Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 575 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new (stable) upstream (minor) release Armadillo 12.8.0 prepared by Conrad two days ago. We, as usual, prepared a release candidate which we tested against the over 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. This found no issues, which was confirmed by CRAN once we uploaded and so it arrived as a new release today in a fully automated fashion. We also made a small change that had been prepared by GitHub issue #400: a few internal header files that were cluttering the top-level of the include directory have been moved to internal directories. The standard header is of course unaffected, and the set of full / light / lighter / lightest headers (matching we did a while back in Rcpp) also continue to work as one expects. This change was also tested in a full reverse-dependency check in January but had not been released to CRAN yet. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.0.0 (2024-02-06)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.0 (Cortisol Injector)
  • Faster detection of symmetric expressions by pinv() and rank()
  • Expanded shift() to handle sparse matrices
  • Expanded conv_to for more flexible conversions between sparse and dense matrices
  • Added cbrt()
  • More compact representation of integers when saving matrices in CSV format
• Five non-user facing top-level include files have been removed (#432 closing #400 and building on #395 and #396)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Write it down before I forget about it again:

for x in $(gh api graphql --paginate -f query='query($endCursor:String)   organization(login:"myorg")  
    repositories(first: 100, after: $endCursor, isArchived:false)  
        pageInfo  
            hasNextPage
            endCursor
         
        nodes  
            name
         
     
     
     ' --jq '.data.organization.repositories.nodes[].name'); do
    secrets=$(gh secret list --json name --jq '.[].name' -R "myorg/$ x "   tr '\n' ',')
    if ! [ -z "$ secrets " ]; then
        echo "$ x ,$ secrets "
    fi
done

Requests a list of all not archived repositories in a GitHub org and queries repository secrets. If we find some we output the repo name and the secrets in a comma separated list. Not real CSV, but good enough for further processing. I've to admit it's kinda beautiful what you can do with the gh cli by now. Sadly it seems the secrets are not yet available via GraphQL (or I missed it in the docs), so I just use the gh cli to do the REST calls.

New Year, Same Great People! Our Debian User Group met for the first of our 2024 bi-monthly meetings on February 4th and it was loads of fun. Around twelve different people made it this time to Koumbit, where the meeting happened. As a reminder, our meetings are called "Debian & Stuff" because we want to be as open as possible and welcome people that want to work on "other stuff" than Debian. Here is what we did: pollo:

• tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the problem was indeed with the battery :D)
• renewed his expiring OpenPGP key
• worked on removing trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure from the DebCI reject_list
• helped anarcat with packaging sigal
• managed to feed most of the people present :)

LeLutin:

• worked with lavamind to upload new upstream release of smokeping

mjeanson:

• migrated from lxd to incus on his servers
• helped anarcat with flashing his AirGradient

lavamind:

• submitted a bug report on r-cran-rserve (promptly fixed/uploaded by maintainer!)
• reviewed and uploaded smokeping
• bug triaged the facter package
• worked on puppet-agent new upstream version 8.4.0

viashimo:

• updated puppet-strings from 2.9.0 to 4.2.1
• reported upstream test failures on puppet-strings with recent versions of mdl

tvaz & tassia:

• drafted a call & request for funding for the Vanier College FLOSS Club hardware marathon at Eastern Bloc
• worked on an application to conduct research at Vanier College on Debian usability
• babysitted :-)

joeDoe:

• worked on his AirGradient
• debugged the WiFi and VPN setup on his new laptop

anarcat:

• worked on packaging sigal
• worked on flashing his AirGradient boards
• rewrote a Prometheus exporter for Airgradient devices
• brought over a car full of old computer gear to donate

Pictures I was pretty busy this time around and ended up not taking a lot of pictures. Here's a bad one of the ceiling at Koumbit I took, and a picture by anarcat of the content of his boxes of loot:

It s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!! My first week ( I started midweek ): It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely amazed with the work they have done, and if you are in the market for a new laptop, you must check these out!!! https://kfocus.org Or if you want to try before you buy you can download the OS! All they ask is for an e-mail, which is completely reasonable. Hosting isn t free! Besides, you can opt out anytime and they don t share it with anyone. I look forward to working closely with this project. We now have a Kubuntu Team in KDE invent https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu if you would like to join us, please don t hesitate to ask! I have started a new Wiki and our first page is the ever important Bug triaging! It is still a WIP but you can check it out here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu/docs/-/wikis/Bug-Triage-Story-WIP , with that said I have started the launchpad work to make tracking our bugs easier buy subscribing kubuntu-bugs to all our packages and creating proper projects for our packages missing them. We have compiled a list of our various documentation links that need updated and Rick Timmis is updating kubuntu.org! Aaron Honeycutt has been busy with the Kubuntu Manual https://github.com/kubuntu-team/kubuntu-manual which is in good shape. We just need to improve our developer story I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844 with testing the fixes from the ppa and writing profiles for the various KDE packages affected ( pretty much anything that uses webengine ) and making progress there. My next order of business staging Frameworks 5.114 with guidance from our super awesome Rik Mills that has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Kubuntu for many years now. So thank you for that Rik I will also start on our big transition to the Calamaras Installer! I do have experience here, so I expect it will be a smooth one. I am so excited for the future of Kubuntu and the exciting things to come! With that said, the Kubuntu funding is community donation driven. There is enough to pay me part time for a couple contracts, but it will run out and a full-time contract would be super awesome. I am reaching out to anyone enjoying Kubuntu and want to help with the future of Kubuntu to please consider a donation! We are working on more donation options, but for now you can donate through paypal at https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you!!!!!

