Signal boost. While returning from a trip to the US (in other words, going to Canada) on December 8th, Canadian SF author Peter Watts was attacked, beaten, pepper-sprayed, and imprisoned without access to legal counsel by the US Border Patrol. See also his post on the subject. The government's case has obviously not yet been presented. However, given the past behavior of the US Department of Homeland Security, I find Watts's description of the event entirely credible. This is an outrage. This is the kind of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. See also Making Light and Boing Boing. John Scalzi's post has information on how to donate money to Watts to get through this legal fight. I will be giving him money. I also plan on calling my US Representative and Senators when I'm no longer at work, as this sort of treatment of a Canadian citizen warrants a Congressional investigation and heads rolling, not only at the agent level but at the Homeland Security management level. Even apart from basic questions of human rights, Homeland Security is going to systematically destroy the tourist industry in the United States if this sort of behavior is not stomped on immediately and severely. There are border patrol guards who are probably still on duty today who are common criminals and belong in prison for assault. ETA: The government's side of the story. This is pretty much what I expected, and with the data available so far, I feel confirmed in my initial reaction. This level of force is completely disproportional and flatly unacceptable short of Watts pulling a weapon on the agents, which they are not claiming that he did and which therefore he clearly didn't do. I'm highly skeptical of this supposed "choking" of a police officer after they pepper-sprayed him. This reads like the standard cover-your-ass charges filed by the police after they beat someone up. Once they've provoked the struggle by grabbing you and have done something as painful and disorienting as pepper-spraying you, chances are you're going to physically react in ways that they can conveniently misinterpret and use as the basis for charges. People elsewhere have pointed out that contacting Congressional representatives is probably better done Monday morning since nothing will happen during the weekend.

There are few things I really hate. One of them is regressions. Regressions are bad because they usually take away things we are used to rely on, and leave us with the idea that perhaps the technical improvements didn t really improve our lifes as a user, despite putting less burden on the developers. Software is made for users, after all. As part of my work on WebKitGTK+, I always keep an eye on regressions, both from previous WebKitGTK+ releases, and those imposed on embedding applications on their migration away from Gecko, and try to focus some of my efforts into lowering their numbers, whenever I can. In recent times I have worked on removing a few very user-visible regressions in Epiphany, which I see as the most demanding WebKitGTK+ user in GNOME, such as save page not working, missing
favicon support, failing to
perform server-pushed downloads (such as GMail attachments), and not being able to view source. An example of a regression from a previous version of WebKit also exists: in 1.1.17 we started advertising more than we should as supported by the HTML5 media player, causing download to be almost completely broken. All of these are working if you are using WebKit and Epiphany from trunk/master, so should be on the next development versions of WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany. Other people have also fixed many other regressions; a few examples: Xan has reimplemented the Epiphany customization of the context menu, Frederic Peters provided a work-around for mailto: links while we don t have SoupURILoader yet, and Joanmarie Diggs keeps rocking on the accessibility front! If you find regressions, keep them coming! If you have a patch, even better! =) Next week WebKitGTK+ team gets together to work furiously on improving WebKitGTK+ in a hackfest sponsored by Collabora, and Igalia, and hosted/organized by Igalia. While there I should also get my hands on one of these. Can t wait! =)

My nook arrived today, along with an email asking for my shipping address in order to be sent a CD with the source on. So that's progress. The nook itself is an interesting device - it comes in impressively well produced packaging, which looks easily as attractive as any Apple product I've laid hands on lately. Except that it then includes a double-sided sheet of instructions in the outer packaging to tell you how to get the damn thing out.

And so far, that seems like a pretty good summary of the device. There's a huge quantity of form here, but the function is lacking. The initial registration was made infuriating by the lag between hitting a key on the keyboard[1] and anything happening. I'm not talking about the understandable lag due to the latency of updates on e-ink screens - I'm talking about the seemingly non-deterministic time between tapping the screen and it indicating that I've pressed a key. The coverflow feature for books is better than selecting from a menu of items (e-ink lends itself badly to interactive displays), but slow and jerky. Worse, it's limited to B&N content. Anything you obtain elsewhere and then copy onto the device (which presents as USB mass storage) ends up in a separate menu without any coverflow. And, even more infuriatingly, you can't catagorise the files you copy on there. It's just one big list, sorted alphabetically by author (surname) and then title.

