How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse

Silicon Valley s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster and when it comes, they ll leave the rest of us behind

Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation.

Poster P590CW $9.00 Early Warning Signs Of Fascism Laurence W. Britt wrote about the common signs of fascism in April, 2003, after researching seven fascist regimes: Hitler's Nazi Germany; Mussolini's Italy; Franco's Spain; Salazar's Portugal; Papadopoulos' Greece; Pinochet's Chile; Suharto's Indonesia. Get involved! Text: Early Warning Signs of Fascism Powerful and Continuing Nationalism Disdain For Human Rights Identification of Enemies As a unifying cause Supremacy of the military Rampant Sexism Controlled Mass Media Obsession With National Security

Political and social scientist Stefania Milan writes about social movements, mobilization and organized collective action. On the one hand, interactions and networks achieve more visibility and become a proxy for a collective we . On the other hand: Law enforcement can exercise preemptive monitorin

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

A regional election offers lessons on combatting the rise of the far right, both across the Continent and in the United States.

The Italian diaspora is the large-scale emigration of Italians from Italy. There are two major Italian diasporas in Italian history. The first diaspora began more or less around 1880, a decade or so after the Unification of Italy (with most leaving after 1880), and ended in the 1920s to early-1940s with the rise of Fascism in Italy. The second diaspora started after the end of World War II and roughly concluded in the 1970s. These together constituted the largest voluntary emigration period in documented history. Between 1880-1980, about 15,000,000 Italians left the country permanently. By 1980, it was estimated that about 25,000,000 Italians were residing outside Italy. A third wave is being reported in present times, due to the socio-economic problems caused by the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century, especially amongst the youth. According to the Public Register of Italian Residents Abroad (AIRE), figures of Italians abroad rose from 3,106,251 in 2006 to 4,636,647 in 2015, growing by 49.3% in just ten years.

Disclaimer: I'm neither an experienced programmer nor proficient in reverse engineering, but I like at least to try to figure out how things work. Sometimes the solution is so easy, that even I manage to find it, still take this with a grain of salt. I lately witnessed the setup of an Envertech EnverBridge ENB-202 which is kind of a classic Chinese IoT device. Buy it, plug it in, use some strange setup software, and it will report your PV statistics to a web portal. The setup involved downloading a PE32 Windows executable, with an UI that basically has two input boxes and a sent button. You've to input the serial number(s) of your inverter boxes and the ID of your EnverBridge. That made me interested in what this setup process really looks like. The EnverBridge device itself has on one end a power plug, which is also used to communicate with the inverter via some Powerline protocol, and a network plug with a classic RJ45 end you plug into your network. If you power it up it will request an IPv4 address via DHCP. That brings us to the first oddity, the MAC address is in the BC:20:90 prefix which I could not find in the IEEE lists. Setting Up the SetID Software You can download the Windows software in a Zipfile, once you unpack it you end up with a Nullsoft installer .exe. Since this is a PE32 executable we've to add i386 as foreign architecture to install the wine32 package.

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt update
apt install wine32:i386
wget http://www.envertec.com/uploads/bigfiles/Set%20ID.zip
unzip Set\ ID.zip
wine Set\ ID.exe

The end result is an installation in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/SetID which reveals that this software is build with Qt5 according to the shipped dll's. The tool itself is in udpCilentNow.exe, and looks like this: The Network Communication To my own surprise, the communication is straight forward. A single UDP paket is sent to the broadcast address (255.255.255.255) on port 8765. I expected some strange binary protocol, but the payload is just simple numbers. They're a combination of the serial numbers of the inverter and the ID of the Enverbridge device. One thing I'm not 100% sure about are the inverter serial numbers, there are two of them, but on the inverter I've seen the serial numbers are always the same. So the payload is assembled like this:

• ID of the EnverBridge
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 1
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 2

If you've more inverter the serials are just appended in the same way. Another strange thing is that the software does close to no input validation, they only check that the inverter serials start with CN and then just extract char 9 to 16. The response from the EnverBridge is also a single UDP paket to the broadcast address on port 8764, with exactly the same content we've sent. Writing a Replacement My result is probably an insult for all proficient Python coders, but based on a bit of research and some cut&paste programming I could assemble a small script to replicate the function of the Windows binary. I guess the usefulness of this exercise was mostly my personal entertainment, though it might help some none Windows users to setup this device. Usage is also very simple:

./enverbridge.py -h
Usage: enverbridge.py [options] MIIDs
Options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -b BID, --bid=BID  Serial Number of your EnverBridge
./enverbridge.py -b 90087654 CN19100912345678 CN19100912345679

This is basically 1:1 the behaviour of the Windows binary, though I tried to add a bit more validation then the original binary and some more error messages. I also assume the serial numbers are also always the same so I take only one as the input, and duplicate it for the paket data.

WebRTC is a standard real-time communication protocol built directly into modern web browsers. It enables the creation of video conferencing services which do not require participants to download additional software. Many services make use of it and it almost always works out of the box. The reason it just works is that it uses a protocol called ICE to establish a connection regardless of the network environment. What that means however is that in some cases, your video/audio connection will need to be relayed (using end-to-end encryption) to the other person via third-party TURN server. In addition to adding extra network latency to your call that relay server might overloaded at some point and drop or delay packets coming through. Here's how to tell whether or not your WebRTC calls are being relayed, and how to ensure you get a direct connection to the other host.

Testing basic WebRTC functionality Before you place a real call, I suggest using the official test page which will test your camera, microphone and network connectivity. Note that this test page makes use of a Google TURN server which is locked to particular HTTP referrers and so you'll need to disable privacy features that might interfere with this:

• Brave: Disable Shields entirely for that page (Simple view) or allow all cookies for that page (Advanced view).

• Firefox: Ensure that http.network.referer.spoofSource is set to false in about:config, which it is by default.
• uMatrix: The "Spoof Referer header" option needs to be turned off for that site.

Checking the type of peer connection you have Once you know that WebRTC is working in your browser, it's time to establish a connection and look at the network configuration that the two peers agreed on. My favorite service at the moment is Whereby (formerly Appear.in), so I'm going to use that to connect from two different computers:

• canada is a laptop behind a regular home router without any port forwarding.
• siberia is a desktop computer in a remote location that is also behind a home router, but in this case its internal IP address (192.168.1.2) is set as the DMZ host.

Chromium For all Chromium-based browsers, such as Brave, Chrome, Edge, Opera and Vivaldi, the debugging page you'll need to open is called chrome://webrtc-internals. Look for RTCIceCandidatePair lines and expand them one at a time until you find the one which says:

• state: succeeded (or state: in-progress)
• nominated: true
• writable: true

Then from the name of that pair (N6cxxnrr_OEpeash in the above example) find the two matching RTCIceCandidate lines (one local-candidate and one remote-candidate) and expand them. In the case of a direct connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of siberia
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: srflx

and the following on local-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of canada
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: prflx

These candidate types indicate that a STUN server was used to determine the public-facing IP address and port for each computer, but the actual connection between the peers is direct. On the other hand, for a relayed/proxied connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate side:

• ip shows an IP address belonging to the TURN server
• candidateType: relay

and the same information as before on the local-candidate.

Firefox If you are using Firefox, the debugging page you want to look at is about:webrtc. Expand the top entry under "Session Statistics" and look for the line (should be the first one) which says the following in green:

• ICE State: succeeded
• Nominated: true
• Selected: true

then look in the "Local Candidate" and "Remote Candidate" sections to find the candidate type in brackets.

Firewall ports to open to avoid using a relay In order to get a direct connection to the other WebRTC peer, one of the two computers (in my case, siberia) needs to open all inbound UDP ports since there doesn't appear to be a way to restrict Chromium or Firefox to a smaller port range for incoming WebRTC connections. This isn't great and so I decided to tighten that up in two ways by:

• restricting incoming UDP traffic to the IP range of siberia's ISP, and
• explicitly denying incoming to the UDP ports I know are open on siberia.

