$ wget https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2016-11-24-raspberry-pi-3-stretch-PREVIEW.img
$ sudo dd if=2016-11-24-raspberry-pi-3-stretch-PREVIEW.img of=/dev/sdb bs=5M

Signal on Jolla Now in Philadelphia, people urged me to use the Signal messenger, and I was convinced by its support for good end-to-end crypto, while still supporting offline messages and allowing me to switch from my phone to my desktop and back during a conversation. The official Signal app uses Google Cloud Messaging (GCM, part of Google Play Services) to get push updates about new posts, and while I do not oppose this use of Google services (it really is just a ping without any metadata), this is a problem on Sailfish OS. Luckily, the Signal client is open source, and someone created a LibreSignal edition that replaced the use of GCM with websockets, and indeed, this worked on my phone, and I could communicate. Things were not ideal, though: I would often have to restart the app to get newly received messages; messages that I send via Signal Desktop would often not show up on the phone and, most severe, basically after every three messages, sending more messages from Desktop would stop working for my correspondents, which freaked them out. (Strangely it continued working from their phone app, so we coped for a while.) So again, my choice of non-standard devices causes inconveniences to others. This, and the fact that the original authors of Signal and the maintainers of LibreSignal got into a fight that ended LibreSignal discontinued, meant that I have to change something about this situation. I was almost ready to give in and get myself a Samsung S7 or something boring of the sort, but then I decided to tackle this issue once more, following some of the more obscure instructions out there, trying to get vanilla Signal working on my phone. About a day later, I got it, and this is how I did it.

microG So I need Google Play Services somehow, but installing the real thing did not seem to be very promising (I tried, and regularly got pop-ups telling me that Play Services has crashed.) But I found some references to a project called microG , which is an independent re-implementation of (some of) of the play services, in particular including GCM. Installing microG itself was easy, as you can add their repository to F-Droid. I installed the core services, the services framework and the fake store apps. If this had been all that was to do, things would be easy!

Play Store detection work arounds But Signal would still complain about the lack of Google Play Services. It asks Android if an app with a certain name is installed, and would refuse to work if this app does not exist. For some reason, the microG apps cannot just have the names of the real Google apps. There seem to be two ways of working around this: Patching Signal, or enabling Signature Spoofing. The initially most promising instructions (which are in a README in a tarball on a fishy file hoster linked from an answer on the Jolla support forum ) suggested patching Signal, and actually came both with a version of an app called Lucky Patcher as well as a patched Android package, but both about two years old. I tried a recent version of the Lucky Patcher, but it failed to patch the current version of Signal.

Signature Spoofing So on to Signature Spoofing. This is a feature of some non-standard Android builds that allow apps (such as microG) to fake the existence of other apps (the Play Store), and is recommended by the microG project. Sailfish OS s Android compatibility layer Alien Dalvik does not support it out of the box, but there is a tool tingle that adds this feature to existing Android systems. One just has to get the /system/framework/framework.jar file, put it into the input folder of this project, run python main.py, select 2, and copy the framework.jar from output/ back. Great.

Deodexing Alien Dalvik Only that it only works on deodexed files. I did not know anything about odexed Android Java classes (and did not really want to know), but there was not way around. Following this explanation I gathered that one finds files foo.odex in the Android system folder, runs some tool on them to create a classes.dex file, and adds that to the corresponding foo.jar or foo.apk file, copies this back to the phone and deletes the foo.odex file. The annoying this is that one does not only have to do it for framework.jar in order to please tingle, because if one does it to one odex file, one has to do to all! It seems that for people using Windows, the Universal Deodexer V5 seems to be a convenient tool, but I had to go more manually. So I first fetched smali , compiled it using ./gradlew build. Then I fetched the folders /opt/alien/system/framework and /opt/alien/system/app from the phone (e.g. using scp). Keep a backup of these in case something breaks. Then I ran these commands (disclaimer: I fetched these from my bash history and slightly cleaned them up. This is not a fire-and-forget script! Use it when you know what it and you are doing):

cd framework
for file in *.odex
do
  java -jar ~/build/smali/baksmali/build/libs/baksmali.jar deodex $file -o out
  java -jar ~/build/smali/smali/build/libs/smali.jar a out -o classes.dex
  zip -u $(basename $file .odex).jar classes.dex
  rm -rf out classes.dex $file
done
cd ..
cd app
for file in *.odex
do
  java -jar ~/build/smali/baksmali/build/libs/baksmali.jar deodex -d ../framework $file -o out
  java -jar ~/build/smali/smali/build/libs/smali.jar a out -o classes.dex
  zip -u $(basename $file .odex).apk classes.dex
  rm -rf out classes.dex $file
done
cd ..

