Search Results: "ema"

1 August 2023

Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Simon Butler on business adoption of Reproducible Builds

The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do. This is the seventh instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project, and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), Bootstrappable Builds, the F-Droid project and David A. Wheeler. Today, however, we will be talking with Simon Butler, an associate senior lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Sk vde, where he undertakes research in software engineering that focuses on IoT and open source software, and contributes to the teaching of computer science to undergraduates.

Chris: For those who have not heard of it before, can you tell us more about the School of Informatics at Sk vde University? Simon: Certainly, but I may be a little long-winded. Sk vde is a city in the area between the two large lakes in southern Sweden. The city is a busy place. Sk vde is home to the regional hospital, some of Volvo s manufacturing facilities, two regiments of the Swedish defence force, a lot of businesses in the Swedish computer games industry, other tech companies and more.

The University of Sk vde is relatively small. Sweden s large land area and low population density mean that regional centres such as Sk vde are important and local universities support businesses by training new staff and supporting innovation. The School of Informatics has two divisions. One focuses on teaching and researching computer games. The other division encompasses a wider range of teaching and research, including computer science, web development, computer security, network administration, data science and so on.

Chris: You recently had a open-access paper published in Software Quality Journal. Could you tell us a little bit more about it and perhaps briefly summarise its key findings? Simon: The paper is one output of a collaborative research project with six Swedish businesses that use open source software. There are two parts to the paper. The first consists of an analysis of what the group of businesses in the project know about Reproducible Builds (R-Bs), their experiences with R-Bs and their perception of the value of R-Bs to the businesses. The second part is an interview study with business practitioners and others with experience and expertise in R-Bs. We set out to try to understand the extent to which software-intensive businesses were aware of R-Bs, the technical and business reasons they were or were not using R-Bs and to document the business and technical use cases for R-Bs. The key findings were that businesses are aware of R-Bs, and some are using R-Bs as part of their day-to-day development process. Some of the uses for R-Bs we found were not previously documented. We also found that businesses understood the value R-Bs have as part of engineering and software quality processes. They are also aware of the costs of implementing R-Bs and that R-Bs are an intangible value proposition - in other words, businesses can add value through process improvement by using R-Bs. But, that, currently at least, R-Bs are not a selling point for software or products.
Chris: You performed a large number of interviews in order to prepare your paper. What was the most surprising response to you? Simon: Most surprising is a good question. Everybody I spoke to brought something new to my understanding of R-Bs, and many responses surprised me. The interviewees that surprised me most were I01 and I02 (interviews were anonymised and interviewees were assigned numeric identities). I02 described the sceptical perspective that there is a viable, pragmatic alternative to R-Bs - verifiable builds - which I was aware of before undertaking the research. The company had developed a sufficiently robust system for their needs and worked well. With a large archive of software used in production, they couldn t justify the cost of retrofitting a different solution that might only offer small advantages over the existing system. Doesn t really sound too surprising, but the interview was one of the first I did on this topic, and I was very focused on the value of, and need for, trust in a system that motivated the R-B. The solution used by the company requires trust, but they seem to have established sufficient trust for their needs by securing their build systems to the extent that they are more or less tamper-proof. The other big surprise for me was I01 s use of R-Bs to support the verification of system configuration in a system with multiple embedded components at boot time. It s such an obvious application of R-Bs, and exactly the kind of response I hoped to get from interviewees. However, it is another instance of a solution where trust is only one factor. In the first instance, the developer is using R-Bs to establish trust in the toolchain. There is also the second application that the developer can use a set of R-Bs to establish that deployed system consists of compatible components. While this might not sound too significant, there appear to be some important potential applications. One that came to mind immediately is a problem with firmware updates on nodes in IoT systems where the node needs to update quickly with limited downtime and without failure. The node also needs to be able to roll back any update proposed by a server if there are conflicts with the current configuration or if any tests on the node fail. Perhaps the chances of failure could be reduced, if a node can instead negotiate with a server to determine a safe path to migrate from its current configuration to a working configuration with the upgraded components the central system requires? Another potential application appears to be in the configuration management of AI systems, where decisions need to be explainable. A means of specifying validated configurations of training data, models and deployed systems might, perhaps, be leveraged to prevent invalid or broken configurations from being deployed in production.
Chris: One of your findings was that reproducible builds were perceived to be good engineering practice . To what extent do you believe cultural forces affect the adoption or rejection of a given technology or practice? Simon: To a large extent. People s decisions are informed by cultural norms, and business decisions are made by people acting collectively. Of course, decision-making, including assessments of risk and usefulness, is mediated by individual positions on the continuum from conformity to non-conformity, as well as individual and in-group norms. Whether a business will consider a given technology for adoption will depend on cultural forces. The decision to adopt may well be made on the grounds of cost and benefits.
Chris: Another conclusion implied by your research is that businesses are often dealing with software deployment lifespans (eg. 20+ years) that differ from widely from those of the typical hobbyist programmer. To what degree do you think this temporal mismatch is a problem for both groups? Simon: This is a fascinating question. Long-term software maintenance is a requirement in some industries because of the working lifespans of the products and legal requirements to maintain the products for a fixed period. For some other industries, it is less of a problem. Consequently, I would tend to divide developers into those who have been exposed to long-term maintenance problems and those who have not. Although, more professional than hobbyist developers will have been exposed to the problem. Nonetheless, there are areas, such as music software, where there are also long-term maintenance challenges for data formats and software.
Chris: Based on your research, what would you say are the biggest blockers for the adoption of reproducible builds within business ? And, based on this, would you have any advice or recommendations for the broader reproducible builds ecosystem? Simon: From the research, the main blocker appears to be cost. Not an absolute cost, but there is an overhead to introducing R-Bs. Businesses (and thus business managers) need to understand the business case for R-Bs.

Making decision-makers in businesses aware of R-Bs and that they are valuable will take time. Advocacy at multiple levels appears to be the way forward and this is being done. I would recommend being persistent while being patient and to keep talking about reproducible builds. The work done in Linux distributions raises awareness of R-Bs amongst developers. Guix, NixOS and Software Heritage are all providing practical solutions and getting attention - I ve been seeing progressively more mentions of all three during the last couple of years. Increased awareness amongst developers should lead to more interest within companies. There is also research money being assigned to supply chain security and R-B s. The CHAINS project at KTH in Stockholm is one example of a strategic research project. There may be others that I m not aware of. The policy-level advocacy is slowly getting results in some countries, and where CISA leads, others may follow.
Chris: Was there a particular reason you alighted on the question of the adoption of reproducible builds in business? Do you think there s any truth behind the shopworn stereotype of hacker types neglecting the resources that business might be able to offer? Simon: Much of the motivation for the research came from the contrast between the visibility of R-Bs in open source projects and the relative invisibility of R-Bs in industry. Where companies are known to be using R-Bs (e.g. Google, etc.) there is no fuss, no hype. They were not selling R-Bs as a solution; instead the documentation is very matter-of-fact that R-Bs are part of a customer-facing process in their cloud solutions. An obvious question for me was that if some people use R-B s in software development, why doesn t everybody? There are limits to the tooling for some programming languages that mean R-Bs are difficult or impossible. But where creating an R-B is practical, why are they not used more widely? So, to your second question. There is another factor, which seems to be more about a lack of communication rather than neglecting opportunities. Businesses may not always be willing to discuss their development processes and innovations. Though I do think the increasing number of conferences (big and small) for software practitioners is helping to facilitate more communication and greater exchange of ideas.
Chris: Has your personal view of reproducible builds changed since before you embarked on writing this paper? Simon: Absolutely! In the early stages of the research, I was interested in questions of trust and how R-Bs were applied to resolve build and supply chain security problems. As the research developed, however, I started to see there were benefits to the use of R-Bs that were less obvious and that, in some cases, an R-B can have more than a single application.
Chris: Finally, do you have any plans to do future research touching on reproducible builds? Simon: Yes, definitely. There are a set of problems that interest me. One already mentioned is the use of reproducible builds with AI systems. Interpretable or explainable AI (XAI) is a necessity, and I think that R-Bs can be used to support traceability in the configuration and testing of both deployed systems and systems used during model training and evaluation. I would also like to return to a problem discussed briefly in the article, which is to develop a deeper understanding of the elements involved in the application of R-Bs that can be used to support reasoning about existing and potential applications of R-Bs. For example, R-Bs can be used to establish trust for different groups of individuals at different times, say, between remote developers prior to the release of software and by users after release. One question is whether when an R-B is used might be a significant factor. Another group of questions concerns the ways in which trust (of some sort) propagates among users of an R-B. There is an example in the paper of a company that rebuilds Debian reproducibly for security reasons and is then able to collaborate on software projects where software is built reproducibly with other companies that use public distributions of Debian.

Chris: Many thanks for this interview, Simon. If someone wanted to get in touch or learn more about you and your colleagues at the School of Informatics, where might they go? Thank you for the opportunity. It has been a pleasure to reflect a little more widely on the research! Personally, you can find out about my work on my official homepage and on my personal site. The software systems research group (SSRG) has a website, and the University of Sk vde s English language pages are also available. Chris: Many thanks for this interview, Simon!

For more information about the Reproducible Builds project, please see our website at reproducible-builds.org. If you are interested in ensuring the ongoing security of the software that underpins our civilisation and wish to sponsor the Reproducible Builds project, please reach out to the project by emailing contact@reproducible-builds.org.

Valhalla's Things: Origami Document Folder

A pink origami holder for business cards, open, with two triangular pockets. The cards in it are pope cards and a Debian consensually name card.

A long time ago, around the turn of the century, I was looking at some Useful Origami website and found a pattern for a document folder with a lot of pockets. The same holder, seen from the top: it also has rectangular pockets on the covers, and there is even room in the middle for moar contents.

The same holder, seen from the top: it also has rectangular pockets on the covers, and there is even room in the middle for moar contents.

And by a lot of pockets I really mean a lot! I immediately had to fold one, and then another one, and then a few others, both in a size suitable for business cards and as a folder for A4 sheets of paper. A document folder in the same shape, but it's white, bigger, and it has an envelope in one pocket and some stationery sheets in the other pocket.

A document folder in the same shape, but it's white, bigger, and it has an envelope in one pocket and some stationery sheets in the other pocket.

And then, a few years ago I needed a new document folder, and looked for these instructions, and couldn t find them anywhere. Luckily I still had some of the folders I had made, and the model was simple enough that I could unfold those and reconstruct the instructions. I tried to show them around to see if anybody knew where it came from, but had no results. An origami schematic; see the link below for text instructions.

An origami schematic; see the link below for text instructions.

Now that I ve prepared a new website for patterns for non-fiber crafts (and that I needed a new folder :D ) I ve decided to post those instructions on it, so that they will have a stable place to live on. And now that the #origami crowd on the fediverse has grown, maybe somebody will stumble on them and will remember where they come from: if you do, please let me know, with a comment if you re reading this on the fediverse, or through one of my contacts if you re reading the blog directly.