To get the IP range, start with the external IP address of the machine (I'll use the IP address of my blog in this example: 66.228.46.55) and pass it to the whois command:

$ whois 66.228.46.55   grep CIDR
CIDR:           66.228.32.0/19

To get the list of open UDP ports on siberia, I sshed into it and ran nmap:

$ sudo nmap -sU localhost
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-03-28 15:55 PDT
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000015s latency).
Not shown: 994 closed ports
PORT      STATE         SERVICE
631/udp   open filtered ipp
5060/udp  open filtered sip
5353/udp  open          zeroconf
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 190.25 seconds

I ended up with the following in my /etc/network/iptables.up.rules (ports below 1024 are denied by the default rule and don't need to be included here):

# Deny all known-open high UDP ports before enabling WebRTC for canada
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5353 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 66.228.32.0/19 -p udp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT

Review: Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder

Publisher:	Basic
Copyright:	June 2018
ISBN:	0-465-09426-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	248

Listening to experts argue can be one of the better ways to learn about a new field. It does require some basic orientation and grounding or can be confusing or, worse, wildly misleading, so some advance research or Internet searches are warranted. But it provides some interesting advantages over reading multiple popular introductions to a field. First, experts arguing with each other are more precise about their points of agreement and disagreement because they're trying to persuade someone who is well-informed. The points of agreement are often more informative than the points of disagreement, since they can provide a feel for what is uncontroversial among experts in the field. Second, internal arguments tend to be less starry-eyed. One of the purposes of popularizations of a field is to get the reader excited about it, and that can be fun to read. But to generate that excitement, the author has a tendency to smooth over disagreements and play up exciting but unproven ideas. Expert disagreements pull the cover off of the uncertainty and highlight the boundaries of what we know and how we know it. Lost in Math (subtitled How Beauty Leads Physics Astray) is not quite an argument between experts. That's hard to find in book form; most of the arguments in the scientific world happen in academic papers, and I rarely have the energy or attention span to read those. But it comes close. Hossenfelder is questioning the foundations of modern particle physics for the general public, but also for her fellow scientists. High-energy particle physics is facing a tricky challenge. We have a solid theory (the standard model) which explains nearly everything that we have currently observed. The remaining gaps are primarily at very large scales (dark matter and dark energy) or near phenomena that are extremely difficult to study (black holes). For everything else, the standard model predicts our subatomic world to an exceptionally high degree of accuracy. But physicists don't like the theory. The details of why are much of the topic of this book, but the short version is that the theory does not seem either elegant or beautiful. It relies on a large number of measured constants that seem to have no underlying explanation, which is contrary to a core aesthetic principle that physicists use to judge new theories. Accompanying this problem is another: New experiments in particle physics that may be able to confirm or disprove alternate theories that go beyond the standard model are exceptionally expensive. All of the easy experiments have been done. Building equipment that can probe beyond the standard model is incredibly expensive, and thus only a few of those experiments have been done. This leads to two issues: Particle physics has an overgrowth of theories (such as string theory) that are largely untethered from experiments and are not being tested and validated or disproved, and spending on new experiments is guided primarily by a sense of scientific aesthetics that may simply be incorrect. Enter Lost in Math. Hossenfelder's book picks up a thread of skepticism about string theory (and, in Hossenfelder's case, supersymmetry as well) that I previously read in Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics. But while Smolin's critique was primarily within the standard aesthetic and epistemological framework of particle physics, Hossenfelder is questioning that framework directly. Why should nature be beautiful? Why should constants be small? What if the universe does have a large number of free constants? And is the dislike of an extremely reliable theory on aesthetic grounds a good basis for guiding which experiments we fund?

Do you recall the temple of science, in which the foundations of physics are the bottommost level, and we try to break through to deeper understanding? As I've come to the end of my travels, I worry that the cracks we're seeing in the floor aren't really cracks at all but merely intricate patterns. We're digging in the wrong places.

Lost in Math will teach you a bit less about physics than Smolin's book, although there is some of that here. Smolin's book was about two-thirds physics and one-third sociology of science. Lost in Math is about two-thirds sociology and one-third physics. But that sociology is engrossing. It's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't thought before about the practical effects of running out of unexplained data on a theoretical field, or about the transition from more data than we can explain to having to spend billions of dollars to acquire new data. And Hossenfelder takes direct aim at the human tendency to find aesthetically appealing patterns and unified explanations, and scores some palpable hits.

I went into physics because I don't understand human behavior. I went into physics because math tells it how it is. I liked the cleanliness, the unambiguous machinery, the command math has over nature. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding physics is that I still don't understand human behavior. "We cannot give exact mathematical rules that define if a theory is attractive or not," says Gian Francesco Giudice. "However, it is surprising how the beauty and elegance of a theory are universally recognized by people from different cultures. When I tell you, 'Look, I have a new paper and my theory is beautiful,' I don't have to tell you the details of my theory; you will get why I'm excited. Right?" I don't get it. That's why I am talking to him. Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful? Such a connection between me and the universe seems very mystical, very romantic, very not me. But then Gian doesn't think that nature cares what I find beautiful, but what he finds beautiful.

The structure of this book is half tour of how physics judges which theories are worthy of investigation and half personal quest to decide whether physics has lost contact with reality. Hossenfelder approaches this second thread with multiple interviews of famous scientists in the field. She probes at their bases for preferring one theory over another, at how objective those preferences can or should be, and what it means for physics if they're wrong (as increasingly appears to be the case for supersymmetry). In so doing, she humanizes theory development in a way that I found fascinating. The drawback to reading about ongoing arguments is the lack of a conclusion. Lost in Math, unsurprisingly, does not provide an epiphany about the future direction of high-energy particle physics. Its conclusion, to the extent that it has one, is a plea to find a way to put particle physics back on firmer experimental footing and to avoid cognitive biases in theory development. Given the cost of experiments and the nature of humans, this is challenging. But I enjoyed reading this questioning, contrarian take, and I think it's valuable for understanding the limits, biases, and distortions at the edge of new theory development. Rating: 7 out of 10

Update a few hours later: an update came in, version 1.7.62, which fixed this misbehavior!!!! I have been using the Brave browser now for many months without any problem, in particular I use the -dev version, which is rather on the edge of development. Unfortunately, either due to Linux kernel changes (I am using the latest stable kernel, at the moment 5.5.9) or due to Brave changes, the browser has become completely unusable: CPU spikes consistently to 100% and more, and the dev browser tries to upload crash reports every 5sec. The problem is shown in the kernel log as I have checked older versions, as well as beta versions, all of them exhibit the same problem. I have disabled all extensions, without any change in behavior. I also have reported this problem in the Brave community forum, without any answer. This means, for now I have to switch back to Firefox, which works smoothly.

Control freaks. You may have called people like this. Or you may have been called one yourself. Maybe you got angry. Or, on the contrary, you felt like being a control freak is a feature, because who would notice all these little details that are not exactly perfect if not you? This post is an attempt to deconstruct the term. Etymological considerations Control - from latin contra- rotulus - refers to the copy of an account register as a means of verification of the original register. So control is about keeping track, not making mistakes, i.e. it's about doing a perfect calculation. The meaning of control in our society is linked to authority, or to policing like in crowd control. What English calls an inspector, is a Kontrolleur in German or contr leur in French. The word is also linked to manufacturing, as in quality control. We also talk about being in control, which is linked to the desire of being autonomous, to be able to act on one's own account. Being in control can also designate a need to preserve one's own integrity: if I have integrity (in the sense of feeling whole), I can self-determine, which is the most fundamental requirement for having one's own identity. Freak - refers to someone who does not fit the norm. Calling someone a freak is per se problematic, because it blames a person for being atypical, abnormal. Freak is a word that, while pointing a finger at difference, at the same time denies people the right to be different and diverse. People can reappropriate such words to make it clear that not fitting the norm is a wanted expression of their diversity we can see that if we follow the history of the word queer for an example. Types of control freaking To me, being a control freak is mostly a feature, if it's about controlling my own life and my own effectiveness. Control freaking becomes troublesome when it's about controlling other people's effectiveness. And it becomes highly problematic when it's about controlling other people's lives. Controlling one's own life Having control over one's own life is a basic human need. In particular people who are part of minorities, people who face discrimination and oppression every day have an increased need for self-determination, and the need to see their existence and their identity acknowledged and accepted by the rest of the world. Too often do we experience that other people (generally the ones with privilege, or not facing the same oppression) try to own the narrative over our lives (1)(2). Calling this control freakish is missing the point, and is probably a sign of looking at it from a perspective of privilege. Controlling one's own effectiveness People produce things. People write code, make ceramics, or write texts, for example. People have a need to control their own effectiveness: they set up routines, product tests, documentation. This type of control is a feature, and can help to release better software, better texts, or perfectly burnt clay pots ultimately controlling one's own effectiveness helps to learn from one's mistakes and to improve routines over time. The grey zone The grey zone describes the zone in between wanting to control one's own effectiveness and wanting to control other people's effectiveness. Here we could situate the type of control freak who does not delegate tasks to others for fear of seeing them done differently then they had expected them to be done. This can be harmful particularly to the person who does not delegate: they can get overworked or burnt out. This type of control freakism might be linked to perfectionism. Controlling other people's effectiveness When we work with other people, our own effectiveness might get in the way of other people's effectiveness, or vice versa. Indeed, it happens - not only in work contexts - that people find themselves in setups in which mutual responsibilities and autonomies conflict with one another because one person is dependent on the other for making decisions or moving things forward as they see fit. (There is generally a relation of dependency between two conflicting parties that is worth looking at (3).) Add to this the fact that, when delegating a task, some people have a hard time also delegating the responsibility and autonomy needed to resolve the task. They lack trust that another person can also do the work, or want that person to do the work exactly in the same way they would do it. (In some cases this can be related to Founder's Syndrome and can result in organizations staying stuck with one or a small group of founders holding knowledge and power, and preventing the organization from growing. Page 11 in the booklet "Working with conflict in our groups" describes how such an informal hierarchy can come into being in grassroot groups.) The (perfectly valid) need behind this type of control freaking could be to make sure that a group of people builds a successful product, releases a fact-checked documentary, or creates a publication without mistakes. But controlling other people's effectiveness as a strategy to satisfy this need can create a non-cooperative climate in which people do not meet each other on eye level, but are dependent on each other, experience a lack autonomy, a break of boundaries, or sometimes feel authority to be overexerted. Acknowledging the need to build a good product, it is possible to create the appropriate strategies to guarantee that the involved people can meet each other on eye level: for example by clearly defining and documenting role-responsibility-accountability along with appropriate decision making processes, or by distributing leadership ( you should totally click on that link!), by looking at inclusive leadership models, by learning from past mistakes, by instating feedback cycles, by making boundaries between the direction of an organization and the day-to-day work clear. An organization I work with has the rule that people can make decisions for themselves if the decision only affects their work, while decisions that affect a team should be made with the team, and decisions that affect the organization as a whole need to be made at the organizational level. They call that a no-brainer, but in organizations with traditional hierarchies, or in grown grassroot environments that have never clearly defined and assigned responsibilities and accountabilities (aka "functional roles") this is not so obvious at all. Controlling someone else's life This type of control freak does not only desire to control their own life but for a reason or another wants to know and control what other people do, think (especially about the control freak), decide, or how they live. In some cases, this type of control freak might even want to force upon others things they should do as a way to be accepted by the control freak. It's what we call narcissism, harassment, abuse. It is unacceptable. Conclusion In summary, the distinctions I came up with in this post describe the boundaries along which control freakism takes hold of someone else's effectiveness or life and ultimately prevents them from self-determining. In German we have the word bergriffig which describes that someone is infringing someone else's boundaries they are over - grabbing, seizing, grasping, taking hold of. Which type of control freak are you, if any?