The resulting framework.jar can now be patched with tingle:

mv framework/framework.jar ~/build/tingle/input
cd ~/build/tingle
./main.py
# select 2
cd -
mv ~/build/tingle/output/framework.jar framework/framework.jar

Now I copy these framework and app folders back on my phone, and restart Dalvik:

devel-su systemctl restart aliendalvik.service

It might start a bit slower than usually, but eventually, all the Android apps should work as before. The final bit that was missing in my case was that I had to reinstall Signal: If it is installed before microG is installed, it does not get permission to use GCM, and when it tries (while registering: After generating the keys) it just crashes. I copied /data/data/org.thoughtcrime.secretsms/ before removing Signal and moved it back after (with cp -a to preserve permissions) so that I could keep my history. And now, it seems, vanilla Signal is working just fine on my Jolla phone!

What s missing Am I completely happy with Signal? No! An important feature that it is lacking is a way to get out all data (message history including media files) in a file format that can be read without Signal; e.g. YAML files or clean HTML code. I do want to be able to re-read some of the more interesting conversations when I am 74 or 75, and I doubt that there will be a Signal App, or even Android, then. I hope that this becomes available in time, maybe in the Desktop version. I would also hope that pidgin gets support to the Signal protocol, so that I conveniently use one program for all my messaging needs on the desktop. Finally it would be nice if my Signal identity was less tied to one phone number. I have a German and a US phone number, and would want to be reachable under both on all my clients. (If you want to contact me on Signal, use my US phone number.)

Alternatives Could I have avoided this hassle by simply convincing people to use something other than Signal? Tricky, at the moment. Telegram (which works super reliable for me, and has a pidgin plugin) has dubious crypto and does not support crypto while using multiple clients. Threema has no desktop client that I know of. OTR on top of Jabber does not support offline messages. So nothing great seems to exist right now. In the long run, the best bet seems to be OMEMO (which is, in essence, the Signal protocol) on top of Jabber. It is currently supported by one Android Jabber client (Conversations) and one Desktop application (gajim, via a plugin). I should keep an eye on pidgin support for OMEMO and other development around this.

Description: Enable a mode to generate troff man pages
 The awscli help system internally uses man pages, but only to convert
 them to text and show them with the pager. This patch enables a mode
 that prints the troff code so the user can save the man page.
 .
 To use that mode, run the help commands with an environment variable
 OUTPUT set to 'troff', for instance:
     OUTPUT='troff' aws rds help
Forwarded: no
Author: Tanguy Ortolo <tanguy+debian@ortolo.eu>
Last-Update: 2016-11-22
Index: /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py
===================================================================
--- /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py       2016-11-21 12:14:22.236254730 +0100
+++ /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py       2016-11-21 12:14:22.236254730 +0100
@@ -49,6 +49,8 @@
     Return the appropriate HelpRenderer implementation for the
     current platform.
     """
+    if 'OUTPUT' in os.environ and os.environ['OUTPUT'] == 'troff':
+        return TroffHelpRenderer()
     if platform.system() == 'Windows':
         return WindowsHelpRenderer()
     else:
@@ -97,6 +99,15 @@
         return contents
+class TroffHelpRenderer(object):
+    """
+    Render help content as troff code.
+    """
+
+    def render(self, contents):
+        sys.stdout.buffer.write(publish_string(contents, writer=manpage.Writer()))
+
+
 class PosixHelpRenderer(PagingHelpRenderer):
     """
     Render help content on a Posix-like system.  This includes

% OUTPUT='troff' aws rds help > aws_rds.1
% man -lt aws_rds.1   lp

#! /usr/bin/python3
import subprocess
import awscli.clidriver
def write_manpage(command):
    manpage = open('%s.1' % '_'.join(command), 'w')
    command.append('help')
    process = subprocess.Popen(command,
            env= 'OUTPUT': 'troff' ,
            stdout=manpage)
    process.wait()
    manpage.close()
driver = awscli.clidriver.CLIDriver()
command_table = driver._get_command_table()
renamed_commands = \
     