30 July 2023

Russell Coker: Links July 2023

Phys.org has an interesting article about finding evidence for nanohertz gravity waves [1]. 1nano-Herz is a wavelength of 31.7 light years! Wired has an interesting story about OpenAI saying that no further advances will be made with larger training models [2]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful article about the need for government run GPT type systems [3]. He focuses on the US, but having other countries/groups of countries do it would be good too. We could have a Chinese one, an EU one, etc. I don t think it would necessarily make sense for a small country like Australia to have one but it would make a lot more sense than having nuclear submarines (which are much more expensive). The Roadmap project is a guide for learning new technologies [4]. The content seems quite good. Bigthink has an informative and darkly amusing article Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [5]. From this month in Australia psilocybin (active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms) can be prescribed for depression and MDMA (known as Ecstacy on the streets) can be prescribed for PTSD [6]. That s great news! Slate has an interesting article about the Operation Underground Railroad organisation that purports to help sex trafficed chilren [7]. This is noteworthy now with the controverst over the recent movie about that. Apparently they didn t provide much help for kids after they had been rescued and at least some of the kids were trafficed specifically to fulfill the demand that they created by offering to pay for it. Vigilantes aren t as effective as law enforcement. The ACCC is going to prevent Apple and Google from forcing app developers to give them a share of in-app purchases in Australia [8]. We need this in every country! This site has links to open source versions of proprietary games [9]. Vice has an interesting article about the Hungarian neuroscientist Viktor T th who taught rats to play Doom 2 [10]. The next logical step is to have mini tanks that they can use in real battlefields. Like the Mason s Rats episode of Love Death and Robots on Netflix. Brian Krebs wrote a mind boggling pair of blog posts about the Ashley Adison hack [11]. A Jewish disgruntled ex-employee sending anti-semitic harassment to the Jewish CEO and maybe cooperating with anti-semitic organisations to harass him is one of the people involved, but he killed himself (due to mental health problems) before the hack took place. Long Now has an insightful blog post about digital avatars being used after the death of the people they are based on [12]. Tavis Ormandy s description of the zenbleed bug is interesting [13]. The technique for finding the bug is interesting as well as the information on how the internals of the CPUs in question work. I don t think this means AMD is bad, trying to deliver increasing performance while limited by the laws of physics is difficult and mistakes are sometimes made. Let s hope the microcode updates are well distributed. The Hacktivist documentary about Andrew Bunnie Huang is really good [14]. Bunnie s lecture about supply chain attacks is worth watching [15]. Most descriptions of this issue don t give nearly as much information. However bad you thought this problem was, after you watch this lecture you will realise it s worse than that!

29 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Manipur, Data Leakage, Aadhar, and IRCv3

Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon
The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is `/msg nickserv help` what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register `/msg nickerv register` Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this
Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be `/msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com` Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

26 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Manipur Violence, Drugs, Binging on Northshore, Alaska Daily, Doogie Kamealoha and EU Digital Resilence Act.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.
The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this
The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

23 July 2023

Wouter Verhelst: Debconf Videoteam sprint in Paris, France, 2023-07-20 - 2023-07-23

The DebConf video team has been sprinting in preparation for DebConf 23 which will happen in Kochi, India, in September of this year.

Present were Nicolas "olasd" Dandrimont, Stefano "tumbleweed" Rivera, and yours truly. Additionally, Louis-Philippe "pollo" V ronneau and Carl "CarlFK" Karsten joined the sprint remotely from across the pond. Thank you to the DPL for agreeing to fund flights, food, and accomodation for the team members. We would also like to extend a special thanks to the Association April for hosting our sprint at their offices. We made a lot of progress:

Now that Debian Bookworm has been released, we updated our ansible repository to work with Debian Bookworm. This encountered some issues, but nothing earth-shattering, and almost all of them are handled. The one thing that is still outstanding is that jibri requires OpenJDK 11, which is no longer in bookworm; a solution for that will need to be found in the longer term, but as jibri is only needed for online conferences, it is not quite as urgent (Stefano, Louis-Philippe).
In past years, we used open "opsis" hardware to do screen grabbing. While these work, upstream development has stalled, and their intended functionality is also somewhat more limited than we would like. As such, we experimented with a USB-based HDMI capture device, and after playing with it for some time, decided that it is a good option and that we would like to switch to it. Support for the specific capture device that we played with has now also been added to all the relevant places. (Stefano, Carl)
Another open tool that we have been using is voctomix, a software video mixer. Its upstream development has also stalled somewhat . While we managed to make it work correctly on Bookworm, we decided that to ensure long-term viability for the team, it would be preferable if we had an alternative. As such, we quickly investigated Nageru, Sesse's software video mixer, and decided that it can everything we need (and, probably, more). As such, we worked on implementing a user interface theme that would work with our specific requirements. Work on this is still ongoing, and we may decide that we are not ready yet for the switch by the time DebConf23 comes along, but we do believe that the switch is at least feasible. While working on the theme, we found a bug which Sesse quickly fixed for us after a short amount of remote debugging, so, thanks for that! (Stefano, Nicolas, Sesse)
Our current streaming architecture uses HLS, which requires MPEG-4-based codecs. While fully functional, MPEG-4 is not the most modern of codecs anymore, not to mention the fact that it is somewhat patent-encumbered (even though some of these patents are expired by now). As such, we investigated switching to the AV1 codec for live streaming. Our ansible repository has been updated to support live streaming using that codec; the post-event transcoding part will follow soon enough. Special thanks, again, to Sesse, for pointing out a few months ago on Planet Debian that this is, in fact, possible to do. (Wouter)
Apart from these big-ticket items, we also worked on various small maintenance things: upgrading, fixing, and reinstalling hosts and services, filing budget requests, and requesting role emails. (all of the team, really).

It is now Sunday the 23rd at 14:15, and while the sprint is coming to an end, we haven't quite finished yet, so some more progress can still be made. Let's see what happens by tonight. All in all, though, we believe that the progress we made will make the DebConf Videoteam's work a bit easier in some areas, and will make things work better in the future. See you in Kochi!

20 July 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.7 on CRAN: QuantLib 1.31 Updates

The seventh release of the still pretty new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. This release brings updates from the just-released QuantLib 1.31 version.

Changes in version 0.0.7 (2023-07-19)

Updates, extensions and corrections to calendars from South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Taiwan, South Africa, Denmark and Finland from QuantLib 1.31

Added support for UnitedStates/SOFR calendar

As the update comprises a number of small-but-important updates to eight different country calendars as well as a new US calendar (in a slight variation on the government bond calendar) we can also update the little demo highlighting all calendars within the US for the given year:

> ## see https://github.com/qlcal/qlcal-r/blob/master/demo/allUScalendars.R
> ## see R/calendars.R in qlcal, we prepend 'UnitedStates/' in makeHol()
> cals <- c("LiborImpact", "NYSE", "GovernmentBond", "NERC", "FederalReserve", "SOFR")
> print(Reduce(cbind, Map(makeHol, cals)))
           LiborImpact NYSE GovernmentBond NERC FederalReserve SOFR
2023-01-02        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2023-01-16        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2023-02-20        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2023-04-07          NA TRUE             NA   NA             NA TRUE
2023-05-29        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2023-06-19        TRUE TRUE           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2023-07-04        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2023-09-04        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2023-10-09        TRUE   NA           TRUE   NA           TRUE TRUE
2023-11-10        TRUE   NA             NA   NA             NA   NA
2023-11-23        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
2023-12-25        TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE           TRUE TRUE
>

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

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

19 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: RISC-V, Chips Act, Burning of Books, Manipur

RISC -V Motherboard, SBC While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests. Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK. As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.

CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc. Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable. Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself. Till later. Happy Reading.

Update:Manipur Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.
Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.
IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other. Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up. Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change. Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible
As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced
This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him. The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here. Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned. Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.
Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das
The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum
Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it. Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger
We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6

Ian Jackson: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

Instructions

Get the official installation image from the usual locations. I got the netinst CD image via BitTorrent.
Boot from the image and go through the installation in the normal way.
1. You may want to select an alternative desktop environment (and unselect GNOME). These steps have been tested with MATE.
2. Stop when you are asked to remove the installation media and reboot.
Press Alt + Right arrow to switch to the text VC. Hit return to activate the console and run the following commands (answering yes as appropriate):

chroot /target bash
apt-get install sysvinit-core elogind ntp dbus-x11
apt-get autoremove
exit

Observe the output from the apt-get install. If your disk arrangements are unusual, that may generate some error messages from update-initramfs.
Go back to the installer VC with Alt + Left arrow. If there were no error messages above, you may tell it to reboot.
If there were error messages (for example, I found that if there was disk encryption, alarming messages were printed), tell the installer to go Back . Then ask it to Install GRUB bootloader (again). After that has completed, you may reboot.
Enjoy your Debian system without systemd.

Discussion This is pleasingly straightforward, albeit with an ugly wart. This recipe was not formally developed and tested; it s just what happened when I tried to actually perform this task. The official installation guide has similar instructions although they don t seem to have the initramfs workaround. update-initramfs The need to go back and have the installer reinstall grub is because if your storage is not very straightforward, the update-initramfs caused by apt-get install apparently doesn t have all the right context. I haven t investigated this at all; indeed, I don t even really know that the initramfs generated in step 3 above was broken, although the messages did suggest to me that important pieces or config might have been omitted. Instead, I simply chose to bet that it might be broken, but that the installer would know what to do. So I used the installer s install GRUB bootloader option, which does regenerate the initramfs. So, I don t know that step 6 is necessary. In principle it would be better to do the switch from systemd to sysvinit earlier in the installation process, and under the control of the installer. But by default the installer goes straight from the early setup questions through to the set the time or reboot questions, without stopping. One could use the expert mode, or modify the command line, or something, but all of those things are, in practice, a lot more typing and/or interaction. And as far as I m aware the installer doesn t have an option for avoiding systemd . The apt-get install line sysvinit-core is the principal part of the sysvinit init system. Asking to install that causes the deinstallation of systemd s init and ancillary packages. systemd refuses to allow itself to be deinstalled, if it is already running, so if you boot into the systemd system you can t then switch init system. This is why the switch is best done at install time. If you re too late, there are instructions for changing init system post-installation. elogind is a forked version of some of systemd s user desktop session functionality. In practice modern desktop environments need this; without it, apt will want to remove things you probably want to keep. Even if you force it, you may find that your desktop environment can t adjust the audio volume, etc. ntp is needed because nowadays the default network time client is systemd-timesyncd (which is a bad idea even on systems with systemd as init). We need to specify it because the package dependencies don t automatically give you any replacement for systemd-timesyncd. dbus-x11 is a glue component. In theory it ought to be installed automatically. However, there have been problems with the dependencies that meant that (for example) asking for emacs would try to switch the init system. Specifying dbus-x11 explicitly is a workaround for that, which I nowadays adopt out of caution. Perhaps it is no longer needed. (On existing systems, it may be necessary to manually install orphan-sysvinit-scripts, which exists as a suboptimal technical workaround for the sociopolitical problems of hostile package maintainers and Debian s governance failures. The recipe above seems to install this package automatically.) usrmerge This recipe results in a system which has merged-/usr via symlinks. This configuration is a bad one. Ideally usrmerge-via-symlinks would be avoided. The un-merged system is declared not officially supported by Debian and key packages try very hard to force it on users. However, merged-/usr-via-symlinks is full of bugs (mostly affecting package management) which are far too hard to fix (a project by some folks to try to do so has given up). I suspect un-merged systems will suffer from fewer bugs in practice. But I don t know how to persuade d-i to make one. Installer images I think there is room in the market for an unofficial installer image which installs without systemd and perhaps without usrmerge. I don t have the effort for making such a thing myself. Conclusion Installing Debian without systemd is fairly straightforward. Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug.

comments

18 July 2023

Jamie McClelland: What am I missing about AI?