I recently had the most astonishingly bad experience with UPS, the courier company. They severely damaged my parcels, and were very bad about UK import VAT, ultimately ending up harassing me on autopilot. The only thing that got their attention was my draft Particulars of Claim for intended legal action. Surprisingly, I got them to admit in writing that the disbursement fee they charge recipients alongside the actual VAT, is just something they made up with no legal basis. What happened Autumn last year I ordered some furniture from a company in Germany. This was to be shipped by them to me by courier. The supplier chose UPS. UPS misrouted one of the three parcels to Denmark. When everything arrived, it had been sat on by elephants. The supplier had to replace most of it, with considerable inconvenience and delay to me, and of course a loss to the supplier. But this post isn t mostly about that. This post is about VAT. You see, import VAT was due, because of fucking Brexit. UPS made a complete hash of collecting that VAT. Their computers can t issue coherent documents, their email helpdesk is completely useless, and their automated debt collection systems run along uninfluenced by any external input. The crazy, including legal threats and escalating late payment fees, continued even after I paid the VAT discrepancy (which I did despite them not yet having provided any coherent calculation for it). This kind of behaviour is a very small and mild version of the kind of things British Gas did to Lisa Ferguson, who eventually won substantial damages for harassment, plus 10K of costs. Having tried asking nicely, and sending stiff letters, I too threatened litigation. I would have actually started a court claim, but it would have included a claim under the Protection from Harassment Act. Those have to be filed under the Part 8 procedure , which involves sending all of the written evidence you re going to use along with the claim form. Collating all that would be a good deal of work, especially since UPS and ControlAccount didn t engage with me at all, so I had no idea which things they might actually dispute. So I decided that before issuing proceedings, I d send them a copy of my draft Particulars of Claim, along with an offer to settle if they would pay me a modest sum and stop being evil robots at me. Rather than me typing the whole tale in again, you can read the full gory details in the PDF of my draft Particulars of Claim. (I ve redacted the reference numbers). Outcome The draft Particulars finally got their attention. UPS sent me an offer: they agreed to pay me 50, in full and final settlement. That was close enough to my offer that I accepted it. I mostly wanted them to stop, and they do seem to have done so. And I ve received the 50. VAT calculation They also finally included an actual explanation of the VAT calculation. It s absurd, but it s not UPS s absurd:

The clearance was entered initially with estimated import charges of 400.03, consisting of 387.83 VAT, and 12.20 disbursement fee. This original entry regrettably did not include the freight cost for calculating the VAT, and as such when submitted for final entry the VAT value was adjusted to include this and an amended invoice was issued for an additional 39.84. HMRC calculate the amount against which VAT is raised using the value of goods, insurance and freight, however they also may apply a VAT adjustment figure. The VAT Adjustment is based on many factors (Incidental costs in regards to a shipment), which includes charge for currency conversion if the invoice does not list values in Sterling, but the main is due to the inland freight from airport of destination to the final delivery point, as this charge varies, for example, from EMA to Edinburgh would be 150, from EMA to Derby would be 1, so each year UPS must supply HMRC with all values incurred for entry build up and they give an average which UPS have to use on the entry build up as the VAT Adjustment. The correct calculation for the import charges is therefore as follows: Goods value divided by exchange rate 2,489.53 EUR / 1.1683 = 2,130.89 GBP Duty: Goods value plus freight (%) 2,130.89 GBP + 5% = 2,237.43 GBP. That total times the duty rate. X 0 % = 0 GBP VAT: Goods value plus freight (100%) 2,130.89 GBP + 0 = 2,130.89 GBP That total plus duty and VAT adjustment 2,130.89 GBP + 0 GBP + 7.49 GBP = 2,348.08 GBP. That total times 20% VAT = 427.67 GBP As detailed above we must confirm that the final VAT charges applied to the shipment were correct, and that no refund of this is therefore due.

This looks very like HMRC-originated nonsense. If only they had put it on the original bills! It s completely ridiculous that it took four months and near-litigation to obtain it. Disbursement fee One more thing. UPS billed me a 12 disbursement fee . When you import something, there s often tax to pay. The courier company pays that to the government, and the consignee pays it to the courier. Usually the courier demands it before final delivery, since otherwise they end up having to chase it as a debt. It is common for parcel companies to add a random fee of their own. As I note in my Particulars, there isn t any legal basis for this. In my own offer of settlement I proposed that UPS should:

State under what principle of English law (such as, what enactment or principle of Common Law), you levy the disbursement fee (or refund it).

To my surprise they actually responded to this in their own settlement letter. (They didn t, for example, mention the harassment at all.) They said (emphasis mine):

A disbursement fee is a fee for amounts paid or processed on behalf of a client. It is an established category of charge used by legal firms, amongst other companies, for billing of various ancillary costs which may be incurred in completion of service. Disbursement fees are not covered by a specific law, nor are they legally prohibited. Regarding UPS disbursement fee this is an administrative charge levied for the use of UPS deferment account to prepay import charges for clearance through CDS. This charge would therefore be billed to the party that is responsible for the import charges, normally the consignee or receiver of the shipment in question. The disbursement fee as applied is legitimate, and as you have stated is a commonly used and recognised charge throughout the courier industry, and I can confirm that this was charged correctly in this instance.

On UPS s analysis, they can just make up whatever fee they like. That is clearly not right (and I don t even need to refer to consumer protection law, which would also make it obviously unlawful). And, that everyone does it doesn t make it lawful. There are so many things that are ubiquitous but unlawful, especially nowadays when much of the legal system - especially consumer protection regulators - has been underfunded to beyond the point of collapse. Next time this comes up I might have a go at getting the fee back. (Obviously I ll have to pay it first, to get my parcel.) ParcelForce and Royal Mail I think this analysis doesn t apply to ParcelForce and (probably) Royal Mail. I looked into this in 2009, and I found that Parcelforce had been given the ability to write their own private laws: Schemes made under section 89 of the Postal Services Act 2000. This is obviously ridiculous but I think it was the law in 2009. I doubt the intervening governments have fixed it. Furniture Oh, yes, the actual furniture. The replacements arrived intact and are great :-).

comments

A new minor release 0.4.21 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN this afternoon, and has already been uploaded to Debian as well. QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for more than twenty years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded there. This release of RQuantLib benefits from some kind attention that Jeroen has been paying to how we build (especially at CRAN) on both macOS and Windows. So the build processes are a little better now, and no internal code changed. QuantLib 1.33 built unchanged.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.21 (2024-02-01)

• Generalize macOS build to universal build (Jeroen in #179)
• Generalize Windows build to arm64 (Jeroen in #181)
• Generalize version string use to support cmake use (Jeroen in #181 fixing #180)
• Minor update to 'ci.yaml' github action (Dirk)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Leonardo and I are happy to announce the release of a very minor maintenance release 0.1.2 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for a little under two years now. dtts builds upon our nanotime package as well as the beloved data.table to bring high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to offers the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense power of data.table while supporting highest nanosecond resolution. This release follows yesterday s long-awaited release of data.table version 1.5.0 which had been some time in the making as the first new major.minor release since Matt drifted into being less active and the forefront. The release also renamed the one C-level API accessor to data.table (which was added, if memory serves, by Leonardo with our use in mind). So we have to catch up to the renamed identifier; this release does that, and adds a versioned imports statement on data.table. The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2024-01-31)

• Update the one exported C-level identifier from data.table following its 1.5.0 release and a renaming
• Routine continuous integration updates

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a report with diffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

If you ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised, and clicked on the Show More button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again. This might make sense after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume of certificates, they ll be seen more often in a list of compromised certificates. In an attempt to see if there is anything that we can learn from this data, though, I did a bit of digging, and came up with some illuminating results.