        'config': 'configservice',
        'codedeploy': 'deploy',
        's3': 's3api'
     
added_commands = \
     
        's3': ['cp', 'ls', 'mb', 'mv', 'presign', 'rb', 'rm', 'sync',
               'website']
     
removed_subcommands = \
     
        'ses': ['delete-verified-email-address',
                'list-verified-email-addresses',
                'verify-email-address'],
        'ec2': ['import-instance', 'import-volume'],
        'emr': ['run-job-flow', 'describe-job-flows',
                'add-job-flow-steps', 'terminate-job-flows',
                'list-bootstrap-actions', 'list-instance-groups',
                'set-termination-protection',
                'set-visible-to-all-users'],
        'rds': ['modify-option-group']
     
added_subcommands = \
     
        'rds': ['add-option-to-option-group',
                'remove-option-from-option-group']
     
# Build a dictionary of real commands, including renames, additions and
# removals.
real_commands =  
for command in command_table:
    subcommands = []
    subcommand_table = command_table[command]._get_command_table()
    for subcommand in subcommand_table:
        # Skip removed subcommands
        if command in removed_subcommands \
                and subcommand in removed_subcommands[command]:
            continue
        subcommands.append(subcommand)
    # Add added subcommands
    if command in added_subcommands:
        for subcommand in added_subcommands[command]:
            subcommands.append(subcommand)
    # Directly add non-renamed commands
    if command not in renamed_commands:
        real_commands[command] = subcommands
    # Add renamed commands
    else:
        real_commands[renamed_commands[command]] = subcommands
# Add added commands
for command in added_commands:
    real_commands[command] = added_commands[command]
# For each real command and subcommand, generate a manpage
write_manpage(['aws'])
for command in real_commands:
    write_manpage(['aws', command])
    for subcommand in real_commands[command]:
        write_manpage(['aws', command, subcommand])
                         'sync', 'website'] 

• Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen presented a status update at MiniDebConf Cambridge. (Video, Slides).

• dpkg 1.18.14 has migrated to stretch.
• Chris Lamb filed #844431 ("packages should build reproducibly") against debian-policy.
• Ximin worked on glibc reproducibility this week, catching some bugs in disorderfs, FUSE, as well as glibc itself.

• Webconverger was added to our list of projects working on reproducible builds..

• #844491 filed against linux by Chris Lamb.
• #844992 filed against perlbrew by Chris Lamb.
• #844993 filed against qsynth by Chris Lamb.
• #845034 filed against initramfs-tools by Chris Lamb.
• #845055 filed against markdown by Chris Lamb.
• #844752 filed against perl by Niko Tyni.
• #845007 filed against qsampler by Reiner Herrmann.
• #845008 filed against qmidinet by Reiner Herrmann.
• #845010 filed against qxgedit by Reiner Herrmann.

• captures_build_path, captures_build_path_via_assert
• issue records_build_flags

• timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_asciidoctor
• randomness_in_property_annotations_generated_by_sphinx
• randomness_in_browserify_lite_output
• txt2man_dash_p

• Chris Lamb (26)
• Daniel Stender (1)
• Filip Pytloun (1)
• Lucas Nussbaum (28)
• Michael Biebl (1)

• Don't make tests rely on Debian::Debhelper::Dh_Lib. (Chris Lamb)

• #844498 ("disorderfs: using it for building kills the host")

• Ximin Luo:
  • Set uname to two explicitly different values
  • Add a --no-diffoscope option. (Closes: #844512)
  • Add "auto" presets and --testbed-init
  • Add --testbed-pre and --testbed-init arguments
  • Fix main script so that build commands starting with ENVVAR=val work after append_command()
  • Dramatically expand documentation (many commits)

• Debian:
  • An index of our usertagged bugs page was added by Holger after a Q+A session in Cambridge.
  • Holger also setup two new i386 builders, build12+16, for >50% increased build performance. For this, we went from 18+17 cores on two 48GB machines to 10+10+9+9 cores on four 36GB ram machines and from 16 to 24 builder jobs. Thanks to Profitbricks for providing us with all these ressources once more!
  • h01ger also tried to enable disorderfs again, but hit #844498, which brought down the i386 builders, so he disabled it again. Next will be trying disorderfs on armhf or amd64, to see whether this bug also manifests there.