Last month I blogged about how the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT story. One of the comments left on the post was:

I encourage you to dig a little deeper. If LLM s were just probability
machines, no one would be raising any flags.
Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark and many others are not simpletons. It is the fact that
the architecture and specific training (deep NN, back prop / gradient descend)
produces a system with emergent properties, beyond just a probability machine,
when the system size reaches some thresholds, that has them spooked.
They do understand mathematics and stats and probabilities, i assure you. It is
just that you may have only read the layman s articles and not the scientific
ones

I confess: I haven t made much progress in this regard. I gave Vicky Boykis' Embeddings a go, and started to get a handle on the math, but honestly had a hard time following it. I m open to suggestions from anyone with a few good recommendations for scientific papers accessible to non-math professionals, particularly ones that explain the emergent properties and what that means. Meanwhile, regardless of the scientific truths or falsehoods around chat GPT, the mainstream media continues to miserably fail in helping the rest of us understand the implications of this technology. Most recently, I listend to This American Life s First Contact (part of their Greetings People of Earth show). They interviewed several Microsft AI researchers who first experimented with ChatGPT 4 prior to it s big release. The focus of the researchers was: can we demonstrate chat GPT s general intelligence ability by presenting it with logic problems it could not possibly have encountered before? And the answer: YES! The two examples were:

Stacking: the researcher asked chat GPT how to stack a number of odd objects in a stable way (a book, a dozen eggs, a nail, etc) and chat GPT gave both the correct answer and a reasonable explanation of why.
Hidden state: the researcher described two people in a room with a cat. One person put the cat in a basket and left. The other moved the cat to a box ad left. And, remarkably, chat GPT could explain that when they returned, the first person would think the cat is in the basket and the second person would know it s in the box.

I thought this was pretty cool. So I fired up chat GPT (and even ponied up for chat GPT version 4). I asked it my own stacking question and, hm, chat GPT thought a plate should be placed on top of a can of soda instead of beneath it. So, well, mostly right but I m pretty sure any reasonable human would put the can of soda on the plate not the other way around (chat GPT 3.5 wanted the can of soda to be balanced on the tip of the nail). I then asked it my own simple version of the cat problem and it got it right. Very good. But when I asked it a much more complicated and weird version of the cat problem (involving beetles in a mansion with a movie theater and changing movies and a butler with a big mustache) it got the answer flat out wrong. Did anyone at This American Life try this? Really? It seems like a basic responsibility of journalism to fact check the experts. Maybe the scientists would have had a convincing response? Or maybe scientists are just like everyone else and can get caught up in the excitement and make mistakes? I am amazed and awed by what chat GPT can do - it truly is remarkable. And, I think that a lot of human intelligence is synthesizing what we ve seen and simply regurgitating it in a different context - a task that chat GPT is way better at doing than we are. But the overriding message of most mainstream media stories is that chat GPT is somehow going beyond word synthesis and probability and magically tapping into a form of logic. If the scientific papers are demonstrating this remarkable feat, I think the media needs to do a way better job reporting it.

15 July 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.

Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.

Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.

Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.

Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).

Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).

Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).

Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.

Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).

Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.

Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.

Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.

Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.

Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).

Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).

Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

Thanks to our sponsors

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 94 months)

Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 62 months)

Gold sponsors:

Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 105 months)

Linode (for 99 months)

Babiel GmbH (for 88 months)

Plat Home (for 88 months)

University of Oxford (for 44 months)

Deveryware (for 31 months)

VyOS Inc (for 26 months)

EDF SA (for 15 months)

Silver sponsors:

Domeneshop AS (for 109 months)

Nantes M tropole (for 103 months)

Univention GmbH (for 95 months)

Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 95 months)

Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 89 months)

Exonet B.V. (for 79 months)

Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 73 months)

CINECA (for 62 months)

Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 56 months)

Cloudways Ltd (for 46 months)

Dinahosting SL (for 44 months)

Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 38 months)

Platform.sh (for 38 months)

Moxa Inc. (for 32 months)

sipgate GmbH (for 29 months)

OVH US LLC (for 27 months)

Tilburg University (for 27 months)

GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 18 months)

Soliton Systems K.K. (for 16 months)

Bronze sponsors:

Evolix (for 110 months)

Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 110 months)

Intevation GmbH (for 107 months)

Linuxhotel GmbH (for 107 months)

Daevel SARL (for 105 months)

Bitfolk LTD (for 104 months)

Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 104 months)

Greenbone AG (for 103 months)

NUMLOG (for 103 months)

WinGo AG (for 103 months)

Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 99 months)

Entr ouvert (for 94 months)

Adfinis AG (for 91 months)

GNI MEDIA (for 86 months)

Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 86 months)

Tesorion (for 86 months)

Bearstech (for 77 months)

LiHAS (for 77 months)

Catalyst IT Ltd (for 72 months)

Supagro (for 67 months)

Demarcq SAS (for 66 months)

Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 52 months)

TouchWeb SAS (for 44 months)

SPiN AG (for 41 months)

CoreFiling (for 36 months)

Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 31 months)

Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 28 months)

Tem Innovations GmbH (for 22 months)

WordFinder.pro (for 22 months)

CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 21 months)

Alter Way (for 14 months)

Institut Camille Jordan (for 3 months)

14 July 2023

Aurelien Jarno: Goodbye Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

Over the years, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has gone through various phases. After many years of development, it was released as technology preview with the release of Squeeze and eventually became an official architecture with the release of Wheezy. However it ceased being an official architecture a couple of years later with the release of Jessie, although a jessie-kfreebsd suite was available in the official archive. Some years later, it was moved to the debian-ports archive, where it slowly regressed over the years. The development totally has now been stopped for over a year, and the port has been removed from the debian-ports archive. It's time to say it goodbye! I feel a touch of nostalgia as I was deeply involved in the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port for nearly a decade, starting in 2006. There are many different reasons to like GNU/kFreeBSD ranging from political to technical considerations. Personally, I liked the technical aspect, as the FreeBSD kernel, at that time, was ahead of the Linux kernel in term of features: jails, ZFS, IPv6 stateful firewalling, and at a later point superpages. That said it was way behind for hardware support and to the best of my knowledge this remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel development accelerated in the latter stages of the 2.6.x series, and eventually closed the feature gap. At some point, I began to lose interest, and also to lack time, and slowly stepped away from its development.

12 July 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2023

Welcome to the June 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

We are very happy to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit which set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page] which has more details about the event and location. (You may also be interested in attending PackagingCon 2023 held a few days before in Berlin.)

This month, Vagrant Cascadian will present at FOSSY 2023 on the topic of Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust:

Corrupted build environments can deliver compromised cryptographically signed binaries. Several exploits in critical supply chains have been demonstrated in recent years, proving that this is not just theoretical. The most well secured build environments are still single points of failure when they fail. [ ] This talk will focus on the state of the art from several angles in related Free and Open Source Software projects, what works, current challenges and future plans for building trustworthy toolchains you do not need to trust.

Hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy and taking place in Portland, Oregon, FOSSY aims to be a community-focused event: Whether you are a long time contributing member of a free software project, a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp or university, or just have an interest in the possibilities that free and open source software bring, FOSSY will have something for you . More information on the event is available on the FOSSY 2023 website, including the full programme schedule.

Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, William Enck, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar recently published an academic paper in the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy titled It s like flossing your teeth: On the Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security . The abstract reads as follows:

The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created.

However, in contrast to other papers that touch on some theoretical aspect of reproducible builds, the authors paper takes a different approach. Starting with the observation that much of the software industry believes R-Bs are too far out of reach for most projects and conjoining that with a goal of to help identify a path for R-Bs to become a commonplace property , the paper has a different methodology:

We conducted a series of 24 semi-structured expert interviews with participants from the Reproducible-Builds.org project, and iterated on our questions with the reproducible builds community. We identified a range of motivations that can encourage open source developers to strive for R-Bs, including indicators of quality, security benefits, and more efficient caching of artifacts. We identify experiences that help and hinder adoption, which heavily include communication with upstream projects. We conclude with recommendations on how to better integrate R-Bs with the efforts of the open source and free software community.

A PDF of the paper is now available, as is an entry on the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security website and an entry under the TeamUSEC Human-Centered Security research group.

On our mailing list this month:

Martin Monperrus asked whether there are any project[s] where reproducibility is checked in a continuous integration pipeline? which received a number of replies from various projects.
Vagrant Cascadian mentioned that Packaging Con 2023 is being held in Berlin, the weekend before the Reproducible Builds summit later this year. In particular, Vagrant noticed that the Call for Proposals (CFP) closes at the end of July.
Larry Doolittle was searching Usenet archives and discovered a thread from December 1999 titled Time independent checksum(cksum) on comp.unix.programming. Larry notes that it starts with Jayan asking about comparing binaries that might have difference in their embedded timestamps (that is, perhaps, Foreshadowing diffoscope, amiright? ) and goes on to observe that:

The antagonist is David Schwartz, who correctly says There are dozens of complex reasons why what seems to be the same sequence of operations might produce different end results, but goes on to say I totally disagree with your general viewpoint that compilers must provide for reproducability [sic]. Dwight Tovey and I (Larry Doolittle) argue for reproducible builds. I assert Any program especially a mission-critical program like a compiler that cannot reproduce a result at will is broken. Also it s commonplace to take a binary from the net, and check to see if it was trojaned by attempting to recreate it from source.

Lastly, there were a few changes to our website this month too, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann adding a simplified Rust example to our documentation about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ], Chris Lamb made it easier to parse our summit announcement at a glance [ ], Mattia Rizzolo added the summit announcement at a glance [ ] itself [ ][ ][ ] and Rahul Bajaj added a taxonomy of variations in build environments [ ].

