreciate the notification, I might not have noticed until the next time I watched an unusually good movie otherwise. The account in question was apparently created on 2026-07-21 at 16:43:47 (presumably UTC) even though at the time I believe creating accounts was not permitted. As an aside the timestamp of account creation is stored in the user_registered column of the wp_users table in the database, there doesn t appear to be a way to access this in a standard WordPress installation other than doing a SQL query.

2026-07-24 15:43:17 status triggers-pending wordpress:all 7.0+dfsg1-1
2026-07-24 15:43:19 upgrade wordpress:all 7.0+dfsg1-1 7.0.2+dfsg1-1

Above are the relevant sections of my dpkg log showing the WordPress versions in use. I was running version 7.0+dfsg1-1 at the time the account was apparently created. I am confident in the accuracy of the dpkg logs and believe that they did not compromise the OS, I am not sure whether they ran hostile SQL code to change fields in the MySQL database so had to consider the possibility that the account creation time could have been set to a deliberately misleading value. I checked backups of the MySQL database stored off-site and found that the account in question was not in the 2026-07-21 backup (which was done before 16:43) but in the 2026-07-22 backup. The WordPress release history [2] has version 7.0.1 released on 2026-07-09 and version 7.0.2 released on 2026-07-17. So presumably the attacker diffed the code on those releases, found an exploitable bug, and used it to create an account on my blog with admin privs. Then they waited a few weeks to see if I would notice and published a blog post when I didn t notice. WordPress Deficiencies

WordPress doesn t seem to store the version it s running at the time of operations. So anyone who doesn t have a suitable external log of versions deployed (such as the dpkg.log file for a Debian managed installation) won t know for sure which version was running. It supports automatic updates but you can t be sure that they happened soon after the release.
There is no log of IP addresses used for operations. There are apparently some 3rd party modules to log such things and web pages documenting how to modify the PHP to add it but nothing in the standard distribution.
Software should have a standard distribution with some support for logging of security relevant data. The typical situation is that people don t plan for logging such things until after they have been attacked so the data should be recorded without users going out of their way to log it.
A log of security relevant data should be stored in a database table with only insert access (no update, delete, or drop).
Ideally a CMS would support different database accounts for different purposes. Someone from an internal network or VPN could talk to an instance of the web server which has a database username and password giving full access. Everyone from outside the trusted range gets an instance of the web server with database access only allowing to read the posts and appearance configuration and to enter comments. If the database didn t allow the account used for public access to create new admin users or create posts then it would be a lot harder for attackers.
Ideally for everything that stores user account data there would be an easy way of getting a list of users in a plain text format to allow running diff. The design of WordPress has two tables, one for users and one for encoded metadata about users of which one will be the access level. The following SQL command will give a list of all users that aren t subscribers (everyone above the minimum level of access which is typical for new users) along with their encoded password and access level. This could be used in a monitoring system to alert about new privileged users. The TABLE_PREFIX variable is for the prefix for WordPress tables, which is wp_ by default but can be any legal value.
```
select $TABLE_PREFIXusers.user_login, $TABLE_PREFIXusers.user_pass, $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta.meta_value from  $TABLE_PREFIXusers join $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta on $TABLE_PREFIXusers.id = $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta.user_id and meta_key='$TABLE_PREFIXcapabilities' and meta_value != 'a:1: s:10:"subscriber";b:1; ';
```

What Next? The blog post they created had a couple of links to Telegram which could presumably be used to contact them. If anyone involved in computer security wants a copy of the original post to do so then they can contact me by any of the usual methods. I am interested in communication with the attacker if they wish, Telegram is not a service I use but I presume that anyone capable of doing this sort of attack is also capable of finding other ways of contacting me. I have idly considered changing to a static site generator, here is a good list of static site generators [3]. I have also idly considered other platforms for blogging such as Lemmy. I don t know if Lemmy is better than WordPress for security and updates, but there are plenty of free instances running where it wouldn t be an issue I have to work on. 15 Years It s been 15 years since my blog server was cracked by a trojaned ssh client [4]. At least this time it was only one service that was compromised.

13 August 2026

Jonathan Dowland: DIY skate punch-out

Since I wrote about my fly30 ice skates, I'd continued to battle pain around the navicular bone in my feet. The action that seems to have finally fixed it was to perform a "punch out": a very localized remoulding of the area of the boot that presses against the sore area. I basically followed the process from this helpful YouTube video. I narrowed down the exact spot by borrowing some lipstick and transferring it from my navicular bone to the boot lining, then making that more permanent with a sharpie. My punch was a spare part from a radiator valve which I packed with US cents (I couldn't fit any UK coins in). For the receiving-end, I tried another part from the radiator valve but I think it wasn't sufficiently larger than the punch to work well, so I swapped that out for a spoon.

take 2

I didn't have a temperature sensor I could use and I used a heat gun rather than a hairdryer, so I YOLO'd it a little. Some of the wrap on one of my boots is now distorted from where I didn't move the heat gun enough. It only took a minute or two to get the boot hot enough to be flexible. I set a 15 minute timer once the clamp was in place. I've only skated one session since I did this but the pain seems to have gone! It's remarkably freeing to be skating without constantly trying to manage pain. Now I can focus on technique.

11 August 2026

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf 26 organization, d-i VLAN support and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2026-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 26 organization, by Lucas Kanashiro, Santiago Ruano Rinc n, Stefano Rivera and Antonio Terceiro The 27th Annual Debian Conference was held in Santa Fe, Argentina, and several Freexian fellows were quite busy by being involved in the organization team.

Santiago continued helping with duties related to the local team, e.g. preparing or proof-reading some announcements, reviewing the proposed food and the menus for the different diet required.

During the conference, Kanashiro and Santiago also carried over tasks related to the content of the conference, including updating the schedule as it became necessary during the event.

Stefano worked within the core video team, setting up equipment in talk rooms and coordinating the live video streaming. Stefano also supported the front desk and local organisers as a website developer and conference book-keeper.

Antonio kept working on website maintenance, specially in support of the content team. During DebConf he also ran a hands-on workshop to help interested contributors get started with developing the DebConf websites.

d-i VLAN support, by Colin Watson In environments that use IEEE 802.1Q VLANs, some hosts (such as routers attached to trunk ports) may need to apply VLAN tags themselves rather than relying on switches to do so. There has been a long-running request to add support for these to the Debian installer with a proposed patch set put together by several people over the years, and a Freexian customer asked us to help get this over the line. Colin reviewed the latest version of the patch set, applied a number of corrections, added Netplan support, spent some time testing a variety of possible paths through the installer, and landed this. There s also now documentation for this in the next version of the installation guide.

Miscellaneous contributions

Carles wrote documentation for installing Mailman3 and migrating from Mailman2. Added it into Mailman3 upstream documentation.

Carles, using po-debconf-manager: reviewed 2 packages, submitted 2 packages

Carles organized Catalan translation update. Created a Debian Wiki page to have an overview of the work / coordination during next months. Reviewed and submitted some pages.

Carles improved the documentation for building the debian.org Web in MR 1154 and MR 1557. Fixed debian-reference documentation. Added sections on Mutt Wiki page (handling of mailto, viewing HTML parts web browser), update and improve bash-completion Wiki page. Added a troubleshooting section in Signal Wiki.

Thorsten did another upload of hplip to fix RC bugs. He also spent some time taking care of older bugs. Most of the time such bugs had been fixed in a previous upload but haven t been closed in the BTS. He also uploaded a new upstream version of foomatic-db. Last but not least, he gave some user support with the package epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. There seems to be a new software available for Epson printers. Unfortunately the license is not compatible with DFSG and so this software will never make it into Debian.

During DebCamp 26, the Golang team had a dedicated Sprint to transition the Golang toolchain (namely on dh-golang) to make builds aware of the module defined upstream with the aim of solving important issues. To help in these efforts, Santiago made changes in the Salsa CI pipeline and documented on how to use it to check if a package requires adjustments after the toolchain update.

Santiago continued co-mentoring Aryan Karamtoth on the Linux livepatching project, specifically providing feedback about the implementation of dlp-tools.

Stefano reviewed and merged a migration of Debian reimbursements from wkhtmltopdf to weasyprint, unblocking an upgrade to Debian trixie.

Stefano s cPython upstream merge request adding multiarch tags to stable ABI extensions was finally merged.

Stefano iterated on his upstream cPython merge request to add CI coverage for Debian s multi-arch expectations.

Stefano uploaded Python 3.15.0 beta 4 to Debian experimental.

Stefano uploaded Python 3.13 to trixie, fixing a regression in a previous trixie point update he made.

Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts.

Helmut sent patches for three cross build failures.

Helmut proposed a MR to port piuparts to pathlib.

Antonio has done quite some work on Debian CI, including rebuilding the Debian CI armhf/armel worker VMs, and releasing debci 4.2, implementing a backup scheme, and several improvements to the codebase such as improving the incus-lxc backend in preparation for switching to the upcoming switch to using it by default as announced in the latest bits from the ci.debian.net operators.

Emilio helped with transitions, particularly with Python 3.14 as default and Perl 5.42. During the Perl transition, an issue was identified with how britney schedules autopkgtests for binNMUs, and that testing was reverted for the time being.

Colin restructured openssh-* binary packages to better support the upcoming GSS-API package split. This caused several autopkgtest regressions in other packages because openssh-server no longer depends on openssh-client, all of which have fixes either pending review or merged now.

Lucas started a discussion around the creation of a Debian packaging video course for newcomers in the context of the Outreach team.

Lucas reviewed some contributions to ruby3.4 and provided feedback.

Anupa worked with Jean-Pierre Giraud on the point release announcements for Debian 13.6 and Debian 12.15.

Anupa joined Jean-Pierre Giraud to prepare the Micronews for DebConf 26 press coverage.

