I have a friend who hates printers. I ll call him Mark , because that, incidentally, is his name. His hatred for printers is partly my fault, but that is, ahem, a story for another time that involves him returning from a battle with a printer with a combination of weld dust, toner, and a deep scowl on his face. I also tend to hate printers. Driver issues, crinkled paper, toner spilling all over the place . everybody hates printers. But there is exactly one printer that I have never hated. It s almost 20 years old, and has some stories to tell. Nearly 20 years ago, I was about to move out of my parents house, and I needed a printer. I bought a LaserJet 6MP. This printer ought to have been made by Nokia. It s still running fine, 18 years later. It turned out to be one of the best investments in computing equipment I ve ever made. Its operating costs, by now, are cheaper than just about any printer you can buy today less than one cent per page. It has been supported by every major operating system for years. PostScript was important, because back then running Ghostscript to convert to PCL was both slow and a little error-prone. PostScript meant I didn t need a finicky lpr/lprng driver on my Linux workstation to print. It just printed. (Hat tip to anyone else that remembers the trial and error of constructing an /etc/printcap that would print both ASCII and PostScript files correctly!) Out of this printer have come plane and train tickets, taking me across the country to visit family and across the world to visit friends. It s printed resumes and recipes, music and university papers. I even printed wedding invitations and envelopes on them two years ago, painstakingly typeset in LaTeX and TeXmacs. I remember standing at the printer in the basement one evening, feeding envelope after envelope into the manual feed slot. (OK, so it did choke on a couple of envelopes, but overall it all worked great.) The problem, though, is that it needs a parallel port. I haven t had a PC with one of those in a long while. A few years ago, in a moment of foresight, I bought a little converter box that has an Ethernet port and a parallel port, with the idea that it would be pay for itself by letting me not maintain some old PC just to print. Well, it did, but now the converter box is dying! And they don t make them anymore. So I finally threw in the towel and bought a new LaserJet. It cost a third of what the 6MP did, has a copier, scanner, prints in color, does duplexing, has wifi and, yes, still supports PostScript strangely enough, a deciding factor in going with HP over Brother once again. (The other was image quality) We shall see if I am still using it when I m 50.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 85.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (13.5h allocated, thus only catching up 0.5 hours out of the 5.5 extra hours he had left from former month).
• Chris Lamb did 11 hours (12h allocated, he will catch up later).
• Guido G nther did 4 hours (out of 8 hours allocated, thus keeping 4 extra hours for November).
• Mike Gabriel did nothing (out of 8 hours allocated, he will catch up in November).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 13.25 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5 hours.
• Scott Kitterman did 8 hours (4 hours allocated and 4 hours remaining from September)
• Thorsten Alteholz did 13.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation November crossed a new record with 114.5 hours funded. This is mainly thanks to our first Platinum sponsor: TOSHIBA (through Toshiba Software Development Vietnam). They don t know yet if they can sponsor us in the long term (they hope so), but it s still a nice news as we jumped from 50% to 65% of the objective of the equivalent of a full-time position with a single new sponsor. Currently no change is expected for next month as we don t have any other new sponsor in the process of joining us. We still need more support to be able to support all the packages we could not afford to support during the squeeze cycle. We are currently discussing which package we can or cannot support on the LTS list, see the thread Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS for the current situation. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 21 packages awaiting an update (6 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (exactly like last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 17 months already)
• Blablacar (for 16 months already)
• Linode LLC (for 6 months already)
• Silver sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 17 months already)
• Domeneshop AS (for 16 months already)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 16 months already)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 14 months already)
• Gandi SAS (for 11 months already)
• University of Luxembourg (for 8 months already)
• Rentabiliweb Group (for 6 months already)
• Univention GmbH
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne
• Bronze sponsors:
• Offensive Security (for 17 months already)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 17 months already)
• Evolix (for 16 months already)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 16 months already)
• MyTux (for 16 months already)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 14 months already)
• Intevation GmbH (for 13 months already)
• Daevel SARL (for 12 months already)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 11 months already)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 11 months already)
• Gree, Inc. (for 10 months already)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 10 months already)
• NUMLOG (for 10 months already)
• WinGo AG (for 9 months already)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 5 months already)
• Sig-I/O (for 3 months already)
• Entr ouvert

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Now this could just be the prodigious amounts of sugar and ghee I've been eating the past few days, but I'm bursting with energy for working on Debian so here is a list of things I want to do in the upcoming year.

• Finish packaging the latest Dovecot (2.2.19).