Distribution work 27 reviews of Debian packages were added, 40 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new `randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_mkdocs` toolchain issue was added by Chris Lamb [ ], and the `deterministic` flag on the `paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge` issue as we are not currently testing `usrmerge` issues [ ] issues.
Roland Clobus posted his 18th update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. Roland reported that all major desktops build reproducibly with `bullseye`, `bookworm`, `trixie` and `sid` , but he also mentioned amongst many changes that not only are the `non-free` images being built (and are reproducible) but that the live images are generated officially by Debian itself. [ ]
Jan-Benedict Glaw noticed a problem when building NetBSD for the VAX architecture. Noting that Reproducible builds [are] probably not as reproducible as we thought , Jan-Benedict goes on to describe that when two builds from different source directories won t produce the same result and adds various notes about sub-optimal handling of the `CFLAGS` environment variable. [ ]
F-Droid added 21 new reproducible apps in June, resulting in a new record of 145 reproducible apps in total. [ ]. (This page now sports missing data for March May 2023.) F-Droid contributors also reported an issue with broken resources in APKs making some builds unreproducible. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE

Upstream patches

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`bcachefs` (sort find / filesys)

`build-compare` (reports files as identical)

`build-time` (toolchain date)

`cockpit` (merged, gzip mtime)

`gcc13` (gcc13 toolchain LTO parallelism)

`ghc-rpm-macros` (toolchain parallelism)

`golangcli-lint` (date)

`gutenprint` (date+time)

`mage` (date (golang))

`mumble` (filesys)

`pcr` (date)

`python-nss` (drop sphinx .doctrees)

`python310` (merged, bisected+backported)

`warpinator` (merged, date)

`xroachng` (date)

Chris Lamb:

#1037159 filed against `elinks`.

#1037205 filed against `multipath-tools`.

#1037216 filed against `mkdocstrings-python-handlers`.

#1038730 filed against `fribidi`.

#1038957 filed against `jtreg7`.

#1039932 filed against `python-bitstring` (forwarded upstream).

Vagrant Cascadian:

#1037235 filed against `gradle-kotlin-dsl`.

#1037240 filed against `libsdl-console`.

#1037267 filed against `kawari8`.

#1037269 filed against `freetds`.

#1037272 filed against `gbrowse`.

#1037276 filed against `bglibs`.

#1037277 filed against `advi`.

#1037278 filed against `afterstep`.

#1037280 filed against `simstring`.

#1037296 filed against `manderlbot`.

#1037298 filed against `erlang-proper`.

#1037300 filed against `comedilib`.

#1037309 filed against `libint`.

#1037427 filed against `newlib`.

#1038908 filed against `binutils-msp430`.

#1038970 & #1038971 filed against `c-munipack`.

#1039044 filed against `python-marshmallow-sqlalchemy`.

#1039457 filed against `mplayer`.

#1039493 & #1039500 filed against `menu`.

#1039506 filed against `mini-buildd`.

#1039610 filed against `pnetcdf`.

#1039617 & #1039618 filed against `liblopsub`.

#1039619 filed against `wcc`.

#1039623 filed against `shotcut`.

#1039624 filed against `icu`.

#1039741 filed against `libapache-poi-java`.

#1039808 filed against `atf`.

#1039865 filed against `valgrind`.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

Additions to a (relatively) new Documented Jenkins Maintenance (djm) script to automatically shrink a cache & save a backup of old data [ ], automatically split out previous months data from logfiles into specially-named files [ ], prevent concurrent remote logfile fetches by using a lock file [ ] and to add/remove various debugging statements [ ].

Updates to the automated system health checks to, for example, to correctly detect new kernel warnings due to a wording change [ ] and to explicitly observe which old/unused kernels should be removed [ ]. This was related to an improvement so that various kernel issues on Ubuntu-based nodes are automatically fixed. [ ]

Holger and Vagrant Cascadian updated all thirty-five hosts running Debian on the `amd64`, `armhf`, and `i386` architectures to Debian bookworm, with the exception of the Jenkins host itself which will be upgraded after the release of Debian 12.1. In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the email configuration for the `@reproducible-builds.org` domain to correctly accept incoming mails from `jenkins.debian.net` [ ] as well as to set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing [ ]. And working together with Holger, Mattia also updated the Jenkins configuration to start testing Debian trixie which resulted in stopped testing Debian buster. And, finally, Jan-Benedict Glaw contributed patches for improved NetBSD testing.

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`.

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Matt Brown: 2023 Mid Year Review

I m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.

No further investment in co2mon.nz In March I made the decision to focus on completing the market research for co2mon.nz. The results of that research led to two key conclusions:

Indoor air quality/ventilation is not a problem many people are actively thinking about or looking to spend money to improve.

Even when introduced to the problem and educated about the need, most people are looking for a one-off expense or solution (e.g. the physical monitor) and are much less interested in a monitoring software service.

Based on that, it was clear that this is not an opportunity that I should continue pursuing and I ve put co2mon.nz into maintenance mode. I ve committed to maintaining the infrastructure to support existing customers, but I won t be investing time or energy in developing it further.

Discipline in selecting product opportunities The decision to stop investing more time into co2mon.nz was straightforward given the results of the research, but it was also painful given the time I ve already sunk into it. I hindsight it s clear that my enthusiasm to solve a problem with technology I enjoyed was my driving force rather than a deep understanding of the wants and needs of potential customers. I don t entirely regret trying my luck once - but it s not time efficient and I know that following that pattern again is not a sustainable or viable path to building a successful business. I ve decided to use the following list of questions to bring more discipline to how I evaluate product opportunities in future:

Problem: Is this something that a sizeable number of people are struggling with AND are willing to spend money solving?

I find the framework from Excuse me, is there a problem? really useful in thinking about this question.

Capability: Can I deliver a solution that solves the problem in a reliable and cost-effective way?

Excitement: Am I excited and motivated to invest time in building the solution to this problem?

Trust: Do I have the expertise and experience to be trusted to solve the problem by potential customers?

Execution: Can I package, market and sell that solution in a profitable manner?

My plan is to answer these questions and then make an evaluation of the potential before I commit time to building any part of a product. As an example of how I think that will help, here s what I think the answer to those questions for ventilation monitoring would have been:

Problem: No - as the market research eventually showed.

Capability: Low - The part of the solution which customers primarily value (the hardware) is complex and outside of my core experience. The software I can easily deliver is not where the value is seen.

Excitement: Yes - this was the primary driver of starting the project.

Trust: Low - I m trusted to build software, but cannot claim any specific expertise in air quality and ventilation.

Execution: Low confidence - These skills are not ones I ve exercised a lot in my career to date.

What these answers point to is that identifying the problem alone is not enough. I don t expect every question to have a perfect answer, but I want to hold myself to only pursuing opportunities where there s only one major area of doubt. In this case, even had the market research demonstrated a problem that many customers would pay to solve, there were still some big answers missing to the trust, capability and execution questions. Overall my conclusion is that co2mon.nz was not the ideal business to start my journey with given the number of open questions in the plan. I like to think that conclusion would also have been clear to me six months ago had I taken the time to go through this process then!

Prioritising areas of growth Applying those questions to my other product ideas results in a lot of I don t know yet answers to the problem and capability questions, further reinforcing the lesson that I need to spend more understanding if there is a problem with a viable business model attached in those areas before progressing any of those ideas. Beyond that lesson, a more interesting observation comes from the last question regarding execution. My answers to the first four questions vary between ideas, but my answers to this last question are always the same - I don t have a lot of confidence in my sales and marketing skills to sell a product. That s not a surprise. My career to date has been focused on software development and leadership, I don t have a lot of experience with sales and marketing. The opportunity to grow and develop those skills is actually a large part of my motivation for choosing the path of building my own business. But seeing that this is a common factor that will need significant investment regardless of which opportunity I pursue sends me a strong signal that I should focus on growth in this area as a priority. Following that logic through to the next step of what creating that focus would look like reveals a conflict: The nature of the mission I ve set for myself draws me to products in areas that are new to me, which means there s also a need to invest in building expertise in those areas. Again not a surprise, but the time and focus required to develop that expertise competes with time spent growing my sales and marketing skills. So I have a prioritisation problem. Solving it is going to require changing the type of product I m trying to build in the short term: I need to build a product that uses my existing expertise and strengths as much as possible, so that I can put the majority of my energy into growing the core business skills where my confidence is currently lacking. Trying to deliver meaningful improvements to a big problem in an area I don t have past experience in while also learning how to sell and market a product is biting off more than I chew right away.

Changing the goal posts With those lessons in hand I m making three changes to my 2023 Goals:

Reducing the product development goal from several ideas to two. The first was co2mon.nz. The second will be drawn from my existing expertise - not one of the previously stated ideas that require me to develop expertise in a new area.

Moving the consulting and product development goals to be alternatives - I expect I can achieve at most one of them this year.

Reducing the publishing target for this site from at least once a week to once a month . I thought I d have more to say this year, but the words are coming very slowly to me.

Reducing scope and ambition is humbling, but that s reality. I hope it turns out to be a case of slow down and lay the foundations in order to then move faster. The good news is that I don t feel the need to make any changes to the vision, mission and strategy I m following - I think they re still the right destination and overall path for me even though the first six months has proven bumpy. I just need to be a bit more realistic on the short-term goals that will feed into them.

The next few months I m choosing to prioritise the product development goal. I m aiming to complete the market research/problem definition phase for a product opportunity I ve identified in the SRE/DevOps space (where my previous experience is) and make a decision on whether to start development by mid August. In making that decision I plan to gather the answers to my questions, and then diligently evaluate whether the opportunity is worth committing to or not. I will write more about this process in coming weeks. If I decide to proceed that gives me 2-3 months to get an MVP in the hands of customers and get concrete validation of whether the product has revenue and growth potential before the end of the year. Tight, but if things go well, and I don t take any further consulting work, there s a reasonable chance I can complete the revised goal successfully. In the event that I decide the product opportunity I m currently researching is not the right one to commit to, I will likely revert to focusing on my consulting goal in the remaining 2-3 months of the year rather than attempt a third product development iteration. Thanks for reading this far! As always, I d love your thoughts and feedback.

Appendix: Revised 2023 Goals Putting all that together, the ultimate outcome of this review (including updated progress scoring) looks like:

Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities. Score: 3/10 - I focused entirely on co2mon.nz during April, May and June to the detriment of my pipeline of consulting work. This score is unlikely to improve given the above plan unless I decide not to commit to developing the idea I m currently investigating.

Grow my product development skill set by taking two ideas (co2mon.nz, an SRE/DevOps focused product) to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and generate revenue and has growth potential from one of them. Score: 4/10 - I launched co2mon.nz and got feedback, I discovered it didn t solve a problem relevant to customers and therefore did not generate substantial revenue or growth potential. Idea number two is in still in progress.

Develop and maintain a broad professional network.

To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year. Score: 6/10 - This is going well. On track for a 10/10 score.

To publish a piece of writing on this site once a month and for many of those to generate interesting conversations and feedback. Score: 6/10 - 4 out of 6 months have featured a post meeting this goal so far.

To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others. Score: 5/10 - I ve given one talk and helped with SREcon23 APAC, but not as much other work in this area as I d like.

11 July 2023

Simon Josefsson: Coping with non-free software in Debian

A personal reflection on how I moved from my Debian home to find two new homes with Trisquel and Guix for my own ethical computing, and while doing so settled my dilemma about further Debian contributions. Debian s contributions to the free software community has been tremendous. Debian was one of the early distributions in the 1990 s that combined the GNU tools (compiler, linker, shell, editor, and a set of Unix tools) with the Linux kernel and published a free software operating system. Back then there were little guidance on how to publish free software binaries, let alone entire operating systems. There was a lack of established community processes and conflict resolution mechanisms, and lack of guiding principles to motivate the work. The community building efforts that came about in parallel with the technical work has resulted in a steady flow of releases over the years. From the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) during the 1980 s and early 1990 s, there was at the time already an established definition of free software. Inspired by free software definition, and a belief that a social contract helps to build a community and resolve conflicts, Debian s social contract (DSC) with the free software community was published in 1997. The DSC included the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which directly led to the Open Source Definition.