Once you're in a book, things aren't bad. It reformats the text every time you enter a book (no caching), but that takes much less time than my Sony did. The default font is very readable, even at small sizes. But there's clearly something horribly wrong - various epub files I have take up to 4 seconds to perform a page turn, which is way longer than the second or so my Sony took. There's no way to skip to a given page number, which seems like an insane oversight. And, though it's a minor point, the next/previous page buttons are the opposite way around to the Kindle or Sonys, and it's taking a while to get used to that.

It's a promising device. The hardware's clearly capable and the software is mostly there, with the features I'm really missing being ones that shouldn't be hard to implement[2]. But those features are pretty glaring, and right now they make this less functional than the Sony, let alone the Kindle. I'm also kind of surprised that it doesn't ship with any kind of cover at all. There's ample opportunity for physical trauma to turn one of these into a paperweight.

Side note: My nook managed to include the QA checklist slip, presumably by accident. The nook's internal manufacturing designation appears to be "X2", and mine was built on 2009/11/25. Which would seem optimistic for an intended shipping date in the US of 2009/11/30, which does support the idea that the shipping delay was due to some kind of delay in the hardware production.

[1] Presented on the LCD panel
[2] Of course, this being closed-source, I can't do so myself. Sigh.

So a few years ago I got stuck with no health insurance as I had a fellowship that had for its history accepted professors (with health insurance) not fresh off the boat PhDs as was the case with me. Since I was at a Large State school it was nearly impossible for me to get insurance and finally I ended up paying 400 a month and getting a whole lot of headache. In many ways my ordeal was a fluke following a change of policy and this fellowship now provides insurance to its postdocs. Increasingly, however, it seems like a number of postdoctoral fellowships shirk from their duties and don t provide a drop of health insurance. Given the academic job market, many academics don t have any choice but to accept these positions and if they don t come with insurance, well then these folks are shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars for basic, really lousy, coverage. Given that universities for the most part have decent, even in some cases kick ass insurance, with a large pool of people, shutting postdocs out of their pool is.. gross and just plain wrong. One of my fellow friends, currently on the market and currently screwed by her last postdoc wrote up a short document (aka Academic Labor Hall of Shame) and I thought I would post it here as it gets to the heart of the issues and starts shaming some of these shameful universities. If you know of other postdoctoral positions that don t offer insurance, please please leave a comment. We will include it in the hall of shame. Academic Labor Hall of Shame Universities like to promote themselves as bastions of enlightenment, but their treatment of temporary and hidden employees is often anything but enlightened. Or progressive. Or fair. 1. Postdoctoral fellows and researchers: There is a growing trend towards classing postdocs as not employees . I learned this recently when I was laid off from postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. I planned to extend my health insurance through COBRA, which is currently federally subsidized for workers who lost their jobs during the financial crisis. I was shocked when Penn initially claimed that I was not eligible for the subsidy (made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called stimulus act ). Their reason was that postdocs were not classed by Penn as employees. I appealed this with the Office of General Counsel and after a few weeks was told that I was indeed eligible, as Penn had found an inconsistency in [their] policy for certain categories of post docs between tax treatment and the availability of COBRA/ARRA . This means that while I am in fact eligible for this subsidy, postdocs paid through many other classes of grants are still not. If you want to see an example of this process of sorting some postdocs into not employee status, here is another one:
Postdocs on training grants or on individual fellowships (roughly 25% of VUMC postdocs) receive a stipend and are specifically excluded from the employee classification. They do not pay FICA and do not receive employee benefits. Their health insurance is provided and purchased separately. [by whom?] Even if Vanderbilt does in this case make provisions for these postdocs to receive health insurance, there is abundant evidence that some postdocs are outright excluded, as in this example at Stanford:
Stanford makes no provision for fellows to purchase health insurance, and the Institute will not provide medical insurance or other benefits. External fellows must bring their own medical coverage with them or purchase an individual plan during their stay in California. This is also quite apparent when you look into the outfits that profit from selling health insurance to postdocs (because their universities don t provide them any):
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/ Also, take a look at the policy they and you ll note that it stinks: it excludes such luxuries as preventive care, birth control, and chemotherapy. I m not making this up:
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/summary.pdf

