The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 165. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

How can I put four years into a pie? I m thinking of Inauguration Day 2017 through to today, Inauguration Day 2021. In truth things started back in 2015, when Donald Trump announced his run for the United States presidency, and I don t know how long things will continue past the moment when President-Elect Joe Biden becomes President Joe Biden. For the United States, it s been a hell of a time. For the world, it d been even worse. Every generation thinks that they lived through more than anyone else, that they had it worse. I had a Boomer tell me that the existential stress of COVID is nothing compared to the Vietnam War. I m sure when we are living through a global water crisis, I ll tell the kids that we had it bad too. Everyday I listen to the radio and read Twitter, aware that the current state of endless wars wars against terrorism and drugs, organized crime and famine, climate change and racism is global, and not limited to just what s happening to and around me. That makes it feel worse and bigger and I wonder if earlier generations can really grasp how big that is. The last four years brought me in closer working relationships with people in India and Nigeria. I would call these people my friends in that if they were in town I would want to see them and show them around. Most of them I would offer a space in my small apartment, in case they needed somewhere to sleep and wanted to save the money. We chat, though we only have the internet as opposed to elevator rides in tall office buildings and slow walks down to the shops during lunch breaks. From these relationships I have learned very little about life in India or Nigeria, and I only visited India separately from any of my colleagues there. (I went for a wedding. My visa to Nigeria was denied on account of a medical issue.) But, I follow these people on social media and see what they share, the same political and social utterances that could be the same here or virtually any other place, as long as we replace the right keywords. Exchange the name of one leader, conservative party, or government unit for another. When I first saw the #EndSARS hashtag show up, I thought the images were from Black Lives Matter protests. Stop police brutality. And that was only in the last few months. I ve had three jobs since Trump first announced his candidacy in three very different places. In the first I felt like I wasn t able to talk about the sexism and discrimination I was dealing with in the office, and how much more so my views on an organizational partnership with a government whose policies I strongly disagreed with. In the second I was able to talk about these things, but there was nothing to do about them. I ve been in love and had my heart broken three times in three very different ways that all came down to someone valuing someone else more than they valued me. Can I bake heartbreak into a pie? Is it even fair to distract from the political world with my own loss? What about COVID-19? There s bitterness and anger and tears and pain emotional and physical. There is desperation and desolation and loneliness. Covid has colored everything during the past year. It is a burden our new political leaders will take on. Biden and Harris, all of the new people in Congress, and everyone else who has taken on an elected position now must content with Covid with new levels of responsibility. Not only do their decisions affect the people they come into contact with, they now affect everyone their policies touch and perhaps even more than that. The government hired people to build walls. Our government approved it and people willingly took on the job of building those walls. Families were separated. Children were placed in inhumane conditions; children were tortured. Remember when the guards at border detention facilities were raping children? Remember when children had guards? Women were forcefully operated upon and had their bodies permanently changed without their permission, against their desires. People were executed by the state. There were so many things I ve lost track of them all. I remember bits and pieces as I write this, coming back to me like singing a song I haven t thought about in years. With each line, I remember another one. Being worried about coming home from Cuba, when the visitation rules were changed in the middle of my trip. Climate change, again and again. Pollution and microplastics and watching the country being broken into pieces and sold off in the name of economy and progress. People losing their access to healthcare, through clinics closing down and loss of insurance. What do you bake into a pie that tastes like sedition? What are the flavors of loss and racism and hate? How to you balance the sourness with subtle hints of hope, which feels to tender and fragile? Do we pair equal parts of the palatable with the unpalatable, in the name of our neatly divided senate? I have hope, of course I have hope, and I have always had hope, but now it feels thinner than ever, like a ganache or a caramel after your hand slips and you pour too much cream in. A custard or compote or curd that that refuses to thicken no matter how long you cook it. I see that things could be better, but better does not mean good and better does not mean enough. So I will put my hope into this pie. I put my pain and anger into the dough. I will put my tears and helplessness and bitterness into the filling. I will cover it sweetness and the delicate hope I ve spun out of sugar. Soon I will bake it and share it with the three other people I see because the most important thing about surviving these past years, these past months and weeks and days, is that we did it together. We will commiserate on what we ve overcome, and we will share our hope and the sweetness of the moment, as the spun sugar dissolves on our tongues. There is so much we have left to do, so much we must do. We will be angry in the future, we may be angry later today, but until then, we have pie.

Review: The Secret Barrister, by The Secret Barrister

Publisher:	Picador
Copyright:	2018
Printing:	2019
ISBN:	1-5098-4115-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	344

The Secret Barrister is a survey and critique of the criminal legal system of England and Wales. The author is an anonymous barrister who writes a legal blog of the same name (which I have not read). A brief and simplified primer for those who, like me, are familiar with the US legal system but not the English one: A barrister is a lawyer who argues cases in court, as distinct from a solicitor who does all the other legal work (and may make limited court appearances). If you need criminal legal help in England and Wales, you hire a solicitor, and they are your primary source of legal advise. If your case goes to court, your solicitor will generally (not always) refer the work of arguing your case before a judge and jury to a barrister and "instruct" them in the details of your argument. The job of the barrister is then to handle the courtroom trial, offer trial-specific legal advice, and translate your defense (or the crown's prosecution) into persuasive courtroom arguments. Unlike the United States, with its extremely sharp distinction between prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, criminal barristers in England and Wales argue both prosecutions and defenses depending on who hires them. (That said, the impression I got from this book is that the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service is moving England closer to the US model and more prosecutions are now handled by barristers employed directly by the CPS, whom I assume do not take defense cases.) Barristers follow the cab-rank rule, which means that, like a taxicab, they are professionally obligated to represent people on a first-come, first-serve basis and are not allowed to pick and choose clients. (Throughout, I'm referencing the legal system of England and Wales because the author restricts his comments to it. Presumably this is because the Scottish and Northern Irish? legal systems are different yet again in ways I do not know.) If details like this sound surprising, you can see the appeal of this book to me. It's easy, in the US, to have a vast ignorance about the legal systems of other countries or even the possibility of different systems, which makes it hard to see how our system could be improved. I had a superficial assumption that since US law started as English common law, the US and English legal systems would be substantially similar. And they are to an extent; they're both adversarial rather than inquisitorial, for example (more on that in a moment). But the current system of criminal prosecution evolved long after US independence and thus evolved differently despite similar legal foundations. Those differences are helpful for this American to ponder the road not taken and the impact of our respective choices. That said, explaining the criminal legal system to Americans isn't the author's purpose. The first fifty pages are that beginner's overview, since apparently even folks who live in England are confused by the ubiquity of US legal dramas (not that those are very accurate representations of the US legal system either). The rest of the book, and its primary purpose, is an examination of the system's failings, starting with the magistrates' courts (which often use lay judges and try what in the US would be called misdemeanors, although as discussed in this book their scope is expanding). Other topics include problems with bail, how prosecution is structured, how victims and witnesses are handled, legal aid, sentencing, and the absurd inadequacy of compensation for erroneous convictions. The most useful part of this book for me, apart from the legal system introduction, was the two chapters the author spends arguing first for and then against replacing an adversarial system with an inquisitorial system (the French criminal justice system, for example). When one is as depressed about the state of one's justice system as both I and the author are, something radically different sounds appealing. The author first makes a solid case for the inquisitorial system and then tries to demolish it, still favoring the adversarial system, and I liked that argument construction. The argument in favor of an adversarial system is solid and convincing, but it's also depressing. It's the argument of someone who has seen the corruption, sloppiness, and political motivations in an adversarial system and fears what would happen if they were able to run rampant under a fig leaf of disinterested objectivity. I can't disagree, particularly when starting from an adversarial system, but this argument feels profoundly cynical. It reminds me of the libertarian argument for capitalism: humans are irredeemably awful, greed and self-interest are the only reliable or universal human motives, and therefore the only economic system that can work is one based on and built to harness greed, because expecting any positive characteristics from humans collectively is hopelessly naive. The author of this book is not quite that negative in their argument for an adversarial system, but it's essentially the same reasoning: the only way a system can be vaguely honest is if it's constantly questioned and attacked. It can never be trusted to be objective on its own terms. I wish the author had spent more time on the obvious counter-argument: when the system is designed for adversarial combat, it normalizes and even valorizes every dirty tactic that might result in a victory. The system reinforces our worst impulses, not to mention grinding up and destroying people who cannot afford their own dirty tricks. The author proposes several explanations for the problems they see in the criminal legal system, including "tough on crime" nonsense from politicians that sounds familiar to this American reader. Most problems, though, they trace back to lack of funding: of the police, of the courts, of the prosecutors, and of legal aid. I don't know enough about English politics to have an independent opinion on this argument, but the stories of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, overworked civil servants, ridiculously low compensation rates, flawed metrics like conviction rates, and headline-driven political posturing that doesn't extend to investing in necessary infrastructure like better case-tracking systems sounds depressingly familiar. This is one of those books where I appreciated the content but not the writing. It's not horrible, but the sentences are ponderous and strained and the author is a bit too fond of two-dollar words. They also have a dramatic and self-deprecating way of describing their own work that I suspect they thought was funny but that I found grating. By the end of this book, I was irritated enough that I can't recommend it. But the content was interesting, even the critique of a political system that isn't mine, and it prompted some new thoughts on the difficulties of creating a fair justice system. If you can deal with the author's writing style, you may also enjoy it. Rating: 6 out of 10