I was introduced to GNU/Linux through Slackware in the early 1990 s (oh boy those nights calculating XFree86 modeline s and debugging sendmail.cf) and primarily used RedHat Linux during ca 1995-2003. I switched to Debian during the Woody release cycles, when the original RedHat Linux was abandoned and Fedora launched. It was Debian s explicit community processes and infrastructure that attracted me. The slow nature of community processes also kept me using RedHat for so long: centralized and dogmatic decision processes often produce quick and effective outcomes, and in my opinion RedHat Linux was technically better than Debian ca 1995-2003. However the RedHat model was not sustainable, and resulted in the RedHat vs Fedora split. Debian catched up, and reached technical stability once its community processes had been grounded. I started participating in the Debian community around late 2006. My interpretation of Debian s social contract is that Debian should be a distribution of works licensed 100% under a free license. The Debian community has always been inclusive towards non-free software, creating the contrib/non-free section and permitting use of the bug tracker to help resolve issues with non-free works. This is all explained in the social contract. There has always been a clear boundary between free and non-free work, and there has been a commitment that the Debian system itself would be 100% free. The concern that RedHat Linux was not 100% free software was not critical to me at the time: I primarily (and happily) ran GNU tools on Solaris, IRIX, AIX, OS/2, Windows etc. Running GNU tools on RedHat Linux was an improvement, and I hadn t realized it was possible to get rid of all non-free software on my own primary machine. Debian realized that goal for me. I ve been a believer in that model ever since. I can use Solaris, macOS, Android etc knowing that I have the option of using a 100% free Debian. While the inclusive approach towards non-free software invite and deserve criticism (some argue that being inclusive to non-inclusive behavior is a bad idea), I believe that Debian s approach was a successful survival technique: by being inclusive to and a compromise between free and non-free communities, Debian has been able to stay relevant and contribute to both environments. If Debian had not served and contributed to the free community, I believe free software people would have stopped contributing. If Debian had rejected non-free works completely, I don t think the successful Ubuntu distribution would have been based on Debian. I wrote the majority of the text above back in September 2022, intending to post it as a way to argue for my proposal to maintain the status quo within Debian. I didn t post it because I felt I was saying the obvious, and that the obvious do not need to be repeated, and the rest of the post was just me going down memory lane. The Debian project has been a sustainable producer of a 100% free OS up until Debian 11 bullseye. In the resolution on non-free firmware the community decided to leave the model that had resulted in a 100% free Debian for so long. The goal of Debian is no longer to publish a 100% free operating system, instead this was added: The Debian official media may include firmware . Indeed the Debian 12 bookworm release has confirmed that this would not only be an optional possibility. The Debian community could have published a 100% free Debian, in parallel with the non-free Debian, and still be consistent with their newly adopted policy, but chose not to. The result is that Debian s policies are not consistent with their actions. It doesn t make sense to claim that Debian is 100% free when the Debian installer contains non-free software. Actions speaks louder than words, so I m left reading the policies as well-intended prose that is no longer used for guidance, but for the peace of mind for people living in ivory towers. And to attract funding, I suppose. So how to deal with this, on a personal level? I did not have an answer to that back in October 2022 after the vote. It wasn t clear to me that I would ever want to contribute to Debian under the new social contract that promoted non-free software. I went on vacation from any Debian work. Meanwhile Debian 12 bookworm was released, confirming my fears. I kept coming back to this text, and my only take-away was that it would be unethical for me to use Debian on my machines. Letting actions speak for themselves, I switched to PureOS on my main laptop during October, barely noticing any difference since it is based on Debian 11 bullseye. Back in December, I bought a new laptop and tried Trisquel and Guix on it, as they promise a migration path towards ppc64el that PureOS do not. While I pondered how to approach my modest Debian contributions, I set out to learn Trisquel and gained trust in it. I migrated one Debian machine after another to Trisquel, and started to use Guix on others. Migration was easy because Trisquel is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Using Guix has its challenges, but I enjoy its coherant documented environment. All of my essential self-hosted servers (VM hosts, DNS, e-mail, WWW, Nextcloud, CI/CD builders, backup etc) uses Trisquel or Guix now. I ve migrated many GitLab CI/CD rules to use Trisquel instead of Debian, to have a more ethical computing base for software development and deployment. I wish there were official Guix docker images around. Time has passed, and when I now think about any Debian contributions, I m a little less muddled by my disappointment of the exclusion of a 100% free Debian. I realize that today I can use Debian in the same way that I use macOS, Android, RHEL or Ubuntu. And what prevents me from contributing to free software on those platforms? So I will make the occasional Debian contribution again, knowing that it will also indirectly improve Trisquel. To avoid having to install Debian, I need a development environment in Trisquel that allows me to build Debian packages. I have found a recipe for doing this:

# System commands:
sudo apt-get install debhelper git-buildpackage debian-archive-keyring
sudo wget -O /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/debian-common https://sources.debian.org/data/main/d/debootstrap/1.0.128%2Bnmu2/scripts/debian-common
sudo wget -O /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/sid https://sources.debian.org/data/main/d/debootstrap/1.0.128%2Bnmu2/scripts/sid
# Run once to create build image:
DIST=sid git-pbuilder create --mirror http://deb.debian.org/debian/ --debootstrapopts "--exclude=usr-is-merged" --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-sid.cow
# Run in a directory with debian/ to build a package:
gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-dist=sid

How to sustainably deliver a 100% free software binary distributions seems like an open question, and the challenges are not all that different compared to the 1990 s or early 2000 s. I m hoping Debian will come back to provide a 100% free platform, but my fear is that Debian will compromise even further on the free software ideals rather than the opposite. With similar arguments that were used to add the non-free firmware, Debian could compromise the free software spirit of the Linux boot process (e.g., non-free boot images signed by Debian) and media handling (e.g., web browsers and DRM), as Debian have already done with appstore-like functionality for non-free software (Python pip). To learn about other freedom issues in Debian packaging, browsing Trisquel s helper scripts may enlight you. Debian s setback and the recent setback for RHEL-derived distributions are sad, and it will be a challenge for these communities to find internally consistent coherency going forward. I wish them the best of luck, as Debian and RHEL are important for the wider free software eco-system. Let s see how the community around Trisquel, Guix and the other FSDG-distributions evolve in the future. The situation for free software today appears better than it was years ago regardless of Debian and RHEL s setbacks though, which is important to remember! I don t recall being able install a 100% free OS on a modern laptop and modern server as easily as I am able to do today. Happy Hacking! Addendum 22 July 2023: The original title of this post was Coping with non-free Debian, and there was a thread about it that included feedback on the title. I do agree that my initial title was confrontational, and I ve changed it to the more specific Coping with non-free software in Debian. I do appreciate all the fine free software that goes into Debian, and hope that this will continue and improve, although I have doubts given the opinions expressed by the majority of developers. For the philosophically inclined, it is interesting to think about what it means to say that a compilation of software is freely licensed. At what point does a compilation of software deserve the labels free vs non-free? Windows probably contains some software that is published as free software, let s say Windows is 1% free. Apple authors a lot of free software (as a tangent, Apple probably produce more free software than what Debian as an organization produces), and let s say macOS contains 20% free software. Solaris (or some still maintained derivative like OpenIndiana) is mostly freely licensed these days, isn t it? Let s say it is 80% free. Ubuntu and RHEL pushes that closer to let s say 95% free software. Debian used to be 100% but is now slightly less at maybe 99%. Trisquel and Guix are at 100%. At what point is it reasonable to call a compilation free? Does Debian deserve to be called freely licensed? Does macOS? Is it even possible to use these labels for compilations in any meaningful way? All numbers just taken from thin air. It isn t even clear how this can be measured (binary bytes? lines of code? CPU cycles? etc). The caveat about license review mistakes applies. I ignore Debian s own claims that Debian is 100% free software, which I believe is inconsistent and no longer true under any reasonable objective analysis. It was not true before the firmware vote since Debian ships with non-free blobs in the Linux kernel for example.

10 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: PLIO, Mum, Debconf, Pressure Cooker, RISC-V,

PLIO I have been looking for an image viewer that can view images via modification date by default. The newer, the better. Alas, most of the image viewers do not do that. Even feh somehow fails. What I need is default listing of images as thumbnails by modification date. I put it up on Unix Stackexchange couple of years ago. Somebody shared ristretto but that just gives listing and doesn t give the way I want it. To be more illustrative, maybe this may serve as a guide to what I mean.
There is an RFP for it. While playing with it, I also discovered another benefit of the viewer, a sort of side-benefit, it tells you if any images have gone corrupt or whatever and you get that info. on the CLI so you can try viewing that image with the path using another viewer or viewers before deleting them. One of the issues is there doesn t seem to be a magnify option by default. While the documentation says use the ^ key to maximize it, it doesn t maximize. Took me a while to find it as that isn t a key that I use most of the time. Ironically, that is the key used on the mobile quite a bit. Anyways, so that needs to be fixed. Sadly, it doesn t have creation date or modification date sort, although the documentation does say it does (at least the modification date) but it doesn t show at my end. I also got Warning: UNKNOWN command detected! but that doesn t tell me enough as to what the issue is. Hopefully the developer will fix the issues and it will become part of Debian as many such projects are. Compiling was dead easy even with gcc-12 once I got freeimage-dev.

Mum s first death anniversary I do not know where the year went by or how. The day went in a sort of suspended animation. The only thing I did was eat and sleep that day, didn t feel like doing anything. Old memories, even dreams of fighting with her only to realize in the dream itself it s fake, she isn t there anymore Something that can never be fixed

Debconf Kochi I should have shared it few days ago but somehow slipped my mind. While it s too late for most people to ask for bursary for Debconf Kochi, if you are anywhere near Kochi in the month of September between the dates. September 3 to September 17 nearby Infopark, Kochi you could walk in and talk to people. This would be for people who either have an interest in free software, FOSS or Debian specific. For those who may not know, while Debian is a Linux Distribution having ports to other kernels as well as well as hardware. While I may not be able to provide the list of all the various flavors as well as hardware, can say it is quite a bit. For e.g. there is a port to RISC-V that was done few years back (2018). Why that is needed will be shared below. There is always something new to look forward in a Debconf.