So a few years ago I got stuck with no health insurance as I had a fellowship that had for its history accepted professors (with health insurance) not fresh off the boat PhDs as was the case with me. Since I was at a Large State school it was nearly impossible for me to get insurance and finally I ended up paying 400 a month and getting a whole lot of headache. In many ways my ordeal was a fluke following a change of policy and this fellowship now provides insurance to its postdocs. Increasingly, however, it seems like a number of postdoctoral fellowships shirk from their duties and don t provide a drop of health insurance. Given the academic job market, many academics don t have any choice but to accept these positions and if they don t come with insurance, well then these folks are shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars for basic, really lousy, coverage. Given that universities for the most part have decent, even in some cases kick ass insurance, with a large pool of people, shutting postdocs out of their pool is.. gross and just plain wrong. One of my fellow friends, currently on the market and currently screwed by her last postdoc wrote up a short document (aka Academic Labor Hall of Shame) and I thought I would post it here as it gets to the heart of the issues and starts shaming some of these shameful universities. If you know of other postdoctoral positions that don t offer insurance, please please leave a comment. We will include it in the hall of shame. Academic Labor Hall of Shame Universities like to promote themselves as bastions of enlightenment, but their treatment of temporary and hidden employees is often anything but enlightened. Or progressive. Or fair. 1. Postdoctoral fellows and researchers: There is a growing trend towards classing postdocs as not employees . I learned this recently when I was laid off from postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. I planned to extend my health insurance through COBRA, which is currently federally subsidized for workers who lost their jobs during the financial crisis. I was shocked when Penn initially claimed that I was not eligible for the subsidy (made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called stimulus act ). Their reason was that postdocs were not classed by Penn as employees. I appealed this with the Office of General Counsel and after a few weeks was told that I was indeed eligible, as Penn had found an inconsistency in [their] policy for certain categories of post docs between tax treatment and the availability of COBRA/ARRA . This means that while I am in fact eligible for this subsidy, postdocs paid through many other classes of grants are still not. If you want to see an example of this process of sorting some postdocs into not employee status, here is another one:
Postdocs on training grants or on individual fellowships (roughly 25% of VUMC postdocs) receive a stipend and are specifically excluded from the employee classification. They do not pay FICA and do not receive employee benefits. Their health insurance is provided and purchased separately. [by whom?] Even if Vanderbilt does in this case make provisions for these postdocs to receive health insurance, there is abundant evidence that some postdocs are outright excluded, as in this example at Stanford:
Stanford makes no provision for fellows to purchase health insurance, and the Institute will not provide medical insurance or other benefits. External fellows must bring their own medical coverage with them or purchase an individual plan during their stay in California. This is also quite apparent when you look into the outfits that profit from selling health insurance to postdocs (because their universities don t provide them any):
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/ Also, take a look at the policy they and you ll note that it stinks: it excludes such luxuries as preventive care, birth control, and chemotherapy. I m not making this up:
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/summary.pdf

A couple of weeks ago, Lucas Nussbaum wrote about his experience at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Two things stuck out at me:

• "Ubuntu has clearly gone a very long way since 2004. Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop."

In the summer of 2004, my laptop (an iBook G4) ran Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC. I tried out Ubuntu that autumn, and was very impressed. It's been five years since then. My desktop still runs Debian, and I'm proud to be a "two-distro" community member. At the same time, this juggernaut nature raises concern. When Ubuntu releases ship with significant flaws, I quietly sigh and wonder, Are we doing good service to the people coming to GNU/Linux for the first time and seeing Ubuntu? This bugginess has bit me a few times (even for upgrades between one release and the next), and it pushed a friend of mine to switch a lot of his computing to DragonflyBSD. Lucas points out that Ubuntu's done a fantastic job of becoming visible. A look at Google Trends shows that people search for "Ubuntu" about as much as they search for "Linux" at all. Richard Stallman complains when people refer to GNU/Linux as just "Linux." But today, the most popular name for an operating system based on GNU is probably "Ubuntu." For Stallman, having his hard work associated with someone else's "Linux" project must be frustrating. As a Debian contributor, it would be easy to succumb to the same feeling with regard to Ubuntu. Lucas is well aware of that. He asks,

• "Will Debian manage to stay relevant, or are we just going to be the technically-pure distro without many users that serves as a package supermarket for Ubuntu?"