The other day, we went to a designer's fashion shop whose owner was rather adamant that he was never ever going to wear a face mask, and that he didn't believe the COVID-19 thing was real. When I argued for the opposing position, he pretty much dismissed what I said out of hand, claiming that "the hospitals are empty dude" and "it's all a lie". When I told him that this really isn't true, he went like "well, that's just your opinion". Well, no -- certain things are facts, not opinions. Even if you don't believe that this disease kills people, the idea that this is a matter of opinion is missing the ball by so much that I was pretty much stunned by the level of ignorance. His whole demeanor pissed me off rather quickly. While I disagree with the position that it should be your decision whether or not to wear a mask, it's certainly possible to have that opinion. However, whether or not people need to go to hospitals is not an opinion -- it's something else entirely. After calming down, the encounter got me thinking, and made me focus on something I'd been thinking about before but hadn't fully forumlated: the fact that some people in this world seem to misunderstand the nature of what it is to do science, and end up, under the claim of being "sceptical", with various nonsense things -- see scientology, flat earth societies, conspiracy theories, and whathaveyou. So, here's something that might (but probably won't) help some people figuring out stuff. Even if it doesn't, it's been bothering me and I want to write it down so it won't bother me again. If you know all this stuff, it might be boring and you might want to skip this post. Otherwise, take a deep breath and read on... Statements are things people say. They can be true or false; "the sun is blue" is an example of a statement that is trivially false. "The sun produces light" is another one that is trivially true. "The sun produces light through a process that includes hydrogen fusion" is another statement, one that is a bit more difficult to prove true or false. Another example is "Wouter Verhelst does not have a favourite color". That happens to be a true statement, but it's fairly difficult for anyone that isn't me (or any one of the other Wouters Verhelst out there) to validate as true. While statements can be true or false, combining statements without more context is not always possible. As an example, the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a Debian Developer" is a true statement, as is the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a professional Volleybal player"; but the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a professional Volleybal player and a Debian Developer" is not, because while I am a Debian Developer, I am not a professional Volleybal player -- I just happen to share a name with someone who is. A statement is never a fact, but it can describe a fact. When a statement is a true statement, either because we trivially know what it states to be true or because we have performed an experiment that proved beyond any possible doubt that the statement is true, then what the statement describes is a fact. For example, "Red is a color" is a statement that describes a fact (because, yes, red is definitely a color, that is a fact). Such statements are called statements of fact. There are other possible statements. "Grass is purple" is a statement, but it is not a statement of fact; because as everyone knows, grass is (usually) green. A statement can also describe an opinion. "The Porsche 911 is a nice car" is a statement of opinion. It is one I happen to agree with, but it is certainly valid for someone else to make a statement that conflicts with this position, and there is nothing wrong with that. As the saying goes, "opinions are like assholes: everyone has one". Statements describing opinions are known as statements of opinion. The differentiating factor between facts and opinions is that facts are universally true, whereas opinions only hold for the people who state the opinion and anyone who agrees with them. Sometimes it's difficult or even impossible to determine whether a statement is true or not. The statement "The numbers that win the South African Powerball lottery on the 31st of July 2020 are 2, 3, 5, 19, 35, and powerball 14" is not a statement of fact, because at the time of writing, the 31st of July 2020 is in the future, which at this point gives it a 1 in 24,435,180 chance to be true). However, that does not make it a statement of opinion; it is not my opinion that the above numbers will win the South African powerball; instead, it is my guess that those numbers will be correct. Another word for "guess" is hypothesis: a hypothesis is a statement that may be universally true or universally false, but for which the truth -- or its lack thereof -- cannot currently be proven beyond doubt. On Saturday, August 1st, 2020 the above statement about the South African Powerball may become a statement of fact; most likely however, it will instead become a false statement. An unproven hypothesis may be expressed as a matter of belief. The statement "There is a God who rules the heavens and the Earth" cannot currently (or ever) be proven beyond doubt to be either true or false, which by definition makes it a hypothesis; however, for matters of religion this is entirely unimportant, as for believers the belief that the statement is correct is all that matters, whereas for nonbelievers the truth of that statement is not at all relevant. A belief is not an opinion; an opinion is not a belief. Scientists do not deal with unproven hypotheses, except insofar that they attempt to prove, through direct observation of nature (either out in the field or in a controlled laboratory setting) that the hypothesis is, in fact, a statement of fact. This makes unprovable hypotheses unscientific -- but that does not mean that they are false, or even that they are uninteresting statements. Unscientific statements are merely statements that science cannot either prove or disprove, and that therefore lie outside of the realm of what science deals with. Given that background, I have always found the so-called "conflict" between science and religion to be a non-sequitur. Religion deals in one type of statements; science deals in another. The do not overlap, since a statement can either be proven or it cannot, and religious statements by their very nature focus on unprovable belief rather than universal truth. Sure, the range of things that science has figured out the facts about has grown over time, which implies that religious statements have sometimes been proven false; but is it heresy to say that "animals exist that can run 120 kph" if that is the truth, even if such animals don't exist in, say, Rome? Something very similar can be said about conspiracy theories. Yes, it is possible to hypothesize that NASA did not send men to the moon, and that all the proof contrary to that statement was somehow fabricated. However, by its very nature such a hypothesis cannot be proven or disproven (because the statement states that all proof was fabricated), which therefore implies that it is an unscientific statement. It is good to be sceptical about what is being said to you. People can have various ideas about how the world works, but only one of those ideas -- one of the possible hypotheses -- can be true. As long as a hypothesis remains unproven, scientists love to be sceptical themselves. In fact, if you can somehow prove beyond doubt that a scientific hypothesis is false, scientists will love you -- it means they now know something more about the world and that they'll have to come up with something else, which is a lot of fun. When a scientific experiment or observation proves that a certain hypothesis is true, then this probably turns the hypothesis into a statement of fact. That is, it is of course possible that there's a flaw in the proof, or that the experiment failed (but that the failure was somehow missed), or that no observance of a particular event happened when a scientist tried to observe something, but that this was only because the scientist missed it. If you can show that any of those possibilities hold for a scientific proof, then you'll have turned a statement of fact back into a hypothesis, or even (depending on the exact nature of the flaw) into a false statement. There's more. It's human nature to want to be rich and famous, sometimes no matter what the cost. As such, there have been scientists who have falsified experimental results, or who have claimed to have observed something when this was not the case. For that reason, a scientific paper that gets written after an experiment turned a hypothesis into fact describes not only the results of the experiment and the observed behavior, but also the methodology: the way in which the experiment was run, with enough details so that anyone can retry the experiment. Sometimes that may mean spending a large amount of money just to be able to run the experiment (most people don't have an LHC in their backyard, say), and in some cases some of the required materials won't be available (the latter is expecially true for, e.g., certain chemical experiments that involve highly explosive things); but the information is always there, and if you spend enough time and money reading through the available papers, you will be able to independently prove the hypothesis yourself. Scientists tend to do just that; when the results of a new experiment are published, they will try to rerun the experiment, partially because they want to see things with their own eyes; but partially also because if they can find fault in the experiment or the observed behavior, they'll have reason to write a paper of their own, which will make them a bit more rich and famous. I guess you could say that there's three types of people who deal with statements: scientists, who deal with provable hypotheses and statements of fact (but who have no use for unprovable hypotheses and statements of opinion); religious people and conspiracy theorists, who deal with unprovable hypotheses (where the religious people deal with these to serve a large cause, while conspiracy theorists only care about the unprovable hypotheses); and politicians, who should care about proven statements of fact and produce statements of opinion, but who usually attempt the reverse of those two these days Anyway... 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It is undeniable that banning Donald Trump from Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites is a benefit for the moment. It may well save lives, perhaps lots of lives. But it raises quite a few troubling issues. First, as EFF points out, these platforms have privileged speakers with power, especially politicians, over regular users. For years now, it has been obvious to everyone that Donald Trump has been violating policies on both platforms, and yet they did little or nothing about it. The result we saw last week was entirely forseeable and indeed, WAS forseen, including by elements in those companies themselves. (ACLU also raises some good points) Contrast that with how others get treated. Facebook, two days after the coup attempt, banned Benjamin Wittes, apparently because he mentioned an Atlantic article opposed to nutcase conspiracy theories. The EFF has also documented many more egregious examples: taking down documentation of war crimes, childbirth images, black activists showing the racist messages they received, women discussing online harassment, etc. The list goes on; YouTube, for instance, has often been promoting far-right violent videos while removing peaceful LGBTQ ones. In short, have we simply achieved legal censorship by outsourcing it to dominant corporations? It is worth pausing at this point to recognize two important princples: First, that we do not see it as right to compel speech. Secondly, that there exist communications channels and other services that nobody is calling on to suspend Donald Trump. Let s dive into those a little bit. There have been no prominent calls for AT&T, Verizon, Gmail, or whomever provides Trump and his campaign with cell phones or email to suspend their service to him. Moreover, the gas stations that fuel his vehicles and the airports that service his plane continue to provide those services, and nobody has seriously questioned that, either. Even his Apple phone that he uses to post to Twitter remains, as far as I know, fully active. Secondly, imagine you were starting up a small web forum focused on raising tomato plants. It is, and should be, well within your rights to keep tomato-haters out, as well as people that have no interest in tomatoes but would rather talk about rutabagas, politics, or Mars. If you are going to host a forum about tomatoes, you have the right to keep it a forum about tomatoes; you cannot be forced to distribute someone else s speech. Likewise in traditional media, a newspaper cannot be forced to print every letter to the editor in full. In law, there is a notion of a common carrier, that provides services to the general public without discrimination. Phone companies and ISPs fall under this. Facebook, Twitter, and tomato sites don t. But consider what happens if Facebook bans you. You might be using Facebook-owned Whatsapp to communicate with family and friends, and suddenly find yourself unable to ask someone to pick you up. Or your treasured family photos might be in Facebook-owned Instagram, lost forever. It s not just Facebook; similar things happen with Google, locking people out of their phones and laptops, their emails, even their photos. Is it right that Facebook and Google aren t regulated as common carriers? Perhaps, or perhaps we need some line of demarcation between their speech-to-the-public services (Facebook timeline posts, YouTube) and private communication (Whatsapp, Gmail). It s a thorny issue; should government be regulating speech instead? That s also fraught. So is corporate control. Decentralization Helps Dramatically With email, you get to pick your email provider (yes, there are two or three big ones, but still plenty of others). Each email provider will have its own set of things it considers acceptable, and its own set of other servers and accounts it s willing to exchange mail with. (It is extremely common for mail providers to choose not to accept mail from various other mail servers based on ISP, IP address, reputation, and so forth.) What if we could do something like that for Twitter and Facebook? Let you join whatever instance you like. Maybe one instance is all about art and they don t talk about politics. Or another is all about Free Software and they don t have advertising. And then there are plenty of open instances that accept anything that s respectful. And, like email, people of one server can interact with those using another just as easily as if they were using the same one. Well, this isn t hypothetical; it already exists in the Fediverse. The most common option is Mastodon, and it so happens that a month ago I wrote about its benefits for other reasons, and included some links on getting started. There is no reason that we must all let our online speech be controlled by companies with a profit motive to keep hate speech on their platforms. There is no reason that we must all have a single set of rules, or accept strong corporate or government control, either. The quality of conversation on Mastodon is far higher than either Twitter or Facebook; decentralization works and it s here today.