The Procedure I started off by finding all the unexpired certificates logged in Certificate Transparency (CT) logs that have a key that is in the pwnedkeys database as having been publicly disclosed. From this list of certificates, I removed duplicates by matching up issuer/serial number tuples, and then reduced the set by counting the number of unique certificates by their issuer. This gave me a list of the issuers of these certificates, which looks a bit like this:

/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=AlphaSSL CA - SHA256 - G4
/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=Sectigo Limited/CN=Sectigo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA
/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=Sectigo Limited/CN=Sectigo RSA Organization Validation Secure Server CA
/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Scottsdale/O=GoDaddy.com, Inc./OU=http://certs.godaddy.com/repository//CN=Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2
/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Scottsdale/O=Starfield Technologies, Inc./OU=http://certs.starfieldtech.com/repository//CN=Starfield Secure Certificate Authority - G2
/C=AT/O=ZeroSSL/CN=ZeroSSL RSA Domain Secure Site CA
/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=GlobalSign GCC R3 DV TLS CA 2020

Rather than try to work with raw issuers (because, as Andrew Ayer says, The SSL Certificate Issuer Field is a Lie), I mapped these issuers to the organisations that manage them, and summed the counts for those grouped issuers together.

The Data

Insert obligatory "not THAT data" comment here

The end result of this work is the following table, sorted by the count of certificates which have been compromised by exposing their private key:

Issuer	Compromised Count
Sectigo	170
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)	161
GoDaddy	141
DigiCert	81
GlobalSign	46
Entrust	3
SSL.com	1

If you re familiar with the CA ecosystem, you ll probably recognise that the organisations with large numbers of compromised certificates are also those who issue a lot of certificates. So far, nothing particularly surprising, then. Let s look more closely at the relationships, though, to see if we can get more useful insights.

Volume Control Using the issuance volume report from crt.sh, we can compare issuance volumes to compromise counts, to come up with a compromise rate . I m using the Unexpired Precertificates colume from the issuance volume report, as I feel that s the number that best matches the certificate population I m examining to find compromised certificates. To maintain parity with the previous table, this one is still sorted by the count of certificates that have been compromised.

Issuer	Issuance Volume	Compromised Count	Compromise Rate
Sectigo	88,323,068	170	1 in 519,547
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)	315,476,402	161	1 in 1,959,480
GoDaddy	56,121,429	141	1 in 398,024
DigiCert	144,713,475	81	1 in 1,786,586
GlobalSign	1,438,485	46	1 in 31,271
Entrust	23,166	3	1 in 7,722
SSL.com	171,816	1	1 in 171,816

If we now sort this table by compromise rate, we can see which organisations have the most (and least) leakiness going on from their customers:

Issuer	Issuance Volume	Compromised Count	Compromise Rate
Entrust	23,166	3	1 in 7,722
GlobalSign	1,438,485	46	1 in 31,271
SSL.com	171,816	1	1 in 171,816
GoDaddy	56,121,429	141	1 in 398,024
Sectigo	88,323,068	170	1 in 519,547
DigiCert	144,713,475	81	1 in 1,786,586
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)	315,476,402	161	1 in 1,959,480

By grouping by order-of-magnitude in the compromise rate, we can identify three bands :

• The Super Leakers: Customers of Entrust and GlobalSign seem to love to lose control of their private keys. For Entrust, at least, though, the small volumes involved make the numbers somewhat untrustworthy. The three compromised certificates could very well belong to just one customer, for instance. I m not aware of anything that GlobalSign does that would make them such an outlier, either, so I m inclined to think they just got unlucky with one or two customers, but as CAs don t include customer IDs in the certificates they issue, it s not possible to say whether that s the actual cause or not.
• The Regular Leakers: Customers of SSL.com, GoDaddy, and Sectigo all have compromise rates in the 1-in-hundreds-of-thousands range. Again, the low volumes of SSL.com make the numbers somewhat unreliable, but the other two organisations in this group have large enough numbers that we can rely on that data fairly well, I think.
• The Low Leakers: Customers of DigiCert and Let s Encrypt are at least three times less likely than customers of the regular leakers to lose control of their private keys. Good for them!

Now we have some useful insights we can think about.

Why Is It So?

If you don't know who Professor Julius Sumner Miller is, I highly recommend finding out

All of the organisations on the list, with the exception of Let s Encrypt, are what one might term traditional CAs. To a first approximation, it s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the customers of these traditional CAs probably manage their certificates the same way they have for the past two decades or more. That is, they generate a key and CSR, upload the CSR to the CA to get a certificate, then copy the cert and key somewhere. Since humans are handling the keys, there s a higher risk of the humans using either risky practices, or making a mistake, and exposing the private key to the world. Let s Encrypt, on the other hand, issues all of its certificates using the ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) protocol, and all of the Let s Encrypt documentation encourages the use of software tools to generate keys, issue certificates, and install them for use. Given that Let s Encrypt has 161 compromised certificates currently in the wild, it s clear that the automation in use is far from perfect, but the significantly lower compromise rate suggests to me that lifecycle automation at least reduces the rate of key compromise, even though it doesn t eliminate it completely.

Sidebar: ACME Does Not Currently Rule The World It is true that all of the organisations in this analysis also provide ACME issuance workflows, should customers desire it. However, the traditional CA companies have been around a lot longer than ACME has, and so they probably acquired many of their customers before ACME existed. Given that it s incredibly hard to get humans to change the way they do things, once they have a way that works , it seems reasonable to assume that most of the certificates issued by these CAs are handled in the same human-centric, error-prone manner they always have been. If organisations would like to refute this assumption, though, by sharing their data on ACME vs legacy issuance rates, I m sure we d all be extremely interested.