(1) Like when a West-Berliner in a round of 15 East Germans arrogantly talks about the time when the wall came down and tells the story that he could not go shopping between Thursdays and Sundays because the East Germans bought too many products in the supermarkets while this event marked an unimaginable rift in the biographies of 17 million East Germans, 15 of whom are sitting right in front of him. Thirty years after 1989, many of us are finally starting to question this publicly ( links in German language).

(2) Women experience it similary regularly, see Men Explain Things to me, a book by Rebecca Solnit.

(3) By the way, rather than having "recruited the wrong person" conflict may intrinsically arise as part of certain work relationships, simply due to the inter-dependencies of roles or workers, like in a delivery chain.

A new version of RcppAPT our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like is now on CRAN. RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations. This new version corrects builds failures under the new and shiny Apt 2.0 release (and the pre-releases like the 1.9.* series in Ubuntu) as some header files moved around. My thanks to Kurt Hornik for the heads-up. I accomodated the change in the (very simple and shell-based) configure script by a) asking pkg-config about the version of pkg-apt and then using that to b) compare to a threshold value of 1.9.0 and c) setting another compiler #define if needed so that d) these headers could get included if defined. The neat part is that a) and b) are done in an R one-liner, and the whole script is still in shell. Now, CRAN being CRAN, I now split the script into two: one almost empty one not using bash that passes the omg but bash is not portable test, and which calls a second bash script doing the work. Fun and games The full set of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.0.6 (2020-03-14)

• Accomodate Apt 2.0 code changes by including more header files
• Change is backwards compatible and conditional
• Added configure call using pkg-config and package version comparison (using R) to determine if the define is needed
• Softened unit tests as we cannot assume optional source deb information to be present, so demo code runs but zero results tolerated

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. A bit more information about the package is available here as well as as the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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 have a Raspberry Pi at my parents home. They have internet access via some ISP using Carrier Grade NAT (CGN). Hence their home router is not reachable via IPv4 from the outside, they do have IPv6 and the devices can also be made accessible via IPv6 via the local router. Did that, was able to access my Raspberry Pi over IPv6 and SSH from the outside. So doing backup of that Raspberry Pi with BackupPC from the outside was a walk in the park. Unfortunately the IPv6 prefix seems to change occasionally and the router only allows to configure explicit IPv6 addresses in firewall rules so after a prefix change the configured rules no more match the devices IPv6 addresses. Meh. So there were multiple possibilities to work around these restrictions and access a devices behind the router:

• Using a permanent VPN connection, e.g. OpenVPN.
• Using a software defined network (SDN), e.g. ZeroTier.
• Enabling a Tor Hidden Service to access the device via SSH and Tor.

Enabling a Tor Hidden Service for port 22 is a no-brainer and was done most quickly (actually it already was in place as I already suspected that an IPv6 prefix change might happen) and I so far was too lazy to replace it with something more proper. But my backup was relying on direct SSH access via IPv6. So I needed to get that working over Tor, too. Here s what was needed for the host named sherpa (named after the Fiberfab Sherpa) to be backed up via Tor:

• Make sure the folloing packages are installed on the BackupPC server:
  • netcat-openbsd (netcat-traditional might work, too, but then needs different commandline options)
  • ssh-tools for ssh-ping
  • tor (of course :-)
• Add these lines to ~backuppc/.ssh/config:

  Host sherpa_via_tor
          Hostname abcdefghijklmnop.onion
          ProxyCommand /bin/nc.openbsd -X 5 -x localhost:9050 %h %p
  

  These lines basically configure an alias hostname for ssh which then connects via SOCKS5 to the Tor daemon instead of doing DNS lookup and connection itself. It also configures the actual hostname (a Tor .onion hostname) to connect to.
• Add the following lines to /etc/backuppc/sherpa.pl:

  $Conf ClientNameAlias  = 'sherpa_via_tor';
  $Conf PingCmd  = '/usr/bin/ssh-ping -c 1 $host';
  $Conf NmbLookupFindHostCmd  = "";
  

  These lines configure a few things in BackupPC:
  • Use the hostname alias declared in .ssh/config.
  • Use ssh-ping instead of standard ping as command to test connectivity. (ICMP neither works over SOCKS5 nor over Tor. And we configured the connection only for SSH anyways.)
  • Don t try to do any DNS lookups on the given hostnames. (Otherwise you ll get error messages like Can t find host sherpa_via_tor via netbios in BackupPC s per-host log files.)

That s it basically. Of course you also need to have the SSH public host key in the .ssh/known_hosts file also for the .onion hostname. And the Tor Hidden Service needs to be configured on the target device. But that s left as exercise for the reader. There s a lot of documentation about that on the internet, including slides and video recordings of talks and live demos I gave about this topic in German. Ah, and in case you might think that s unfair and misuse of the resources of the Tor Project: No, I explicitly asked and they said more or less any additional traffic helps to make it more difficult to analyse Tor traffic or to track Tor users and is hence welcome. Addendum: The last direct full backup of that Raspberry Pi (5.5 GB) took around 32 minutes. The first full backup over Tor (8.7 GB) took 341 minutes. Seems much slower, but there might be other factors as well: Most backups which ran last night were running at only 0.85 MB/s to 1 MB/s, probably because too many backups were running in parallel after a recent backup server downtime with file system check the backup server was probably the bottleneck. The backup of the Raspberry Pi over Tor ran at 0.42 MB/s, so about half the speed of the other backups. (Will probably add some more notes if I have more statistics over time.)

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in March) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games

• The games team received a lot of FTBFS bug reports due to a recent change in SDL2. (#951087) Many games that relied on the FindSDL2.cmake macro suddenly stopped building from source. Simon McVittie, who analyzed the situation, provided some helpful fixes for the problem. Ideally all affected packages and SDL2 should be fixed. I applied his patch for blockattack (#951943) and came up with similar patches for megaglest (#951959) and spring (#951974), pekka-kana-2 (#952049) was fixed by Simon and Carlos again.
• I updated clanlib, an older SDK for game development, fixed a Perl build failure and applied patches to make cross-builds and reproducible builds possible.
• I backported the latest version of Minetest, 5.1.1, to buster-backports.
• Morris was ported to GSetting by Yavor Doganov and Reiner Herrmann ported it to the signals2 boost library (well done folks!) while I was tying all things together.
• Freecol, a remake of the old Colonization received some love too. I could fix a build failure, create a valid appdata file and apply upstream s patch to address CVE-2018-1000825.
• I packaged new upstream releases of freeciv, freeorion and armagetronad.
• ufoai: I fixed a build failure caused by an upgrade to the mxml 3.x library. There is another issue with the old and soon to be removed gtksourceview2 library which the map editor relies on for some specific functions. I suppose the only way is to disable the functionality or to disable the editor alltogether. The game itself is not affected.
• I sponsored an improved version of mupen64plus-qt for Dan Hastings, an RC fix for widelands by Juhani Numminen and
• reviewed opensurge and surgescript for Carlos Donizete Froes. The former retro platformer opensurge is still missing from Debian and would be a nice addition to the games section. There is still some kind of runtime problem / shared library error and more work is required to make progress here.

Debian Java

• This month I packaged new releases of jboss-threads, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-jr, intellij-annotations, jboss-modules and libpdfbox2-java.