Debian does have users! I was feeling a bit disheartened about my maintenance work on alpine lately, when out of the blue I received an email from a fellow at MIT asking me if I would accept some help with maintenance from him. Just seeing the note was a relief; it's very nice to be reminded that I have users to take care of. Debian is not as popular as Ubuntu on the desktop (or laptop), it's true. But technically sharp people do frequently still choose it. For example, the FreeNAS project recently announced a switch from FreeBSD to Debian (and a new name as coreNAS). But we could end up a "package supermarket". To stave this off, we must do good releases and make sure people know about them. Doing all that work takes us all time. We must recruit new contributors, help them find things to work on, and make sure they feel welcome. And sometimes-sloppy maintainers like me ought to fix our packages, and get help from others where necessary. I promise to work toward that.

As I ran out of time whilst writing the "introducing ujail" post on monday I would like to further elaborate on the idea, giving you some examples of possible use cases and then having a look at FAQs regarding ujail. Additionally I have created a second proof of concept that should be a lot faster, see below for more details.

Use cases of ujail

Monday's post was rather technical, so let's have a look at possible use cases today.

The main reason for both having the idea of ujail and starting working on it is my web server. I am running quite a few (S)CGI scripts there and, even though running them as different users, on a per-vhost basis, I have the impression of the whole thing being a bit insecure.

Okay, PHP does provide its famous open_basedir feature, but I am also running some Python applications which I simply cannot restrict easily. My first ideas involved adding something similar to open_basedir to Python, followed by the idea of replacing some C library functions, like fopen and friends on startup time.

Whilst the adding open_basedir to Python would have involved changing a lot of Python's internals I soon discarded the library patching idea as those could be worked around by injected code directly invoking syscalls. It didn't take long for me to notice that I have to dig deeper. The idea of ujail was born and after coming up with the proof of concept this seems to be a viable solution.

Now ujail is not only about protecting a web server from its web applications, but could do a lot more, for example:

• Creating a sandbox for untrusted code (socket&file i/o emulation)
  
• Implementing some sort of personal firewall (socket-call only emulation)
• Testing applications that perform low-level system operations (read: package managers and friends, filesystem emulation)

I am sure you can come up with even more use-cases. What should be noted is that emulating a system call does not mean that one necessarily needs to emulate the whole filesystem. What can be done, for example, is patching through access to common files (libraries, executables, etc.) whilst maintaining a virtual filesystem for data that will eventually be modified. A copy-on-write approach is possible too, for example. There are multiple methods with which the multiple filesystem could be implemented, the most common would probably be using a state directory.

FAQs

There have been some questions about ujail in comments to my first post which I would like to answer. Also, I have been thinking about things that are different about ujail compared to other virtualization techniques. Feel free to add additional questions either in a comment or drop me an email: debian at sp dot or dot at.

1. Could you change the license of ujail to ... ?
   
   Not likely to happen. The proof of concept's license is GPLv3 and the actual code's license will be too. However, ujail is a userspace application that does not need any modifications to the kernel so there should be no problems with porting ujail from GNU/Linux to any other system.
   
   
2. Does ujail work on operating systems other than GNU/Linux?
   
   Not yet. If it's technically possible to implement the technique on other operating systems I would be happy to accept patches.
   
   
3. Do I need to patch my kernel for ujail to work?
   
   No, ujail is running in userspace. The only thing it needs is Linux with support for PTRACE_SYSEMU.
   
   
4. How is this approach different from using LD_PRELOAD?
   
   With LD_PRELOAD one can replace library functions, but malicious code could still directly invoke syscalls, working around this protection completely. Also, statically linked binaries cannot be restricted with LD_PRELOAD.
   
   
5. How is this approach different from user-mode-linux?
   
   User-mode-linux (UML) works by emulating a full kernel in userspace and allows you to virtualize a whole Linux instance (including a new init process, etc). ujail is about providing a way of restricting a single process (and its childs) inside a running system in terms of access to syscalls and the partial emulation of those.
   
   
6. How is this approach different from linux-vserver?
   
   Linux-vserver is a kernel patch and runs in kernel space, as opposed to ujail, which works in userspace.
   Also, linux-vserver works similarly to user-mode-linux, providing a fully virtualized Linux instance.
   
   
7. Does the account running ujail need any special privileges?
   
   No, the only restrictions that apply are those of ptrace.
   
   
8. Where is the code?
   
   Right now ujail is in a planning phase, and only the proof of concept code has been written and published. The actual ujail code is yet to be written and the code will be hosted on launchpad.net.
   