Explaining the Outlier The difference in presumed issuance practices would seem to explain the significant difference in compromise rates between Let s Encrypt and the other organisations, if it weren t for one outlier. This is a largely traditional CA, with the manual-handling issues that implies, but with a compromise rate close to that of Let s Encrypt. We are, of course, talking about DigiCert. The thing about DigiCert, that doesn t show up in the raw numbers from crt.sh, is that DigiCert manages the issuance of certificates for several of the biggest hosted TLS providers, such as CloudFlare and AWS. When these services obtain a certificate from DigiCert on their customer s behalf, the private key is kept locked away, and no human can (we hope) get access to the private key. This is supported by the fact that no certificates identifiably issued to either CloudFlare or AWS appear in the set of certificates with compromised keys. When we ask for all certificates issued by DigiCert , we get both the certificates issued to these big providers, which are very good at keeping their keys under control, as well as the certificates issued to everyone else, whose key handling practices may not be quite so stringent. It s possible, though not trivial, to account for certificates issued to these hosted TLS providers, because the certificates they use are issued from intermediates branded to those companies. With the crt.sh psql interface we can run this query to get the total number of unexpired precertificates issued to these managed services:

SELECT SUM(sub.NUM_ISSUED[2] - sub.NUM_EXPIRED[2])
  FROM (
    SELECT ca.name, max(coalesce(coalesce(nullif(trim(cc.SUBORDINATE_CA_OWNER), ''), nullif(trim(cc.CA_OWNER), '')), cc.INCLUDED_CERTIFICATE_OWNER)) as OWNER,
           ca.NUM_ISSUED, ca.NUM_EXPIRED
      FROM ccadb_certificate cc, ca_certificate cac, ca
     WHERE cc.CERTIFICATE_ID = cac.CERTIFICATE_ID
       AND cac.CA_ID = ca.ID
  GROUP BY ca.ID
  ) sub
 WHERE sub.name ILIKE '%Amazon%' OR sub.name ILIKE '%CloudFlare%' AND sub.owner = 'DigiCert';

The number I get from running that query is 104,316,112, which should be subtracted from DigiCert s total issuance figures to get a more accurate view of what DigiCert s regular customers do with their private keys. When I do this, the compromise rates table, sorted by the compromise rate, looks like this:

Issuer	Issuance Volume	Compromised Count	Compromise Rate
Entrust	23,166	3	1 in 7,722
GlobalSign	1,438,485	46	1 in 31,271
SSL.com	171,816	1	1 in 171,816
GoDaddy	56,121,429	141	1 in 398,024
"Regular" DigiCert	40,397,363	81	1 in 498,732
Sectigo	88,323,068	170	1 in 519,547
All DigiCert	144,713,475	81	1 in 1,786,586
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)	315,476,402	161	1 in 1,959,480

In short, it appears that DigiCert s regular customers are just as likely as GoDaddy or Sectigo customers to expose their private keys.

What Does It All Mean? The takeaway from all this is fairly straightforward, and not overly surprising, I believe.

The less humans have to do with certificate issuance, the less likely they are to compromise that certificate by exposing the private key. While it may not be surprising, it is nice to have some empirical evidence to back up the common wisdom. Fully-managed TLS providers, such as CloudFlare, AWS Certificate Manager, and whatever Azure s thing is called, is the platonic ideal of this principle: never give humans any opportunity to expose a private key. I m not saying you should use one of these providers, but the security approach they have adopted appears to be the optimal one, and should be emulated universally. The ACME protocol is the next best, in that there are a variety of standardised tools widely available that allow humans to take themselves out of the loop, but it s still possible for humans to handle (and mistakenly expose) key material if they try hard enough. Legacy issuance methods, which either cannot be automated, or require custom, per-provider automation to be developed, appear to be at least four times less helpful to the goal of avoiding compromise of the private key associated with a certificate.

Humans Are, Of Course, The Problem

No thanks, Bender, I'm busy tonight

This observation that if you don t let humans near keys, they don t get leaked is further supported by considering the biggest issuers by volume who have not issued any certificates whose keys have been compromised: Google Trust Services (fourth largest issuer overall, with 57,084,529 unexpired precertificates), and Microsoft Corporation (sixth largest issuer overall, with 22,852,468 unexpired precertificates). It appears that somewhere between most and basically all of the certificates these organisations issue are to customers of their public clouds, and my understanding is that the keys for these certificates are managed in same manner as CloudFlare and AWS the keys are locked away where humans can t get to them. It should, of course, go without saying that if a human can never have access to a private key, it makes it rather difficult for a human to expose it. More broadly, if you are building something that handles sensitive or secret data, the more you can do to keep humans out of the loop, the better everything will be.

Your Support is Appreciated If you d like to see more analysis of how key compromise happens, and the lessons we can learn from examining billions of certificates, please show your support by buying me a refreshing beverage. Trawling CT logs is thirsty work.

Appendix: Methodology Limitations In the interests of clarity, I feel it s important to describe ways in which my research might be flawed. Here are the things I know of that may have impacted the accuracy, that I couldn t feasibly account for.

• Time Periods: Because time never stops, there is likely to be some slight mismatches in the numbers obtained from the various data sources, because they weren t collected at exactly the same moment.
• Issuer-to-Organisation Mapping: It s possible that the way I mapped issuers to organisations doesn t match exactly with how crt.sh does it, meaning that counts might be skewed. I tried to minimise that by using the same data sources (the CCADB AllCertificates report) that I believe that crt.sh uses for its mapping, but I cannot be certain of a perfect match.
• Unwarranted Grouping: I ve drawn some conclusions about the practices of the various organisations based on their general approach to certificate issuance. If a particular subordinate CA that I ve grouped into the parent organisation is managed in some unusual way, that might cause my conclusions to be erroneous. I was able to fairly easily separate out CloudFlare, AWS, and Azure, but there are almost certainly others that I didn t spot, because hoo boy there are a lot of intermediate CAs out there.

I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was initially tempted to buy a new Thinkpad by the prices of high end X1 devices dropping, this new Yoga has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 screen that s a good upgrade from 8G with 1920*1080. The CPU of my new Thinkpad is a quad core i5-8350U that rates 6226 [2] and is a decent upgrade from the dual core i5-6300U that rates 3239 [3] although that wasn t a factor as I found the old CPU fast enough. The Yoga Gen3 has a minimum weight of 1.4Kg and mine might not be the lightest model in the range while the old Carbon weighs 1.14Kg. I can really feel the difference. It s also slightly larger but fortunately still fits in the pocket of my Scottware jacket. The higher resolution screen and more RAM were not sufficient to make me want to spend some money. The deciding factor is that as I m working on phones with touch screens it is a benefit to use a laptop with a touch screen so I can do more testing. The Yoga I bought was going cheap because the touch part of the touch screen is broken but the stylus still works, this is apparently a common failure mode of the Yoga. The Yoga has a brighter screen than the Carbon and seems to have better contrast. I think Lenovo had some newer technology for that generation of laptops or maybe my Carbon is slightly defective in that regard. It s a hazard of buying second hand that if something basically works but isn t quite as good as it should be then you will never know. I m happy with this purchase and I recommend that everyone who buys laptops secondhand the way I do only get 1440p or better displays. I ve currently got the Kitty terminal emulator [4] setup with 9 windows that each have 103 or 104 columns and 26 or 28 rows of text. That s a lot of terminals on a laptop screen!