Background I usually don t mind ads, as not as they not very intrusive. I get that the current media model is basically ad-funded, and that unless I want to pay $1/month or so to 50 web sites, I have to accept ads, so I don t run an ad-blocker. Sure, sometimes are annoying (hey YT, mid-roll ads are borderline), but I ve also seen many good ads, as in interesting or funny even. Well, I don t think I ever bought anything as direct result from ads, so I don t know how useful ads are for the companies, but hey, what do I care. Except there a few ad networks that run what I would say are basically revolting ads. Things I don t want to ever accidentally see while eating, or things that are really make you go WTF? Maybe you know them, maybe you don t, but I guess there are people who don t know how to clean their ears, or people for whom a fast 7 day weight loss routine actually works. Thankfully, most of the time I don t browse sites which use this networks, but randomly they do leak to even sites I do browse. If I m not very stressed already, I can ignore them, otherwise they really, really annoy me. Case in point, I was on Slashdot, and because I was logged on and recently had mod points, the right side column had a check-box disable ads . That sidebar had some relatively meaningful ads, like a VPN subscription (not that I would use it, but it is a tech thing), or even a book about Kali Linux, etc. etc. So I click the disable ads , and the right column goes away. I scroll down happily, only to be met, at the bottom, by the best way to clean your ear , the most 50 useless planes ever built (which had a drawing of something that was for sure never ever built outside of in movies), you won t believe how this child actor looks today , etc.

Solving the problem The above really, really pissed me off, so I went to search how to block ad network . To my surprise, the fix was not that simple, for standard users at least.

Method 1: hosts file The hosts file is reasonable as it is relatively cross-platform (Linux and Windows and Mac, I think), but how the heck do you edit hosts on your phone? And furthermore, it has some significant downsides. First, /etc/hosts lists individual hosts, so for an entire ad network, the example I had had two screens of host names. This is really unmaintainable, since rotating host names, or having a gazillion of them is trivial. Second, it cannot return negative answers. I.e. you have to give each of those hosts a valid IPv4/IPv6, and have something either reply with 404 or another 4xx response, or not listen on port 80/443. Too annoying. And finally, it s a client-side solution, so one would have to replicate it across all clients in a home, and keep it in sync.

Method 2: ad-blockers I dislike ad-blockers on principle, since they need wide permissions on all pages, but it is a recommended solution. However, to my surprise, one finds threads saying ad-blocker foo has whitelisted ad network bar, at which point you re WTF? Why do I use an ad-blocker if they get paid by the lowest of the ad networks to show the ads? And again, it s a client-side solution, and one would have to deploy it across N clients, and keep them in sync, etc.

Method 3: HTTP proxy blocking To my surprise, I didn t find this mentioned in a quick internet search. Well, HTTP proxies have long gone the way of the dodo due to HTTPs everywhere , and while one can still use them even with HTTPS, it s not that convenient:

• you need to tunnel all traffic through them, which might result in bottlenecks (especially for media playing/maybe video-conference/etc.).
• or even worse, there might be protocol issues/incompatibilities due to 100% tunneling.
• running a proxy opens up some potential security issues on the internal network, so you need to harden the proxy as well, and maintain it.
• you need to configure all clients to know about the proxy (via DHCP or manually), which might or might not work well, since it s client-dependent.
• you can only block at CONNECT level (host name), and you have to build up regexes for the host name.

On the good side, the actual blocking configuration is centralised, and the only distributed configuration is pointing the clients through the proxy. While I used to run a proxy back in HTTP times, the gains were significant back them (media elements caching, downloads caching, all with a slow pipe, etc.), but today is not worth it, so I ve stopped and won t bring a proxy back just for this.

Method 4: DNS resolver filtering After thinking through all the options, I thought - hey, a caching/recursive DNS resolver is what most people with a local network run, right? How difficult is to block at resolver level? and oh my, it is so trivial, for some resolvers at least. And yes, I didn t know about this a week ago

Response Policy Zones Now, of course, there is a standard for this, called Response Policy Zone, and which is supported across multiple resolvers. There are many tutorials on how to use RPZs to configure things, some of them quite detailed - e.g. this one, or a simple/more straightforward one here. The upstream BIND documentation also explains things quite well here, so you can go that route as well. It looks a bit hairy for me thought, but it works, and since it is a standard, it can be more easily deployed. There are many discussions on the internet about how to configure RPZs, how to not even resolve the names (if you re going to return something explicitly/statically), etc. so there are docs, but again it seems a bit overdone.

Resolver hooks There s another way too, if your resolver allows scripting. For example, the PowerDNS resolver allow Lua scripting, and has a relatively simple API at least, to me it looks way, way simpler than the RPZ equivalent. After 20 minutes of reading the docs, I ended up with this, IMO trivial, solution (in a file named e.g. rules.lua):

ads = newDS()
ads:add( 'evilads.com', 'evilads.well-known-cdn.com', 'moreads.net' )

function preresolve(dq)
  if ads:check(dq.qname) then
    dq.rcode = pdns.NXDOMAIN
    return true;
  end
  return false;
end

and that s it. Well, enable it/load the file in the configuration, but nothing else. Syntax is pretty straightforward, matching by suffix here, and if you need more complex stuff, you can of course do it; it s just Lua and a simple API. I don t see any immediate equivalent in Bind, so there s that, but if you can use PowerDNS, then the above solution seems simple for simple cases, and could be extended if needed (not sure in which cases). The only other thing one needs to do is to serve the local/custom resolver to all clients, whether desktop or mobile, and that s it. DNS server is bread-and-butter in DHCP, so better support than proxy, and once the host name has been (mis)resolved, nothing is involved anymore in the communication path. True, your name server might get higher CPU usage, but for home network, this should not be a problem. Can this filtering method (either RPZ or hooks) be worked around by ad networks? Sure, like anything. But changing the base domain is not fun. DNSSEC might break it (note Bind RPZ can be configure to ignore DNSSEC), but I m more worried about DNS-over-HTTPS, which I thought initially it s done for the user, but now I m not so sure anymore. Not being in control even of your own DNS resolver seems evil , but what do I know.