Misc

• After we received new bug reports for ublock-origin, this time because of sandboxing limitations in Chromium, I decided to revert back to two different binary packages, one for Firefox and one for Chromium. This will avoid any sandboxing problems due to the previous use of symlinks. The new version 1.25.0 is currently waiting in NEW.
• Instead the update of privacybadger to version 2020.2.19 and binaryen was much more straightforward.

Debian LTS This was my 48. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 10 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• DLA-2133-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 3 CVE.
• DLA-2138-1. Issued a security update for wpa fixing 1 CVE.
• Worked on a security update for squid3 that is not finished yet.

ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 21. month and I have been paid to work 8 hours on ELTS.

• ELA-217-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE. I investigated CVE-2019-17569 and found that it did not affect the version in Wheezy because the refactoring and thus the regression happened in a later version. I worked on CVE-2020-1938, a possible remote code execution vulnerability regarding the AJP protocol. After I had backported the initial upstream patch, I discovered that more and more changes to the code were required which I found to be too intrusive eventually. Since the AJP port is disabled by default in Debian and the scenario of an untrusted user/service like mod_jk and Apache 2 seems unlikely, I opted for not making those changes.
• Created a script to display which supported source packages are embedded into other supported packages and to show the embedded code copies in supported packages. There will be another script for LTS that behaves slightly different but it will also help to highlight CVE in embedded-code-copies in LTS and Debian packages in general.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

I have worked a bit on the fonts I use recently. From the main font I use every day in my text editor and terminals to this very website, I did a major and (hopefully) thoughtful overhaul of my typography, in the hope of making things easier to use and, to be honest, just prettier.

Editor and Terminal: Fira mono This all started when I found out about the Jetbrains Mono font. I found the idea of ligatures fascinating: the result is truly beautiful. So I do what I often do (sometimes to the despair of some fellow Debian members) and filed a RFP to document my research. As it turns out, Jetbrains Mono is not free enough to be packaged in Debian, because it requires proprietary tools to build. I nevertheless figured I could try another font so I looked at other monospace alternatives. I found the following packages in debian:

• fonts-firacode: ligatures
• fonts-hack: no ligatures
• fonts-hermit: no ligatures, smaller
• fonts-monoid: ligatures, feels much "thinner" than jetbrains

Those are also "programmer fonts" that caught my interest but somehow didn't land in Debian yet:

• sudo: personal project, no ligatures
• Iosevka: ligatures, multilingual
• Adobe's source code pro: WNPP

Because Fira code had ligatures, i ended up giving it a shot. I really like the originality of the font. See, for example, how the @ sign looks when compared to my previous font, Liberation Mono:

Liberation Mono

Fira Mono

Interestingly, a colleague (thanks ahf!) pointed me to the Practical Typography post "Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no", which makes the very convincing argument that ligatures are downright dangerous to programming environment. In my experiences with the fonts, it was also not always giving the result I would expect. I also remembered that the Emacs Haskell mode would have this tendency of inserting crazy syntactic sugar like this in source code without being asked, which I found extremely frustrating. Besides, Emacs doesn't support ligatures, unless you count such horrendous hacks which hack at the display time. That's because Emacs' display layer is not based on a modern rendering library like Pango but some scary legacy code that very few people understand. On top of the complexity of the codebase, there is also resistance in including a modern font. So I ended up using Fira mono everywhere I use fixed-width fonts, even though it's not packaged in Debian. That involves the following configuration in my .Xresources (no, I haven't switched to Wayland):

! font settings
Emacs*font: Fira mono
rofi*font: Fira mono 12
! Symbola is to get emojis to display correctly, apt install fonts-symbola
!URxvt*font: xft:Monospace,xft:Symbola
URxvt*font: xft:Fira mono,xft:Symbola

I also dropped this script in ~/.local/share/fonts/download.sh, for lack of a better way, to download all the fonts I'm interested in:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -u
wget --no-clobber --continue https://practicaltypography.com/fonts/charter.zip
unzip -u charter.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif-pro/releases/download/3.001R/source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
unzip -u source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases/download/3.006R/source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
unzip -u source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro/releases/download/2.030R-ro%2F1.050R-it/source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
unzip -u source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue -O Fira-4.202.zip https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/archive/4.202.zip   true
unzip -u Fira-4.202.zip

Update: I forgot to mention one motivation behind this was to work around a change in the freetype interpreter, discussed in bug 866685 and my upgrades documentation.

Website: Charter That "hell no" article got me interested in the Practical Typography web book, which I read over the weekend. It was an eye opener and I realized I had already some of those concepts implanted; in fact it's probably after reading the Typography in ten minutes guide that I ended up trying Fira sans a few years ago. I have removed that font since then, however, after realising it was taking up an order of magnitude more bandwidth space than the actual page content. I really loved the book, so much that I actually bought it. I liked the concept of it, the look, and the fact that it's a living document. There's a lot of typography work I would need to do on this site to catchup with the recommendations from Matthew Butterick. Switching fonts is only one part of this, but it's something I was excited to work on. So I sat down and reviewed the free fonts Butterick recommends and tried out a few. I ended up settling on Charter, a relatively old (in terms of computing) font designed by Matthew Carter (of Verdana fame) in 1987. Charter really looks great and is surprisingly small. While a single version of Fira varies between 96KiB (Fira Sans Condensed) and 308KiB (Fira Sans Medium Italic), Charter is only 28KiB! While it's still about as large as most of my articles, I found it was a better compromise and decided to make the jump. This site is now in Serif, which is a huge change for me. The change was done with the following CSS:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, body  
    /* 
     * Charter: Butterick's favorite, freely available, found on https://practicaltypography.com/free-fonts.html
     * Palatino: Mac OS
     * Palatino Linotype: Windows
     * Noto serif: Android, packaged in Debian
     * Liberation serif: Linux fallback
     * Serif: fallback
     */
    font-family: Charter, Palatino, "Palatino Linotype", "Noto serif", "Liberation serif", serif;
    /* Charter is available from https://practicaltypography.com/charter.html under the liberal Bitstream license */
 

I have also decided to outline headings by making them slanted, using the beautiful italic version of Charter:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5  
    font-style: italic;
 

I also made the point size larger, if the display is large enough:

/* enlarge body point size for charter for larger displays */
@media (min-device-width: 750px)  
    body  
        font-size: 20px;
        line-height: 1.3; /* default in FF is ~1.48 */
     
 

Modern display (including fonts) have a much higher resolution and the point size on my website was really getting too small to be readable. This, in turn, required a change to the max-width:

#content  
    /* about 2.5 alphabets with charter */
    max-width: 35em;
 

I have kept the footers and "UI" elements in sans-serif though, and kept those aligned on operating system defaults or "system fonts":

/* some hacking at typefaces to get some fresh zest in here
 * fallbacks from:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_Microsoft_Windows
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_macOS
 */
.navbar, .footer  
    /*
     * Avenir: Mac, quite different but should still be pretty
     * Gill sans: Mac, Windows, somewhat similar to Avenir (indulge me)
     * Noto sans: Android, packaged in Debian
     * Open sans: Texlive extras AKA Linux, packaged in Debian
     * Fira sans: Mozilla's Firefox OS
     * Liberation sans: Linux fallback
     * Helvetica: general fallback
     * Sans-serif: fallback
     */
    font-family: Avenir, "Gill sans", "Noto sans", "Open sans", "Fira sans", "Liberation sans", Helvetica, sans-serif;
    /* Fira is available from https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/ under the SIL Open Font License */
    /* alternatively, just use system fonts for "controls" instead:
    font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
    gitlab uses: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Noto Sans", Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"
    */
 

I've only done some preliminary testing of how this will look like. Although I tested on a few devices (my phone, e-book tablet, an iPad, and of course my laptop), I fully expect things to break on your device. Do let me know if things look better or worse. For future comparison, my site is well indexed in the Internet Wayback Machine and can be used to look at the site before the change. For example, compare the previous article here with its earlier style. The changes to the theme are of course available in my custom ikiwiki bootstrap theme (see in particular commits 0bca0fb7 and d1901fb8), as usual. Enjoy, and let me know what you think! PS: I considered just setting the Charter font in CSS and not adding it as a @font-face. I'm still considering that option and might do so if the performance cost is too big. The Fira mono font is actually set like this for the preformatted sections of the site, but because it's more common (and it's too big) I haven't added it as a font-face. You might want to download the font locally to benefit from the full experience as well. PPS: As it turns out, an earlier version of this post featured exactly that: a non-webfont version of Charter, which works fine if you have a good Charter font available. But it looks absolutely terrible if, like many Linux users, you have the nasty bitmap font shipped with xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi. So I fixed the webfont and it's unlikely this site will be able to load reasonably well in Linux until those packages are removed or bitmap font rendering is disabled.

Last night, a series of forged emails was sent to a number of places around the Debian, Ubuntu and Free Software communities. The meat of the mail was a fake message from me to debian-private with the subject "DebConf19 Diversity Girls." I didn't write such a message.
I view this message as the latest installment in a campaign of attacks on Debian that attempt to undermine the project and take up the time of our members.
I was expecting something like this: yesterday, I banned Daniel Pocock from the project.There's been a pattern of related events over the past year and a half:

• Confrontational messages from Daniel that do not stop even when moderators of the discussion forum ask him to stop.
  