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen5/
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/ysnrnelp
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/y94bdr2y
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/29/hello-kitty/

In my previous blog post Providing online reference documentation for debputy, I made a point about how debhelper documentation was suboptimal on account of being static rather than online. The thing is that debhelper is not alone in this problem space, even if it is a major contributor to the number of packaging files you have to to know about. If we look at the "competition" here such as Fedora and Arch Linux, they tend to only have one packaging file. While most Debian people will tell you a long list of cons about having one packaging file (such a Fedora's spec file being 3+ domain specific languages "mashed" into one file), one major advantage is that there is only "the one packaging file". You only need to remember where to find the documentation for one file, which is great when you are running on wetware with limited storage capacity. Which means as a newbie, you can dedicate less mental resources to tracking multiple files and how they interact and more effort understanding the "one file" at hand. I started by asking myself how can we in Debian make the packaging stack more accessible to newcomers? Spoiler alert, I dug myself into rabbit hole and ended up somewhere else than where I thought I was going. I started by wanting to scan the debian directory and annotate all files that I could with documentation links. The logic was that if debputy could do that for you, then you could spend more mental effort elsewhere. So I combined debputy's packager provided files detection with a static list of files and I quickly had a good starting point for debputy-based packages.

Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI.

Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported.Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too.Recently livepatch support was expanded for FIPS compliant kernels, Public cloud FIPS compliant kernels, and as well IBM Z (mainframe) kernels. Bringing the total of kernel flavours support to over 60 distinct kernel flavours supported in parallel. The table of supported kernels in the documentation lists the supported kernel flavours ABIs, the duration of individual build's support window, supported architectures, and the Ubuntu release. This work was only possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud team, engineers at IBM for IBM Z (s390x) support, Ubuntu Pro team, Livepatch server & client teams.It is a great milestone, and I personally enjoy seeing the non-intrusive popup on my Ubuntu Desktop that a kernel livepatch was applied to my running system. I do enable Ubuntu Pro on my personal laptop thanks to the free Ubuntu Pro subscription for individuals.What's next? The next frontier is supporting ARM64 kernels. The Canonical kernel team has completed the gap analysis to start supporting Livepatch Service for ARM64. Upstream Linux requires development work on the consistency model to fully support livepatch on ARM64 processors. Livepatch code changes are applied on a per-task basis, when the task is deemed safe to switch over. This safety check depends mostly on kernel stacktraces. For these checks, CONFIG_HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE needs to be available in the upstream ARM64 kernel. (see The Linux Kernel Documentation). There are preliminary patches that enable reliable stacktraces on ARM64, however these turned out to be problematic as there are lots of fix revisions that came after the initial patchset that AWS ships with 5.10. This is a call for help from any interested parties. If you have engineering resources and are interested in bringing Livepatch Service to your ARM64 platforms, please reach out to the Canonical Kernel team on the public Ubuntu Matrix, Discourse, and mailing list. If you want to chat in person, see you at FOSDEM next weekend.

The tenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page. This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.33 and its updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.10 (2024-01-24)

• Synchronized with QuantLib 1.33

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change. This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files. Moreover, because the windows portion of the corresponding R-internal code underwent some changes, our (#ifdef conditional) coverage here is a little behind and created a warning under the newer UCRT setup. So starting with this release we are back to OS_type: unix meaning there will not be any Windows builds at CRAN. If you would like that to change, and ideally can work in the Windows portion, do not hesitate to get in touch. Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.9 (2024-01-23)

• Replace auto-generated stale RApitDatetime-package.Rd with macro-filled stanza to satisfy CRAN request.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A very minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms behind (drum roll ) vector search as it finds approximate matches very quickly and also allows to persist the data. This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files. Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.0.22 (2024-01-23)

• Replace empty examples macro to satisfy CRAN request.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

The x13binary team is thrilled to share the availability of Release 1.1.60-1 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today. This release brings the package up to speed with the most current release by the Census Bureau. More importantly, we finally made good on an old promise to ourselves and now install the binary by compiling from its Fortran sources! No more pre-made binaries. This required some work by Kirill, Michael, and Jeroen to finalize matter because, as we all know, the CRAN build processes and tool chains can be a little byzantine in their details. Use on platforms not covered by binaries from CRAN (or r-universe) should just work too as the demands on the (Fortran) compiler are fairly standard. All in all the build is fairly lightweight and quick even when rebuilding from source. Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

While working on hz.tools, I started to move my beamforming code from 2-D (meaning, beamforming to some specific angle on the X-Y plane for waves on the X-Y plane) to 3-D. I ll have more to say about that once I get around to publishing the code as soon as I m sure it s not completely wrong, but in the meantime I decided to write a simple simulator to visually check the beamformer against the textbooks. The results were pretty rad, so I figured I d throw together a post since it s interesting all on its own outside of beamforming as a general topic. I figured I d write this in Rust, since I ve been using Rust as my primary language over at zoo, and it s a good chance to learn the language better. This post won t cover the basics of how phased arrays work or the specifics of calculating the phase offsets for each antenna, but I ll dig into how I wrote a simple simulator and how I wound up checking my phase offsets to generate the renders below.

Assumptions I didn t want to build a general purpose RF simulator, anything particularly generic, or something that would solve for any more than the things right in front of me. To do this as simply (and quickly all this code took about a day to write, including the beamforming math) I had to reduce the amount of work in front of me. Given that I was concerend with visualizing what the antenna pattern would look like in 3-D given some antenna geometry, operating frequency and configured beam, I made the following assumptions: All anetnnas are perfectly isotropic they receive a signal that is exactly the same strength no matter what direction the signal originates from. There s a single point-source isotropic emitter in the far-field (I modeled this as being 1 million meters away 1000 kilometers) of the antenna system. There is no noise, multipath, loss or distortion in the signal as it travels through space. Antennas will never interfere with each other.