9 August 2026

Elana Hashman: Managing virtualenvs with a little bash

When you need to install something directly from PyPI, Python virtualenvs have been my go-to for over a decade. A quick virtualenv intro Most of my readers are probably already familiar with virtualenvs, but for completeness, I'll give you a brief introduction. A virtualenv (short for "virtual environment") is an isolated distribution of Python packages, where you can independently install packages without disturbing your system packages or other virtualenvs. You can set one up like this, assuming you are using Python 3.3 or higher:

python3 -m venv ~/.venv/my-virtualenv

The directory specified here is just a convention. I keep all my virtualenvs in the .venv folder in my home directory, but you can pick whatever location you like. To use the virtualenv, you must activate it:

source ~/.venv/my-virtualenv/bin/activate

This activation script is a special shell script that configures your current shell, pointing at all the right paths in order to use the virtual environment. source runs this script in your current shell session to set it up. You will notice that this adds (my-virtualenv) to the beginning of your shell prompt, reminding you that the "my-virtualenv" virtualenv is active. Now when you pip install amazing-package, the software will only be available in this virtual environment. When you're done, you can deactivate it like so:

deactivate

Wonderful! Managing many virtualenvs gets annoying Over time, I end up accumulating many virtualenvs, which can become harder to manage. Maybe something like this:

$ ls ~/.venv/
my-virtualenv cool-project snakes-ahoy

I also don't want to type source ~/.venv/my-virtualenv/bin/activate every time I use the virtualenv, because it gets very repetitive only the name of the venv is really needed. But luckily, we can write a little bit of bash to make managing this less annoying. (Or you can use one of many Python developer tools that are designed to manage this, like pipx, but when I merely want to consume Python software, I might not have a development environment set up. So that's beyond the scope of this post!) If you add the following shell function to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file, it will nicely wrap our activation command:

setup-venv()  
        source "$HOME/.venv/$1/bin/activate"

Now all we need to run is

setup-venv my-virtualenv

So much quicker! Spicing it up with tab completion The first thing I noticed after writing this wrapper was that I started hitting tab on the virtual environment name, but... nothing happened. Wouldn't it be nice to know what virtualenvs I had available, and to not have to type out the whole long thing? Well, we can write it ourselves If for some reason you don't already have bash completion installed, on a Debian-based system, you will need to install it with

apt install bash-completion

In order to configure our bash completion, we will create a new file, /etc/bash_completion.d/venv, with the following contents:

_list_venvs()
 
    local cur prev opts
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD] "
    prev="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1] "
    opts=$(find $HOME/.venv/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf "%f ")
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$ opts " -- $ cur ) )
    return 0
 
complete -F _list_venvs setup-venv

This file defines another shell function order to determine how to autocomplete the options for our setup-venv function. $opts is where we define the options for our function. We generate it with a find command looking at the .venv folder in the current user's home directory, then only including child folders (excluding the current directory itself, .venv, in our results) by using the min/max depth and type arguments, and printing just the individual directory names, deliminated by spaces using our print formatter. Everything else is the standard scaffolding required to use bash completions. Once you save this file and reload your shell, you'll see that you are able to use completions as expected!

setup-venv <tab>
my-virtualenv cool-project snakes-ahoy
setup-venv s<tab>
setup-venv snakes-ahoy

Complaints, comments, questions? Hope this was helpful! If it wasn't, that's too bad. But don't worry you can safely ignore this post.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2026

Welcome to the July 2026 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap about what problem our project intends to solve, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised or not. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website. In this month s report, we cover:

Tool development diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions `324`, `325` and `326` to Debian:

Fix tests to work with `zipdetails` 4.0008. (#1141359)

Bump debhelper compatibility level to 13. [ ]

Update copyright years. [ ]

In addition, Paul Spooren made changes to allow trailing garbage in Gzip files [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool reference for the `pedump` binary to use the `mono` package under GNU Guix. [ ]
disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into system calls to reliably flush out reproducibility issues. This month, Christelle Gloor added the option to sort by `ctime` as returned by the `lstat(2)` syscall. [ ], which Chris Lamb uploaded whilst bumping the `Standards-Version` to version 4.7.4 [ ]. Bernhard Wiedemann also updated disorderfs to version 0.7.0 in openSUSE.
Yet again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month as well. For example, Chris Lamb, by request of Digital Ocean, changed the target of a referral link so that they can manage incoming referrers [ ] and pushed a number of changes to the Tools page [ ].

Distribution work In Debian this month, 32 reviews of Debian packages were added, 26 were updated and a total of 21 were removed this month, adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were added by Chris Lamb, including:

`python_towncrier_build_date` [ ][ ]

`log_files_installed_in_package` [ ]

`fontforge_varies_by_timezone` [ ][ ]

Chris also added a further note for the `build_date_in_manpage_generated_by_spf13_cobra` issue. [ ]
In addition, there is a new page showing verification rebuilds of OpenWrt APK packages and firmware images, powered by rebuilderd:

Three new scholarly papers Yan Li, Nan Jiang, Qihang Zhou, Shaowen Xu, Yamin Xie and Xiaoqi Jia of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper titled VCAligner: Aligning Source Distribution Versions with Upstream Git Commits to Secure Supply Chain:
We present VCAligner, a content-based alignment methodology that constructs inverted indexes over VCS histories to precisely map released artifacts to their originating commits, independent of fragile version tags. We evaluated VCAligner on a dataset of 2,984 verifiable PyPI packages derived from the 4,000 most-downloaded projects linked to public GitHub upstreams. Our results reveal a critical weakness in conventional tag-based heuristics: while they appear effective on 85% of the dataset, the residual 15% failure rate generates a catastrophic downstream audit workload of over 10.3 million commits. In contrast, VCAligner reduces this burden by two orders of magnitude ( 158 ), bounding the total workload to under 65,000 commits. Furthermore, we provide the large-scale characterization of Packaging Noise, classifying artifact divergence into structural additions (Path Phantoms) and content mutations (Blob Phantoms), thereby isolating the distinct attack surfaces of malicious injection and code tampering.

Jens Dietrich and Spencer Sun from the Victoria University of Wellington together with Tim W. White and Behnaz Hassanshahi from Oracle Inc pre-published their paper No Snake Oil: Verifying Python Package Builds (PDF):
Python has become the default language for interacting with AI, with packages being distributed through registries like the Python Package Index (PyPI). This creates a need to analyse supply chains comprising such packages. One such analysis is to rebuild packages in order to identify compromised builds injecting malware. Independent rebuilds in hardened environments have the added advantage that they can generate and record provenance in order to increase the trustworthiness of packages. Two tools that are designed to automate such rebuilds and run them at scale are macaron and oss-rebuild. We study 12,180 popular releases from PyPI and find that the byte-for-byte equivalence rate is generally low. We analyse the reasons why they produce different wheels, and find that equivalence between the original and rebuilt wheels can often still be established, preserving most of the guarantees users expect from rebuildable releases. We present and evaluate daleq4py, a tool to establish the equivalence of Python wheels through the kernel of a normalisation function that is based on provenance-preserving datalog rules. Experimental results show that daleq4py substantially expands the set of rebuilds that can be accepted as equivalent. Although only 15.4% of macaron rebuilds and 19.1% of oss-rebuild rebuilds are byte-for-byte identical to the published PyPI wheels, daleq4py establishes wheel equivalence for 60.2% and 78.9% of source-equivalent rebuilds, respectively.

Denise Nanni, Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Th o Zimmermann from T l com Paris together with Gabriele D Angelo from the University of Bologna pre-published their paper Understanding Build Reproducibility in the F-Droid Ecosystem (PDF), which was accepted at the 2026 ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability:
The security of open source applications benefits considerably from the possibility of rebuilding their source and verifying the output. F-Droid, a prominent distribution for open source Android applications, systematically rebuilds them from source and tests their bitwise reproducibility at app publishing time. However, F-Droid offers no guarantee that app reproducibility will continue to hold in the future. As software ecosystems evolve, reproducibility may degrade, with potential negative consequences for software preservation and security. We present the first empirical study of build reproducibility in the F-Droid app ecosystem. Analyzing historical reproducibility logs, we find that the overall bitwise reproducibility rate has been steadily increasing over time (as new versions of apps are published). We then evaluate how reproducibility holds in time for fixed app versions, by attempting to rebuild 18 904 app versions that F-Droid had previously confirmed bitwise reproducible, published between September 2018 and February 2026, achieving an 83% rebuild success rate, and identify missing dependencies as the dominant cause of failure, accounting for 76% of non-rebuildable cases. Among successfully rebuilt apps, 94% are also bitwise reproducible-i.e., they still yield bitwise identical artifacts upon rebuild. Together, these results show that while bitwise reproducibility largely holds for apps that can be rebuilt, rebuildability itself is highly sensitive to temporal decay.

Patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where applicable or possible. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

openSUSE monthly

Arnout Engelen:

`ivy`

`pekko-grpc`

`sbt-ivy`

`scala`

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`angelfish`

`cpython`

`efl`

`erlang+ex_doc`

`eww/glib-macros`

`intel-graphics-compiler`

`java-11-openjdk`

`java-17-openjdk`

`java-1_8_0-openjdk`

`java-21-openjdk`

`mono-core`

`nasm/rav1e`

`python-langsmith`

`zathura*`

`zig0.15`

Chris Lamb:

#1141505 filed against `golang-github-tidwall-wal`.

#1141506 filed against `lightproof`.

#1141582 filed against `libslow5lib`.

#1141687 filed against `siso`.

#1141841 filed against `grout`.

#1142126 filed against `libpsl`.

#1142492 filed against `node-grunt-contrib-internal`.

#1142495 filed against `fontforge`.

#1142496 filed against `spopt`.

#1142887 filed against `go-dlib`.

#1143147 filed against `towncrier`.

Jochen Sprickerhof:

#1141412 filed against `python-sphinx-chango`.

#1141553 filed against `gasnet`.

#1141577 filed against `yubihsm-connector`.

#1141663 filed against `dh-fortran`.

#1142000 filed against `watcher`.

#1142001 filed against `rakudo`.

#1142128 filed against `kf6-breeze-icons`.

#1142141 filed against `oxygen-icons`.

#1142256 filed against `gnu-apl`.

#1142513 filed against `barvinok`.

#1143169 filed against `ecbuild`.