This will happen soon. Sooner if you people will stop filing bugs all the time. The rest of the items are more long term.

• Recruit more members for the Dovecot packaging team.
• Undertake to respond to all bug reports and other Debian correspondence within three days.
• Finally get the Minix port to a state where other people can use it and work on it too.
• Relearn Debian development from scratch so that I can be familliar with and apply the latest techniques. Write down what I've learned.
• Arrange (or more realistically get someone to arrange) a Debian event in Northern or Eastern India.
• Watch all the Debconf 15 videos.

To keep all of this on track, I shall adopt the practice lately seen on Debian Planet of periodically posting a report of my Debian activities.

db2twitter 0.2 was just released! If you missed my last post about it, db2twitter automatically extracts fields from your database, use them to feed a template of tweet and send the tweet. db2twitter is developed by and run for LinuxJobs.fr, the job board of th french-speaking Free Software and Opensource community.

• Github of db2twitter (star it if you like ;)
• Official documentation on readthedocs

The main new feature allows to send tweets only during authorized days/hours with the following content in your db2twitter.ini file :

[timer]
days=mon-fri,
hours=0-11,14-17,

• The line days=mon-fri specifies db2twitter can send tweets only from monday to friday.
• The line hours=0-11,14-17 specifies db2twitter can send tweets from midnight to 11AM (included) and from 2PM to 17PM (included)

Given the fact db2twitter will mostly be launched via cron, it allows sending tweets detected since the last db2twitter run during user-defined hours. And that s cool! db2twitter is coded in Python 3.4, uses SQlAlchemy (see supported database types) and Tweepy. The official documentation is available on readthedocs.

On the 13th of May this year, I legally became Lucy Wayland. I d been living as a woman full time a couple of months before that, but that is when two dear friends witnessed my name change. I am going to post about the whole experience when it is finally into the completion zone. However, this last weekend just gone, I was helping out with the Cambridge (UK) MiniDebConf. I was mostly gophering and front-desk-helpering, with side orders of beverages, so I missed most of the talks. Which is not the point. I met nearly everybody at the conference. Many of them knew me as Jon, a goateed man. I was there as Lucy, a woman. And nobody batted an eyelid.

• Not a single person used my old name
• Not a single person mis-gendered me
• Not a single person referred to my transition

The only time I had to produce my Deed Poll out was for keysigning, as I still do not have photo ID with my new name on. I proffered it along with my passport, so there was no embarrassment. I know other people within Debian have gone through the same process. However, I just have to say how wonderful it is, to be accepted just that way. And hence the title of my article. Our differences bring us together. So many different people from so many different cultures came together, wanted to create, and my change of gender was just irrelevant. And that s how it should be.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• ChangZhuo Chen (czchen)
• Eugene Zhukov (eugene)
• Hugo Lefeuvre (hle)
• Milan Kupcevic (milan)
• Timo Weing rtner (tiwe)
• Uwe Kleine-K nig (ukleinek)
• Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
• Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
• Prach Pongpanich (prach)
• Markus Koschany (apo)
• Andy Simpkins (rattustrattus)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Miguel A. Col n V lez
• Afif Elghraoui
• Bastien Roucari s
• Carsten Schoenert
• Tomasz Nitecki
• Christoph Ulrich Scholler
• Mechtilde Stehmann
• Alexandre Viau
• Daniele Tricoli
• Russell Sim
• Benda Xu
• Andrew Kelley
• Ivan Udovichenko
• Shih-Yuan Lee
• Edward Betts
• Punit Agrawal
• Andreas Boll
• Dave Hibberd
• Alexandre Detiste
• Marcio de Souza Oliveira
• Andrew Ayer
• Alf Gaida

Congratulations!

I m excited to see other people thinking about userspace-to-kernel attack surface reduction ideas. Theo de Raadt recently published slides describing Pledge. This uses the same ideas that seccomp implements, but with less granularity. While seccomp works at the individual syscall level and in addition to killing processes, it allows for signaling, tracing, and errno spoofing. As de Raadt mentions, Pledge could be implemented with seccomp very easily: libseccomp would just categorize syscalls. I don t really understand the presentation s mention of Optional Security , though. Pledge, like seccomp, is an opt-in feature. Nothing in the kernel refuses to run unpledged programs. I assume his point was that when it gets ubiquitously built into programs (like stack protector), it s effectively not optional (which is alluded to later as comprehensive applicability ~= mandatory mitigation ). Regardless, this sensible (though optional) design gets me back to his slide on seccomp, which seems to have a number of misunderstandings:

• A Turing complete eBPF program watches your program Strictly speaking, seccomp is implemented using a subset of BPF, not eBPF. And since BPF (and eBPF) programs are guaranteed to halt, it makes seccomp filters not Turing complete.
• Who watches the watcher? I don t even understand this. It s in the kernel. The kernel watches your program. Just like always. If this is a question of BPF program verification, there is literally a program verifier that checks various properties of the BPF program.
• seccomp program is stored elsewhere This, with the next statement, is just totally misunderstood. Programs using seccomp define their program in their own code. It s used the same way as the Pledge examples are shown doing.
• Easy to get desyncronized either program is updated As above, this just isn t the case. The only place where this might be true is when using seccomp on programs that were not written natively with seccomp. In that case, yes, desync is possible. But that s one of the advantages of seccomp s design: a program launcher (like minijail or systemd) can declare a seccomp filter for a program that hasn t yet been ported to use one natively.
• eBPF watcher has no real idea what the program under observation is doing I don t understand this statement. I don t see how Pledge would have a real idea either: they re both doing filtering. If we get AI out of our syscall filters, we re in serious trouble. :)

OpenBSD has some interesting advantages in the syscall filtering department, especially around sockets. Right now, it s hard for Linux syscall filtering to understand why a given socket is being used. Something like SOCK_DNS seems like it could be quite handy. Another nice feature of Pledge is the path whitelist feature. As it s still under development, I hope they expand this to include more things than just paths. Argument inspection is a weak point for seccomp, but under Linux, most of the arguments are ultimately exposed to the LSM layer. Last year I experimented with creating a seccomp LSM for path matching where programs could declare whitelists, similar to standard LSMs. So, yes, Linux could match this API on seccomp . It d just take some extensions to libseccomp to implement pledge(), as I described at the top. With OpenBSD doing a bunch of analysis work on common programs, it d be excellent to see this usable on Linux too. So far on Linux, only a few programs (e.g. Chrome, vsftpd) have bothered to do this using seccomp, and it could be argued that this is ultimately due to how fine grained it is.

2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

A little over a year ago I wrote about how I'd been using a Mac as my main work machine. I hadn't written anything on the subject since. Here are four useful Mac programs that I can recommend to people. Sizeup, from Irradiated Software. A bit Like Windows' aero snap, but on steroids. I love this. I regularly move windows between two desktops (external and internal display), resize and centre them or put them in one quarter of the screen with just a few presses. The "snapback" feature is also great. X Lossless Decoder (XLD). A handy transcoder that can use QuickTime encoders and so can write out Apple/Quicktime/iTunes-encoded AAC/MP4 files en-mass, translating file meta-data. LimeChat, an IRC client. I theme it to look like Colloquy. The net result is pretty clean. I like using a proportional-font for text things, so getting IRC out of a terminal is a win for me. LimeChat automatically fetches and thumbnails URIs to images that people paste in channels, which is either incredibly convenient or a curse, depending on the channel. You can toggle that behaviour but only across the whole client, not on a channel or network basis. Finally, 1Password is an incredibly slick password manager. I use it in a very basic fashion: no mobile client, no syncing to anything outside of my workstation. You could also use LastPass which is similar and has a Linux client. I haven't tried it, but there's a third party tool to read 1Password password stores on Linux written by Ryan Coleman of SDL fame called 1pass.

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• Debian-Blog
• Tools

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• apt-offline
• Offline APT Package Manager

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October 2015 has been mainly dedicated to contracted/payed work. Only a few issues I could address during the last month:

• Fix FTBFS of Arctica Greeter on non-Ubuntu systems
• Co-working on renewed Xinerama support in nx-libs
• Development of GOsa Password Management Add-on
• Improving Debian Edu main server upgrade documentation (from Debian Edu squeeze to Debian Edu jessie)
• Fixing my personal Horde Groupware installation for access via mobile devices
• Learning Dovecot et al.