2-D Polar Plots The last time I wrote something like this, I generated 2-D GIFs which show a radiation pattern, not unlike the polar plots you d see on a microphone. These are handy because it lets you visualize what the directionality of the antenna looks like, as well as in what direction emissions are captured, and in what directions emissions are nulled out. You can see these plots on spec sheets for antennas in both 2-D and 3-D form. Now, let s port the 2-D approach to 3-D and see how well it works out.

Writing the 3-D simulator As an EM wave travels through free space, the place at which you sample the wave controls that phase you observe at each time-step. This means, assuming perfectly synchronized clocks, a transmitter and receiver exactly one RF wavelength apart will observe a signal in-phase, but a transmitter and receiver a half wavelength apart will observe a signal 180 degrees out of phase. This means that if we take the distance between our point-source and antenna element, divide it by the wavelength, we can use the fractional part of the resulting number to determine the phase observed. If we multiply that number (in the range of 0 to just under 1) by tau, we can generate a complex number by taking the cos and sin of the multiplied phase (in the range of 0 to tau), assuming the transmitter is emitting a carrier wave at a static amplitude and all clocks are in perfect sync.

 let observed_phases: Vec<Complex> = antennas
.iter()
.map( antenna   
let distance = (antenna - tx).magnitude();
let distance = distance - (distance as i64 as f64);
((distance / wavelength) * TAU)
 )
.map( phase  Complex(phase.cos(), phase.sin()))
.collect();

At this point, given some synthetic transmission point and each antenna, we know what the expected complex sample would be at each antenna. At this point, we can adjust the phase of each antenna according to the beamforming phase offset configuration, and add up every sample in order to determine what the entire system would collectively produce a sample as.

 let beamformed_phases: Vec<Complex> = ...;
let magnitude = beamformed_phases
.iter()
.zip(observed_phases.iter())
.map( (beamformed, observed)  observed * beamformed)
.reduce( acc, el  acc + el)
.unwrap()
.abs();

Armed with this information, it s straight forward to generate some number of (Azimuth, Elevation) points to sample, generate a transmission point far away in that direction, resolve what the resulting Complex sample would be, take its magnitude, and use that to create an (x, y, z) point at (azimuth, elevation, magnitude). The color attached two that point is based on its distance from (0, 0, 0). I opted to use the Life Aquatic table for this one. After this process is complete, I have a point cloud of ((x, y, z), (r, g, b)) points. I wrote a small program using kiss3d to render point cloud using tons of small spheres, and write out the frames to a set of PNGs, which get compiled into a GIF. Now for the fun part, let s take a look at some radiation patterns!

1x4 Phased Array The first configuration is a phased array where all the elements are in perfect alignment on the y and z axis, and separated by some offset in the x axis. This configuration can sweep 180 degrees (not the full 360), but can t be steared in elevation at all. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 1x4 phased array: And now let s take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and make sure things look right. Our initial quarter-wavelength spacing is very effective and has some outstanding performance characteristics. Let s check to see that everything looks right as a first test. Nice. Looks perfect. When pointing forward at (0, 0), we d expect to see a torus, which we do. As we sweep between 0 and 360, astute observers will notice the pattern is mirrored along the axis of the antennas, when the beam is facing forward to 0 degrees, it ll also receive at 180 degrees just as strong. There s a small sidelobe that forms when it s configured along the array, but it also becomes the most directional, and the sidelobes remain fairly small.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s try again, but rather than spacing each antenna of a wavelength apart, let s see about spacing each antenna 1 of a wavelength apart instead. The main lobe is a lot more narrow (not a bad thing!), but some significant sidelobes have formed (not ideal). This can cause a lot of confusion when doing things that require a lot of directional resolution unless they re compensated for.

Going from ( to 5 ) The last model begs the question - what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other but without moving the beam? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very cool. As the spacing becomes longer in relation to the operating frequency, we can see the sidelobes start to form out of the end of the antenna system.

2x2 Phased Array The second configuration I want to try is a phased array where the elements are in perfect alignment on the z axis, and separated by a fixed offset in either the x or y axis by their neighbor, forming a square when viewed along the x/y axis. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 2x2 phased array: Let s do the same as above and take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and see what things look like. This configuration should suppress the sidelobes and give us good performance, and even give us some amount of control in elevation while we re at it. Sweet. Heck yeah. The array is quite directional in the configured direction, and can even sweep a little bit in elevation, a definite improvement from the 1x4 above.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s do the same thing as the 1x4 and take a look at what happens when the distance between elements is long compared to the frequency of operation say, 1 of a wavelength apart? What happens to the sidelobes given this spacing when the frequency of operation is much different than the physical geometry? Mesmerising. This is my favorate render. The sidelobes are very fun to watch come in and out of existence. It looks absolutely other-worldly.

Going from ( to 5 ) Finally, for completeness' sake, what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other just as we did with the 1x4? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very very cool. The sidelobes wind up turning the very blobby cardioid into an electromagnetic dog toy. I think we ve proven to ourselves that using a phased array much outside its designed frequency of operation seems like a real bad idea.

Future Work Now that I have a system to test things out, I m a bit more confident that my beamforming code is close to right! I d love to push that code over the line and blog about it, since it s a really interesting topic on its own. Once I m sure the code involved isn t full of lies, I ll put it up on the hztools org, and post about it here and on mastodon.

A new maintenance release 0.4.22 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. This release matches the recent 0.4.21 release which enabled use of the package with newer ProtoBuf releases. Tomas has been updating the Windows / rtools side of things, and supplied us with simple PR that will enable building with those updated versions once finalised. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.22 (2022-12-13)

• Apply patch by Tomas Kalibera to support updated rtools to build with newer ProtoBuf releases on windows

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore. However you can do much of rsnapshot with rsync alone nowadays. The --link-dest option (manpage) solves the part of creating hardlinks to a previous backup (found here). So my backup program becomes this shell script in ~/backups/backup.sh:

#!/bin/sh
SERVER="$ 1 "
BACKUP="$ HOME /backups/$ SERVER "
SNAPSHOTS="$ BACKUP /snapshots"
FOLDER=$(date --utc +%F_%H-%M-%S)
DEST="$ SNAPSHOTS /$ FOLDER "
LAST=$(ls -d1 $ SNAPSHOTS /????-??-??_??-??-?? tail -n 1)
rsync \
  --rsh="ssh -i $ BACKUP /sshkey -o ControlPath=none -o ForwardAgent=no" \
  -rlpt \
  --delete --link-dest="$ LAST " \
  $ SERVER ::backup "$ DEST "

The script connects to rsync in daemon mode as outlined in section USING RSYNC-DAEMON FEATURES VIA A REMOTE-SHELL CONNECTION in the rsync manpage. This allows to reference a module as the source that is defined on the server side as follows:

[backup]
path = /
read only = true
exclude from = /srv/rsyncbackup/excludelist
uid = root
gid = root

The important bit is the read only setting that protects the server against somebody with access to the ssh key to overwrit files on the server via rsync and thus gaining full root access. Finally the command prefix in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys runs rsync as daemon with sudo and the specified config file:

command="sudo rsync --config=/srv/rsyncbackup/config --server --daemon ."