Pressure Cooker and Potatoes This was asked to me in the last Debconf (2016) by few people. So as people are coming to India, it probably is a good time to sort of reignite the topic :). So a Pressure Cooker boils your veggies and whatnot while still preserving the nutrients. While there are quite a number of brands I would suggest either Prestige or Hawkins, I have had good experience with both. There are also some new pressure cookers that have come that are somewhat in the design of the Thai Wok. So if that is something that you are either comfortable with or looking for, you could look at that. One of the things that you have to be sort of aware of and be most particular is the pressure safety valve. Just putting up pressure cooker safety valve in your favorite search-engine should show you different makes and whatnot. While they are relatively cheap, you need to see it is not cracked, used or whatever. The other thing is the Pressure Cooker whistle as well. The easiest thing to cook are mashed potatoes in a pressure cooker. A pressure Cooker comes in Litres, from 1 Ltr. to 20 Ltr. The larger ones are obviously for hotels or whatnot. General rule of using Pressure cooker is have water 1/4th, whatever vegetable or non-veg you want to boil 1/2 and let the remaining part for the steam. Now the easiest thing to do is have wash the potatoes and put 1/4th water of the pressure cooker. Then put 1/2 or less or little bit more of the veggies, in this instance just Potatoes. You can put salt to or that can be done later. The taste will be different. Also, there are various salts so won t really go into it as spices is a rabbit hole. Anyways, after making sure that there is enough space for the steam to be built, Put the handle on the cooker and basically wait for 5-10 minutes for the pressure to be built. You will hear a whistling sound, wait for around 5 minutes or a bit more (depends on many factors, kind of potatoes, weather etc.) and then just let it cool off naturally. After 5-10 minutes or a bit more, the pressure will be off. Your mashed potatoes are ready for either consumption or for further processing. I am assuming gas, induction cooking will have its own temperature, have no idea about it, hence not sharing that. Pressure Cooker, first put on the heaviest settings, once it starts to whistle, put it on medium for 5-10 minutes and then let it cool off. The first time I had tried that, I burned the cooker. You understand things via trial and error.

Poha recipe This is a nice low-cost healthy and fulfilling breakfast called Poha that can be made anytime and requires at the most 10-15 minutes to prepare with minimal fuss. The main ingredient is Poha or flattened rice. So how is it prepared. I won t go into the details of quantity as that is upto how hungry people are. There are various kinds of flattened rice available in the market, what you are looking for is called thick Poha or zhad Poha (in Marathi). The first step is the trickiest. What do you want to do is put water on Poha but not to let it be soggy. There is an accessory similar to tea filter but forgot the name, it basically drains all the extra moisture and you want Poha to be a bit fluffy and not soggy. The Poha should breathe for about 5 minutes before being cooked. To cook, use a heavy bottomed skillet, put some oil in it, depends on what oil you like, again lot of variations, you can use ground nut or whatever oil you prefer. Then use single mustard seeds to check temperature of the oil. Once the mustard seeds starts to pop, it means it s ready for things. So put mustard seeds in, finely chopped onion, finely chopped coriander leaves, a little bit of lemon juice, if you want potatoes, then potatoes too. Be aware that Potatoes will soak oil like anything, so if you are going to have potatoes than the oil should be a bit more. Some people love curry leaves, others don t. I like them quite a bit, it gives a slightly different taste. So the order is

Oil

Mustard seeds (1-2 teaspoon)

Curry leaves 5-10

Onion (2-3 medium onions finely chopped, onion can also be used as garnish.)

Potatoes (2-3 medium ones, mashed)

Small green chillies or 1-2 Red chillies (if you want)

Coriander Leaves (one bunch finely chopped)

Peanuts (half a glass)

Make sure that you are stirring them quite a bit. On a good warm skillet, this should hardly take 5 minutes. Once the onions are slighly brown, you are ready to put Poha in. So put the poha, add turmeric, salt, and sugar. Again depends on number of people. If I made for myself and mum, usually did 1 teaspoon of salt, not even one fourth of turmeric, just a hint, it is for the color, 1 to 2 teapoons of sugar and mix them all well at medium flame. Poha used to be two or three glasses. If you don t want potato, you can fry them a bit separately and garnish with it, along with coriander, coconut and whatnot. In Kerala, there is possibility that people might have it one day or all days. It serves as a snack at anytime, breakfast, lunch, tea time or even dinner if people don t want to be heavy. The first few times I did, I did manage to do everything wrong. So, if things go wrong, let it be. After a while, you will find your own place. And again, this is just one way, I m sure this can be made as elaborate a meal as you want. This is just something you can do if you don t want noodles or are bored with it. The timing is similar. While I don t claim to be an expert in cooking in anyway or form, if people have questions feel free to ask. If you are single or two people, 2 Ltr. Pressure cooker is enough for most Indians, Westerners may take a slightly bit larger Pressure Cooker, maybe a 3 Ltr. one may be good for you. Happy Cooking and Experimenting I have had the pleasure to have Poha in many ways. One of my favorite ones is when people have actually put tadka on top of Poha. You do everything else but in a slight reverse order. The tadka has all the spices mixed and is concentrated and is put on top of Poha and then mixed. Done right, it tastes out of this world. For those who might not have had the Indian culinary experience, most of which is actually borrowed from the Mughals, you are in for a treat. One of the other things I would suggest to people is to ask people where there can get five types of rice. This is a specialty of South India and a sort of street food. I know where you can get it Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai but not in Kerala, although am dead sure there is, just somehow have missed it. If asked, am sure the Kerala team should be able to guide. That s all for now, feeling hungry, having dinner as have been sharing about cooking.

RISC-V There has been lot of conversations about how India could be in the microprocesor spacee. The x86 and x86-64 is all tied up in Intel and AMD so that s a no go area. Let me elaborate a bit why I say that. While most of the people know that IBM was the first producers of transistors as well as microprocessors. Coincidentally, AMD and Intel story are similar in some aspects but not in others. For a long time Intel was a market leader and by hook or crook it remained a market leader. One of the more interesting companies in the 1980s was Cyrix which sold lot of low-end microprocessors. A lot of that technology also went into Via which became a sort of spiritual successor of Cyrix. It is because of Cyrix and Via that Intel was forced to launch the Celeron model of microprocessors.

Lawsuits, European Regulation For those who have been there in the 1990s may have heard the term Wintel that basically meant Microsoft Windows and Intel and they had a sort of monopoly power. While the Americans were sorta ok with it, the Europeans were not and time and time again they forced both Microsoft as well as Intel to provide alternatives. The pushback from the regulators was so great that Intel funded AMD to remain solvent for few years. The successes that we see today from AMD is Lisa Su s but there is a whole lot of history as well as bad blood between the two companies. Lot of lawsuits and whatnot. Lot of cross-licensing agreements between them as well. So for any new country it would need lot of cash just for licensing all the patents there are and it s just not feasible for any newcomer to come in this market as they would have to fork the cash for the design apart from manufacturing fab.

ARM Most of the mobiles today sport an ARM processor. At one time it meant Advanced RISC Machines but now goes by Arm Ltd. Arm itself licenses its designs and while there are lot of customers, you are depending on ARM and they can change any of the conditions anytime they want. You are also hoping that ARM does not steal your design or do anything else with it. And while people trust ARM, it is still a risk if you are a company.

RISC and Shakti There is not much to say about RISC other than this article at Register. While India does have large ambitions, executing it is far trickier than most people believe as well as complex and highly capital intensive. The RISC way could be a game-changer provided India moves deftly ahead. FWIW, Debian did a RISC port in 2018. From what I can tell, you can install it on a VM/QEMU and do stuff. And while RISC has its own niches, you never know what happens next.One can speculate a lot and there is certainly a lot of momentum behind RISC. From what little experience I have had, where India has failed time and time again, whether in software or hardware is support. Support is the key, unless that is not fixed, it will remain a dream On a slightly sad note, Foxconn is withdrawing from the joint venture it had with Vedanta.

9 July 2023

Vasudev Kamath: Using LUKS-Encrypted USB Stick with TPM2 Integration

I use a LUKS-encrypted USB stick to store my GPG and SSH keys, which acts as a backup and portable key setup when working on different laptops. One inconvenience with LUKS-encrypted USB sticks is that you need to enter the password every time you want to mount the device, either through a Window Manager like KDE or using the cryptsetup luksOpen command. Fortunately, many laptops nowadays come equipped with TPM2 modules, which can be utilized to automatically decrypt the device and subsequently mount it. In this post, we'll explore the usage of systemd-cryptenroll for this purpose, along with udev rules and a set of scripts to automate the mounting of the encrypted USB. First, ensure that your device has a TPM2 module. You can run the following command to check:

sudo journalctl -k --grep=tpm2

The output should resemble the following:

Jul 08 18:57:32 bhairava kernel: ACPI: SSDT 0x00000000BBEFC000 0003C6 (v02
LENOVO Tpm2Tabl 00001000 INTL 20160422) Jul 08 18:57:32 bhairava kernel:
ACPI: TPM2 0x00000000BBEFB000 000034 (v03 LENOVO TP-R0D 00000830
PTEC 00000002) Jul 08 18:57:32 bhairava kernel: ACPI: Reserving TPM2 table
memory at [mem 0xbbefb000-0xbbefb033]

You can also use the systemd-cryptenroll command to check for the availability of a TPM2 device on your laptop:

systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=list

The output will be something like following:

blog git:(master) systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=list
PATH        DEVICE      DRIVER
/dev/tpmrm0 MSFT0101:00 tpm_tis
   blog git:(master)

Next, ensure that you have connected your encrypted USB device. Note that systemd-cryptenroll only works with LUKS2 and not LUKS1. If your device is LUKS1-encrypted, you may encounter an error while enrolling the device, complaining about the LUKS2 superblock not found. To determine if your device uses a LUKS1 header or LUKS2, use the cryptsetup luksDump <device> command. If it is LUKS1, the header will begin with:

LUKS header information for /dev/sdb1
Version:        1
Cipher name:    aes
Cipher mode:    xts-plain64
Hash spec:      sha256
Payload offset: 4096

Converting from LUKS1 to LUKS2 is a simple process, but for safety, ensure that you backup the header using the cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup command. Once backed up, use the following command to convert the header to LUKS2:

sudo cryptsetup convert --type luks2 /dev/sdb1

After conversion, the header will look like this:

Version:        2
Epoch:          4
Metadata area:  16384 [bytes]
Keyslots area:  2064384 [bytes]
UUID:           000b2670-be4a-41b4-98eb-9adbd12a7616
Label:          (no label)
Subsystem:      (no subsystem)
Flags:          (no flags)

The next step is to enroll the new LUKS key for the encrypted device using systemd-cryptenroll. Run the following command:

sudo systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=/dev/tpmrm0 --tpm2-pcrs="0+7" /dev/sdb1

This command will prompt you to provide the existing key to unseal the device. It will then add a new random key to the volume, allowing it to be unlocked in addition to the existing keys. Additionally, it will bind this new key to PCRs 0 and 7, representing the system firmware and Secure Boot state. If there is only one TPM device on the system, you can use --tpm2-device=auto to automatically select the device. To confirm that the new key has been enrolled, you can dump the LUKS configuration and look for a systemd-tpm2 token entry, as well as an additional entry in the Keyslots section. To test the setup, you can use the /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup command. Additionally, you can check if the device is unsealed by using lsblk:

sudo /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup attach GPG_USB "/dev/sdb1" - tpm2-device=auto
lsblk