Misc news On our mailing list this month, Colin Winter of Markovian Protocol wrote to our mailing list on the topic of Reproducible verification for retained logs:
Reproducible builds remove trust in the builder: anyone re-derives the same artifact from the same source, byte for byte. The same shape applies one layer over, to a retained record. Most record-keeping regimes (the EU AI Act s Article 12 logging is the current example) require that events be recorded and logs retained, but not that a retained log be verifiable, by a party who was not present, as unaltered and existing when claimed. That leaves an integrity obligation resting on trusting the party being audited.
(Full thread)

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

6 August 2026

Bits from Debian: DebConf26 closes in Santa Fe and DebConf27 announced

DebConf26 group photo - click to enlarge

On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Over 270 attendees representing 35 countries from around the world came together for a combined 90 events (including some which took place during the DebCamp) including more than 27 Talks, 21 Short Talks, 29 Birds of a Feather sessions ("BoF" informal meeting between developers and users), 8 workshops, and activities in support of furthering our distribution and free software, learning from our mentors and peers, building our community, and having a bit of fun. The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp hacking session held 13 through 19 July where Debian Developers and Contributors convened to focus on their individual Debian-related projects or work in team sprints geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian. As has been the case for several years, a special effort has been made to welcome newcomers and help them become familiar with Debian and DebConf by organizing a sprint "New Contributors Onboarding" every day of Debcamp, followed more informally by mentorship during DebConf. Half a dozen new contributors joined the sessions and learned about Debian, free software, packaging and much more. This year, a week-long DebCamp session was dedicated to auditing, patching, and modernizing the Go ecosystem in Debian and enable the transition triggered by the recent upload of dh-golang enabling GO111MODULE=on by default in Experimental. In order to make the conference more accessible for local participants, a local language track was included in the schedule for talks in Spanish, as was done at DebConf19 in Brazil. The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Monday 20 July 2026. In addition to the traditional "Bits from the DPL" talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks, and the announcement of next year's DebConf27, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and teams. Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical core teams with the usual and useful "Meet the Technical Committee", three talks about Linux Kernel, early boot and improving Debian s kernel and installer support for Chromebooks, and about twenty BoFs and talks about Debian packaging policy, Debian infrastructure, security and privacy. This year, and echoing ongoing discussions within the Free Software community, Artificial Intelligence and Age Verification have been the subject of several talks. The Python, Perl, Ruby, Go, and Rust programming language teams also shared updates on their work and efforts. More than 17 BoFs and talks about community, diversity, and local outreach highlighted the work of various teams involved in not just the technical but also the social aspect of our community The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several traditional activities took place: a poetry performance, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the Group Photos, and the Day Trip. For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were broadcasted live and recorded. One can find the seventy hours of recorded videos available via the conference schedule, or alternatively through this link. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC and Matrix messaging apps or online collaborative text documents which allowed remote attendees to "be in the room" and ask questions or share comments with the speaker or assembled audience. DebConf26 saw over 341 T-shirts, a day trip, and up to 130 meals planned per day. All of these events, activities, conversations, and streams coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian and F/OSS certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Santa Fe, Argentina and online around the world. The DebConf26 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events. Next year, DebConf27 will be held in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, from Sunday September 5th to Saturday September 11th, 2027. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in Japan will start the conference activities with DebCamp with a particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution. DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct on the DebConf26 website for more details on this. Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf26, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, and Proxmox, and our Gold Sponsors : Freexian, and Viridien. We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf26 and DebConf committees, our host nation of Argentina, and each and every person who helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall. Thank you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal Operating System". See you next year! About Debian The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential Open Source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system. About DebConf DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Korea, France. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/. About Infomaniak Infomaniak is an independent, employee-owned Swiss technology company that designs, develops, and operates its own cloud infrastructure and digital services entirely in Switzerland. With over 300 employees more than 70% engineers and developers the company reinvests all profits into R&D. Its public cloud is built on OpenStack, with managed Kubernetes, Database as a Service, object storage, and sovereign AI services accessible via OpenAI-compatible APIs, all running on its own Swiss infrastructure. Infomaniak also develops a sovereign collaborative suite messaging, email, storage, online office tools, videoconferencing, and a built-in AI assistant developed in-house and as a privacy-respecting solution to proprietary platforms. Open source is central to how Infomaniak operates. Its latest data center (D4) runs on 100% renewable energy and uses no traditional cooling: all the heat generated by its servers is captured and fed into Geneva's district heating network, supplying up to 6,000 homes in winter and hot water year-round. The entire project has been documented and open-sourced at d4project.org. About Proxmox Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server solutions. The comprehensive open-source ecosystem is designed to manage divers IT landscapes, from single servers to large-scale distributed data centers. Our unified platform integrates server virtualization, easy backup, and rock-solid email security ensuring seamless interoperability across the entire portfolio. With the Proxmox Datacenter Manager, the ecosystem also offers a "single pane of glass" for centralized management across different locations. Since 2005, all Proxmox solutions have been built on the rock-solid Debian platform. We are proud to return to DebConf26 as a sponsor because the Debian community provides the foundation that makes our work possible. We believe in keeping IT simple, open, and under your control. Contact Information For further information, please visit the DebConf26 web page at https://debconf26.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

Gunnar Wolf: Subscription Bombing Email under Attack

This post is an unpublished review for Subscription Bombing Email under Attack

One of the most important inputs one can have when designing a response strategy against a security attack is a good characterization. This article describes a relatively newly described attack mode (subscription bombing), hypothetizes on the motivations that can lie behind it, and presents some countermeasures that can be taken by different actors to reduce its impact. At its core, suscription bombing is a classical reflection attack: it uses a third party service so that the answer to a relatively simple request is amplified and results in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) for the victim. And, as with most DDoS attacks, its effectivity lies in that there is not much a person can do against traffic coming from seemingly random different providers all around the world. The core differentiatof for subscription bombing is that the attack s victim is not a network port, but an individual s e-mail address. The attacker builds a database of service providers that allow interested users to sign up for newsletter on their activities, or a mailing list, or even just to create a new account on a given Web system. This action will generate a (seemingly legitimate) confirmation mail sent to the victim. But the attacker scripts together hundreds of thousands of such request, creating a deluge of confirmation mails sent to the unsuspecting victim. The authors explain the goals an attacker might pursue by performing this kind of attack. They suppose this can be due to harassment (a disgruntled employee being denied a salary raise, a political adversary, or even a romantic ex-partner wanting to inconvenience the victim s use of their e-mail). More worryingly, the attack can be used as a distraction: by sending a high volume of mails in a controlled timeframe, the attacker can reduce the probability of the victim noticing a specific attack warning them of, i.e., financial fraud, unwanted purchases, or break-in attempts into their accounts. Attacks targetting mailboxes at private mail servers can also lead to overloading an account s limit, causing it to reject mails after the attack is delivered and before the folder is cleaned. And it can also pave the way for follow-up, targetted deception attacks, where the attackers call the victim pretending to be the company s IT department, and get them to install a remote desktop monitoring and management tool, with which they can effectively seize control of the victim s data. To do this, they present a study they made over 24 cases of victims, from which 47,970 total e-mails were received between October and December 2024, with individual attacks receiving between 81 and 3,387 e-mails per hour, from where they presented several descriptive analysis. The authors explored cyber criminal s offers on underground websites, comparing flooding services and pricing schemes. Finally, mitigation strategies are discussed. Mitigation is quite problematic, as none of the mail servers is acting in either a hostile way or lacking permissions they are performing just the task they should. The authors suggest four mitigation strategies for mail server operators to reduce the burden on their users, although none of them is easily automatizab (rate-limit the number of emails a given inbox can receive from previously unseen senders; educate users about this kind of attacks; group similar newsletter or account reset mails during active attacks; and automatically unsubscribe or bounce newsletter messages when a surge is detected). They also recommend newsletter providers and services accepting the unrestricted creation of user accounts to provide some hardening to increase the effort wrongdoers need to spend to abuse their services, such as requiring CAPTCHAs or requiring users to take several steps before requesting a subscription, although they recognize this adds friction to the process providers are most interested in providing; filtering and triaging known-good and known-bad domains, although this is hard to implement on a preemptive fashion, and adhering to easy unsubscription standards, such as easily identifiable headers with which mass unsubscription could be performed more easily victims, instead of hunting for the right places to click, potentially even in mails written in an unknown language. The described problem is interesting, and properly tackling it can be a game changer for many users who will suffer this kind of abuse, and the article is easy to read and soundly supports its claims.

4 August 2026

Russell Coker: Monitors for Work

The Corporate Monitor Issue Some time ago I worked in the IT department of a company that had a corporate standard of two 27 FUllHD (either 1920*1080 or 1920*1200) monitors for the desktop. I was pushing to make the standard be one 32 4K monitor or the two cheaper monitors. They ended up making one 27 4K monitor an option which was still a better option for many users than two FullHD monitors due to having twice the pixels even though it had half the screen area. It was a surprise to me when hardly anyone took up that option. One man who worked there brought a wide curved monitor from home and ran with one of the FullHD monitors on each side of that. As an employee in the IT department I had concerns about expensive personal equipment being used in the office regarding who s going to pay the bill if it gets broken. But I was assured that it was his old monitor that he didn t need after buying a better one for gaming at home and he wouldn t be too upset if something happened to it. This isn t the only time I ve witnessed such problems of companies paying large salaries for skilled people and providing poor equipment for them to do the work. One previous time I raised a OH&S issue because the outdated monitors were so blurry but the company determined that the monitors wouldn t cause health problems and spending $150 per employee on better replacements was a waste of money. Computer hardware tends to become cheaper over time and one thing that has become really cheap recently is portable monitors. Kogan has a 15.6 FullHD monitor with USB-C and mini-HDMI inputs for $89 [1]. It wouldn t be difficult for someone to put one of those on each side of the monitor or monitors that their employer provides and put them in a desk drawer at the end of the day to minimise risk. The same Kogan page has a 16 monitor with 2560*1600 resolution for $189. Company Ownership I previously wrote about the potential benefits to companies in not owning all those keyboards, mice, and headsets when they could just give each employee the money and have them buy their own [2]. I don t think we are at the stage where that can be applied to monitors as the cheapest price for a decent monitor is about $500 which takes it out of the disposable price range that keyboards and mice are in. Also from an IT support perspective there are real support issues with monitors and cables having compatibility issues. But paying small amounts of money to reimburse employees who buy cheap portable monitors to supplement their main monitor is a more reasonable option. For some people that will allow noteworthy improvements in work performance. Who Will it Help? I don t think that adding such portable monitors will directly help the majority of workers. I think that to maximise performance and efficiency we need to chase the long tail of improvements. Big monitors, really big monitors (65 at a larger distance), multiple monitors, standing desks, and whatever else people want. There was some research from Microsoft some years ago (back when 27 was a really big monitor) showing that some tasks had a 50% increase in performance with a larger monitor. Now that 27 is about the smallest monitor size commonly available the potential for improvement is reduced. Probably most workers now already have monitors that provide the benefits to them that the big monitors in Microsoft research provided. But there will always be some portion of the user base who will benefit. If you can get a 50% performance boost for 1% of the users that s really worth doing. If you can get a 0.5% benefit for 100% of the users that is also worth doing and will theoretically give equal benefits. Costs of Employees It is claimed that the total cost of an employee including all overheads of management and providing office facilities etc amounts to twice their base salary. If that is the case then a minimum wage employee in Australia costs $100k per year, someone at the low end of the IT pay scale costs $200k, and someone at the high end of the IT scale is around $400k. It seems clearly worthwhile to spend $1000 in hardware purchases for a $100k employee who declares that it will really help their work, anything which is noticeable to the user is going to be more than a 1% difference in performance. For someone at the high end of the IT pay scale spending $40,000 on hardware to improve their performance could pay for itself. This is not only due to direct return on investment but because the people who do such work are often in key roles in important projects. If there s too much work for one person on minimum wage to do then you just hire another person. You can t hire another senior IT person and have them just do the work, it can take months to get up to speed. But as management in corporations seems unable to recognise this cheap hardware employees can afford to buy with their own money can bridge the gap. Job Interviews In future when interviewing for jobs I ll ask about the hardware that s to be used. I won t say I m not interested in this job offer because you don t respect your employees enough to buy adequate hardware , but I may make it a condition of working at a company that the hardware on my desk will not be obsolete.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #058: Reverse Dependencies Made Easy, Fast, Reliable