Combined authoritative + recursive solution This solution was provided by Guillem Jover, who uses unbound, which is a combined authoritative name server and recursive resolver in one, and dnsmasq (which is even more things, I think):

For my LANs I use unbound, and then block this kind of thing in /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/block.conf, with stuff like:

server:
 local-zone: adsite.example.com refuse

But then for things that are mobile, and might get out of the LAN, such as laptops, I also block with dnsmasq in /etc/dnsmasq.d/block.conf, with stuff like:

 address=/adsite.example.com/

I still use ublock-origin to block stuff at the browser level, though, for yet an extra layer of noise suppression. :)

Thanks for the info!

Happy browsing! 10 lines of Lua, and now for sure I m going to get even fatter without the this natural method will melt your belly fat in 7 days information. Or I will just throw away banana peels without knowing what I could do with hem. After a few days, I asked myself but ads are not so bad, why did I and then realised that yes, ads are not so bad anymore. And Slashdot actually loads faster So, happy browsing!

The Smithsonian Mag has an informative article about the history of the game Monopoly [1]. The main point about Monopoly teaching about the problems of inequality is one I was already aware of, but there are some aspects of the history that I learned from the article. Here s an article about using modified version of Monopoly to teach Sociology [2]. Maria Paino and Jeffrey Chin wrote an interesting paper about using Monopoly with revised rules to teach Sociology [3]. They publish the rules which are interesting and seem good for a class. I think it would be good to have some new games which can teach about class differences. Maybe have an Escape From Poverty game where you have choices that include drug dealing to try and improve your situation or a cooperative game where people try to create a small business. While Monopoly can be instructive it s based on the economic circumstances of the past. The vast majority of rich people aren t rich from land ownership.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yyuukne3
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y6cq5t9d
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y5p88ubd

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

Sometimes you need to do things you don't like and you don't know where you will end up.
In our household there exists one (production) system running Windows. Don't ask why and please no recommandations how to substitute it. Some things are hard to (ex)change, for example your love partner. Looking into Backup with rsync on Windows (WSL) I needed to start a privileged powershell, so I first started an unprivileged one:

powershell

Just to start a privileged:

Start-Process powershell -Verb runAs

Now you can follow the Instructions from Microsoft to install OpenSSH. Or just install the OpenSSH Server:

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0

Check if a firewall rule was created (maybe you want to adjust it):

Get-NetFirewallRule -Name *ssh*

Start the OpenSSH server:

Start-Service sshd

Running OpenSSH server as service:

Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'

You can create the .ssh directory with the correct permissions by connecting to localhost and creating the known_hosts file.

ssh user@127.0.0.1

When you intend to use public key authentication for users in the administrators group, have a look into How to Login Windows Using SSH Key Under Local Admin. Indeed you can get rsync running via WSL. But why load tons of dependencies on your system? With the installation of rsync I cheated a bit and used chocolately by running choco install rsync, but there is also an issue requesting rsync support for the OpenSSH server which includes an archive with a rsync.exe and libraries which may also fit. You can place those files for example into C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH so they are in the PATH. So here we are. Now I can solve all my other issues with BackupPC, Windows firewall and the network challenges to get access to the isolated dedicated network of the windows system.

For many years now I ve had WordPress installed as a subdirectory to my site but appearing to at the domain level, i.e. /wordpress/index.php is transparently presented as the homepage. This is done by setting the WordPress Address and Site Address settings and then mapping requests which do not match an existing file or directory through as a PHP pathinfo using Apache s mod_rewrite rules in a .htaccess file or server configuration. In this way most of the site is WordPress s dynamic pages and posts, but WordPress itself is neatly contained and random static resources such as /screentest/1024.GIF work as expected. Those .htaccess rules were originally hand-crafted but didn t take account of changing recommendations, e.g. the Authorization header. When I rearranged matters recently I decided to take advantage of WordPress s own generated rules and ditch my old rules. They look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
# The directives (lines) between "BEGIN WordPress" and "END WordPress" are
# dynamically generated, and should only be modified via WordPress filters.
# Any changes to the directives between these markers will be overwritten.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:% HTTP:Authorization ]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME  !-f
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME  !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If .htaccess is writable, WordPress adds these rules automatically. Unfortunately, when I switched to them and not my own, the site broke. Crucially the generated rules do not cater for WordPress being in a subdirectory. No matter what combination of settings I tried, local changes to the rules (like RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]) were rewritten back to the original values at random times and clearly couldn t be relied upon to stay as I need them. This feels like a bug: my intuition is that if the WordPress Address and Site Address settings are different, but within the same domain, the rules should be generated to take care of that. One option is to make the .htaccess file read-only, which WordPress detects and avoids trying to make changes at all. But this rather defeats the object of letting it take care of future changes as the software and specifications change. The second option, which I stuck with, is to add an index.php file with the following contents:

<?php
include('wordpress/index.php');

Now the generated rules, though incorrect, result in the right behaviour and won t break on every setting change.

In 2020, I finished and reviewed 42 books, two more than 2019 (although I had finished but not reviewed two books at the end of 2019, so the total is even more similar than that). This is the best year for reading in terms of book count since 2012, despite being seriously distracted by a new job, a pandemic, and US political meltdowns. Those distractions do show up in the drop in page count. If it weren't for the pandemic, the count would have been higher. Just as I got into a rhythm of reading while I exercised, gyms became a bad idea for the rest of the year. Treadmills are good for reading; long walks around the neighborhood not so much. That time went to podcasts instead, which I'm not too sad about but which don't prompt reviews. Finding the mental space and energy to write reviews proved as much of a challenge as finding time to read this year, and I once again had to do some catch-up at the end of the year. To the extent that I have goals for 2021, it's to tighten up the elapsed time between finishing a book and writing a review so that the reviews don't pile up. I read one book this year that I rated 10 out of 10: Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk, which is partly about the US presidential transition and is really about what the US government does and what sort of people make careers in civil service. This book is brilliant, fascinating, and surprisingly touching, and I wish it were four times as long. If anything, it's even more relevant today as we enter another transition than it was when Lewis wrote it or when I read it. There were so many 9 out of 10 ratings this year that it's hard to know where to start. I read the last Murderbot novella by Martha Wells (Exit Strategy) and then the first Murderbot novel (Network Effect), both of which were everything I was hoping for. Murderbot's sarcastic first-person voice continues to be a delight, and I expect Network Effect to take home several 2021 awards. I'm eagerly awaiting the next novel, Fugitive Telemetry, currently scheduled for the end of April, 2021. Also on the fiction side were Alix E. Harrow's wonderful debut novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a fierce novel about family and claiming power that will hopefully win the 2020 Mythopoeic Award (which was delayed by the pandemic), and TJ Klune's heart-warming The House in the Cerulean Sea, my feel-good novel of the year. Finally, Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth were a glorious mess in places, but I had more fun reading and discussing those books than I've had with any novel in a very long time. On the non-fiction side, Tressie McMillan Cottom's Thick is the best collection of sociology that I've read. It's not easy reading, but that book gave me a new-found appreciation and understanding of sociology and what it's trying to accomplish. Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet is much easier reading but similarly perspective-enhancing, helping me understand (among other things) how choice of punctuation and capitalization expands the dynamic range of meaning in informal text conversation. Finally, Nick Pettigrew's Anti-Social is a funny, enlightening, and sobering look at the process of addressing low-level unwanted behavior that's directly relevant to the current conflicts over the role of policing in society. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Review: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Red Wombat Studio
Copyright:	July 2020
ASIN:	B08CJ86Y1W
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	287