The sudo setup is left as an exercise for the reader as mine is rather opinionated. Unfortunately I have not managed to configure systemd timers in the way I wanted and therefor opened an issue: Allow retry of timer triggered oneshot services with failed conditions or asserts . Any help there is welcome!

I Just bought a LicheePi 4A RISC-V embedded computer (like a RaspberryPi but with a RISC-V CPU) for $322.68 from Aliexpress (the official site for buying LicheePi devices). Here is the Sipheed web page about it and their other recent offerings [1]. I got the version with 16G of RAM and 128G of storage, I probably don t need that much storage (I can use NFS or USB) but 16G of RAM is good for VMs. Here is the Wiki about this board [2]. Configuration When you get one of these devices you should make setting up ssh server your first priority. I found the HDMI output to be very unreliable. The first monitor I tried was a Samsung 4K monitor dating from when 4K was a new thing, the LicheePi initially refused to operate at a resolution higher than 1024*768 but later on switched to 4K resolution when resuming from screen-blank for no apparent reason (and the window manager didn t support this properly). On the Dell 4K monitor I use on my main workstation it sometimes refused to talk to it and occasionally worked. I got it running at 1920*1080 without problems and then switched it to 4K and it lost video sync and never talked to that monitor again. On my Desklab portabable 4K monitor I got it to display in 4K resolution but only the top left 1/4 of the screen displayed. The issues with HDMI monitor support greatly limit the immediate potential for using this as a workstation. It doesn t make it impossible but would be fiddly at best. It s quite likely that a future OS update will fix this. But at the moment it s best used as a server. The LicheePi has a custom Linux distribution based on Ubuntu so you want too put something like the following in /etc/network/interfaces to make it automatically connect to the ethernet when plugged in:

auto end0
iface end0 inet dhcp

Then to get sshd to start you have to run the following commands to generate ssh host keys that aren t zero bytes long:

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
systemctl restart ssh.service

It appears to have wifi hardware but the OS doesn t recognise it. This isn t a priority for me as I mostly want to use it as a server. Performance For the first test of performance I created a 100MB file from /dev/urandom and then tried compressing it on various systems. With zstd -9 it took 16.893 user seconds on the LicheePi4A, 0.428s on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 with a i5-6300U CPU (Debian/Unstable), 1.288s on my E5-2696 v3 workstation (Debian/Bookworm), 0.467s on the E5-2696 v3 running Debian/Unstable, 2.067s on a E3-1271 v3 server, and 7.179s on the E3-1271 v3 system emulating a RISC-V system via QEMU running Debian/Unstable. It s very impressive that the QEMU emulation is fast enough that emulating a different CPU architecture is only 3.5* slower for this test (or maybe 10* slower if it was running Debian/Unstable on the AMD64 code)! The emulated RISC-V is also more than twice as fast as real RISC-V hardware and probably of comparable speed to real RISC-V hardware when running the same versions (and might be slightly slower if running the same version of zstd) which is a tribute to the quality of emulation. One performance issue that most people don t notice is the time taken to negotiate ssh sessions. It s usually not noticed because the common CPUs have got faster at about the same rate as the algorithms for encryption and authentication have become more complex. On my i5-6300U laptop it takes 0m0.384s to run ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 localhost id with the below server settings (taken from advice on ssh-audit.com [3] for a secure ssh configuration). On the E3-1271 v3 server it is 0.336s, on the QMU system it is 28.022s, and on the LicheePi it is 0.592s. By this metric the LicheePi is about 80% slower than decent x86 systems and the QEMU emulation of RISC-V is 73* slower than the x86 system it runs on. Does crypto depend on instructions that are difficult to emulate?

HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key
KexAlgorithms -ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group14-sha256
MACs -umac-64-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha1-etm@openssh.com,umac-64@openssh.com,umac-128@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256,hmac-sha2-512,hmac-sha1

I haven t yet tested the performance of Ethernet (what routing speed can you get through the 2 gigabit ports?), emmc storage, and USB. At the moment I ve been focused on using RISC-V as a test and development platform. My conclusion is that I m glad I don t plan to compile many kernels or anything large like LibreOffice. But that for typical development that I do it will be quite adequate. The speed of Chromium seems adequate in basic tests, but the video output hasn t worked reliably enough to do advanced tests. Hardware Features Having two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB-3 ports, and Wifi on board gives some great options for using this as a router. It s disappointing that they didn t go with 2.5Gbit as everyone seems to be doing that nowadays but Gigabit is enough for most things. Having only a single HDMI port and not supporting USB-C docks (the USB-C port appears to be power only) limits what can be done for workstation use and for controlling displays. I know of people using small ARM computers attached to the back of large TVs for advertising purposes and that isn t going to be a great option for this. The CPU and RAM apparently uses a lot of power (which is relative the entire system draws up to 2A at 5V so the CPU would be something below 5W). To get this working a cooling fan has to be stuck to the CPU and RAM chips via a layer of thermal stuff that resembles a fine sheet of blu-tack in both color and stickyness. I am disappointed that there isn t any more solid form of construction, to mount this on a wall or ceiling some extra hardware would be needed to secure this. Also if they just had a really big copper heatsink I think that would be better. 80386 CPUs with similar TDP were able to run without a fan. I wonder how things would work with all USB ports in use. It s expected that a USB port can supply a minimum of 2.5W which means that all the ports could require 10W if they were active. Presumably something significantly less than 5W is available for the USB ports. Other Devices Sipheed has a range of other devices in the works. They currently sell the LicheeCluster4A which support 7 compute modules for a cluster in a box. This has some interesting potential for testing and demonstrating cluster software but you could probably buy an AMD64 system with more compute power for less money. The Lichee Console 4A is a tiny laptop which could be useful for people who like the 7 laptop form factor, unfortunately it only has a 1280*800 display if it had the same resolution display as a typical 7 phone I would have bought one. The next device that appeals to me is the soon to be released Lichee Pad 4A which is a 10.1 tablet with 1920*1200 display, Wifi6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 16G of RAM. It also has 1 USB-C connection, 2*USB-3 sockets, and support for an external card with 2*Gigabit ethernet. It s a tablet as a laptop without keyboard instead of the more common larger phone design model. They are also about to release the LicheePadMax4A which is similar to the other tablet but with a 14 2240*1400 display and which ships with a keyboard to make it essentially a laptop with detachable keyboard. Conclusion At this time I wouldn t recommend that this device be used as a workstation or laptop, although the people who want to do such things will probably do it anyway regardless of my recommendations. I think it will be very useful as a test system for RISC-V development. I have some friends who are interested in this sort of thing and I can give them VMs. It is a bit expensive. The Sipheed web site boasts about the LicheePi4 being faster than the RaspberryPi4, but it s not a lot faster and the RaspberryPi4 is much cheaper ($127 or $129 for one with 8G of RAM). The RaspberryPi4 has two HDMI ports but a limit of 8G of RAM while the LicheePi has up to 16G of RAM and two Gigabit Ethernet ports but only a single HDMI port. It seems that the RaspberryPi4 might win if you want a cheap low power desktop system. At this time I think the reason for this device is testing out RISC-V as an alternative to the AMD64 and ARM64 architectures. An open CPU architecture goes well with free software, but it isn t just people who are into FOSS who are testing such things. I know some corporations are trying out RISC-V as a way of getting other options for embedded systems that don t involve paying monopolists. The Lichee Console 4A is probably a usable tiny laptop if the resolution is sufficient for your needs. As an aside I predict that the tiny laptop or pocket computer segment will take off in the near future. There are some AMD64 systems the size of a phone but thicker that run Windows and go for reasonable prices on AliExpress. Hopefully in the near future this device will have better video drivers and be usable as a small and quiet workstation. I won t rule out the possibility of making this my main workstation in the not too distant future, all it needs is reliable 4K display and the ability to decode 4K video. It s performance for web browsing and as an ssh client seems adequate, and that s what matters for my workstation use. But for the moment it s just for server use.