Welcome to post 58 in the R⁴ series. R and the CRAN repositories maintain a very high level of what we might call quality assurrance by requiring that newly-added code does not break any existing dependencies. This is frequently called a reverse-dependency check . For any given CRAN package one can quickly determine it reverse dependencies. Calling tools::package_dependencies(pkgName, reverse=TRUE) will for a scalar or vector-valued argument return a named list with the reverse dependencies. It is then a matter of looping over this list. There are helper functions in base R as well as in contributed packages on and off CRAN. I also wrote my own with package prrd which, while possibly a wee bit specialised and under-documented has served me well to check on Rcpp and related packages which can indeed have a large number of reverse dependencies. I recently looked into one of these contributed runner packages, and while I will refrain from naming its implementation language let me just mention that the term cargo cult may be a real thing here. What go me interested in this was the fact that if one has a simple-to-use runner then the fact that r2u makes it fast, easy, reliable: pick all three (to borrow its slogan) to deal with actual depencies if Ubuntu has indeed been selected as the host. We will maintain the position that if you can in fact integrate with the system-wide package management then any alternative per-repo package management approach not doing so will likely be dominated by an approach that does integrate with the system facilities. Which is what precisely what r2u does, and offers. And why it is used enough to by now have shipped eighty eight million binary packages. So I tested it for the reverse-dependency check task. What I learned by looking into the (much more complicated) runner was that it at the end of the day it hands the actual task of running the reverse dependecies off to a helper function rev_check that is part of the xfun package by Yuhui. I quickly found that besides xfun we would also need its suggested dependency tinytex which in turn would error unless the tlmgr binary was present. So as the sole requirement (on an Ubuntu system with r2u) turns out to be

$ apt install r-cran-xfun r-cran-tinytex texlive-base

where we do it all in one apt call (as root in the container). (Given r2u we could also call install.packages(c("xfun","tinytext")) followed by apt install texlive-base but it is simpler for this setup step to be just one call). With that we are basically done. I did this (twice) using a rocker/r2u container with r2u preinstalled, mounting a local work and scrap directory for the container. In it we expand the package to be tested (i.e. tar xaf pkgName_*tar.gz for a given source package pkgName from CRAN) and then just call with the package name and expanded direcrtory. I.e. I used this call to test my package AsioHeaders (which has just three reverse dependencies) to both name it and to point to the expanded source directory created for this purposed:

> system.time( res <- xfun::rev_check("AsioHeaders", src="AsioHeaders") )
## ... earlier output omitted for brevity here ...
   user  system elapsed 
 35.732   3.333 149.683 
> res
   httpgd ipaddress websocket 
        0         0         0 
>

and about a good two minutes later I would get the timing result and the summary in variable res. As I checked the current CRAN version, the check was as expected free of concerns or issues. To support this, r2u did indeed go off and install about sixty seven binary packages (and the total includes all binary dependencies fully resolved) delivering on the just works promise by the r2u documentation. As another check, I did the same for RcppAnnoy which has seven reverse dependencies and needed about two hundred CRAN packages to be installed. The full test took just over four minutes with the timing function reporting some nice gains from parallelisation as total user compute time was on the order of just under eight minutes. Again, test results were clean and free of worries as expected:

> system.time( res <- xfun::rev_check("RcppAnnoy", src="RcppAnnoy") )
## ... earlier output omitted for brevity here ...
   user  system elapsed 
471.765 378.220 266.855 
> res
   bbknnR  bigANNOY  blocking     scDHA    Seurat      uwot VectrixDB 
        0         0         0         0         0         0         0 
>

Overall this was a rather useful quick excursion as it demonstrates that - existing functions can be used to orchestrate a reverse dependency check - with reasonable dependency scale we can do this on a single machine quite easily taking advantage of parallel computing on multi-core machines - using r2u gives us fast, easy, reliable package installation making testing of packages we might not otherwise use or know a breeze - doing this in an ephemeral Docker container facilitates easy build-up of required resources and leaves no side effects behind which might affect our normal development environment

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Petter Reinholdtsen: FreeCAD MCP with llama.cpp, toy or tool?

After seeing a video a few months ago demonstrating how a proprietary CAM solution uses machine learning and large language models to automatically generate CNC instructions, and successfully testing it on a real CNC, I began wondering if the same could be achieved with free software. I still do not know the answer, but I may be getting closer to finding out. Two weeks ago, I came across the video "I Connected Claude AI to FreeCAD (And It Models Parts Like an Engineer)" by Make Form, which introduced me to the FreeCAD MCP project. Even though the video creator apparently believes it is acceptable to download and run random binaries from the Internet on a local machine (his setup uses UCX), I do not. I would probably have left the project alone entirely if I had not noticed that all of its dependencies are already available in Debian. This significantly boosted my motivation, so I set out to test it using packages built from source on Debian rather than relying on untrusted binaries. The first hurdle was that the MCP SDK for Python was not present on my Debian Forky test machine. I initially believed it was missing from Debian altogether, but it has been available in Debian Unstable for about a month and is only absent from Forky because some automated tests fail on architectures like riscv64 and s390. Fortunately, backporting it was straightforward using apt-get source -b python3-mcp . The next hurdle involved an outdated version of the Validators Python library. Since I am a member of Debian's Python team, which maintains this package, updating it to a sufficient version for FreeCAD MCP was relatively easy. I could not upgrade to the latest upstream release due to a new dependency on an Ethereum-related library, so I settled on a 2024 version. With those dependencies in place, I proceeded to create a Debian package for FreeCAD MCP. I had previously submitted a request for packaging of FreeCAD MCP to gauge interest while deciding whether to prioritize maintaining it myself. Because salsa.debian.org blocks access from Tor users like myself, I published my draft packaging scripts in a Git repository on Codeberg as the Debian FreeCAD MCP project and got it working with the FreeCAD 1.1 version in Forky. I initially struggled with the button controls for the MCP feature, which led me to submit a pull request titled "Fixed startup sync of checkable toolbar buttons" proposing a fix. Once this confusion was resolved and the MCP setup was enabled via the GUI, I was able to run FreeCAD completely headless using xvfb-run on a machine without an X server to generate models. I am using a private LLM service running the Debian package of llama.cpp with the Qwen 3.6 model downloaded from Hugging Face, configured with a maximum context window of 105k tokens. I also tested the Bonsai model on my test laptop; initially, its context window was too small (8k and 16k could not accommodate the FreeCAD MCP instructions), but even after increasing it to 32k, it proved useless for generating FreeCAD models so far. I've used Claw Code, Aider and Open Code with my server so far, and for this test I ended up with OpenCode because it was easy to set up to use an MCP. Because none of my LLM services are set up to be multimodal (capable of processing both text and images in this case), I configured the MCP to return only textual feedback from FreeCAD. I am unsure if this is a major limitation, though I suspect it might be. My testing experience remains limited, with no clear successes yet. Part of the issue likely stems from my ability to provide effective instructions for modeling 3D objects (I am relatively new to FreeCAD, English is not my first language, and I lack a precise vocabulary for describing construction features to an LLM). Nevertheless, the LLM has demonstrated the capacity to create 3D models in FreeCAD. In one of my first tests, I asked it to generate a cube and then produce CAM/G-code instructions for a CNC machine. It did output G-code (which remains untested), but I was surprised to find that it bypassed FreeCAD's built-in CAM module entirely and instead generated an external Python script to produce the code. This was not quite what I intended, though my instructions were probably unclear. The Qwen model with OpenCode seems to strongly prefer programming directly; it frequently executes Python snippets inside FreeCAD to achieve its goals rather than using the standard sketch-and-extrude workflow I am accustomed to. In another test, I asked the LLM to create a parameterized pipe assembly to see which of FreeCAD's parametric tools it would choose, but found no evidence of traditional parametric features in the output. When prompted, the LLM explained that the parameters were embedded directly in the Python script used to generate the model, rather than in native FreeCAD features. With more explicit instructions, it eventually created a FreeCAD spreadsheet to manage the parameters. The resulting model looked much closer to my expectations and could have been useful with further refinement. My so far last experiment was less successful: I asked it to design a pipe clamp, but the LLM repeatedly failed to position the clamping screws in a way that would actually secure the brackets around the pipe. It is unclear whether this limitation lies with the model, my prompt, or other factors. Based on my testing so far, I am uncertain whether FreeCAD MCP is merely a fun toy or a genuinely useful tool. I will only commit time to maintaining it in Debian if it proves to be practically valuable. I would welcome feedback from anyone who has experience with the project, preferably via the original request-for-packaging mailing list thread. Alternatively, I am available in the FreeCAD and Debian AI IRC channels for further discussion. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and wish to support my activities, please send donations to 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Anuradha Weeraman: Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the little OS that could