• Anonymous messages that expand on the points Daniel has been making accusing people and organizations of misconduct
  
• Without claiming authorship of these anonymous messages, Daniel quickly expands on the messages in his blogs and goes forward assuming these anonymous claims are true
  
• Use of mechanisms described on Daniel's websites to bypass moderation of community forums and other mechanisms designed to reach people who are not interested in the communication on the part of Daniel and the anonymous messages
  
• And now, forged emails
  

This campaign involves a lot of activities hurtful to members of our community. The "DebConf19 Diversity Girls" message was no exception. It alleges misconduct on the part of members of our community. Through the #metoo movement we've seen countless examples of victims standing up, demanding to be acknowledged and demanding that abusers are held accountable. That's not what is happening here. This message combines half-truths with a shocking presentation to damage Debian. It does not work to improve Debian. It is not championing the cause of someone trying to get redress for wrongs done to them.
I reject this approach and the intent behind this forged message and the broader campaign that it fits into.


---


However, I also feel it is important to reassure everyone that Debian is committed to creating a safe and welcoming community. We take concerns about misconduct seriously. We particularly encourage anyone who has concerns about their safety in the debian community or concerns about how they are treated to talk to us. I am available as the project leader. Our community team is available. We will work to understand and resolve your concern.
While I think the presentation was hurtful and inappropriate, I also do acknowledge that personal conflict of interest is something that we all should be aware of. When we are taking on roles that have power within the project, we can create situations where we need to be extra careful to respect people's boundaries. There are cases where a personal conflict of interest may prevent us from being in certain personal relationships while also acting in a role within the project that could affect those relationships.
I think we are already generally aware of these issues. Even so, as we continue to build a community that does a better job respecting its members and their boundaries, it benefits us to continue to refine our approach to important issues like conflict of interest. Sometimes that will involve awareness. Sometimes that will involve crafting more clear policies around the issues. It does not involve vague accusations spammed to the entire Free Software community. If I were actually writing a message on these topics, it would look a lot more like the paragraph above than the message forged in my name.

Self-handicapping - Wikipedia

Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem.[1] It was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas,[2] according to whom self-handicaps are obstacles created, or claimed, by the individual in anticipation of failing performance.[3]

Learned Helplessness is behaviour exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused from the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness: discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented. Upon exhibiting such behavior, the subject was said to have acquired learned helplessness.[1][2] Over the past few decades, neuroscience has provided insight into learned helplessness and shown that the original theory actually had it backwards: the brain's default state is to assume that control is not present, and the presence of "helpfulness" is what is actually learned.[3]

One of the "classics" of Magic literature. Stuck In The Middle With Bruce by John F. Rizzo.

This year s FOSDEM conference was a lot of fun one of the things I always enjoy most about this particular conference (besides having some of the outstanding food you can get in Brussels and meeting with friends from the free software world) is the ability to meet a large range of new people who I wouldn t usually have interacted with, or getting people from different communities together who otherwise would not meet in person as each bigger project has their own conference (for example, the amount of VideoLAN people is much lower at GUADEC and Akademy compared to FOSDEM). It s also really neat to have GNOME and KDE developers within reach at the same place, as I care about both desktops a lot. An unexpected issue This blog post however is not about that. It s about what I learned when talking to people there about AppStream, and the outcome of that. Especially when talking to application authors but also to people who deal with larger software repositories, it became apparent that many app authors don t really want to deal with the extra effort of writing metadata at all. This was a bit of a surprise to me, as I thought that there would be a strong interest for application authors to make their apps look as good as possible in software catalogs. A bit less surprising was the fact that people apparently don t enjoy reading a large specification, reading a long-ish intro guide with lots of dos and don ts or basically reading any longer text at all before being able to create an AppStream MetaInfo/AppData file describing their software. Another common problem seems to be that people don t immediately know what a reverse-DNS ID is, the format AppStream uses for uniquely identifying each software component. So naturally, people either have to read about it again (bah, reading! ) or make something up, which occasionally is wrong and not the actual component-ID their software component should have. The MetaInfo Creator It was actually suggested to me twice that what people really would like to have is a simple tool to put together a MetaInfo file for their software. Basically a simple form with a few questions which produces the final file. I always considered this a nice to have, but not essential feature, but now I was convinced that this actually has a priority attached to it. So, instead of jumping into my favourite editor and writing a bunch of C code to create this make MetaInfo file form as part of appstreamcli, this time I decided to try what the cool kids are doing and make a web application that runs in your browser and creates all metadata there. So, behold the MetaInfo Creator! If you click this link, you will end up at an Angular-based web application that will let you generate MetaInfo/AppData files for a few component-types simply by answering a set of questions. The intent was to make this tool as easy to use as possible for someone who basically doesn t know anything about AppStream at all. Therefore, the tool will:

• Generate a rDNS component-ID suggestion automatically based on the software s homepage and name
• Fill out default values for anything it thinks it has enough data for
• Show short hints for what values we expect for certain fields
• Interactively validate the entered value, so people know immediately when they have entered something invalid
• Produce a .desktop file as well for GUI applications, if people select the option for it
• Show additional hints about how to do more with the metadata
• Create some Meson snippets as pointers how people can integrate the MetaInfo files into projects using the Meson build system

For the Meson feature, the tool simply can not generate a use this and be done script, as each Meson snippet needs to be adjusted for the individual project. So this option is disabled by default, but when enabled, a few simple Meson snippets will be produced which can be easily adjusted to the project they should be part of. The tool currently does not generate any release information for a MetaInfo file at all, This may be added in future. The initial goal was to have people create any MetaInfo file in the first place, having projects also ship release details would be the icing on the cake. I hope people find this project useful and use it to create better MetaInfo files, so distribution repositories and Flatpak repos look better in software centers. Also, since MetaInfo files can be used to create an inventory of software and to install missing stuff as-needed, having more of them will help to build smarter software managers, create smaller OS base installations and introspect what software bundles are made of easily. I welcome contributions to the MetaInfo Creator! You can find its source code on GitHub. This is my first web application ever, the first time I wrote TypeScript and the first time I used Angular, so I d bet a veteran developer more familiar with these tools will cringe at what I produced. So, scratch that itch and submit a PR! Also, if you want to create a form for a new component type, please submit a patch as well. C developer s experience notes for Angular, TypeScript, NodeJS This section is just to ramble a bit about random things I found interesting as a developer who mostly works with C/C++ and Python and stepped into the web-application developer s world for the first time. For a project like this, I would usually have gone with my default way of developing something for the web: Creating a Flask-based application in Python. I really love Python and Flask, but of course using them would have meant that all processing would have had to be done on the server. One the one hand I could have used libappstream that way to create the XML, format it and validate it, but on the other hand I would have had to host the Python app on my own server, find a place at Purism/Debian/GNOME/KDE or get it housed at Freedesktop somehow (which would have taken a while to arrange) and I really wanted to have a permanent location for this application immediately. Additionally, I didn t want people to send the details of new unpublished software to my server. TypeScript I must say that I really like TypeScript as a language compared to JavaScript. It is not really revolutionary (I looked into Dart and other ways to compile $stuff to JavaScript first), but it removes just enough JavaScript weirdness to be pleasant to use. At the same time, since TS is a superset of JS, JavaScript code is valid TypeScript code, so you can integrate with existing JS code easily. Picking TS up took me much less than an hour, and most of its features you learn organically when working on a project. The optional type-safety is a blessing and actually helped me a few times to find an issue. It being so close to JS is both a strength and weakness: On the one hand you have all the JS oddities in the language (implicit type conversion is really weird sometimes) and have to basically refrain from using them or count on the linter to spot them, but on the other hand you can immediately use the massive amount of JavaScript code available on the web. Angular The Angular web framework took a few hours to pick up there are a lot of concepts to understand. But ultimately, it s manageable and pretty nice to use. When working at the system level, a lot of complexity is in understanding how the CPU is processing data, managing memory and using the low-level APIs the operating system provides. With the web application stuff, a lot of the complexity for me was in learning about all the moving parts the system is comprised of, what their names are, what they are, and what works with which. And that is not a flat learning curve at all. As C developer, you need to know how the computer works to be efficient, as web developer you need to know a bunch of different tools really well to be productive. One thing I am still a bit puzzled about is the amount of duplicated HTML templates my project has. I haven t found a way to reuse template blocks in multiple components with Angular, like I would with Jinja2. The documentation suggests this feature does not exist, but maybe I simply can t find it or there is a completely different way to achieve the same result. NPM Ecosystem The MetaInfo Creator application ultimately doesn t do much. But according to GitHub, it has 985 (!!!) dependencies in NPM/NodeJS. And that is the bare minimum! I only added one dependency myself to it. I feel really uneasy about this, as I prefer the Python approach of having a rich standard library instead of billions of small modules scattered across the web. If there is a bug in one of the standard library functions, I can submit a patch to Python where some core developer is there to review it. In NodeJS, I imagine fixing some module is much harder. That being said though, using npm is actually pretty nice there is a module available for most things, and adding a new dependency is easy. NPM will also manage all the details of your dependency chain, GitHub will warn about security issues in modules you depend on, etc. So, from a usability perspective, there isn t much to complain about (unlike with Python, where creating or using a module ends up as a fight the system event way too often and the question which random file do I need to create now to achieve what I want? always exists. Fortunately, Poetry made this a bit more pleasant for me recently). So, tl;dr for this section: The web application development excursion was actually a lot of fun, and I may make more of those in future, now that I learned more about how to write web applications. Ultimately though, I enjoy the lower-level software development and backend development a bit more. Summary Check out the MetaInfo Creator and its source code, if you want to create MetaInfo files for a GUI application, console application, addon or service component quickly.