   

Proof of concept, part 2

An anonymous person (who were you stranger?) added a comment to my first post, suggesting "Also, why patch the process rather than just modifying its state and trapping into the kernel?". I have had a look at this approach earlier, but it didn't work out. However, I decided to give it yet another try and created a second proof of concept. That code does not require patching any code, but only modifies the instruction pointer (eip) and the first register (eax). This should be a lot faster than patching the code.

Technically the new main loop works by calling PTRACE_SYSEMU and waiting for a notification. It then saves the instruction pointer and switches to PTRACE_SYSCALL. As before it waits for the emulated syscall to exit and at this point sets eax from orig_eax and decreases the value of the instruction pointer by the size of the "int $0x80" instruction. Another call to PTRACE_SYSCALL resumes the process. The next event is the process actually entering the real syscall and yet another one leaving the syscall again. These are resumed by PTRACE_SYSCALL and PTRACE_SYSEMU respectively. So, comparing this with the first approach we are only modifying two registers now, instead of writing to the TEXT area of the running process.

Thanks should go to the anonymous commenter for making me give this approach another try.

Questions? Criticism? More ideas? Want to contribute?

Coming to an end I would yet again like to let you know that I am open for questions, criticism, more ideas and contributions in general. So if you are interested in this topic come join the discussion by either dropping me an email, writing a comment to this post or replying to this post on your own blog.

Guess what happens when you use software that can fuck up your keyboard mappings (VMware Remote Console), in combination with software that uses these mappings to be able to switch back to a text console (X.org) and a screen saver that locks your screen (gnome-screensaver, but that would worl equally well with xlock or anything else similar) ? A recipe for FAIL. It so happens that VMware Remote Console, and apparently other VMware products such as Player or Workstation not only are unable to do anything useful with special keys (try installing Debian without the arrows keys, for example), but they are also able to remap keys (such as ctrl, shift and caps lock) to nothing. It also happens that X.org uses its keyboard mappings when dealing with the ctrl+alt+Fn key combinations that allow to get back to a text console. Yes, that means you can t switch to a text console after VMware fucked up your keyboard mappings. On top of all that, add a X session locking program, that won t allow you back until you type your password, and a password that, well, you just can t type without shift of caps-lock, because it is somehow strong. The X session locking program won t allow you to fix your keyboard mappings, you can t switch to a text console either, and you can t unlock for obvious reasons. The only solution that didn t involve a reboot or losing everything under the X session was to ssh in, change the password to one that can be typed without shift and unlock. It is said on the interwebs that adding xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true in the ~/.vmware/config file solves the issue. At least, it works for the arrows. I ll see if it also prevents the special keys to be remapped.

Barnes and Noble's new nook ebook reader is now shipping to people. Mine[1] is due to turn up tomorrow, but the instruction manual is available for download already. Quoting from it:

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Agreement, certain components of the
Software are licensed subject to the General Public License Version 2.0, a copy of which is attached
as Exhibit A (the GPL License ). You may not use these components except in compliance with
the GPL License. In addition, you may have additional rights with respect to such components
under the GPL License, including, without limitation, the right to obtain the source code for such
components from us. You may obtain a copy of such source code by contacting us through the
contact information provided on the Web Site. We will provide such source code in accordance
with the GPL License.

Which is all very promising[2], except contacting them via either phone or email reveals that nobody has the faintest idea what I'm talking about. I can certainly imagine that they have other concerns right now (delaying your initial shipments by up to two weeks depending on how early people ordered suggests some kind of utter failure somewhere in the chain), but it's depressing that approximately nobody appears to be able to get this right.

Updated:

After further conversations with tech support, I was told that I'll be mailed a CD of source within two weeks.

[1] I had a Sony, which unfortunately had a bit of an accident. On the other hand, it was running 2.4, so maybe it was a lucky escape of some sort?
[2] Well, apart from the traditional confusion of the GPL as something that claims to restrict use

Dear life,

It has been a pretty crazy couple of months, had to stay away from most of the things that I would normally breeze through, including but not limited to a few aspects of my real life day job, Debian work, movies, the routine yearly Oct-Nov time vacation that I take etc. Obviously, hobbies took a big hit. Also had to let go of an opportunity to travel to one of my favorite places, IIT Guwahati; something that I don't usually pass up. Sigh! But such is life.

Been bouncing back slowly:

I finally moved a few domains that I run (including my personal domain) and their email to a linode and I am quite liking it so far (I would've been great if I had some more disk space at my disposal but 16GB isn't all that bad).