Mona is fourteen, an orphan, and works in the bakery owned by her Aunt Tabitha. She's also a magicker, although a very minor one. She can tell bread to do things, like bake properly or slice itself, and can make gingerbread men dance. Also, there's Bob, her sourdough starter, into whom she put a bit too much panicked magic when she was ten. Her magic is a useful small talent for a baker, but nothing all that exceptional. The dead body she finds in the kitchen when opening the bakery is certainly exceptional. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking starts as a minor murder mystery. There are constables and sweet buns and Mona is accused of murder by an officious inquisitor, which was rather terrifying, but everything seems like it will work out and get back to normal. Except it won't, because someone is murdering magickers and the authorities who are supposed to be helping Mona don't appear to be on her side. This is a very Ursula Vernon sort of book. (T. Kingfisher is the pseudonym that Vernon uses when not writing children's books.) The protagonist is brave, scared, and stubborn, the first-person narration has a stream-of-consciousness feel and an undercurrent of constant curiosity, and the story has a strong "this is awful but moping about it won't help so we may as well get on with it" energy. It is (as you might guess from the age of the protagonist) pitched a bit younger than Vernon's other recent Kingfisher work. If I had to classify it, I'd call it young adult possibly edging into middle grade. It's also a book about creative use of magic powers. If you're the sort of person who liked analyzing an apparently unimpressive superpower and thinking up all the creative ways in which it could be quite powerful, well, that's a lot of the plot here. Vernon sticks to the rules of the game: Mona can only affect bread and dough and maybe icing in tiny ways if she tries very hard (but it gives her a headache). But there are a lot of creative ways that one can use dough and cookies, particularly once you get some help. The other interesting and unusual thing about this book is its attitude towards authorities and heroism. Authorities who try to do good and authorities who are evil and corrupt are both common in fantasy. Authorities who let themselves get caught up in a tangle of small decisions and minor fears until they become ineffective are not quite as common, and usually fantasy dispenses with that sort of power by calling it weak and inviting the heroes to take over. This book does not go in that direction at all. It's startling and thought-provoking to see a fantasy novel treat Mona's elevation into unwanted heroism as an indefensible societal failure that is not excused by gratitude. This more than any other story element made this feel like a 2020 book. I won't spoil the ending, but it caught me by surprise, was extremely moving, and further broadens that questioning of what heroism is and why we celebrate it. This is not a book full of complex plotting or moral ambiguity. The villain is awful, the threat he provokes is rather thoroughly dehumanized, and the plot is a reasonably straightforward sequence of events. One reads this book for Mona's flustered first-person voice, Vernon's humor and no-nonsense morality, and the creative exploration of the limits of what one can do with bread magic and a seriously irritated sourdough starter. And the thoughtfulness about heroism, and the recognition that heroism comes with an impact that the rest of society doesn't want to think about. To be clear, that thoughtfulness doesn't go beyond questioning here. This is still a heroism book. But it made me want to read the fantasy novel in which people work collectively to remake a society so that it won't need to have heroes again. I think whether you like Vernon's previous Kingfisher books, particularly the more young adult ones, will strongly predict whether you like A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. If you like her protagonists, recommended. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	March 2020
ISBN:	1-250-21732-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	398

Linus Baker is a case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. His job is to evaluate the orphanages to which children with magical powers are sent and ensure those children are treated properly. This must be done properly, with professional care and detachment and careful documentation so that his superiors can make the correct choices. Linus has no ambition or desire to be anything other than a case worker. He does his job meticulously by the book, namely the DICOMY Rules and Regulations, which he studies religiously. Linus is therefore caught entirely by surprise when he is summoned without explanation to the offices of Extremely Upper Management on the intimidating 5th floor. That summons turns out to be a new assignment for which Extremely Upper Management believes Linus to be ideal: an orphanage on an island far from the city, home to some highly unusual (and, in one case, disturbing) children and a headmaster who is as odd as his charges. Management is correct about Linus up to a point. He is a bureaucrat and a stickler for rules. However, Extremely Upper Management did not account for the possibility that Linus does the work that he does because he cares deeply about children, or that, if the two come into conflict, the children might matter more than the rules. The House in the Cerulean Sea is the sort of book that tells you exactly what it's doing, assures you that you'll enjoy it anyway, and then you actually do. The plot developments are obvious well in advance, the tugs on the heart-strings are telegraphed and obvious, and there are very few surprises. But the story is told with such charm and feeling that I at least didn't mind at all, and indeed would have been furious at the author if he hadn't delivered the expected ending. This is not the book to read if you want to delve deep into the implications of the world-building. It follows children's book logic in several important places: intentions matter more than institutional structure, sincerity is persuasive, and courage is rewarded. A few reviews compare it to Nineteen Eighty-Four, but this is wildly misleading beyond a few trappings of the setting. The internal logic of the book is closer to a cross between Good Omens and Dr. Seuss. It's a "good people are rewarded" sort of book and wears that on its sleeve. One of the things that Klune does extremely well is subtlety of characterization despite the relative lack of subtlety in the plot. Linus starts the book as a caricature whose life is nearly a blank canvas, and by the end of the book he feels like someone you know. Klune pulls this off less by filling in the canvas than by making careful use of all that negative space to put emotional weight and depth behind a few telling details like Linus's pyjamas, records, and cat. He also does an exceptional job with the mannerisms and habits of speech of both Linus and the headmaster of the orphanage. To say much more would be a spoiler; suffice it to say that Klune captures an interaction style that I have rarely seen in novels and certainly not in a fantasy novel of this type, and does it so well that I was strongly reminded of people I've known. Anyone who knows me is unlikely to be surprised that my favorite character in the book is Zoe, the sarcastic and fiercely protective sprite who owns the island on which the orphanage is located, but almost all of the characters are wonderful. One or two of the children are a bit one-note, but the group dynamics make up for that, and the suspicious, thoughtful, and respectful interplay between the three adults is beautifully done. My only real complaints on the characterization front are that some of the confrontations in the nearby village felt a bit strained, and I think Helen got short shrift and could have been fleshed out some more. I will say that the motives of the villains never made much sense, but they didn't have to; they're essentially monsters in Linus's story, and they do enough to serve that purpose. I now want to read the story of how Zoe and the headmaster met, although I'm not sure Klune is the right person to write it, and I'm not sure he left enough emotional space for another novel. Sometimes I want to read a positive, hopeful book in which people learn and grow and good things happen to good people, one where the author is unapologetically manipulating my emotions and I don't care because I want these people to be happy. If you feel the same way, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's lovely. Rating: 9 out of 10

Farmer on-going protests Before I start with the education system in India which I have talked about many times in the past, first let me share couple of pieces about the farmer movement which is still at Sanghu Delhi border. The above picture became somewhat viral as it showed Manjeet Kaur, who drove down from Patiala, Punjab to Sanghu border along with her friends to take part in the on-going protests. The picture not only shares how the women are part and parcel of this protest but also they are independently taking part in the protest. The other were two articles I read today, first was an article in tribune which questions that if the policy worked, why it didn t work in the state of Bihar. The other by a young law student who had to go from Chandigarh to Delhi with family for some work and her experience with the ongoing protest. In fact, an interesting observation was made by the CJI in the many suits against farmer protests in the SC. This makes for much more interesting read when you see an RTI query filed by Saket Gokhale to NHAI , a Central Govt. agency which is supposed to be independent and asks if they had filed an FIR and asked compensation from Haryana State and Haryana State Police which had dug up National Highway 44 and if any permission was asked for the same from NHAI. And NHAI unable to take any action for the same. If this isn t shameful, I dunno what is

NHAI response to Saket Gokhale s query.