• Debian users
• DDs
• Debian contributors
• General FLOSS interested people

• Does the phone numbers' (international) prefix match the country of the user?
• Does the postal address supplied even exist?

• Does the IP address the user submitted from come from TOR?
• Does the geo-IP country match the users' stated location?
• Is the email address provided by a "free" provider?

Changes in version 1.62.0-1 (2016-11-15)

• Upgraded to Boost 1.62 installed directly from upstream source
• Added Boost property_tree as requested in #29 by Aydin Demircioglu
• Added Boost scope_exit as requested in #30 by Kirill Mueller
• Added Boost atomic which we had informally added since 1.58.0

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

chunk_low = heap base
new_top = heap base
For all of the heap
    Find the first 64 live objects above chunk_low
    Compact them all to new_top
    Rewrite references in the whole heap for them
    Set new_top above the new locations
    Set chunk_low above the old locations
top = new_top

int find (needle)  
    int l = 0;
    int r = count - 1;
    while (l <= r)  
        int m = (l + r) >> 1;
        if (haystack[m] < needle)
            l = m + 1;
        else
            r = m - 1;
     
    return l;
 

void insert(needle)  
    int l = find(needle);
    memmove(&haystack[l+1],
        &haystack[l],
        (num - l) * sizeof (haystack[0]));
    haystack[l] = needle;
 

bool exists(needle)  
    int l = find(needle);
    return (l < count && haystack[l] == needle);
 

> (+ "hello " (call/cc (lambda (return) (setq boo return) (return "foo "))) "world")
"hello foo world"
> (boo "bar ")
"hello bar world"
> (boo "yikes ")
"hello yikes world"

boo
[
    expr:   (call/cc (lambda (return) (set (quote boo) return) (return "foo ")))
    state:  val
    values: (call/cc
             [recurse...]
             )
    sexprs: ()
    frame:   
]
[
    expr:   (+ "hello " (call/cc (lambda (return) (set (quote boo) return) (return "foo "))) "world")
    state:  formal
    values: (+
             "hello "
             )
    sexprs: ((call/cc (lambda (return) (set (quote boo) return) (return "foo ")))
             "world"
             )
    frame:   
]

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.8 (2016-11-16)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • String and vector elements now use extended R_xlen_t indices (Qiang in PR #560)
  • Hashing functions now return unsigned int (Qiang in PR #561)
  • Added static methods eye(), ones(), and zeros() for select matrix types (Nathan Russell in PR #569)
  • The exception call stack is again correctly reported; print methods and tests added too (Jim Hester in PR #582 fixing #579)
  • Variatic macros no longer use a GNU extensions (Nathan in PR #575)
  • Hash index functions were standardized on returning unsigned integers (Also PR #575)
• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
  • Added new Sugar functions rowSums(), colSums(), rowMeans(), colMeans() (PR #551 by Nathan Russell fixing #549)
  • Range Sugar now used R_xlen_t type for start/end (PR #568 by Qiang Kou)
  • Defining RCPP_NO_SUGAR no longer breaks the build. (PR #585 by Daniel C. Dillon)
• Changes in Rcpp unit tests
  • A test for expression vectors was corrected.
  • The constructor test for datetime vectors reflects the new classes which treats Inf correctly (and still as a non-finite value)
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes
  • An 'empty' return was corrected (PR #589 fixing issue #588, and with thanks to Duncan Murdoch for the heads-up)
• Updated Date and Datetime vector classes:
  • The DateVector and DatetimeVector classes were renamed with a prefix old; they are currently typedef'ed to the existing name (#557)
  • New variants newDateVector and newDatetimeVector were added based on NumericVector (also #557, #577, #581, #587)
  • By defining RCPP_NEW_DATE_DATETIME_VECTORS the new classes can activated. We intend to make the new classes the default no sooner than twelve months from this release.
  • The capabilities() function can also be used for presence of this feature

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

siamezzze: I've been accepted to #outreachy winter internship - going to
work with Debian reproducible builds team. So excited about that! <3
Debian

• Thanks to a series of dpkg uploads by Guillem Jover, all our toolchain changes are now finally available in sid!
• This means your packages should now be reproducible without having to use our custom APT repository.
• Ximin Luo opened #843925 to remind the fact that dpkg-buildpackage should sign buildinfo files.
• We hope to have detailed post about the new dpkg and the new .buildinfo files for debian-devel-announce soon!