Welcome to the February 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to provide the ability to demonstrate these binaries originated from a particular, trusted, source release: if identical results are generated from a given source in all circumstances, reproducible builds provides the means for multiple third-parties to reach a consensus on whether a build was compromised via distributed checksum validation or some other scheme. In this month s report, we cover:

• Media coverage & upstream news A new paper on reproducible containers, Ruby updates, etc.
• Distribution work More work in Debian, openSUSE & friends.
• Software development Updates and improvements to our tooling.
• Getting in touch How to contribute, more venues for discussion.

If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Media coverage & upstream news Omar Navarro Leija, a PhD student at the University Of Pennsylvania, published a paper entitled Reproducible Containers that describes in detail the workings of a new user-space container tool called DetTrace:

All computation that occurs inside a DetTrace container is a pure function of the initial filesystem state of the container. Reproducible containers can be used for a variety of purposes, including replication for fault-tolerance, reproducible software builds and reproducible data analytics. We use DetTrace to achieve, in an automatic fashion, reproducibility for 12,130 Debian package builds, containing over 800 million lines of code, as well as bioinformatics and machine learning workflows.

There was also considerable discussion on our mailing list regarding this research and a presentation based on the paper will occur at the ASPLOS 2020 conference between March 16th 20th in Lausanne, Switzerland. The many virtues of Reproducible Builds were touted as benefits for software compliance in a talk at FOSDEM 2020, debating whether the Careful Inventory of Licensing Bill of Materials Have Impact of FOSS License Compliance which pitted Jeff McAffer and Carol Smith against Bradley Kuhn and Max Sills. (~47 minutes in). Nobuyoshi Nakada updated the canonical implementation of the Ruby programming language a change such that filesystem globs (ie. calls to list the contents of filesystem directories) will henceforth be sorted in ascending order. Without this change, the underlying nondeterministic ordering of the filesystem is exposed to the language which often results in an unreproducible build. Vagrant Cascadian reported on our mailing list regarding a quick reproducible test for the GNU Guix distribution, which resulted in 81.9% of packages registering as reproducible in his installation:

$ guix challenge --verbose --diff=diffoscope ...
2,463 store items were analyzed:
  - 2,016 (81.9%) were identical
  - 37 (1.5%) differed
  - 410 (16.6%) were inconclusive

Jeremiah Orians announced on our mailing list the release of a number of tools related to cross-compilation such as M2-Planet and mescc-tools-seed. This project attemps a full bootstrap of a cross-platform compiler for the C programming language (written in C itself) from hex, the ultimate goal being able to demonstrate fully-bootstrapped compiler from hex to the GCC GNU Compiler Collection. This has many implications in and around Ken Thompson s Trusting Trust attack outlined in Thompson s 1983 Turing Award Lecture. Twitter user @TheYoctoJester posted an executive summary of reproducible builds in the Yocto Project: Finally, Reddit user tofflos posted to the /r/Java subreddit asking about how to achieve reproducible builds with Maven and Chris Lamb noticed that the Linux kernel documentation about reproducible builds of it is available on the kernel.org homepages in an attractive HTML format.

Distribution work

Debian Chris Lamb created a merge request for the core debian-installer package to allow all arguments and options from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no] , etc.) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure. (#13) Thorsten Glaser followed-up to a bug filed against the dpkg-source component that was originally filed in late 2015 that claims that the build tool does not respect permissions when unpacking tarballs if the umask is set to 0002. Matthew Garrett posted to the debian-devel mailing list on the topic of Producing verifiable initramfs images as part of a wider conversation on being able to trust the entire software stack on our computers. 59 reviews of Debian packages were added, 30 were updated and 42 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Many issue types were noticed and categorised by Chris Lamb, including:

• openstack_pkg_tools_python_shebang_and_dependencies
• build_path_in_code_generated_by_dgbus_codegen
• random_argument_handling_in_javatools_jh_build
• fortran_captures_build_path
• etc.

openSUSE In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update as well as provided the following patches:

• python-rpm-macros (do not save time-based .pyc files for tests)
• solfege (filesystem ordering issue sent upstream via email; package is orphaned upstream)
• DVDStyler (zip timestamps, submitted upstream)
• python-pikepdf (recreate unreproducible .pyc files)

Software development

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff-like utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. It is run countless times a day on our testing infrastructure and is essential for identifying fixes and causes of nondeterministic behaviour. Chris Lamb made the following changes this month, including uploading version 137 to Debian:

• The sng image utility appears to return with an exit code of 1 if there are even minor errors in the file. (#950806)
• Also extract classes2.dex, classes3.dex from .apk files extracted by apktool. (#88)
• No need to use str.format if we are just returning the string. [ ]
• Add generalised support for ignoring returncodes [ ] and move special-casing of returncodes in zip to use Command.VALID_RETURNCODES. [ ]

Other tools disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues. This month, Vagrant Cascadian updated the Vcs-Git to specify the debian packaging branch. [ ] reprotest is our end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments and then checks the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, versions 0.7.13 and 0.7.14 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen after Vagrant Cascadian added support for GNU Guix [ ].

Project documentation & website There was more work performed on our documentation and website this month. Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a Java Gradle Build Tool snippet to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation [ ] and normalised various terms to unreproducible [ ]. Chris Lamb added a Meson.build example [ ] and improved the documentation for the CMake [ ] to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation, replaced anyone can with anyone may as, well, not everyone has the resources, skills, time or funding to actually do what it refers to [ ] and improved the pre-processing for our report generation [ ][ ][ ][ ] etc. In addition, Holger Levsen updated our news page to improve the list of reports [ ], added an explicit mention of the weekly news time span [ ] and reverted sorting of news entries to have latest on top [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo added Codethink as a non-fiscal sponsor [ ] and lastly Tianon Gravi added a Docker Images link underneath the Debian project on our Projects page [ ].

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann (for the openSUSE distribution):
  • rdiff-backup fixed, build date in Python manpage
  • click-man fixed, toolchain, build date in Python manpage
  • rpm report filesystem-order related nondeterminism
  • python-enaml report nondeterministic .enamlc compiler output
  • k9s date
  • python-xcffib fix a test with a race condition
• Chris Lamb:
  • #943956 re-opened against snakemake.
  • #950630 filed against designate.
  • #950936 filed against pynwb.
  • #950942 filed against python-oslo.reports.
  • #951357 filed against mate-desktop (forwarded upstream).
  • #951573 filed against javatools.
  • #952493 filed against xavs2.
  • #952694 filed against snapd-glib (forwarded upstream).
  • #952762 filed against openstack-pkg-tools.
  • ccextractor issues with MacOSX BSD date not understanding GNU date options
  • python-django (Always build the documentation in English)
  • python_example (sort glob / readdir)

Vagrant Cascadian submitted patches via the Debian bug tracking system targeting the packages the Civil Infrastructure Platform has identified via the CIP and CIP build depends package sets:

• #950410 filed against autogen.
• #950417 & 950416 & 950415 filed against autoconf.
• #950419 filed against m4.
• #950444 filed against intltool.
• #950585 filed against binutils-dev.
• #950603 filed against yodl-doc.
• #950606 filed against gdb-source.
• #950704 filed against automake-1.15.
• #951031 filed against libtool.

Testing framework We operate a fully-featured and comprehensive Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian:
  • Configured an instance of David Bremner s builtin-pho database of .buildinfo files. This has resulted in so that we now know that Debian bullseye contains 4,557 source packages for the amd64 architecture without corresponding .buildinfo files and 25,668 source packages with .buildinfo files. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Forward mails addressed to buildinfo@ to the root user. [ ]
  • Temporarily revert using backports [ ][ ] and use devscripts from buster-backports [ ].
  • Update URL for PureOS package set. [ ]
  • Deprioritise the scheduling of older old packages in bullseye and unstable. [ ][ ]
  • Treat the bullseye distribution like unstable when scheduling the i386 architecture, to allow the latter to catch up a bit. [ ]
• Misc/other:
  • Disable the last active Alpine builder too for now. [ ]
  • Improve generated HTML output. [ ][ ]
  • Ignore Fedora jobs. [ ]
  • Include links to failed and unstable jobs in HTML output. [ ]
  • Start weighting job importance and five a lot more weight to nodes acting as a proxy for others. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add new job to calculate the overall system health for tests.reproducible-builds.org for usage with Jelle van der Waa s Reproducible Builds status display. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added an Apache web server redirect for buildinfos.debian.net [ ] and reverted the reshuffling of arm64 architecture builders [ ]. The usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian.