Plan 9 Fourth Edition showing the rio windowing system

I first heard of Plan 9 from my friend Vajra in 1999 or so, as we were distro-hopping on early Linux distributions and trying to find our way. Vajra is now a Nebula Award-winning science fiction author - have a look at his work. We had just been through Tom's Root Boot, a UNIX-like operating system crammed into a single floppy, and through it discovered a whole new world outside of DOS 6.22. Combing through old UNIX manuals, we went in search of the perfect OS, through Slackware, Caldera, TurboLinux, SUSE and Red Hat. I finally settled on Debian, which lived up to everything I stood for. Plan 9 was distinct. It came out of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, built by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with Dennis Ritchie heading the department. The name is a joke at their own expense, borrowed from Ed Wood's 1959 Plan 9 from Outer Space, routinely nominated as the worst film ever made. Thompson and Ritchie had, of course, built the original UNIX; it almost seemed as if they were building a new OS from the lessons learnt from building it - which was in turn built on the lessons from Multics. I remember the awe I felt playing around with Plan 9, and I've not been able to replicate it since. Plan 9 was different in a couple of fundamental ways: per-process namespaces, and a protocol that abstracted locality of resources to processes. As a consequence of these core primitives, the OS surface area was distinctly small. The entire system from the core kernel, to the system call interface, to the compiler, linker and shell was reduced to a form small enough that a single developer could hold it in their head. Lessons from the implementation of UNIX helped the designers make the system leaner, and in Ken Thompson's words, it's the "best operating system out except that it doesn't have the apps that everybody demands" [1]. It also took the concept of "everything is a file" in UNIX to a whole new level. The network stack is a filesystem (/net), processes are files, the display is a file (/dev/draw). Because every resource speaks 9P and every process has its own namespace, you can mount another machine's /net into your namespace and your program makes network calls through that machine's stack without knowing or caring. No sockets API, no RPC layer, just ordinary file system operations through a simple system call interface. Some would say that OS research is dead, and that backwards-compatibility and POSIX killed it. Rob Pike himself argued as much in his 2000 talk, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" - but we didn't care at the time. There was so much happening that we didn't have time to take it all in. And then Linux happened, and Software Freedom became a focal point (more on that in a later post). In the summer of 2020, with the world deep in Covid lockdowns, I decided to build a toy operating system, just to try my hand at the the thing that I had always wanted to do. I spent three feverish months working on Odyssey and, looking back, it is perhaps the most fun I have ever had. I would not dare compare it to the magnum opus that is Plan 9, but it gave me perspective: how hard it is to build an OS from scratch, and above all, how fun it is to build an OS from scratch, and why the original creators kept coming back to the same problem. The highlight of those three months was booting the OS and watching it render "The Great Wave off Kanagawa". Nothing in my professional achievements to date captures what that meant to me.

Odyssey rendering The Great Wave off Kanagawa during boot

Decades on from the first time I booted Plan 9, I look back with nothing but awe and respect for the creators of this little operating system and marvel at the foresight that went into it. While many readers will not have heard of Plan 9, they have almost certainly worked with the ideas that came from it: 9P (if you ever used the Windows Subsystem for Linux), UTF-8 (if you ever used any modern operating system), per-process namespaces (if you've ever run a container), Go (whose assembler still uses Plan 9 syntax). Plan 9 still lives on in 9front, a community-maintained fork. Separately, Yoann Padioleau [2] has produced a set of annotated books at principia-softwarica.org, presenting the Plan 9 source in the spirit of Donald Knuth's literate programming - an admirable effort to introduce new readers to the art of operating systems engineering. Pike thought systems research had become irrelevant, and Thompson thought Plan 9 would never "make it" [1]. Both were right about the industry, but may have been pessimistic about the impact. The system lost as a product but won as a set of ideas, assimilated one at a time by modern operating systems. Success is not always measured by popularity. The mark that Plan 9 left behind is greater than what's reflected in its current user base. To me, Plan 9 will always be the OS that punched above its weight class, the little OS that could. References [1] Ken Thompson Interview, March 6, 2024 [2] Yoann Padioleau Principia Softwarica, May 9, 2026

3 August 2026

John Goerzen: Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years (and working with a decades-old C codebase)

1981 was a different time for computing. It was expensive (both hardware and software), and it was far from a given that machines from one vendor would be able to talk to those from another. In fact, Columbia University had just such a problem, so in 1981, Frank da Cruz and Bill Catchings designed a serial protocol they called Kermit. Because of the many quirks of the DEC-20 and IBM mainframes, the Kermit protocol was highly adaptable from the start: able to handle systems that had trouble processing more than 96 bytes of data at once, able to transfer 8-bit files over 7-bit links, able to translate between character sets (ASCII and EBCDIC then; now also various Unicodes), and of course, handling of error-prone serial links. Kermit spread rapidly; by 1982, Kermit had been ported to MS-DOS and Unix. Eventually, C-Kermit (an implementation of Kermit in C) became the flagship Kermit. It gained TCP support, an interactive CLI, a powerful scripting language (with features from the shell, Lisp, and expect), and optimizations for today s high-speed links, such as jumbo packets, sliding windows, and streaming modes. Along the way, Kermit flew on the International Space Station, ran data collection from sensors during hurricanes, and many other uses including postal systems, Boeing 787 manufacturing, and more. Today, I use it as a powerful ssh wrapper (letting me easily transfer files through multiple nested ssh, sudo, su, etc. commands), a BBS client, to exchange data with me HP 48GX calculator, and so on. It s also used today to transmit firmware updates to embedded devices. And, of course, anyone that works with vintage systems is likely to use Kermit at some point. It wouldn t be until the late 1990s that the TCP/IP stack was finally adopted by most OS vendors, establishing something of a common basis for communication. Of course, we assume this today. Though transferring large files between OSs (say, Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iPad, etc.) is still a challenge, even though they all speak TCP/IP! I find that the easiest way to get large files from two computers is to spin up Kermit (see ckwin for a Windows fork of C-Kermit) and just set up a TCP connection over the LAN. In fact, I added a new show interfaces command in C-Kermit 11, making it easy to see your system s local IPs. For most of its history, Columbia s Kermit project was self-funded. Columbia charged for commercial use, which limited its inclusion in Linux distributions. In 2011, 30 years after its founding, Columbia canceled the Kermit Project and released C-Kermit as Open Source under a BSD license. Frank da Cruz, who had still been working with the Kermit project all those years, volunteered to continue maintaining Kermit outside Columbia, and continued development with alpha and beta releases through his retirement from the project in 2025. I dive into this C codebase As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn t matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not desired now; we are used to byte-identical binary transfers, and the defaults caused confusion and even some rare instances of data corruption. So I started making a few patches last year. I ve worked with old C codebases before, such as Varnish. I ve generally hated it. You usually find a mix of bad and terrible practices, unclear memory management, and so forth. But I ve been living in the C-Kermit codebase for a few months now, and I enjoy it. Yes, this thing is still designed to build on VMS, OS/2, and with compilers that haven t heard of ANSI and those that require modern practices. (That em-dash was mine; I knew how to use them before LLMs existed and I m not going to stop just because LLMs have copied people like me! No AI was used for this post.) The there is an elegance in all of that. As I worked, I fixed a bunch more potential security issues, both with memory safety and with protecting against a malicious remote in roughly the same manner that some patches to scp did a few years back. I added IPv6 support, of course conditionally compiled because some systems C-Kermit builds on have never heard of IPv6 and never will. (And, of course, with fallback algorithms at runtime for systems that have IPv6 support but not IPv6 connectivity.) I added unit tests and Python-based end-to-end tests, running nearly 2000 test cases in total. Along the way, I found and fixed a number of bugs going back decades. I learned about FIONREAD being broken on macOS, about NetBSD s bugs in the pty driver, and fixed bugs in the Kermit protocol implementation itself. I added compatibility tests with the gkermit and ekermit (embedded) implementations, as well as the last full release, C-Kermit 9.0.302 from 2011 (which was difficult to get compiled on a modern system). There is an extensive changelog describing all the improvements in C-Kermit 11. C-Kermit development had never really used a VCS at any point, though Kermit veteran Jeffrey Altman imported historical releases into a Git repo, along with some patches that hadn t made it into a release (which I also pulled in.) There was a lot of disabled code behind #ifdef COMMENT, along with commentary describing why it was no longer used. With Git, we would now generally just remove the old code and explain why in a commit message. I went through and did so with a lot of it, meaning that, at last check, C-Kermit actually has fewer lines of code now than it used to. Towards a new release It became apparent pretty quickly that I was making more changes than would make sense as a Debian patch series. Not only that, but they would be more widely applicable to more than just Debian and Ubuntu users. As Linux and BSD distributions were running everything from the last non-beta release (2011 s 9.0.302) to the last beta release (about 1.5 years ago), depending on their different policies about running betas, even sharing patches in a useful fashion was going to be quite difficult. So, I spun up a project at Open Kermit to coordinate future development in the open and keep Kermit going. With modern CI, I run that test suite on Linux (x86_64 and arm64), macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It builds binary releases on all those platforms, plus a statically-linked Linux binary built with musl libc. You can download the latest C-Kermit release, and of course contribute to C-Kermit and its website. Dedication Frank da Cruz was directly involved with Kermit for 44 years. I m not aware of any other Open Source project founder being involved for so long. Richard Stallman started working on GNU Emacs in 1984, 3 years after Frank started working on Kermit, but Richard hasn t been in that role since around 2008. Accordingly, C-Kermit 11 bears this dedication:

I dedicate this release of C-Kermit to Frank da Cruz. Frank was directly involved with Kermit for 44 years, from its initial design in 1981 all the way through 2025. He maintained Kermit as an Open Source project after Columbia University ended its sponsorship. I know of no other Open Source project where the founder remains so personally involved for so long. When Kermit was begun, transfers between different hardware and operating systems were difficult or impossible. Frank helped build a bridge. Kermit glued systems together, from the International Space Station to pocket calculators, and set a new standard for interoperability. It continues to do so. Kermit is still one of the quietly-working pillars of computing today, enabling everything from firmware upgrades to radios. And, yes, it still reliably transfers files over serial lines. As we start to spend a lot of time in the Kermit codebase, we do so standing on the shoulders of a giant. Thanks, Frank, for your decades of work on Kermit. John Goerzen, July 2026