On the Debian front, finished attending to package sponsorship requests, I've been updating packages (there is one elinks RC bug that I'll fix next) and work is finally under progress for the clang ITP in the Debian GIT repository.

There are a ton of pictures in RAW format that I haven't yet had the time to convert to JPEG (I use UFRaw but the output that I got from Bibble Pro is fairly impressive -- perhaps I should consider getting myself a license) but that could wait.

Found a decent place to rent (I should be moving in about a month or so). I would've liked a place that isn't an apartment or at least in a smaller community, preferably something in-town but good places are difficult to come by.

I am back,

Giridhar

I've got a new, fast, server and I've migrated my homepage to Drupal6. This has given me a chance to experiment with i18n updates.

I've got a section for translations and I can write blog entries for this section using drivel. The new i18n blog is a separate feed, not syndicated on planet, intended for anyone who wants to know about the translation status of any of my packages - whether upstream or Debian. POT files will be uploaded for each package and each message (should have) links to the VCS where the current PO files can be found.

I could post continual messages to the debian-i18n mailing list but this way I can put specific content (like messages about which parts of the project I'm changing) as well as updates on which translations are lagging etc. I hope it'll be easier for translators to find the relevant data instead of having to search through the debian-i18n mailing list archive.

I'm not sure about comment handling within the i18n section at this stage. I think I'd prefer to get input via normal email and bug reports.

This, more general, i18n blog category will remain on my main blog and syndicated with planet. I'll use this for posts that aren't specific to one particular project.

I'd like to make pyroman IPv6 capable. That is actually the one big thing before calling it a version "1.0".I must admit that I havn't been very active on Pyroman (or Debian in general) the last years. This goes even so far as that "pyroman" was considered "abandoned" by Fedora or so. It is not; I use it on all my servers. It's still in use at the network I developed it for (after all there is not that much benefit for a workstation setup, where a 10 line iptables script will do the job just perfectly.).Anyway, I'd like to get IPv6 support into pyroman, but there is one big issue here: I don't have any machine using IPv6, so I havn't used ip6tables myself yet, so I don't know about all the magic involved ...So if you use IPv6, it would be very cool if someone would jump in to get full IPv6 support into pyroman. Madduck had already done some preliminary stuff, but I didn't get around to have a look at the integration or completeness yet.The '--no-act' and '--print' modes of pyroman should even allow development without any IPv6 support or root permissions in the system.Other things remaining on my pyroman wishlist:

• Fully automatic iptables firewall visualization
• Keeping traffic counters over firewall reloads
• Configuration UI
• A fancy 'arsonist' icon and a web page design

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

The compensation U.S. veterans now receive for herbicide-related illnesses was gained only after a long, hard-fought battle in which the lines between science and politics were often blurred. Stunningly written and depressing piece of investigate journalism about Agent Orange s continued presence, wreaking havoc in the lives of many.

The compensation U.S. veterans now receive for herbicide-related illnesses was gained only after a long, hard-fought battle in which the lines between science and politics were often blurred. Stunningly written and depressing piece of investigate journalism about Agent Orange s continued presence, wreaking havoc in the lives of many.

Some time ago we decided in phpMyAdmin team to create yet another team meeting (after five years) at FOSDEM 2010. It took some time, but now I should have all travel things arranged (thanks to my employer who sends me there). So if anybody wants to meet there, just drop me an email and I will try to put you on my schedule.

Yesterday, the German magazine freeX published its December issue. It includes an three-page article about vbox-sync, written by me, that is even mentioned on the cover page. After my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the German Linux-Magazin and the international Linux Magazine in 2005, this is my second publication.Vbox-sync is a tool to distribute VirtualBox images via apt-get that Phil Kern and I wrote as part of our work for itomig.de, a German Free Software consulting company, and the LiMux project. I also held a talk about it at the Debian Conference in Extremadura, Spain, in 2009.

Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out. DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them working and enjoying themselves so much. This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes Tincho, Dami n, Romanella, Maxy, Sebas, Zero, Mendieta, Dererk, Melisa, Angasule, Lisandro, Nueces, and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us during DebCamp and DebConf, which include Tom s, Tinchito, M nica, Lucas, Germ n, Diego, Fefu, Nicol s, Mart n, Marcos, Hern n, Alejandro, Mat as, Rodrigo, Alberto and Joaqu n, and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out. See you in Extremadura!

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.