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

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

---

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

Sealioning - Wikipedia

Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".[5]

Tone policing (also tone trolling, tone argument, and tone fallacy) is an ad hominem (personal attack) and antidebate tactic based on criticizing a person for expressing emotion. Tone policing detracts from the validity of a statement by attacking the tone in which it was presented rather than the message itself.

"A brawler who tattoos a message onto his knuckles does not throw every punch with the weight of First Amendment protection behind him," the brief stated. "Conduct like this does not constitute speech, nor should it. A deliberate attempt to cause physical injury to someone does not come close to the expression which the First Amendment is designed to protect."

It s no secret that times are changing. It used to be that men were men, jokes were jokes, and all facts came from one white guy in a suit who you trusted because he looked like your dad. Now I know I could get in a lot of trouble for just saying this, but I don t care because someone has to tell the truth: These days, you can t say anything racist at all without being called a racist.

Russia's neighbor has developed a plan for countering misinformation. Can it be exported to the rest of the world?

So, I wrote my BIFF Response but Marvin wrote me another angry email. Actually, he wrote 6 more this week, so what s up with that? Why didn t he stop after my first email?

The BIFF Response Method will teach you how to respond to angry emails, texts, or social media posts while maintaining your dignity and personal power.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during February 2020 (previous month):

• Attended FOSDEM and CopyleftConf in Brussels, Belgium. Thanks to all the organisers and attendees for making this happen.

• Further conversations for the next iteration of the OpenUK awards to be presented in June.
• As part of my duties of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest (SPI) I attended and prepared for their respective monthly meetings, participated in various licensing and other free software related topics occurring on the internet, had a number of discussions at FOSDEM and CopyleftConf, as well as participated the usual internal discussions regarding logistics, policy, etc.
• python-debianbts is a Python Interface to Debian's Bug Tracking System by Bastian Venthur. This month I submitted two small pull requests including moving to using the warnings.warn method over logging.warning [...] and to document missing archive keyword argument to the get_bugs call [...].
• Reviewed and merged two patches for django-enumfield, a library of mine for the Django web application framework to fix tests against some Django versions [...] and to correct an import for migration deconstruction [...].
• Opened a number of pull requests to make the build reproducible in upstream projects, including:
  • In the libmate-desktop library component of the MATE Desktop Environment I submitted a pull request to make the build reproducible in/around various dialogs. [...]
  • In python_example, an example pybind11 module built with a Python-based build system, I suggested sorting the extension sources to ensure a reproducible build in any projects based on this template. [...]
  • snapd-glib is a GLib library for communicating with the snapd component of the Snappy package manager. Here, I opened a pull request to make the build reproducible. [...]

• Even more hacking on the Lintian static analysis tool for Debian packages:
  • New features:
    • Check for NO_START and FOO_NO_START in /etc/default scripts. (#950238)
    • Check for debian/upstream/metadata files without bug tracking information and upstream repository locations. (#950115, #950117)
    • Debhelper compat level 9 as been deprecated. (#950453)
  • Bug fixes:
    • Emit rules-requires-root-explicitly for values other than binary-targets. (#951650)
    • Permit millisecond-resolution timestamps in tar archives. (#951594)
  • Reporting:
    • Clarify the error messages when tags are not covered in the testsuite. [...]

For the Tails privacy-oriented operating system, I uploaded the following packages to Debian:

• onionbalance (0.1.8-5):
  • Add missing dh-python to Build-Depends. (#952366)
  • Add sphinxdoc:Depends to binary package dependencies. (#832588)
  • Update Tox dependency for Python 3.x.
  • Use tool:pytest section in setup.cfg over plain "pytest".
  • Update build-dependency on dh-systemd with debhelper version 9.20160709, specify Rules-Requires-Root: no, use secure URL in debian/copyright, update Vcs-Git & Vcs-Browser and bump the package's Standards-Version to 4.5.0.
• pt-websocket (0.2-9):
  • Export a writable home directory. (#952330)
  • Respect nocheck in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS.
  • Update Vcs-Git and Vcs-Browser, specify Rules-Requires-Root: no, drop unused "lack of hardening" Lintian overrides, drop some boilerplate in debian/rules & bump Standards-Version to 4.5.0.

Reproducible builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to provide the ability to demonstrate these binaries originated from a particular trusted source release: if identical results are generated from a given source in all circumstances, reproducible builds provides the means for multiple third-parties to reach a consensus on whether a build was compromised via distributed checksum validation or some other scheme. The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. This month, I:

• Filed upstream pull requests for:
  • In the libmate-desktop library component of the MATE Desktop Environment I submitted a pull request to make the build reproducible in/around various dialog boxes, etc. [...]
  • snapd-glib is a GLib library for communicating with the snapd component of the Snappy package manager. Here, I opened a pull request to make the build reproducible. [...]
  • In python_example, an example pybind11 module built with a Python-based build system, I suggested sorting the extension sources to ensure a reproducible build in any projects based on this template. [...]
• Attended FOSDEM and CopyleftConf in Brussels, Belgium and had a number of ad hoc meetings regarding the organisation itself, potential future collaborations with other projects as well as to generally represent the project in a wider ense.
• Begun collaborative work on an academic paper to be published within the next few months.
• In Debian:
  • Filed a pull request for the core debian-installer package to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no]) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure. (#13)
  • Submitted a patch to openstack-pkg-tools to fix a curious issue where packages built differently if they built "too fast" for example, if we built for both Python 3.7 and Python 3.8 but the installation of the latter occurs within the same wall clock second of the former, the Python 3.8 version will not overwrite the Python 3.7 version and lead to a shebang of #!/usr/bin/python3.7, whilst if it does not occur within the same second, the shebang will be overwritten to #!/usr/bin/python3.8. (#952762)
  • I also submitted 9 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in azure-uamqp-python (nondeterministic #include directives), designate (embedded build path), javatools (nondeterminstic parsing of command-line variables), mate-desktop (build timestamps), msgpack-c (embeds build path), pynwb (embedded timestamps in test files), python-oslo.reports (nondeterminstic/random numbers), snapd-glib (embedded build path) & xavs2 (embedded timestamps).
• Kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date.
• Categorised a huge number of packages and issues in the Reproducible Builds "notes" repository, including identifying a number of new generalised issues.
• Authored a report as part of the Open Technology Fund's previous investment in our project.
• Drafted, published and publicised our monthly report.
• I spent a few moments on our website this month including improving the documentation for CMake [...], adding a Meson.build example to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation [...], replacing instances of "anyone can" with "anyone may" [...], correcting/improving the logic to skip commits when generating drafts [...][...][...], etc.

In our tooling, I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including uploading version 137 to Debian:

• The sng image utility will return 1 if there are even minor errors in the file. (#950806)
• Also extract classes2.dex, classes3.dex from .apk files. (#88)
• No need to use str.format if we are just returning the string. [...]
• Add generalised support for "ignoring" returncodes [...] and move special-casing of returncodes in zip to use Command.VALID_RETURNCODES. [...]

Debian I submitted a Request for Package (RFP) bug for hsd, a blockchain-based top-level domain DNS protocol implementation that underpins Handshake and worked on some initial packaging. (#952472) Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project.

• Investigated and triaged: cacti (CVE-2020-8813), golang-go.crypto (CVE-2020-9283), netty, nodejs (CVE-2019-15605), nova (CVE-2015-9543), ntp, otrs2 (CVE-2019-11358)), php-horde-data (CVE-2020-8518), proftpd-dfsg, python-bleach (CVE-2020-6802), python-django, python-pysaml2, qtbase-opensource-src (CVE-2015-9541), ruby-rack, salt, sudo, systemd (CVE-2020-1712), waitress (CVE-2020-5236), wpa (CVE-2019-5061) & yara
• Frontdesk duties, responding to user/developer questions, reviewing others' packages, participating in mailing list discussions, etc.
• Uploaded version 1.10.7-2+deb9u8 to Debian stretch and 1.11.28-1~deb10u1 for Debian buster to address CVE-2020-7471, a potential SQL injection vulnerability.
• Added DLA 2083-1 in hiredis to the Debian webpages. [...]
• Issued DLA 2115-1 for the proftpd FTP server to address a use-after-free vulnerability. (CVE-2020-9273)
• Issued ELA 213-1 for sudo to fix a privilege escalation vulnerability. (CVE-2019-18634)

You can find out more about the project via the following video:
Uploads

• Django (2.2.10-1) New upstream security release. (#950581)
• Redis:
  • 6.0~rc1-2 Add support for Transport Layer Security added in Redis 6.x (#951255) and add a comment regarding why we export a MAKEFLAGS variable in debian/rules.
  • 5.0.7-2:
    • Apply patches from Christian G ttsche to update the systemd service to reflect new names & create directories in postinst with the correct SELinux context.
    • Bump the package Standards-Version to 4.5.0.
    • Apply a patch from David Pr vot to update the long description to remove duplicate information.
• cpio (2.13+dfsg-2) Fix a regression in handling of CVE-2015-1197 with respect to the --no-absolute-filenames argument by reverting part of an upstream commit. (#946267 #946469)
• hiredis (0.14.0-6) Set the Bug-Database, Bug-Submit, Repository and Repository-Browse upstream metadata fields and rely on pre-initialised dpkg-architecture variables in debian/rules.
• Memcached:
  • 1.5.22-1 New upstream release.
  • 1.5.22-2 Apply a patch to fix build failures on the s390x architecture. (#950777)
• Gunicorn:
  • 20.0.4-2 Set the upstream metadata fields (Repository, Repository-Browse, etc.), bump Standards-Version to 4.5.0.
  • 20.0.4-3 Specify that the gunicorn binary package provides the httpd-wsgi3 virtual package. (#952706)
• GNU Mtools:
  • 4.0.23-2:
    • Add future=+lfs to DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS to support operating on large files. (#949665)
    • Add a gitlab-ci.yml.
    • Use secure HTTPS URL in debian/copyright, set Rules-Requires-Root: no and bump the Standards-Version to 4.5.0.
  • 4.0.23-3 Drop quotes from DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS export line. (#951037)

Finally, I made a non-maintainer upload of adminer (4.7.6-1) on behalf of Alexandre Rossi.