2 August 2026

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in July 2026

Debian packages:
- apt:
  - Bugs:
    - replied to #1078608: apt update silently leaves old index data
- firmware-nonfree:
  - Merge requests:
    - opened and merged !151: Update to 20260622
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 20260622-1 to unstable
    - uploaded version 20260622-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
- hexagon-dsp-binaries:
  - Bugs:
    - opened #1141904: Missing new DSP binaries for shikra
- initramfs-tools:
  - Bugs:
    - replied to #1142780: initramfs-tools: ip=dhcp lease is not renewed while initramfs remains active
- kernel-handbook:
  - Merge requests:
    - opened and merged !15: Update Building a development version of the Debian kernel package
- linux:
  - Bugs:
  - Merge requests:
    - closed !1936: [sparc64] Add nvme module to scsi-modules udeb
    - reviewed and merged !1968: [bookworm] net: mana: refresh driver from 6.12.94 (LTS)
    - merged !1984: udeb: Ensure that aead and macsec modules are in the right packages
    - reviewed and closed !2003: 6.1 backport: eventpoll: fix ep_remove struct eventpoll / struct file UAF (CVE-2026-46242) (LTS)
    - merged !2004: [sparc64] udeb: scsi-modules: Use the default module list
    - opened !2010: [x86] Backport security fixes for KVM (LTS)
    - merged !2012: Update to 6.1.177 (LTS)
    - merged !2017: Enable NTFS_FS (and replace NTFS3_FS)
    - opened and closed !2019: Fix rtmutex security issues (LTS)
    - opened !2027: Include rsync in Build-Depends-Arch for any build including tools
    - merged !2038: [loong64] drivers/mmc/host: Enable MMC_LOONGSON2 as module
    - reviewed !2041: Update to 5.10.262 (LTS)
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 5.10.259-1 to bullseye-security (LTS)
    - uploaded version 6.1.176-1 to bookworm-security (LTS)
    - uploaded version 6.1.177-1 to bookworm-security (LTS)
    - uploaded version 6.12.95-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports (LTS)
    - uploaded version 7.0.13-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
    - uploaded version 7.1.3-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
- linux-6.1 (LTS):
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 6.1.176-1~deb11u1 to bullseye-security
    - uploaded version 6.1.177-1~deb11u1 to bullseye-security
- linux-6.12 (LTS):
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 6.12.96-1~deb12u1 to bookworm-security (not yet accepted)
- linux-base:
  - Merge requests:
    - reviewed !21: Draft: Add hooks to copy vmlinuz file to /boot
- localechooser:
  - Bugs:
    - replied to #1141886: localechooser: Turkey is inconsistently classified under Asia in regionmap
- wireless-regdb:
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 2026.05.30-1~deb11u1 to bullseye-security (LTS)
Mailing lists:
- debian-kernel:
  - posted Agenda items for kernel-team meeting on 2026-07-01
  - posted Agenda items for kernel-team meeting on 2026-07-22
- debian-lts-announce:
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4664-1] linux security update
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4665-1] linux security update
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4671-1] linux-6.1 security update
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4676-1] wireless-regdb new upstream version
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4688-1] linux security update
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4700-1] linux-6.1 security update
- linux-kernel:
  - posted [PATCH] irqchip/irq-imgpdc: Remove unused driver
- stable (mostly LTS):

31 July 2026

Clint Adams: N.K. Jemisin is doing a worldbuilding workshop at the Bronx Library Center tomorrow afternoon

Normally, I do not read book reviews. Either I haven't read the book, in which case there's spoiler potential, or I have, in which case it's unlikely to be useful or enjoyable for me to read a thing about a thing I've already read. But Review: Radiant Star caught my eye, and I thought, Hmm, I've read all those books and was curious. Of course, because I am old and senile and have no understanding of time, the May 2026 staring at me was not able to trigger the neural synapses that would remind me that I haven't read any Ann Leckie since 2023. However, as I read Russ's review, and began to wonder what the hell he was talking about, I was able to piece together that while I have, in fact, read 6 Ann Leckie books, none of them have been Radiant Star. This presented an opportunity, so I resolved to add Radiant Star to my todo list. To my surprise, it was already there.

Posted on 2026-07-31

Tags: bamamba

Russ Allbery: Review: Painting the Blues in Gretna Green

Review: Painting the Blues in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Series:	Midlife Recorder #2
Publisher:	Linzi Day
Copyright:	November 2022
ISBN:	9798360228431
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	577

Painting the Blues in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel and the second in the Midlife Recorder series. It picks up immediately after the end of Midlife in Gretna Green. I also read it almost immediately after, so I didn't pay attention to how good the recap of previous events was. As before, this is urban fantasy except not urban. Day calls it paranormal women's fantasy, which I suppose is as good of a genre label as any. The other book I can think of off-hand that would go into that genre would be Nancy Springer's Larque on the Wing, although it is considerably more literary. I suspect I'm going to read this whole series and it's going to be impossible to review these books without talking about Niki's job, so I'm not going to treat that as a spoiler. It's fairly well-advertised in the marketing for the book, so that feels justified. If you're particularly averse to any spoilers, though, you may want to stop reading here until you've gotten to the reveal in the first book. Niki is now officially the Recorder, with the power, advice book, and sentient house to go with it. She's about to face her first test in managing interworld politics: There's something amiss in the world of the Picts. Her allies are dropping hints, there's a petition from a group on the Pict world that she can't make sense of, and although she likes the queen of the Picts, there is a great deal of tension beneath the surface that she doesn't understand. Meanwhile, after the incompetent disaster that she uncovered in the first book, Niki is determined to pick her new staff by her own criteria. The second book leans even harder into giving Niki both a tangled mess created by previous incompetence and enough power to fix it. Watching that happen is very satisfying, particularly when it involves surprising people who are rather too used to getting their own way. I was somewhat less convinced that Niki is getting the right training to make the decisions that she's making. Diplomacy and staff management are real skills that one needs to learn, not just wing on vibes and gut instinct. My love of competence porn occasionally wishes that Niki had a bit more structure around her competence. We do at least get a new fictional self-help book on how to rule that contributes the quotes that open each chapter. Not the ethics and management training that I would have chosen, but it's something! In defense of Niki's technique, it becomes clear in this book that the last few recorders have been far too cautious, conservative, and content with a status quo that involved a minimum of work. One of the delights of this book is that Niki thinks power exists to be used to fix things and is determined to use it, not just sit on it. I had more suspension of disbelief issues with this book than with the first some of the problems Niki is solving seem far too obvious to have been in stasis for this long while also having this easy of a solution, and the level of political power given to the Recorder is a bit unbelievable but it is so satisfying to see Niki cajole and bully people into being sensible. I have no idea if this is intentional on Day's part, but I will not be at all surprised if adult-diagnosed ADHD comes up at some point in this series. The way that Niki's focus jumps, her tendency to veer between focusing on a problem and forgetting about it, and something about the way she switches between trains of thought or misses important context because she's jumping to conclusions is making me wonder. This, to be clear, is not a complaint; I think it makes Niki more relatable and more interesting. It's a good thing that she has a sentient house to serve as her assistant. The glee with which she's delegating any task that involves keeping track of details or following up with other people feels like a bit of an indicator by itself. I did get a bit frustrated with the plot structure of this book. Niki keeps mentioning that a critical petition submitted to her office makes no sense, but it takes half of this (rather long) book before she finally explains to anyone else, even the reader, what's deficient about it. The excuse within the book is that she's having a rather busy day, but by the third time Niki mentions and then fails to do anything about the petition, I was wishing Day would stop bringing it up until she was ready for that part of the plot. This, as with a few issues in the previous book, feels partly like an editing problem. There is something joyful in indulgent, sprawling books, but only up to the point where they become repetitive. Painting the Blues was right at that line, and once again I wish someone had helped Day trim about fifty pages out of it. All that said, and despite having more quibbles with this book than the previous one, this continues to be great fun. It's satisfying wish-fulfillment about fixing long-standing problems and having the power to not have to put up with abusive nonsense and ridiculous bullshit, and I am so here for that. I hope Niki realizes she's eventually going to need more refined skills than a heart-to-heart over wine, but she's learning on the job and I'm happily along for the ride. She's also capable of recognizing skill in other people, and that goes a long way. Recommended if you liked the first one and are in the mood for another fantasy of "no, we're not going to leave it that way, we're going to fix that right now." Followed by Ties that Bond in Gretna Green. Rating: 7 out of 10

Otto Kek l inen: Estonia, the country of the fit and the wit

Featured image of post Estonia, the country of the fit and the wit

While many Western democracies seem to be in a state of decay and are no longer the safe, civilized and prosperous countries they once were, there are still some European countries that are governed well. One of those that stand out is Estonia. Estonia is probably most well known for multiple software companies that originated from there, such as Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive and Skype. The government itself is also famous for being early in issuing government IDs with an embedded smart chip for online authentication already in the 1990s. Via the national portal at eesti.ee all residents can access extensive eServices ranging from viewing their health benefits to filing taxes. Estonia has also been running an e-Residency program since 2014, where they issue digital ID cards to foreigners, making it easy for them to remotely log into the government portals and for example, establish businesses, file annual reports and so forth. Note that the e-Residency is not a path to physical residency. Estonia does, however, have a separate Digital Nomad visa program that makes it easy for non-EU citizens to also physically establish themselves in Estonia, assuming, of course, you meet the criteria, which includes, among others, a minimum monthly income of 3960 from outside Estonia. EU citizens naturally have free mobility inside the EU and can simply get an apartment and register as a resident in Estonia if they so choose. And there are plenty of reasons to do so.