Sadly, the way the response has been worded makes it impossible for NHAI to discharge its own responsibilities and this becomes a precedent for other states now that know that NHAI is vulnerable. A pretty sad turn on events. Indian Education can t go online There was a recent article on scroll which shared how Indian education can t go online as only a few have computers with decent netlink speeds as well as other factors which are needed for online education. But there are also many things that the article doesn t take into account which actually make the task more difficult and raise the boundary more. Now in most schools and colleges, the number of students to teacher ratio could be anywhere between 70-150 or even more. In the last few years, a lot of schools have been closed down by various Governments, including and not limited to the ruling Govt. They have in fact intensified closures of public schools wherever their Govt. has been in power. Closing to 5000+ schools in one state in a year is a dramatic shift and such has been happening time and again. In fact, the rising costs of Indian education has made many to leave Indian shores and do studies abroad. And once they do their masters or whatever, the chances of them coming back to India become more and more remote. In India the costs have been becoming so bad that NBFC s have started products targeting the same. How NBFC and Banks have (both public and private) have fared with respect to Indian consumers needs its own blog post but one word to describe it is bad . But as shared above, needs its own blog post. Coming to the Indian context though, what has not been captured in that article is that the responsibility of making new content also raises huge barriers for teachers. My own experience in teacher s trainings for ICT usage has shown that most teachers do not know and use internet effectively both to sustain their own curiosity as well as their students. Part of which is whether you are private employee or a public school teacher, the teacher is not paid enough. I have had multiple conversations with friends over the years who are teachers who shared that they get 50% salary in-hand while they sign for 100%. This is more in the case or private schools though. In Govt. schools, the teachers apart from their regular administrative duties apart from teaching duties are also unpaid labor for Govt. policy. Take the recent covid crisis, it was the teachers who for months together went from door-to-door asking if they had a covid patient. This was all over India. Even for voter registration, census, polio and various other immunization efforts, the teachers are roped in. So apart from that, they somehow have to figure out how to make ends meet and also boost student morale. Hence the attention is only limited to the first couple of benches rather than the whole as a 45-minute to an hr. session is just not enough to go through a class of 70-150 school students giving individual attention. And this is when for most teachers, teaching is a means to an end and not the end itself. I am going to take one example of science and sort of break-it-down in multiple steps and how I would have approached that topic for say the 5th-6th standard students in say a public school in Pune and especially if Covid would not have been an issue so you have face-to-face meetup. There was recent news about a mysterious radio signal which came from one of our closest galactic neighbors Proxima Centauri. Now let s say there was a class I was teaching/sharing which I had shared before and there already is trust formed. So before coming to the news, I would tell the students about frequency and more generally the notation of why we like to measure things and how we measure things. There is so much beautiful history which could be acted and enacted which can show and remains in mind why measurement is needed. Once that is understood, discussed and an underpinning is established, we could move to human perception or the lack of it. We know that humans have lots of limits in almost everything, whether it is talking, touching, hearing, all of our five senses are pretty limited with what we know of spectrum available in the immediate family kingdom as well as in the Universe. I would start with how far can a person throw his voice and be heard without using any other means. There does come a point where they need to use anything from a megaphone to a loudspeaker and what it actually does. The other thing I would then talk is about the radio and ask the students to find more about the internals of a radio. If possible to bring an old radio to school where it could be disassembled. After they are familiar with some names of the electronic components and what they do, take them to the electronics market where they try to source all the things needed to make a radio and whatever they encounter. This would allow the students to try and do bargain shopping as well as learn from where to source things. Some might even get a copy or two of electronic projects where the shop themselves sell blueprints to hobbyists so that they can tinker. If there is a place in the school where soldering can be done, then all can try and sooner or later we come to know if something works or not. There is also possibility of talking about noise cancellation and then the topic of ITU can also be bought up and how they do frequency allocation. Last but not the least then the topic can be approached about an alien civilization and an unknown radio signal and what it means and what it can mean. Now if just one topic can give such a wide range of things to do and develop an understanding about not the subject itself but surrounding subjects as well I see no reason why teachers can t do this except they are handcuffed to lot of policy as well as real-life constraints. For e.g. I remember in my school days, we used to go out once or twice a year and that used to be either a school picnic or something similar. The only other I know is going to Mumbai for Nehru planetarium and Nehru science Centre. Unfortunately, I didn t go at that time because the school was taking students via air and the tickets were super costly at the time and that too for a 10 minute journey between the two cities. Those were different days, today you can t have a direct flight between the two cities as it doesn t make an economic sense. It makes more sense to go to Mumbai via train or bus as you will reach Mumbai in about couple of hrs. Of course, Pune does have its own planetarium at New English school and there are a few amateur astronomy clubs in Pune but nothing on the scale that what Mumbai has, but then this is getting off-topic. Now, again in an online world could this be done? Not without both the teacher and the student both spending lot of resources online and even then will be a lower understanding as both the hands-on experience as well as interacting with other students and learning from other students (aping) would be hugely limited. Even the social skills that students develop in a school setting will be rusted. My own social skills probably have weakened and rusted as I have very limited interaction with people over the past few months due to Covid fears and would be at least for the next few years till a large enough population is not vaccinated.

Review: Your Day, Your Way, by Timothy Caulfield

Publisher:	Running Press
Copyright:	December 2020
ISBN:	0-7624-7248-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	236

In case you're wondering why I would pick up a self-help book with such an uninspiring title, it's because this book was originally published in Canada with the title Relax, Damnit! Why Caulfield's US publishers would have changed that title is beyond me. Canada clearly got the better end of this deal. (I'm hoping it's not because they thought "damn" would scare someone off, but it probably is.) The topic of this book is a scientific take on all the little decisions that you may worry about throughout the day: whether to eat breakfast, how much water to drink, whether public toilet seats are risky, whether to weigh yourself, how important flossing is, and much more. Caulfield is a law professor at the University of Alberta specializing in health law and scientific ethics, but the hat he's wearing when writing this book is that of professional skeptic. I found out about this book through Dr. Jen Gunter, a connection that you won't find surprising when I mention that one of Caulfield's earlier books is titled Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?. (Spoiler: yes.) Caulfield chose to organize this collection of random essays around the timeline of a single day, starting with waking up (how long should you sleep?) and morning routines (what do scientific studies say about brushing your teeth?), going through a work day (there's a chapter on multitasking and why you really shouldn't do it), and concluding with dinner (no, you can't taste the difference between most wines even if you think you can), evening routines, and sleep. This worked for me. It's still a bit arbitrary, but it's hard to organize random bits of skepticism, and this layout let Caulfield make a point about how frequently most people check their phones. (Stop doomscrolling. It makes you feel bad. Yes, I'm talking to myself.) I've now read several books, and considerably more essays, on scientific skepticism of this type. They're all a bit the same, and unless you enjoy this general genre of writing, there aren't many compelling reasons to read this specific entry. (Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is still my favorite.) I think the only tidbit that I found surprising and hadn't heard elsewhere is that the science on flossing is meh at best. The rest is the standard mix of mainstream scientific advice (don't drink raw milk, you're not going to catch something from a public toilet seat, multivitamins just give you expensive urine), advice that's scientifically correct but that I'm still not going to follow (there's no scientific reason to wash your hair daily but I still prefer how it feels), and advice to not worry about things with no evidence on either side (it doesn't matter whether you eat breakfast, ten thousand steps is a marketing gimmick, drink water when you're thirsty and don't worry about how much). Caulfield does have a particularly good debunking of the myth that angry ranting helps you calm down and feel better (it does the exact opposite), but if you're reasonably well-read on scientific trivia, nothing here will be that novel. If you don't follow scientific trivia and want a good collection of debunking essays, this book is fine. I certainly won't discourage you from reading it. Caulfield is engaging and succinct, and there's a balanced mix of odd trivia, debunking of pseudoscience, and good public health advice, all comfortably in line with what I've read elsewhere. That said, I found it striking to read this book shortly after Can't Even. I was hoping that Caulfield would tackle the larger problem of anxiety and overload that is in part created by the proliferation of arbitrary standards and rules to which we hold ourselves. He does tackle some related topics, such as our bizarre belief in the US (and apparently Canada) that it is unsafe to let children walk to school without adult supervision, but Caulfield's solutions are nearly all individual. He wants to inform the reader, he wants to show you how to analyze scientific research and notice when news articles are scaring you unnecessarily, and he wants you to become more immune to fear-mongering. Petersen's salient point in Can't Even is that many of us are burned out already and this is even more work. In order to avoid being gratuitously frightened and deceived by con artists and sensational news stories, we have to run a mental checklist of evidence evaluation and go do independent research. Sure, this works, makes you better at risk analysis, and may thus make you feel calmer, but this takes a lot of time and energy. Wasn't a point of having the news media that other people would do some of that work for you? Once again, everything that's wrong with the world becomes another chore or energy expenditure that we all have to independently make. I know, it's asking too much of a harmless book on the scientific evidence behind daily life decisions to make a political point about individual versus collective effort. But it's hard to shake the feeling that asking individuals to try harder to ignore intentionally deceptive and well-funded propaganda campaigns doesn't scale. Not everyone enjoys skepticism as a hobby, and there's only so much individual energy to go around. Relax, Damnit! is good advice as far as it goes. But I'm more in the mood for the books that look at who is making us so anxious in the first place and how we can (collectively) get them to stop. I don't know what that looks like (there are obvious free speech concerns), but we need reliable sources of information that don't make us anxious. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: King of the Murgos, by David Eddings

Series:	The Malloreon #2
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	April 1988
Printing:	November 1991
ISBN:	0-345-35880-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	403