Last year I wrote about some tools for working with Docker images. Since then, we've deprecated the dogen tool for our own images and have built a successor called Concreate. Concreate takes a container image definition described in a YAML document and generates an output image. To do so, it generates an intermediate Dockerfile, along with the scripts and artefacts you references in the YAML file, and by default invokes docker build on the result. However, it can use other builders, such as the OpenShift Build Service, which is what we use for our production images. Concreate can also manage running tests against the image. As with the Container Testing Framework that I mentioned last time, these tests are defined using the Behave system. In related news is that we have published the sources for all of our images. You can now go and read the image.yaml file for EAP 7 on OpenShift to give you an example of what a real image using Concreate looks like.

A month ago, I blogged about my work to automatically check the copyright status of IMDB entries, and try to count the number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and identified a few more. The code used to extract information from various data sources is available in a git repository, currently available from github. So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak around 2010?

I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:

  249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
 2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
  830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
 2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
  291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
  144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
  350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
    4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
  698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
    8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total

The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I've seen examples of all these situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713. It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement, if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries? Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 197 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 21h (out of 16h allocated + 8.75h remaining, thus keeping 3.75h for November).
• Ben Hutchings did 20 hours (out of 15h allocated + 9 extra hours, thus keeping 4 extra hours for November).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 7 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 1.5 hours remaining, thus keeping 15.25 hours for November).
• Guido G nther did 6.5 hours (out of 11h allocated + 1 extra hour, thus keeping 5.5h for November).
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 20h.
• Lucas Kanashiro did 2 hours (out of 5h allocated, thus keeping 3 hours for November).
• Markus Koschany did 19 hours (out of 20.75h allocated, thus keeping 1.75 extra hours for November).
• Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 7h allocated + 0.5 extra hours).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 13.5 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.5 extra hours).
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 11 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 14.75 hours remaining, thus keeping 24.50 extra hours for November, he will give back remaining hours at the end of the month).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 20.75 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased slightly to 183 hours per month. With the increasing number of security issues to deal with, and with the number of open issues not really going down, I decided to bump the funding target to what amounts to 1.5 full-time position. The security tracker currently lists 50 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36 (we re a bit behind in CVE triaging apparently). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 25 months)
• GitHub (for 16 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 41 months)
• Blablacar (for 40 months)
• Linode (for 30 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 19 months)
• Plat Home (for 19 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 40 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 40 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 38 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 35 months)
• Dalenys (for 31 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 26 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 26 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 20 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 14 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 10 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 4 months)
• Vente-privee.com
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 41 months)
• Evolix (for 41 months)
• Offensive Security (for 41 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 41 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 40 months)
• MyTux (for 40 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 38 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 38 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 36 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 35 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 35 months)
• NUMLOG (for 35 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 34 months)
• WinGo AG (for 34 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 30 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 28 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 25 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 23 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 17 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 17 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 17 months)
• RHX Srl (for 14 months)
• Bearstech (for 8 months)
• LiHAS (for 8 months)
• People Doc (for 5 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 3 months)

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games

• I packaged a new upstream version of springlobby. There is even a more recent one now but I discovered that it would fail to build from source. I reported the issue and now I am waiting for another release.
• These packages were also updated: bullet, tuxfootball (#876481), berusky (#877979), spring, hitori and trackballs.
• I released a new version of cube2-data, a DFSG-free version of the Sauerbraten game. This release was largely made possible thanks to the work of Nyav.
• I prepared two stable point releases of berusky and simutrans to fix #877979 and # 869029 for users of Debian s stable distributions too. The bug in Berusky is already resolved but I m still waiting for the confirmation to upload simutrans (#878668).
• I updated wing and biniax2. Here I discovered that biniax2 would segfault immediately at startup after recompilation. I tracked down the issue to some C code that caused undefined behavior, prepared a patch and released a fixed revision.
• I sponsored a new upstream version of mupen64plus-qt.

Debian Java

• This month I started to work on fixing Java9 bugs since Java 9 shall become the new default JDK/JRE for Buster. The bug reports were filed by Chris West who did the important work of identifying build failures and broken packages. I started with some low hanging fruits first and the following packages are now Java 9 ready: libgetopt-java, libjide-oss-java, activemq-protobuf, antelope, yecht, slashtime, colorpicker, f2j, libreadline-java, libjaxp1.3-java, jlapack, isorelax, libisrt-java, rxtx, uima-addons.
• New upstream releases this month: apktool, jboss-xnio, okio, pdfsam, libsejda-java, bcel, autocomplete, mediathekview, sweethome3d.
• MediathekView introduced yet another build-dependency. Let s welcome libokhttp-java in Debian.
• I upgraded jackson-databind to fix CVE-2017-7525. While I was at it, I continued this work with jackson-core, jackson-annotations, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-jr, jackson-datatype-joda, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-smile, jackson-dataformat-yaml and jackson-jaxrs-providers. I also requested the removal of jackson-datatype-guava.
• More resolved RC issues: commons-io (#873118), tycho (#879250)
• Package updates: mockobjects (converted from CDBS to DH) and jblas (RC #877225, #873212, #698176)
• The Maven 2 to Maven 3 transition caused (and still causes) a lot of fallout: I investigated the following packages with RC bugs. In most cases the issue was in another package, so the bugs could be closed but there were also packages like conversant-disruptor (#869002) which caused build failures unrelated to the transition. In total 15 packages were triaged or fixed: jasypt (#871195), mustache-java (#869009), libslf4j-java, apache-log4j2, conversant-disruptor, powermock(#869017), jetty9(#869021), maven-site-plugin(#869001), javamail(#871102), assertj-core(#871131), java-allocation-instrumenter(#869251), json-smart(#868603), sisu-guice(#868611), maven-archiver(#871069), doxia-sitetools(#875948)
• I have started to work on a new upstream version of triplea, multiple strategy games written in Java. The update would fix a couple of bugs and make the package ready for Java 9.
• It was also requested to upgrade Gradle to version 3.4.1 at least. I have made good progress but there is more work to do.

Debian LTS This was my twentieth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 19 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. I will catch up with the remaining 1,75 hours in November. In that time I did the following:

• From 30. October to 05. November I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in jasperreports, jbossas4, libstruts1.2-java, httpcomponents-client, vim, emacs23, trafficserver, async-http-client, liblouis, wordpress, apr, apr-utils, redis, nautilus, libpam4j and spip.
• I decided to mark jbossas4 as end-of-life because the Java application server was never fully packaged and the version in Wheezy is already nine years old. I investigated the open security issues in jasperreports and contacted upstream but they have not published any details yet.
• I pinged bug #878088. The reportbug maintainer still has to respond to the idea of informing the security teams when users report bugs in security uploads. I will discuss the possibility with the rest of the team, whether it is helpful to patch reportbug in Wheezy/Jessie/Stretch now.
• DLA-1151-1 and DLA-1160-1. Issued two security updates for WordPress addressing 10 CVE. It was later discovered that the patch for CVE-2017-14990 was incomplete and caused a regression when using WordPress multi-site feature. Single-site installations were not affected. The complete fix would either include a database upgrade or a different approach without using the new database field signup_id . I reverted the patch for now and issued a regression update in DLA-1151-2.
• DLA-1158-1. Issued a security update for bchunk fixing 3 CVE.
• DLA-1159-1. Issued a security update for graphicsmagick fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-1164-1. Issued a security update for mupdf fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-1165-1. Issued a security update for libpam4j fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1167-1. Issued a security update for ruby-yajl fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1157-1. I uploaded a security update for openssl. The update was prepared by Kurt Roeckx, the maintainer of openssl.

Misc

• I prepared the security updates for libpam4j (DSA-4025-1) and bchunk (DSA-4026-1) and fixed the same issues in Sid and Buster.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.