Estonians value health, education and entrepreneurship I moved to Estonia about one and a half years ago. In my observations Estonia strikes me as a country that values health, education (in particular programming and natural sciences) and entrepreneurship highly. I don t know how Estonians achieve it, but they look pretty fit and rarely obese. Estonia has rye bread and sauna in their culture just like Finland, and in addition the flat terrain and well-planned bike routes and extensive network of parks (and pull-up bars everywhere) seem to create an environment where it is easy to live in a healthier way. The consumption of processed foods and candy also seems relatively low among Estonians. The gym chain MyFitness also seems to be present everywhere. Even the Tallinn airport has a calisthenics workout station right at the departure gates, which anyone is free to use while waiting for their flight to take off. One of the top longevity influencers in Europe, Siim Land, is Estonian. Estonians also seem to value the school system highly. The government has been actively raising teacher pay and has a stated goal of reaching 120% of the national average by 2027. The students are also expected to value the education and respect their teachers. According to the TALIS 2024 survey (OECD s international teacher survey), Estonian teachers spend significantly more time on actual teaching and learning and waste less time on interruptions or keeping classroom order compared to the OECD average. This is among the highest rates internationally, meaning they spend relatively little time on maintaining order or dealing with disruptions. While the international education benchmark PISA scores have been dropping globally, Estonia has consistently been climbing the ranks in past decades. In the latest PISA study (from 2022), Estonia ranked number one in Europe for reading, mathematics and science. In the overall results, Estonia ranked seventh globally, only behind countries such as Japan, Korea and Singapore. Valuing entrepreneurship is evident in how the taxation system is set up in Estonia. Famously, in Estonia, companies can defer taxes on annual earnings and reinvest all of their profit in growing the company. Taxes are due only later, when paid out from the company, for example as dividends. For individuals, receiving dividends from any Estonian or foreign company is tax-free as long as the company paying dividends already paid corporate tax on the same income. The tax system is also very simple. For all individuals, all types of income, including salary and capital gains, are always taxed at a flat rate of 22%. This removes the incentive for anyone to try to convert income into different types, setting up holding company structures and other optimizations as there is no gain. All entrepreneurs can simply focus on growing their business and forget extra bureaucracy. There is also no marginal tax rate cliff to stop working at everyone is encouraged to always try to produce as much value as they can. A simple tax system is also reflected in the fact that anyone can easily read all tax rules that apply to individuals in plain English on the Estonian tax authority website, and one does not need to hire any accountants simply to file taxes. Estonia also has a very straightforward investment account system: any person can freely open a self-directed investment account at any brokerage at no extra cost and report it as such to the tax authority, and then use it to save for an apartment, retirement, or other purposes, and defer all income taxes until withdrawal. There are no caps or time limits, and all residents are encouraged to save and invest as much as they can and thus take responsibility for their own wealth accumulation. It seems that culturally Estonians respect people who are active and progress in their careers and businesses more than in other countries. Unlike in Finland, successful people are admired and living on government welfare is not romanticized. At the same time, the government benefits are less generous so people can t live comfortably on them and, for example, many of the asylum seekers Estonia accepted have since left on their own initiative to other European countries in search of better benefits.

Low crime, high trust Another thing that strikes me when walking the streets of Tallinn is that there are no drug addicts, beggars, thugs or the like. The difference compared to, for example, Vancouver (where I lived previously) is stark. In public buildings, people leave their coats and bags hanging in the lobby while visiting. Private houses and apartment block yards are not fenced. In my building, I noticed people even leave their bikes unlocked in the bike shed. I have also seen the staff of a coffee stall in a shopping mall going for a break and leaving everything unattended, not worrying that anyone would take anything while the staff is away. This is not just my personal experience. According to the Numbeo crime index, Estonia has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Also, comparing drug and property crime stats, for example, Finland has twice as much crime per capita, and places like Vancouver in Canada almost five times more. I don t have any clear explanation for why crime is so much lower in Estonia, but some suggest that higher social cohesion and lower levels of welfare contribute to people standing to lose more if they behave antisocially. Compared to Finland, Estonia also more readily jails repeat offenders, and those who are put on trial will experience a swifter court process thanks to simplified legal processes and more efficient governance.

Moving to Estonia: quick checklist Moving to Estonia is very easy for any EU citizen, in particular if your work is not location-dependent (e.g., remote work or an online business) and you are simply looking for the cleanest and safest environment to live in. First, check into a hotel in Tallinn, check out various neighborhoods to figure out what area you like (my favorites are Kalaranna, Kalamaja, Noblessner and Volta) and start browsing available apartments in English at kv.ee. Most professionals speak fluent English, so there should not be any difficulty in reaching out to people by email or phone. The next step is to buy a local prepaid SIM card at e.g., an R-Kiosk or a convenience store as signing up for other matters later on will require an Estonian phone number. Once you have an apartment and e.g., signed a rental agreement, you can register in the population registry online. After that, you have proof you are a local resident with an address and telephone number in Estonia. With local resident status, you can go to the police station to get a local ID card. Don t bother scheduling an appointment, just go to the Tammesaare police station in Tallinn, take a queue number and wait. Once it is your turn, they will guide you on how to use the photo booth, fingerprint registration device, and file your application. A few days later you will receive an email confirming whether your application was accepted, and after a few more days, you will get another email notifying you that your ID card has been printed and is available for pick-up at the same location. This will also be your first practical experience of how fast and efficient the government in Estonia is. Once you have the local ID card, you can use the smart card feature to log into all the government eServices and sort out the rest of the relocation process, such as registering tax residency and getting a family doctor.

How did Estonia evolve to be like this? After Estonia regained its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first elected government in 1992 was led by a very progressive 31-year-old Prime Minister Mart Laar, who managed to set up some very good policies and laid the foundation of a society that has evolved well in the decades since. Estonia was very lucky to have people in power in the 1990s who didn t simply copy what other Western countries were doing, but who tried to think about things from first principles and create Estonia s own model for efficient and fair governance. As a post-Soviet country, the population had also been vaccinated against overly socialist and unrealistic ideals, and everyone had a healthy distrust of the government s ability to solve problems and emphasis was placed on people s liberty to work for themselves as they best see fit. The improvement in living standards over the past 35+ years has also been witnessed by the population, and voting behavior supports keeping the country on the same trajectory. General living standards still continue to improve as the nominal wage growth sits at around 6%, clearly above the annual inflation rate of about 3%. In 2026, the Estonian economy is expected to grow about 2.4%, which is faster than the EU average. The growth in Estonia is not the result of any accounting tricks - Estonia is part of the euro and can t print its own currency, nor has it been funding the public sector with excessive debt. With a 24% debt-to-GDP ratio, Estonia consistently ranks as one of the most responsibly managed countries among advanced Western economies. As wages in Estonia soon catch up with the EU average, and higher defence spending has forced the government to raise taxes in recent years, the economic growth that Estonia has enjoyed for 35+ years since it exited the Soviet Union might slow down a bit in future years. The policies that fueled this growth in living standards, however, are likely to stay.

The tiger leap There is one specific government policy in Estonia s history that I think should be highlighted in particular. Estonia was very progressive by announcing the Tiigrih pe (Tiger Leap) program in 1996 with the goal of equipping all schools with computers and teaching all students the basics of programming. This surely had a large influence on why Estonia has so many successful software companies, why the government eServices are so mature that even neighboring countries like Finland are striving to copy the Estonian government s IT architecture called X-road. The Tiigrih pe project was originally suggested in the mid-1990s by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, then ambassador of Estonia to the United States, Canada and Mexico, and later President of Estonia in 2006 2016. While he was a psychologist by education, he was also a self-taught amateur programmer and used his political influence to promote sensible adoption of information technology in both Estonia and the EU. The history of Estonia has several prominent figures who were not lawyers by profession but engineers, scientists and historians who were very practical in their political decisions, which I think is now reflected in how government processes were formed. The video below shows how the Estonian government advertises itself and what values they choose to highlight:

Should other countries adopt policies from Estonia? Of course, not everything is perfect in Estonia either. The fertility rate of 1.16 in Estonia is very low. This trend is present globally, but in Estonia it is way below the EU average. Also, the service culture is something that needs to improve in Estonia. While services are in general fast and efficient, the attitude of people working in cafes and stores does not reflect a willingness to fill in gaps if the standard process falls short, nor are visitors actively made to feel welcome as individual humans, but are treated as mere process inputs. However, many of the things listed earlier I think should be studied by policymakers elsewhere. Societies are complex systems and there is of course no guarantee that copying a single policy to another country with different ethnicities, history and ingrained culture would lead to the same policy outcomes. But considering that Estonia is a small country without favorable geography and no natural resources, and that it started out from a place of total chaos, low economic activity and high crime in 1992 to rise to what it is now in 2026, the success it has seen is surely largely a result of good policies, governance and culture that other countries can and should mimic.

30 July 2026

Clint Adams: not ninpo

The UX of jj's builtin merge editor finally became too much for me. So, I looked at the list of merge tool options, saw vimdiff, and thought, Oh, cool, I know how to use vimdiff. So, I launched jj config edit --user, added a ui section, and set merge-editor to vimdiff. With the new config, I ran jj resolve again. It was at that point that I realized that I do not, in fact, know how to use vimdiff: I only know how to use vimdiff with two buffers. What appeared in my terminal was a 4-pane monstrosity. Why are there four panes? I'm trying to resolve conflicts between only two changes on only one file. For a moment, I nearly go down a rabbit hole, because this says that by default, vimdiff is barely useable [sic]. Should I be installing some addon or a Python script? Apparently there are tradeoffs. I just want to resolve these conflicts without doing line-by-line approvals for how ever many hours that would take. Accordingly, I ran away in terror, installed meld, set merge-editor to meld, and went clicky-clicky in the GUI. I'm not happy using a GUI, but at least it didn't have a mysterious extra buffer to confuse and taunt me.

Posted on 2026-07-30

Tags: mintings jujutsu

29 July 2026

Joey Hess: my harddrive is probably not full

I enjoyed reading this post by Marginalia "Your harddrive is probably full"

You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty.

Of course it made me check how full my laptop drive is, and indeed it was more than 75% full, as predicted. But, I almost never feel that my hard drive is full. I can very easily free up almost any amount of disk space at any time, without any thought. While writing this blog post, I ran a single command and now my harddrive is 50% empty.

The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn t a problem until it s so full you can t put more stuff on it, and at the point it s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.

Why doesn't this apply to me? Because I have put in the up-front thought to organize things, so that I never have to do that anymore. I have 3 categories of files that I can remove at any time I need more space, without any thought:

Any files that are stored in git-annex. This is one of git-annex's superpowers; you can git-annex drop any file and stop it using disk space, but the file is still there (as a broken symlink) so you don't risk losing or forgetting about it.
Caches.
Files in ~/tmp/, which is reserved for any files I only want to have a passing acquaintance with. If I'm not comfortable with something being deleted at any time, I don't put it there.

Not only do I only have these 3 categories, these are the only 3 categories for everything except OS files and files I have decided I never want to remove (eg dotfiles and other files stored in git repos). Computer scientists invented caches (and of course cache invalidation is no problem lol) so I only needed to learn about that one. Unix gave me /tmp/ as an example that I long ago used as the basis for the rules for my ~/tmp/. I hope that git-annex might also serve as an example that moving files between drives is not the best way to manage disk space use.