The lsblk command should display the unsealed and mounted device, like this:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk
 sda1        8:1    0   976M  0 part  /boot/efi
 sda2        8:2    0 222.6G  0 part
   root    254:0    0 222.6G  0 crypt /
sdb           8:16   1   7.5G  0 disk
 sdb1        8:17   1   7.5G  0 part
   GPG_USB 254:1    0   7.5G  0 crypt /media/vasudev/GPG_USB

Auto Mounting the device Now that we have solved the initial problem of unsealing the USB device using TPM2 instead of manually entering the key, the next step is to automatically mount the device upon insertion and remove the mapping when the device is removed. This can be achieved using the following udev rules:

ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV DEVTYPE =="partition", ENV ID_BUS =="usb", ENV SYSTEMD_WANTS ="mount-gpg-usb@$env DEVNAME .service"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV DEVTYPE =="partition", ENV ID_BUS =="usb", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/umount_enc_usb.sh '%E ID_FS_UUID '"

When a device is added, a systemd service is triggered to mount the device at a specific location. Initially, I used a script with the RUN directive, but it resulted in an exit code of 32. This might be due to systemd-cryptsetup taking some time to return, causing udev to time out. To address this, I opted to use a systemd service instead. For device removal, even though the physical device is no longer present, the mapping may still remain, causing issues upon reinsertion. To resolve this, I created a script to close the luks mapping upon device removal. Below are the systemd service and script files: mount_enc_usb.sh:

#!/bin/bash
set -x
if [[ "$#" -ne 1 ]]; then
    echo "$(basename $0) <device>"
    exit 1
fi
device_uuid="$(blkid --output udev $1   grep ID_FS_UUID=   cut -d= -f2)"
if [[ "$device_uuid" == 000b2670-be4a-41b4-98eb-9adbd12a7616 ]]; then
    # Found our device, let's trigger systemd-cryptsetup
    /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup attach GPG_USB "$1" - tpm2-device=auto
    [[ -d /media/vasudev/GPG_USB ]]   (mkdir -p /media/vasudev/GPG_USB/ && chown vasudev:vasudev /media/vasudev/GPG_USB)
    mount /dev/mapper/GPG_USB /media/vasudev/GPG_USB
else
    echo "Not the interested device. Ignoring."
    exit 0
fi

umount_enc_usb.sh:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ "$#" -ne 1 ]]; then
  echo "$(basename $0) <fsuuid>"
  exit 1
fi
if [[ "$1" == "000b2670-be4a-41b4-98eb-9adbd12a7616" ]]; then
  # Our device is removed, let's close the luks mapping
  [[ -e /dev/mapper/GPG_USB ]] && cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/GPG_USB
else
  echo "Not our device."
  exit 0
fi

mount-gpg-usb@.service:

[Unit]
Description=Mount the encrypted USB device service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mount_enc_usb.sh

With this setup, plugging in the USB device will automatically unseal and mount it, and upon removal, the luks mapping will be closed.

Note

This can be even done for LUKS2 encrypted root disk but will need some tweaking in initramfs.

References

8 July 2023

Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer: Open question: Podman and user/group IDs

Here is an open question for Podman users: is there a (ideally simple) way to keep the user/group ID between the real system and the container? Let me be more verbose. I use Docker mostly in two "special" cases:

As Yocto build environment: I can use whatever the people I work with/Yocto version wants.
For creating developer environments: I create Docker containers that have the same environments as the CI docker instances I use with GitLab + development tools I run sharing the X socket. In that way the people I work with can reuse the same environment and have the exact same set of tools, without the inconveniences of virtual machines.

Now in both setups I mount some system directory into the chroot, normally as $HOME. Using Docker I can do the right UID/GID mapping and any file I create inside the container will have my system's UID/GID. And that's the thing I so far could not do with Podman. So dear Podman user: is there any way to do this with Podman? If you know, please feel free to send a comment/email!

Russell Coker: Sandboxing Phone Apps

As a follow up to Wayland [1]: A difficult problem with Linux desktop systems (which includes phones and tablets) is restricting application access so that applications can t mess with each other s data or configuration but also allowing them to share data as needed. This has been mostly solved for Android but that involved giving up all legacy Linux apps. I think that we need to get phones capable of running a full desktop environment and having Android level security on phone apps and regular desktop apps. My interest in this is phones running Debian and derivatives such as PureOS. But everything I describe in this post should work equally well for all full featured Linux distributions for phones such as Arch, Gentoo, etc and phone based derivatives of those such as Manjaro. It may be slightly less applicable to distributions such as Alpine Linux and it s phone derivative PostmarketOS, I would appreciate comments from contributors to PostmarketOS or Alpine Linux about this. I ve investigated some of the ways of solving these problems. Many of the ways of doing this involves namespaces. The LWN articles about namespaces are a good background to some of these technologies [2]. The LCA keynote lecture Containers aka crazy user space fun by Jess Frazelle has a good summary of some of the technology [3]. One part that I found particularly interesting was the bit about recognising the container access needed at compile time. This can also be part of recognising bad application design at compile time, it s quite common for security systems to flag bad security design in programs. Firejail To sandbox applications you need to have some method of restricting what they do, this means some combination of namespaces and similar features. Here s an article on sandboxing with firejail [4]. Firejail uses namespaces, seccomp-bpf, and capabilities to restrict programs. It allows bind mounts if run as root and if not run as root it can restrict file access by name and access to networking, system calls, and other features. It has a convenient learning mode that generates policy for you, so if you have a certain restricted set of tasks that an application is to perform you can run it once and then force it to do only the same operations in future. I recommend that everyone who is still reading at this point try out firejail. Here s an example of what you can do:

# create a profile
firejail --build=xterm.profile xterm
# now this run can only do what the previous run did
firejail --profile=xterm.profile xterm

Note that firejail is SETUID root so can potentially reduce system security and it has had security issues in the past. In spite of that it can be good for allowing a trusted user to run programs with less access to the system. Also it is a good way to start learning about such things. I don t think it s a good solution for what I want to do. But I won t rule out the possibility of using it at some future time for special situations. Bubblewrap I tried out firejail with the browser Epiphany (Debian package epiphany-browser) on my Librem5, but that didn t work as Epiphany uses /usr/bin/bwrap (bubblewrap) for it s internal sandboxing (here is an informative blog post about the history of bubblewrap AKA xdg-app-helper which was developed as part of flatpak [5]). The Epiphany bubblewrap sandbox is similar to the situation with Chrome/Chromium which have internal sandboxing that s incompatible with firejail. The firejail man page notes that it s not compatible with Snap, Flatpack, and similar technologies. One issue this raises is that we can t have a namespace based sandboxing system applied to all desktop apps with no extra configuration as some desktop apps won t work with it. Bubblewrap requires setting kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 to run as non-root (IE provide the normal and expected functionality) which potentially reduces system security. Here is an example of a past kernel bug that was exploitable by creating a user namespace with CAP_SYS_ADMIN [6]. But it s the default in recent Debian kernels which means that the issues have been reviewed and determined to be a reasonable trade-off and also means that many programs will use the feature and break if it s disabled. Here is an example of how to use Bubblewrap on Debian, after installing the bubblewrap run the following command. Note that the new-session option (to prevent injecting characters in the keyboard buffer with TIOCSTI) makes the session mostly unusable for a shell.

bwrap --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --die-with-parent bash

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the game Warzone2100 running with Wayland/Vulkan graphics and Pulseaudio sound.

bwrap --bind $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 --bind /run/user/$UID/pulse /run/user/$UID/pulse --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri --ro-bind $HOME/.pulse $HOME/.pulse --ro-bind $XAUTHORITY $XAUTHORITY --ro-bind /sys /sys --new-session --die-with-parent warzone2100

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the Debian bug reporting tool reportbug

bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/sbin /sbin --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --symlink /usr/lib32 /lib32 --symlink /usr/libx32 /libx32 --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-ipc --unshare-pid reportbug

Here is an example shell script to wrap the build process for Debian packages. This needs to run with unshare-user and specifying the UID as 0 because fakeroot doesn t work in the container, I haven t worked out why but doing it through the container is a better method anyway. This script shares read-write the parent of the current directory as the Debian build process creates packages and metadata files in the parent directory. This will prevent the automatic signing scripts which is a feature not a bug, so after building packages you have to sign the .changes file with debsign. One thing I just learned is that the Debian build system Sbuild can use chroots for building packages for similar benefits [7]. Some people believe that sbuild is the correct way of doing it regardless of the chroot issue. I think it s too heavy-weight for most of my Debian package building, but even if I had been convinced I d still share the information about how to use bwrap as Debian is about giving users choice.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
BUILDDIR=$(realpath $(pwd)/..)
exec bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --bind $BUILDDIR $BUILDDIR --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-user --unshare-ipc --unshare-net --unshare-pid --new-session --uid 0 --gid 0 $@

Here is an informative blog post about using Bubblewrap with Seccomp (BPF) [8]. In a future post I ll write about how to get this sort of thing going but I ll just leave the URL here for people who want to do it on their own. The source for the flatpak-run program is the only example I could find of using Seccomp with Bubblewrap [9]. A lot of that code is worth copying for application sandboxing, maybe the entire program. Unshare The unshare command from the util-linux package has a large portion of the Bubblewrap functionality. The things that it doesn t do like creating a new session can be done by other utilities. Here is an example of creating a container with unshare and then using cgroups with it [10]. systemd --user Recent distributions have systemd support for running a user session, the Arch Linux Wiki has a good description of how this works [11]. The units for a user are .service files stored in /usr/lib/systemd/user/ (distribution provided), ~/.local/share/systemd/user/ (user installed applications in debian a link to ~/.config/systemd/user/), ~/.config/systemd/user/ (for manual user config), and /etc/systemd/user/ (local sysadmin provided) Here are some example commands for manipulating this:

# show units running for the current user
systemctl --user
# show status of one unit
systemctl --user status kmail.service
# add an environment variable to the list for all user units
systemctl --user import-environment XAUTHORITY
# start a user unit
systemctl --user start kmail.service
# analyse security for all units for the current user
systemd-analyze --user security
# analyse security for one unit
systemd-analyze --user security kmail.service

Here is a test kmail.service file I wrote to see what could be done for kmail, I don t think that kmail is the app most needing to be restricted it is in more need of being protected from other apps but it still makes a good test case. This service file took it from the default risk score of 9.8 (UNSAFE) to 6.3 (MEDIUM) even though I was getting the error code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES when I tried anything that used capabilities (apparently due to systemd having some issue talking to the kernel).