• srebuild / debrebuild work was resumed by Johannes Schauer and others in #774415.

• #844102 filed against lava-dispatcher
• #844103 filed against lava-server
• #844111 filed against python-defaults
• #843698 filed against tunnelx
• #843967 filed against asyncpg
• #843865 filed against keystone
• #844101 filed against suil

• #844232 filed against daisy-player
• #844236 filed against libhtml-lint-perl
• #844228 filed against ebook-speaker

• #843432 filed against libwww-curl-perl

• #844095 filed against fdm
• #844096 filed against gringo
• #843469 filed against dpkg

• Added: random_order_in_dh_pythonX_substvars, valac_permutes_get_type_calls
• Updated: timestamps_in_static_libraries

• Chris Lamb (29)
• Niko Tyni (1)

• Submissions with duplicate Installed-Build-Depends entries are rejected now that a bug in dpkg causing them has been fixed. Thanks to Guillem Jover.
• Add a new page for every (source, version) combination, for example diffoscope 62.
• DigitalOcean have generously offered to sponsor the hardware buildinfo.debian.net is running on.

• For privacy reasons, the new dpkg-genbuildinfo includes Build-Path only if it is under /build. HW42 updated our jobs so this is the case for our builds too, so you can see the build path in the .buildinfo files.
• HW42 also updated our jobs to vary the basename of the source extraction directory. This detects packages that incorrectly assume a $pkg-$version directory naming scheme (which is what dpkg-source -x gives but is not mandated by Debian nor always-true) or that they're being built from a SCM.
• The new dpkg-genbuildinfo also records a sanitised Environment. This is different in our builds, so HW42, Reiner and Holger updated our jobs to hide these differences from diffoscope output.
• Package-set improvements:
  • Holger refactored the create_meta_pkg_sets job so that it's easier to add new package sets.
  • This job is now also using dose-extra from jessie-backports so that it can deal with versioned provides.
  • Added 4 new package sets: debian-edu, debian-edu_build-depends, maint_pkg-grass-devel, maint_debian-accessibility, maint_pkg-openstack.
  • Switched to using the new URL for tails manifests to generate the tails package set.
  • Renamed maint_lua to maint_debian-lua
• Valerie Young contributed four patches for our long-planned transition from SQLite to PostgreSQL.
• In anticipation of the freeze, already-tested packages from unstable and testing on amd64 are now scheduled with equal priority.

• I referenced the architecture diagrams at https://www.docker.com/what-docker
• the Docker Hub, https://hub.docker.com/
• most of my demos used the wildfly image https://hub.docker.com/r/jboss/wildfly/
• github issue describing the Steam "delete all your files" bug
• Research paper A Framework for Scientific Workflow Reproducibility in the Cloud (PDF available)
• ikiwiki
• my work-in-progress Ikiwiki-in-a-box Docker image

• CoreOS, a stripped-down OS for containers
• the Rkt container manager (alternative for Docker daemon)
• the App Container Specification

# cd /srv/tftp
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/vmlinuz
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/initrd.gz
# wget https://www.kleine-koenig.org/tmp/armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb

dhcp
setenv serverip 192.168.1.17
tftpboot 0x01000000 vmlinuz
tftpboot 0x02000000 armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
tftpboot 0x03000000 initrd.gz
bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000

setenv mmcboot=btrload mmc 0 0x01000000 boot/vmlinuz\; btrload mmc 0 0x02000000 boot/dtb\; btrload mmc 0 0x03000000 boot/initrd.img\; bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=btrfs rootdelay=2 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootflags=commit=5 rw
saveenv
boot

• rtc doesn't work (workaround: mw 0xf10184a0 0xfd4d4cfa in U-Boot)
• SFP and switch don't work, MAC addresses are random
• wifi fails to probe