Russ Allbery: Review: Midlife in Gretna Green

Review: Midlife in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day

Series:	Midlife Recorder #1
Publisher:	Linzi Day
Copyright:	July 2022
ISBN:	9798837010774
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	464

Midlife in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel. It's urban fantasy in the sense that it's set in our world but with magic that most people don't know about, but the primary setting is a parish in rural Scotland and therefore the genre is not urban in that sense. It was Linzi Day's published first novel. As the story opens, Niki McKnight is a widow in Manchester, England with a job in the Register Office she likes, a boss she hates, and a Bichon Frise dog she adores. In the year since her husband Nick died, she's put her life on hold and made as few decisions as possible, despite some concerned pushing from her best friend Aysha. The death of her grandmother is not entirely unexpected, but her inheritance is about to upend her life. Niki assumes that her grandmother has a modest cottage and a small estate, and therefore being the named heir will mostly involve cleaning up the details of a modest life. She is caught by surprise by a requirement in the will that she live in Gretna Green for a year and a day in order to inherit. Her initial reaction is to treat this as an absurd impossibility given her life and job in Manchester, but she slowly realizes something strange is going on. Her grandmother's lawyer is lying to her, he refuses to tell her the value of the estate and seems to think it's more valuable than she expected, and her grandmother's tiny cottage does not seem to be following the seasons of the rest of the world. There is something magical at work. I will not spoil the rest of the reveal. I will say that this is a magical house book because, if you are anything like me, that is why you will want to read this series. There are not enough magical house books, and this is one of the better kind that allow the house to be a full speaking character. Midlife in Gretna Green is an unapologetic fantasy of personal agency. Niki starts the novel with a miserable manager, a messy pile of unread mail she doesn't want to deal with, and a lot of personal emotional baggage. She gets handed a position that requires and rewards standing up for herself and being decisive. It comes with a pile of unresolved but not horribly complex problems that were waiting for someone who would listen, make sensible decisions, and treat other people with respect. Oh, and there are a few assholes in the way, but they seriously underestimate the power she has to put a stop to their bullshit. This is the sort of book that traditional publishers tended not to buy (although Day apparently did get an offer for this one and turned it down), and I'm not sure why. Editors thought protagonists should have to work harder for their payoff? Some lingering Calvinist dourness in English language publishing mistrusted triumphant books? Obvious wish fulfillment was considered embarrassing or low-class and thus didn't warrant publication? This didn't apply to the endless bildungsromans about magically talented boys, so some level of sexism was probably in play. Maybe this is finally changing? It reminds me of the bias against romance novels and their guaranteed happily ever after, and in the case of romance there was too much money for publishers to leave it on the table. In any case, the growth of self-publishing has created an alternative market that let these books reach an audience and I for one am here for it. A lot of wish-fulfillment books, and a lot of self-published books, are not very good, but the ones that have a spark of originality and character can be a delight worth tolerating the somewhat rocky editing and pacing problems that a full editorial staff might have cleaned up.

I loved reading books about kickass women who took no crap and fixed their lives up exactly how they wanted them to be. But how did they get to be that way? They always started out awesome in the books. Seriously, did they kick ass at sixteen? Or did their superpower kickassery not kick in until they were thirty? Forty? If so, then I was screwed. Would I need to wait till I was fifty or until a genie arrived offering wishes? I already felt as if I d spent my whole life waiting for something wild and wonderful to happen.

Niki is a Specific Type to a somewhat hilarious degree, and I'm not sure if Day is playing into that intentionally or if she's projecting herself into the book. The amount of self-insertion is not zero: Day also lives in Gretna Green, owns a Bichon Frise, and worked as an assistant registrar and civil celebrant. Niki also drinks wine regularly, has a psychic gift, occasionally reads tarot cards, is an accommodating pushover at work who struggles to say no to her abusive boss, has impostor syndrome problems, and swears by a fictional self-help book about grief that provides the quotes at the starts of chapters. There is a cat, because of course there's a cat. (The fictional self-help book is a spot-on parody played entirely straight in the story. I think Day is having some fun with the reader? I can't tell!) This is what I mean by unapologetic. It's easy to read Niki as a stereotype, but she's a stereotype a lot of real people can identify with and there's something highly satisfying in watching her find her footing. I like wish fulfillment books; it's fun to see someone's wishes come true! Particularly in the year of 2026, there's something immensely satisfying in seeing an ordinary, insecure person get a massive amount of power and use it to make the world better. I don't need everything to be hard, fraught, and laden with costs in fiction, although I wouldn't want every book I read to be like this. Also, the world building is great. It's not polished; there's a bit of a grab bag feeling to it, I'm dubious the magic system has any underlying rigorous rule set, and Niki's powers, once she has access to them, are more of a semi-sentient genie than a skill she has to learn with hard practice. But the magic is fun. The sentient house is one of the best characters, particularly after Niki realizes how underused it has been, and I am a sucker for any good sentient house book. The cat is a far more interesting character than I first thought she would be. And Niki's new magical job is more complicated and less typical than the normal Celtic-inspired fantasy that I thought it was going to be at first. My primary warning about this book is that Niki starts out beaten down and grieving her dead husband, and it took me about five pages to decide that her dead husband was a complete piece of shit who was not worth any of the grief Niki puts into him. She also doesn't stand up for herself for the first hundred pages or so, which made me want to yell at the book a few times. Both of these problems go away farther into the book, and Niki does eventually figure out that Nick was abusive trash, but I was relieved when the "make endless excuses for worthless men" portion of the story was finally over. You have to stick with it until Niki gets brave enough to try being the protagonist; once that happens, it becomes great fun. It is fairly obvious that Midlife in Gretna Green was self-published, and I wish it had gotten the editing that it deserved. My copy had a couple of obvious formatting errors, the plot veers about more than was strictly necessary, and I think a careful editing pass could have tightened the writing by about fifty pages or so without losing any important detail. If that sort of thing bothers you, make sure you're in self-published fiction mode before starting this one. But it also has that irrepressible, bubbling-with-ideas feeling of a book where nothing has suppressed the author's enthusiasm. It's a very grabby book; once Niki starts embracing her new life, I could barely put it down. If you're in the mood for a good fantasy wish-fulfillment story that has no romance and a whole lot of "why are things run this way, no, we're changing that," highly recommended. I had so much fun with this book, and the series is currently making the rounds of my whole family. Don't read this when you're looking for something challenging and literary and deep; save it for when you desperately want to watch someone just fix something for once, damn it. Followed by Painting the Blues in Gretna Green, which I have already read, breaking my usual rule of writing reviews before reading the next book in a series. Rating: 8 out of 10

27 July 2026

Jonathan Carter: DebConf26 Santa Fe, Argentina

TL;DR: What a great DebConf! I managed to recharge my Debian batteries, and my talks / BoF sessions all went fine. Already looking forward to DebConf in Japan next year!

DebCamp
The evening before DebCamp started, we had a nice bbq (we taught some locals to call it a braai at an organiser s house and went for a walk around the river as the sun set. It was a very peaceful lead-in to DebCamp.

I set up and sent out the call for Forky desktop artwork:

https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/910906f3-7ce4-4884-a49f-4b4a5975471b@debian.org

Had many nice discussions about various Debian topics with all the Debian people around. It s really fun being around people who are natural problem solvers who care deeply about both technical and social issues. At one point Jonas told me Holy shit, these people are motivated! and I appreciate that so much too!

Debian LTS wine

Most of my DebCamp was dedicated to preparing for my demo and main talk that followed at DebConf.

Sadly, we had no loopy this year, I just didn t have the time, and the people who stepped up to help last year were either overwhelmed with other issues or couldn t make it. I ll try to make it happen again for next year by kicking it off long before DC27.

View of Santa Fe city from hotel

DebConf

Talk Is it even possible to build a truly universal system installer?
In this talk I do a very quick comparison of system installers based on my experience with them. It s hard to directly compare all of them, since there are so many, and each have their own niche that they attempt to satisfy.
I also introduce Yasi my attempt to answer the question of whether we could build a universal installer, which can also better cover advanced installations, automated installations and niche setups.
It s very early days for the project, and I didn t quite feel ready to share the code with the world, but it was nice that I did a quick demo where I could install a Debian system and the resulting system actually booted up. phew.
This is also going to be my main focus for the mid-term future. I aim to have all the basic partitioning options working by the time Debian 14 (Forky) is released, and by the time Debian 15 is released, I have a long list of features that I aim to have working. So, my timeline for having something that s generally useful is around a year from now, and in around 3 years it should be a fully fledged installer that should cover a very large amount of Debian use cases and architectures.

Day Trip
For the day trip, we did a tour across Santa Fe, visited Constituci n de la Naci n Argentina, had lunch where we tried various dishes based on local fish from the river, and then went on a boat ride on the river.

BoF Sessions:
Funding in Free Software Projects: I initially registered this BoF because I m increasingly concerned about how upstreams are asking for donations in their software. I increased the scope to talk about funding in free software in general. It followed Marga s talk about funding, which focussed more about how developers are funded in general. We didn t dive very deep into this, but we certainly need some further discussion (and action) on this within Debian.
Debian Social Team: My most important issue for this team is a carry-over from last year, I want to set up barman (packaged in Debian) for live postgres syncing for our larger databases. For the smaller DBs, doing a daily dump is quite cheap. But for Matrix, it s very expensive in terms if i/o and CPU, so it would be ideal to do less regular complete dumps and use live replication for the first line of redundancy instead.
Images Team: I wasn t initially planning to say much during this session, I have some ideas to reduce both size and count of images, without losing any benefits, but I don t have any work to show for that yet. I ended up talking a lot more than I anticipated, the topics covered were quite good and representative of the current state of Debian images built. I don t have time to create a full summary, so I suggest checking the etherpad / video recording if you re interested.

Some more wine variety during the conference dinner

Debianites in the main hacklab

Rosario

I m spending two days in Rosario before I head home. Exploring a bit, catching up with sleep, finishing this blog post, signing keys and exploring some ideas I made note of during DebConf.

Thank you to the DebConf26 Team!

It was a little surreal not being part of any DebConf team for the first time ever, I ve just been too focussed on getting Yasi ready for my talk (no regrets!). I hope to be more involved again next year, in the meantime, I m very grateful to everyone who has made this happen, you did a stellar job! I hope to see many of you again next year in Japan!

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