This is the second book of the Malloreon, which in turn is a sequel trilogy to The Belgariad. You could start here, since Eddings does a good job at summarizing previous volumes, but I'm not sure why you'd want to. This is the sort of book that gives epic fantasy series a bad name. After a lot of action in Guardians of the West, our band of heroes has been mostly assembled. They set out after the villain through the novel strategy of exploring the parts of the world map we have not yet seen. By the end of 400 pages of traveling they... are on the trail of the villain while exploring parts of the world map we have not yet seen. What I'm saying is that you'd better be really enjoying Silk's nose twitching and Belgarath being grumpy at Polgara, because that's about all you get. The protagonists collect a few important plot coupons and set up some emotional conflicts whose resolutions are already telegraphed, and that's about it. After wasting a bunch of time getting to and wandering around Nyissa, all of which felt pointless except for one moment of Errand doing something nifty (often the best parts of this series), the band of heroes ventures into enemy territory as foreshadowed by the title. The structure of Eddings's series is basically Suikoden (collect all the protagonists), so as one might expect the point of this excursion is to pick up another protagonist. In the process, we get to see a bit more of the Murgos than we have before. I've commented before that Eddings takes racial essentialism to such an absurd degree that these books start feeling like animal fairy tales, which is why I'm willing to tolerate all of the stereotyping. It's Planet of Hats except with fantasy countries. That tolerance is stretched rather thin when it comes to the bad guys, since the congruence with real-life racism and dehumanization of enemies is a bit too strong. Eddings dodges this mostly by not putting many of the bad guys in the page, but in King of the Murgos he has a golden opportunity to undercut his racial structure and surprise the reader. What if one of the Murgos is a protagonist and is vital to the series plot? I won't spoil what Eddings actually does, but if you imagine the stupidest and most obvious way to avoid having to acknowledge his fantasy races are not uniform, you probably just guessed the big reveal in this book. It's sadly not surprising, since Eddings is all in on his racial construction of this fantasy world, but it's still disgusting. The main reason why I decided to re-read this series, which is notorious for being a re-run of the Belgariad, is because I think what Eddings does here with prophecy, the voice in Garion's head, and the meddling of the seers is hilarious. The plot is openly on rails to the point that the characters actively grumble about it. I find that oddly entertaining, a bit like watching a Twitch streamer play an RPG. In this installment, Errand does something random in the middle of a Murgo temple, Garion gets a level-up chime, the prophecy gets very smug about how well things are going, and no one knows why. It's an absolute delight, and I don't know of any other series that isn't pure parody that would be willing to use that as a plot element. Sadly, King of the Murgos has only one or two enjoyable moments like that, a whole lot of frankly boring map exploration, some truly egregious racist claptrap, and no plot development worth speaking of. I probably should have skipped this one when re-reading this series. Followed by Demon Lord of Karanda. Rating: 4 out of 10

Review: The Biggest Bluff, by Maria Konnikova

Publisher:	Penguin Press
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-525-52263-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	335

After a particularly unlucky year for her family, Maria Konnikova was reading about the balance between luck and control in life and discovered, to her surprise, that John von Neumann, one of the foundational thinkers of computer science, was fascinated by poker. He found most card games boring because they relied on luck. Poker, however, he thought was the perfect balance between luck and skill: enough skill to make its effect undeniable, but enough luck that one could not control the game fully regardless of skill. Konnikova decided on a research project: spend one year learning No Limit Texas Hold'em from one of the best poker players in the world, with a goal of competing in the World Series of Poker. She had studied the description-experience gap during her doctoral research in psychology and wanted to see if the experience of randomness in poker would teach her something the description of the randomness of life could not. Before starting this project, she didn't know the basic rules and had never watched a game. Erik Seidel agreed to mentor her, and The Biggest Bluff is her account of that experience. This book is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating in ways that I don't think can be untangled without making it a far different book. Fitting, I suppose, for a book about how our brains entangle luck and skill. First, if you're looking for a book about poker play, this is not one. Konnikova rarely talks about specific hands or tournaments in more detail than her overall trajectory. That was a disappointment. In the few places she does describe some of her betting decisions, analysis of the other players, and tournament strategy, her accounts are engrossing and suspenseful. I would have happily read a book chronicling her poker tournaments and the decisions she made, but this is not that book. What The Biggest Bluff is instead is a psychological and philosophical examination of the process of learning poker. Konnikova uses her experiences as launching points into philosophical digressions. Even the lessons that have limited surface utility outside of poker, such as learning to suppress body language to avoid giving away information, turn into digressions about interpersonal dynamics and personality types. There are interesting tidbits here, but I've read a lot of popular psychology and was more interested in the poker. My frequent reading experience was impatiently waiting for Konnikova to finish lecturing and get back to her narrative. What Konnikova does do though, at a level that I haven't seen before before in a book of this type, is be brutally honest about her mistakes and her learning process. And I do mean brutally: The book opens with her throwing up in a casino bathroom. (This is not a fun book to read if you don't like reading about stress reactions and medical problems. There aren't many of them, but they're... memorable.) Konnikova knows and can explain the psychological state she's trying to reach, but still finds it hard to do in the moment. Correctly reacting to probabilities, cutting losses, and neither being too over-confident or too scared is very hard. Most books of this type elide over the repeated failures in a sort of training montage, which makes the process look easier than it feels. Konnikova tries to realistically show the setbacks and failures, and I think succeeds. That relentless introspection and critical honesty is the best part of this book, but I think it's also behind the stream of consciousness digressions about psychology and philosophy. It's a true portrayal of how Konnikova makes sense of the world. A more polished and streamlined book about the poker would have been more dramatically engrossing, but it might have lost the deep examination of how she combines poker with her knowledge of psychology to change her thinking. The one place where I think that self-reflection may fall a bit short, which I want to mention because I thought it was a missed opportunity, is around knowledge of hand probabilities. Konnikova makes a point, early in the book, of not approaching poker through the memorization and mathematics route and instead trying to find a play style that focuses on analyzing the other players and controlling her own emotions. This is a good hook, but by the end of the book it's not entirely true. The point that I think she was trying to make is that her edge against other poker players at her same level comes more from psychology than from calculation of precise odds in rare situations. This is true. But by the time she reaches high levels of play, she is using statistical simulators, practice tools, and intensive study just like any professional poker player. There is a minimum level of pure knowledge and memorization required that cannot be avoided. It's clear from the few things she says about this that those tools became more interesting to her as she became better at poker, and I wish she would have dug more into why and how that happened. How much of her newfound ability to make decisions and stick to a plan comes from emotional changes, and how much from that background store of confident knowledge? Or maybe those are different ways of looking at the same change? I did appreciate Konnikova's explicit acknowledgment at the end of the book that poker did not, in the end, provide some deep insight into the balance of luck and skill in real life. Learning poker instead gave Konnikova more personal ability to make a plan for the things that she can control and let go of the things she can't. I'm glad that worked for her, but since reading this book I have noticed former poker players who think life is more knowable than it is. Poker combines random chance with psychological play against other people, but it does so in a way and to an extent that is quantifiable. You can make the correct play and still lose a hand, but you can also know when this has happened. When you're used to analyzing the world through that frame and real life fails to provide that certainty, it's tempting to impose it anyway and insist your simplified models are more accurate because they're more comprehensible. But poker is a game, not a model; being more predictable and more constrained than real life is part of what makes it fun. The skill that Konnikova learned from it has a potential downside that she doesn't talk about. I'm not sure how to sum up this book. Konnikova's internal analysis and honesty is truly admirable and illuminating, but it left me wanting to read a different book that was more focused on poker narration. I know there are lots of those books out there, but I doubt they would be written with Konnikova's self-awareness and lack of ego. However, they would probably also lack the moments that made me cringe or that were deeply uncomfortable to read. My feelings are mixed. But if you want popular psychology wrapped around a deeply honest account of the process of learning poker, I suspect this book is one of a kind. Rating: 7 out of 10

I have updated my debpkg plugin for IDEA (e.g. IntelliJ, PyCharm, Android Studios) to v0.0.8. Here are some of the changes since last time I wrote about the plugin. New file types supported

• .dsc (as a generic deb822 file)
• .buildinfo and .changes (as a generic deb822 provided the base name looks like it follows the package_version_arch pattern)
• debian/copyright (as a DEP-5 / machine-readable copyright file if the Format field exists).

Links for URLs and bug closes There are often links in deb822 files or the debian/changelog and as of v0.0.8, the plugin will now highlight them and able you to easily open them via your browser. In the deb822 case, they generally appear in the Homepage field, the Vcs-* fields or the Format field of the debian/copyright field. For the changelog file, they often appear in the form of bug Closes statements such as the #123456 in Closes: #123456 , which is a reference to https://bugs.debian.org/123456. Improvements to debian/control The dependency validator now has per-field knowledge. This enables it to flag dependency relations in the Provides field that uses operators other than = (which is the only operator that is supported in that field). It also knows which fields support build-profile restrictions. It in theory also do Architecture restrictions, but I have not added it among other because it gets a bit spicy around binary packages. (Fun fact, you can have Depends: foo [amd64] but only for arch:any packages.) The plugin now suggests adding a Rules-Requires-Root field to the Source stanza along with a quick fix for adding the field. Admittedly, it was mostly done as exercise for me to learn how to do that kind of feature. Support for machine-readable debian/copyright The plugin now has a dedicated file type for debian/copyright that follows the machine-readable format. It should auto-detect it automatically based on the presence of the Format field being set to https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0. Sadly, I have not found the detection reliable in all cases, so you may have to apply it manually. With the copyright format, the plugin now scans the Files fields for common issues like pointing on non-existing paths and invalid escape sequences. When the plugin discovers a path that does not match anything, it highlights the part of the path that cannot be found. As an example, consider the pattern src/foo/data.c and that src/foo exist but data.c does not exist, then the plugin will only flag the data.c part of src/foo/data.c as invalid. The plugin will also suggest a quick fix if you a directory into the Files field to replace it with a directory wildcard (e.g. src/foo -> src/foo/* ), which is how the spec wants you to reference every file beneath a given directory. Finally, when the plugin can identify part of the path, then it will turn it into a link (reference in IDEA lingo). This means that you can CTRL + click on it to jump to the file. As a side-effect, it also provides refactoring assistance for renaming files, where renaming a file will often be automatically reflected in debian/copyright. This use case is admittedly mostly relevant people, who are both upstream and downstream maintainer. Folding support improvement for .dsc/.changes/.buildinfo files The new field types appeared with two cases, where I decided to improve the folding support logic. The first was the GPG signature (if present), which consists of two parts. The top part with is mostly a single line marker but often followed by a GPG armor header (e.g. Hash: SHA512 ) and then the signature blob with related marker lines around it. Both cases are folded into a single marker line by default to reduce their impact on content in the editor view. The second case was the following special-case pattern:

Files:
 <md5> <size> filename
Checksums-Sha256:
 <sha256> <size> filename

In the above example, where there is exactly on file name, those fields will by default now be folded into:

Files: <md5> <size> filename
Checksums-Sha256: <sha256> <size> filename

For all other multi-line fields, the plugin still falls back to a list of known fields to fold by default as in previous versions. Spellchecking improvements The plugin already supported selective spell checking in v0.0.3, where it often omitted spell checking for fields (in deb822 files) where it did not make sense. The spell check feature has been improved by providing a list of known packaging terms/jargo used by many contributors (so autopkgtests is no longer considered a typo). This applies to all file types (probably also those not handled by the plugin as it is just a dictionary). Furthermore, the plugin also attempts discover common patterns (e.g. file names or command arguments) and exempt these from spell checking in the debian/changelog. This also includes manpage references such as foo.1 or foo(1) . It is far from perfect and relies on common patterns to exclude spell checking. Nonetheless, it should reduce the number of false positive considerably. Feedback welcome Please let me know if you run into bugs or would like a particular feature implemented. You can submit bug reports and feature requests in the issue tracker on github.

A good backup strategy needs to consider various threats to the integrity of data. For instance:

• Building catches fire
• Accidental deletion
• Equipment failure
• Security incident / malware / compromise

It s that last one that is of particular interest today. A lot of backup strategies are such that if a user (or administrator) has their local account or network compromised, their backups could very well be destroyed as well. For instance, do you ssh from the account being backed up to the system holding the backups? Or rsync using a keypair stored on it? Or access S3 buckets, etc? It is trivially easy in many of these schemes to totally ruin cloud-based backups, or even some other schemes. rsync can be run with delete (and often is, to prune remotes), S3 buckets can be deleted, etc. And even if you try to lock down an over-network backup to be append-only, still there are vectors for attack (ssh credentials, OpenSSL bugs, etc). In this post, I try to explore how we can protect against them and still retain some modern conveniences. A backup scheme also needs to make a balance between:

• Cost
• Security
• Accessibility
• Efficiency (of time, bandwidth, storage, etc)

My story so far About 20 years ago, I had an Exabyte tape drive, with the amazing capacity of 7GB per tape! Eventually as disk prices fell, I had external disks plugged in to a server, and would periodically rotate them offsite. I ve also had various combinations of partial or complete offsite copies over the Internet as well. I have around 6TB of data to back up (after compression), a figure that is growing somewhat rapidly as I digitize some old family recordings and videos. Since I last wrote about backups 5 years ago, my scheme has been largely unchanged; at present I use ZFS for local and to-disk backups and borg for the copies over the Internet. Let s take a look at some options that could make this better. Tape The original airgapped backup. You back up to a tape, then you take the (fairly cheap) tape out of the drive and put in another one. In cost per GB, tape is probably the cheapest medium out there. But of course it has its drawbacks. Let s start with cost. To get a drive that can handle capacities of what I d be needing, at least LTO-6 (2.5TB per tape) would be needed, if not LTO-7 (6TB). New, these drives cost several thousand dollars, plus they need LVD SCSI or Fibre Channel cards. You re not going to be hanging one off a Raspberry Pi; these things need a real server with enterprise-style connectivity. If you re particularly lucky, you might find an LTO-6 drive for as low as $500 on eBay. Then there are tapes. A 10-pack of LTO-6 tapes runs more than $200, and provides a total capacity of 25TB sufficient for these needs (note that, of course, you need to have at least double the actual space of the data, to account for multiple full backups in a set). A 5-pack of LTO-7 tapes is a little more expensive, while providing more storage. So all-in, this is going to be in the best possible scenario nearly $1000, and possibly a lot more. For a large company with many TB of storage, the initial costs can be defrayed due to the cheaper media, but for a home user, not so much. Consider that 8TB hard drives can be found for $150 $200. A pair of them (for redundancy) would run $300-400, and then you have all the other benefits of disk (quicker access, etc.) Plus they can be driven by something as cheap as a Raspberry Pi. Fancier tape setups involve auto-changers, but then you re not really airgapped, are you? (If you leave all your tapes in the changer, they can generally be selected and overwritten, barring things like hardware WORM). As useful as tape is, for this project, it would simply be way more expensive than disk-based options. Fundamentals of disk-based airgapping The fundamental thing we need to address with disk-based airgapping is that the machines being backed up have no real-time contact with the backup storage system. This rules out most solutions out there, that want to sync by comparing local state with remote state. If one is willing to throw storage efficiency out the window maybe practical for very small data sets one could just send a full backup daily. But in reality, what is more likely needed is a way to store a local proxy for the remote state. Then a runner device (a USB stick, disk, etc) could be plugged into the network, filled with queued data, then plugged into the backup system to have the data dequeued and processed. Some may be tempted to short-circuit this and just plug external disks into a backup system. I ve done that for a long time. This is, however, a risk, because it makes those disks vulnerable to whatever may be attacking the local system (anything from lightning to ransomware). ZFS ZFS is, it should be no surprise, particularly well suited for this. zfs send/receive can send an incremental stream that represents a delta between two checkpoints (snapshots or bookmarks) on a filesystem. It can do this very efficiently, much more so than walking an entire filesystem tree. Additionally, with the recent addition of ZFS crypto to ZFS on Linux, the replication stream can optionally reflect the encrypted data. Yes, as long as you don t need to mount them, you can mostly work with ZFS datasets on an encrypted basis, and can directly tell zfs send to just send the encrypted data instead of the decrypted data. The downside of ZFS is the resource requirements at the destination, which in terms of RAM are higher than most of the older Raspberry Pi-style devices. Still, one could perhaps just save off zfs send streams and restore them later if need be, but that implies a periodic resend of a full stream, an inefficient operation. dedpulicating software such as borg could be used on those streams (though with less effectiveness if they re encrypted). Tar Perhaps surprisingly, tar in listed incremental mode can solve this problem for non-ZFS users. It will keep a local cache of the state of the filesystem as of the time of the last run of tar, and can generate new tarballs that reflect the changes since the previous run (even deletions). This can achieve a similar result to the ZFS send/receive, though in a much less elegant way. Bacula / Bareos Bacula (and its fork Bareos) both have support for a FIFO destination. Theoretically this could be used to queue of data for transfer to the airgapped machine. This support is very poorly documented in both and is rumored to have bitrotted, however. rdiff and xdelta rdiff and xdelta can be used as sort of a non-real-time rsync, at least on a per-file basis. Theoretically, one could generate a full backup (with tar, ZFS send, or whatever), take an rdiff signature, and send over the file while keeping the signature. On the next run, another full backup is piped into rdiff, and on the basis of the signature file of the old and the new data, it produces a binary patch that can be queued for the backup target to update its stored copy of the file. This leaves history preservation as an exercise to be undertaken on the backup target. It may not necessarily be easy and may not be efficient. rsync batches rsync can be used to compute a delta between two directory trees and express this as a single-file batch that can be processed by a remote rsync. Unfortunately this implies the sender must always keep an old tree around (barring a solution such as ZFS snapshots) in order to compute the delta, and of course it still implies the need for history processing on the remote. Getting the Data There OK, so you ve got an airgapped system, some sort of runner device for your sneakernet (USB stick, hard drive, etc). Now what? Obviously you could just copy data on the runner and move it back off at the backup target. But a tool like NNCP (sort of a modernized UUCP) offer a lot of help in automating the process, returning error reports, etc. NNCP can be used online over TCP, over reliable serial links, over ssh, with offline onion routing via intermediaries or directly, etc. Imagine having an airgapped machine at a different location you go to frequently (workplace, friend, etc). Before leaving, you put a USB stick in your pocket. When you get there, you pop it in. It s despooled and processed while you want, and return emails or whatever are queued up to be sent when you get back home. Not bad, eh? Future installment I m going to try some of these approaches and report back on my experiences in the next few weeks.