• [1] https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a
• [2] https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/th1520/lp4a.html
• [3] https://www.ssh-audit.com/

Review: Making Money, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #36
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 2007
Printing:	November 2014
ISBN:	0-06-233499-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	473

Making Money is the 36th Discworld novel, the second Moist von Lipwig book, and a direct sequel to Going Postal. You could start the series with Going Postal, but I would not start here. The post office is running like a well-oiled machine, Adora Belle is out of town, and Moist von Lipwig is getting bored. It's the sort of boredom that has him picking his own locks, taking up Extreme Sneezing, and climbing buildings at night. He may not realize it, but he needs something more dangerous to do. Vetinari has just the thing. The Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, unlike the post office before Moist got to it, is still working. It is a stolid, boring institution doing stolid, boring things for rich people. It is also the battleground for the Lavish family past-time: suing each other and fighting over money. The Lavishes are old money, the kind of money carefully entangled in trusts and investments designed to ensure the family will always have money regardless of how stupid their children are. Control of the bank is temporarily in the grasp of Joshua Lavish's widow Topsy, who is not a true Lavish, but the vultures are circling. Meanwhile, Vetinari has grand city infrastructure plans, and to carry them out he needs financing. That means he needs a functional bank, and preferably one that is much less conservative. Moist is dubious about running a bank, and even more reluctant when Topsy Lavish sees him for exactly the con artist he is. His hand is forced when she dies, and Moist discovers he has inherited her dog, Mr. Fusspot. A dog that now owns 51% of the Royal Bank and therefore is the chairman of the bank's board of directors. A dog whose safety is tied to Moist's own by way of an expensive assassination contract. Pratchett knew he had a good story with Going Postal, so here he runs the same formula again. And yes, I was happy to read it again. Moist knows very little about banking but quite a lot about pretending something will work until it does, which has more to do with banking than it does with running a post office. The bank employs an expert, Mr. Bent, who is fanatically devoted to the gold standard and the correctness of the books and has very little patience for Moist. There are golem-related hijinks. The best part of this book is Vetinari, who is masterfully manipulating everyone in the story and who gets in some great lines about politics.

"We are not going to have another wretched empire while I am Patrician. We've only just got over the last one."

Also, Vetinari processing dead letters in the post office was an absolute delight. Making Money does have the recurring Pratchett problem of having a fairly thin plot surrounded by random... stuff. Moist's attempts to reform the city currency while staying ahead of the Lavishes is only vaguely related to Mr. Bent's plot arc. The golems are unrelated to the rest of the plot other than providing a convenient deus ex machina. There is an economist making water models in the bank basement with an Igor, which is a great gag but has essentially nothing to do with the rest of the book. One of the golems has been subjected to well-meaning older ladies and 1950s etiquette manuals, which I thought was considerably less funny (and somewhat creepier) than Pratchett did. There are (sigh) clowns, which continue to be my least favorite Ankh-Morpork world-building element. At least the dog was considerably less annoying than I was afraid it was going to be. This grab-bag randomness is a shame, since I think there was room here for a more substantial plot that engaged fully with the high weirdness of finance. Unfortunately, this was a bit like the post office in Going Postal: Pratchett dives into the subject just enough to make a few wry observations and a few funny quips, and then resolves the deeper issues off-camera. Moist tries to invent fiat currency, because of course he does, and Pratchett almost takes on the gold standard, only to veer away at the last minute into vigorous hand-waving. I suspect part of the problem is that I know a little bit too much about finance, so I kept expecting Pratchett to take the humorous social commentary a couple of levels deeper. On a similar note, the villains have great potential that Pratchett undermines by adding too much over-the-top weirdness. I wish Cosmo Lavish had been closer to what he appears to be at the start of the book: a very wealthy and vindictive man (and a reference to Cosimo de Medici) who doesn't have Moist's ability to come up with wildly risky gambits but who knows considerably more than he does about how banking works. Instead, Pratchett gives him a weird obsession that slowly makes him less sinister and more pathetic, which robs the book of a competent antagonist for Moist. The net result is still a fun book, and a solid Discworld entry, but it lacks the core of the best series entries. It felt more like a skit comedy show than a novel, but it's an excellent skit comedy show with the normal assortment of memorable Pratchettisms. Certainly if you've read this far, or even if you've only read Going Postal, you'll want to read Making Money as well. Followed by Unseen Academicals. The next Moist von Lipwig book is Raising Steam. Rating: 8 out of 10