[Unit]
Description=kmail
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kmail
# can not limit capabilities (code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES)
#CapabilityBoundingSet=~CAP_SYS_TIME CAP_SYS_PACCT CAP_KILL CAP_WAKE_ALARM CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_FOWNER CAP_IPC_OWNER CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_SYS_MODULE CAP_SYS_TTY_CONFIG CAP_SYS_BOOT CAP_SYS_CHROOT CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND CAP_LEASE CAP_MKNOD CAP_CHOWN CAP_FSETID CAP_SETFCAP CAP_SETGID CAP_SETUID CAP_SETPCAP CAP_SYS_RAWIO CAP_SYS_PTRACE CAP_SYS_NICE CAP_SYS_RESOURCE CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_BROADCAST CAP_NET_RAW CAP_SYS_ADMIN CAP_SYSLOG
# also 218 for ProtectKernelModules PrivateDevices ProtectKernelLogs ProtectClock
# MemoryDenyWriteExecute stops it displaying message content (bad)
# needs @resources and @mount to startup
# needs @privileged to display message content
SystemCallFilter=~@cpu-emulation @debug @raw-io @reboot @swap @obsolete
SystemCallArchitectures=native
UMask=077
NoNewPrivileges=true
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateMounts=false
RestrictNamespaces=~user pid net uts mnt cgroup ipc
RestrictSUIDSGID=true
ProtectHostname=true
LockPersonality=true
ProtectKernelTunables=true
RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET
RestrictRealtime=true
ProtectSystem=strict
ProtectProc=invisible
PrivateUsers=true
[Install]

When I tried to use the TemporaryFileSystem=%h directive (to make the home directory a tmpfs the most basic step in restricting what a regular user application can do) I got the error (code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE) . So I don t think the systemd user setup competes with bubblewrap for restricting user processes. But if anyone else can start where I left off and go further then that will be interesting. Systemd-run The following shell script runs firefox as a dynamic user via systemd-run, running this asks for the root password and any mechanism for allowing that sort of thing opens potential security holes. So at this time while it s an interesting feature I don t think it is suitable for running regular applications on a phone or Linux desktop.

#!/bin/bash
# systemd-run Firefox with DynamicUser and home directory.
#
# Run as a non-root user.
# Or, run as root and change $USER below.
SANDBOX_MINIMAL=(
    --property=DynamicUser=1
    --property=StateDirectory=openstreetmap
    # --property=RootDirectory=/debian_sid
)
SANDBOX_X11=(
    # Sharing Xorg always defeats security, regardless of any sandboxing tech,
    # but the config is almost ready for Wayland, and there's Xephyr.
#    --property=LoadCredential=.ICEauthority:/home/$USER/.ICEauthority
    --property=LoadCredential=.Xauthority:/home/$USER/.Xauthority
    --property=Environment=DISPLAY=:0
)
SANDBOX_FIREFOX=(
    # hardware-accelerated rendering
    --property=BindPaths=/dev/dri
    # webcam
    # --property=SupplementaryGroups=video
)
systemd-run  \
    "$ SANDBOX_MINIMAL[@] "  "$ SANDBOX_X11[@] " "$ SANDBOX_FIREFOX[@] " \
    bash -c '
        export XAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.Xauthority
        export ICEAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.ICEauthority
        export HOME="$STATE_DIRECTORY"/home
        firefox --no-remote about:blank
    '

Qubes OS Here is an interesting demo video of QubesOS [12] which shows how it uses multiple VMs to separate different uses. Here is an informative LCA presentation about Qubes which shows how it asks the user about communication between VMs and access to hardware [13]. I recommend that everyone who hasn t seen Qubes in operation watch the first video and everyone who isn t familiar with the computer science behind it watch the second video. Qubes appears to be a free software equivalent to NetTop as far as I can tell without ever being able to use NetTop. I don t think Qubes is a good match for my needs in general use and it definitely isn t a good option for phones (VMs use excessive CPU on phones). But it s methods for controlling access have some ideas that are worth copying. File Access XDG Desktop Portal One core issue for running sandboxed applications is to allow them to access files permitted by the user but no other files. There are two main parts to this problem, the easier one is to have each application have it s own private configuration directory which can be addressed by bind mounts, MAC systems, running each application under a different UID or GID, and many other ways. The hard part of file access is to allow the application to access random files that the user wishes. For example I want my email program, IM program, and web browser to be able to save files and also to be able to send arbitrary files via email, IM, and upload to web sites. But I don t want one of those programs to be able to access all the files from the others if it s compromised. So only giving programs access to arbitrary files when the user chooses such a file makes sense. There is a package xdg-desktop-portal which provides a dbus interface for opening files etc for a sandboxed application [14]. This portal has backends for KDE, GNOME, and Wayland among others which allow the user to choose which file or files the application may access. Chrome/Chromium is one well known program that uses the xdg-desktop-portal and does it s own sandboxing. To use xdg-desktop-portal an application must be modified to use that interface instead of opening files directly, so getting this going with all Internet facing applications will take some work. But the documentation notes that the portal API gives a consistent user interface for operations such as opening files so it can provide benefits even without a sandboxed environment. This technology was developed for Flatpak and is now also used for Snap. It also has a range of APIs for accessing other services [15]. Flatpak Flatpack is a system for distributing containerised versions of applications with some effort made to improve security. Their development of bubblewrap and xdg-desktop-portal is really good work. However the idea of having software packaged with all libraries it needs isn t a good one, here s a blog post covering some of the issues [16]. The web site flatkill.org has been registered to complain about some Flatpak problems [17]. They have some good points about the approach that Flatpak project developers have taken towards some issues. They also make some points about the people who package software not keeping up to date with security fixes and not determining a good security policy for their pak. But this doesn t preclude usefully using parts of the technology for real security benefits. If parts of Flatpak like Bubblewrap and xdg-portal are used with good security policies on programs that are well packaged for a distribution then these issues would be solved. The Flatpak app author s documentation about package requirements [18] has an overview of security features that is quite reasonable. If most paks follow that then it probably isn t too bad. I reviewed the manifests of a few of the recent paks and they seemed to have good settings. In the amount of time I was prepared to spend investigating this I couldn t find evidence to support the Flatkill claim about Flatpaks granting obviously inappropriate permissions. But the fact that the people who run Flathub decided to put a graph of installs over time on the main page for each pak while making the security settings only available by clicking the Manifest github link, clicking on a JSON or YAML file, and then searching for the right section in that shows where their priorities lie. The finish-args section of the Flatpak manifest (the section that describes the access to the system) seems reasonably capable and not difficult for users to specify as well as being in common use. It seems like it will be easy enough to take some code from Flatpak for converting the finish-args into Bubblewrap parameters and then use the manifest files from Flathub as a starting point for writing application security policy for Debian packages. Snap Snap is developed by Canonical and seems like their version of Flatpak with some Docker features for managing versions, the Getting Started document is worth reading [19]. They have Connections between different snaps and the system where a snap registers a plug that connects to a socket which can be exposed by the system (EG the camera socket) or another snap. The local admin can connect and disconnect them. The connections design reminds me of the Android security model with permitting access to various devices. The KDE Neon extension [20] has been written to add Snap support to KDE. Snap seems quite usable if you have an ecosystem of programs using it which Canonical has developed. But it has all the overheads of loopback mounts etc that you don t want on a mobile device and has the security issues of libraries included in snaps not being updated. A quick inspection of an Ubuntu 22.04 system I run (latest stable release) has Firefox 114.0.2-1 installed which includes libgcrypt.so.20.2.5 which is apparently libgcrypt 1.8.5 and there are CVEs relating to libgcrypt versions before 1.9.4 and 1.8.x versions before 1.8.8 which were published in 2021 and updated in 2022. Further investigation showed that libgcrypt came from the gnome-3-38-2004 snap (good that it doesn t require all shared objects to be in the same snap, but that it has old versions in dependencies). The gnome-3-38-2004 snap is the latest version so anyone using the Snap of Firefox seems to have no choice but to have what appears to be insecure libraries. The strict mode means that the Snap in question has no system access other than through interfaces [21]. SE Linux and Apparmor The Librem5 has Apparmor running by default. I looked into writing Apparmor policy to prevent Epiphany from accessing all files under the home directory, but that would be a lot of work. Also at least one person has given up on maintaining an Epiphany profile for Apparmor because it changes often and it s sandbox doesn t work well with Apparmor [22]. This was not a surprise to me at all, SE Linux policy has the same issues as Apparmor in this regard. The Ubuntu Security Team Application Confinement document [23] is worth reading. They have some good plans for using AppArmor as part of solving some of these problems. I plan to use SE Linux for that. Slightly Related Things One thing for the future is some sort of secure boot technology, the LCA lecture Becoming a tyrant: Implementing secure boot in embedded devices [24] has some ideas for the future. The Betrusted project seems really interesting, see Bunnie s lecture about how to create a phone size security device with custom OS [25]. The Betrusted project web page is worth reading too [26]. It would be ironic to have a phone as your main PC that is the same size as your security device, but that seems to be the logical solution to several computing problems. Whonix is a Linux distribution that has one VM for doing Tor stuff and another VM for all other programs which is only allowed to have network access via the Tor VM [27]. Xpra does for X programs what screen/tmux do for text mode programs [28]. It allows isolating X programs from each other in ways that are difficult to impossible with a regular X session. In an ideal situation we could probably get the benefits we need with just using Wayland, but if there are legacy apps that only have X support this could help. Conclusion I think that currently the best option for confining desktop apps is Bubblewrap on Wayland. Maybe with a modified version of Flatpak-run to run it and with app modifications to use the xdg-portal interfaces as much as possible. That should be efficient enough in storage space, storage IO performance, memory use, and CPU use to run on phones while giving some significant benefits. Things to investigate are how much code from Flatpak to use, how to most efficiently do the configuration (maybe the Flatpak way because it s known and seems effective), how to test this (and have regression tests), and what default settings to use. Also BPF is a big thing to investigate.

7 July 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.11 on CRAN: Updates and Maintenance

The Rcpp Core Team is delighted to announce that the newest release 1.0.11 of the Rcpp package arrived on CRAN and in Debian earlier today. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was finalized three days ago, but given the widespread use and extended reverse dependencies at CRAN it usually takes a few days to be processed. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2720 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 251 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.7% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.6% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 72.5 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1678 (JSS, 2011) and 259 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 588. This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp version 1.0.11 (2023-07-03)

Changes in Rcpp API:

Rcpp:::CxxFlags() now quotes only non-standard include path on linux (Lukasz in #1243 closing #1242).

Two unit tests no longer accidentally bark on stdout (Dirk and I aki in #1245).

Compilation under C++20 using clang++ and its standard library is enabled (Dirk in #1248 closing #1244).

Use backticks in a generated .Call() statement in RcppExports.R (Dirk #1256 closing #1255).

Switch to system2() to capture standard error messages in error cases (I aki in #1259 and #1261 fixing #1257).

Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

The CITATION file format has been updated (Dirk in #1250 fixing #1249).

Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

A test for qnorm now uses the more accurate value from R 4.3.0 (Dirk in #1252 and #1260 fixing #1251).

Skip tests with path issues on Windows (I aki in #1258).

Container deployment in continuous integrations was improved. (I aki and Dirk in #1264, Dirk in #1269).

Several files receives minor edits to please R CMD check from r-devel (Dirk in #1267).

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2994 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

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CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

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Changes in version 0.0.7 (2023-07-19)

Updates, extensions and corrections to calendars from South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Taiwan, South Africa, Denmark and Finland from QuantLib 1.31

Added support for UnitedStates/SOFR calendar