Arctica Project While having a week off from work, I managed to get Arctica Greeter to build on non-Ubuntu systems. The issue was very simple. The build crashed during the test suite run and it was caused by the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable not being set in my clean build environment. Furthermore, I added various more session type icons to Arctica Greeter (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, OpenBox, TWM, Default X11 Session, etc.) and also rebased the Arctica Greeter code base against all recent commits found in Unity Greeter for Ubuntu 15.10 / upcoming 16.04. Together with Ulrich Sibiller, I continued our work on the new Xinerama implementation for the remote X11 server nxagent (used as x2goagent in X2Go). However, this is unfortunately still work in progress, because various theoretical monitor layout issues became evident that require being handled in the new code before it can get merged into nx-libs's current 3.6.x branch. Also, I managed to do some little work on https://arctica-project.org, the still too rudimentary project homepage. read more

Wishing you all a happy Diwali and Gujarati New Year (V.S. 2072 called Plavanga.)Instead of being something sane like a flat disk supported by four elephants standing on a tortoise, the Earth is an oblate spheroid in heliocentric orbit. The Moon too offends by maintaining an unreasonably non-epicyclic orbit. Combined this means that the Americas (plus Iceland if there any Hindus there) observe Diwali today whereas in India and the rest of the world it is tomorrow. Technically in these longitudes the Ashvayuja amavasya tithi pervades both Tuesday and Wednesday but as Lakshmi Puja takes place at the pradosha kala it means it should be celebrated today though no doubt most of the non-astronomically minded people will just follow India any way. The New Year is on Thursday all over the world.Regardless of when you celebrate, may your year be full of happiness, good fortune and prosperity.

It s now official: I m a pilot. This has been one of the most challenging, and also most rewarding, journeys I ve been on. It had its moments of struggle, moments of joy, moments of poetry. I wrote about the poetry of flying at night recently. Here is the story of my first landing on a grass runway, a few months ago. Grass

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright. John A. Lomax

We are used to seeing planes in these massive palaces of infrastructure we call airports. We have huge parking garages, giant terminals, security lines hundreds of people deep, baggage carts, jetways, video screens, restaurants, and miles and miles of concrete. But most of the world s airports are not like that. A pilot of a small plane gets to see the big airports, sure, but we also get to use the smaller airports hidden in plain sight to most. Have you ever taken off from a strip of grass? As I told my flight instructor when I tried it for the first time, I know this will work, but somehow I will still be amazed if it actually does. I took off from a strip of grass not long ago. The airport there had one paved runway, and the rest were grass. Short runways, narrow runways, grass runways. No lights. No paint. No signs. No trucks, no jetways, nothing massive. In fact, no people. Just a mowed path and a couple of yellow or white markers. I taxied down the grass runway, being careful to never let the plane s wheels stop moving lest the nose gear get stuck in a pothole. I felt all the bumps in the ground as we moved. End of runway. Turn the plane around. A little bit of flap for more lift, full throttle, mind the centerline imaginary centerline, this time. It starts picking up speed, slower than usual, bump bump bump. Those buildings at the end of the runway are staring me down. More speed, and suddenly the runway feels smooth; it has enough lift to keep from falling into every bump. Then we lift off just a touch; I carefully keep the plane down until we pick up enough speed to ascend farther, then up we go. I keep a watchful eye on those buildings straight ahead and that water tower just slightly off to the one side. We climb over a lake as I watch that water tower pass safely below and to the side of the plane. It had worked, and I had a smile of amazement. With a half mile of grass, you really can go anywhere. Many times I had driven within half a mile of that runway, but never seen it. Never wondered where people go after using it. Never realizing that, although it s a 45-minute drive from my house, it s really pretty close. Never understanding that where people go after taking off from that runway is everywhere .

We launched Offline Maps!

Ok, I have been an iPhone user since I moved to Japan and got my first smart-phone ever. First a 3s, then a 4s, then a 5s that I dropped into the toilet, so I switched the SIM back into the 4s to have a working phone. Furthermore, I am a heavy music listener and used iTunes Radio for 3 months. Since I am planning to change phones to an Android phone (being fed up with Apple s super-closed environment), I tried out Google Music Plus for about 3 months, too. Here is my verict Google Music is a big pain, far from iTunes in comfort and user friendliness. My move to Android is not very much in danger. General description of the service In principle, iTunes Radio and Google Music Subscription do the same things:

• allow you to have your own music in the cloud
• stream any music from the respective market place to your device
• provide radio stations, pre-curated or based on artist/genre/etc

There are slight differences, that often create confusion, especially with Apple s services: If you are only signed in, you can listen to music stations and can skip some music (limited), but you cannot listen to arbitrary songs from the whole Apple Music library. Then there is another service from Apple, called iTunes Match, that only allows you to upload your music library to the cloud, but other than that again only listening to normal radio stations. Google Music is much simpler, there are only two options: By default it is free to have your music (up to 25000 songs) in the cloud, but if you want to listen to radio stations or any other music in the Google music store, you need a subscription. Prizes and features overview:

	Apple			Google
	No subscription	iTunes Match	iTunes Radio	No subscription	With subscription
Prize	0	25$/year	10$/month	0	10$/month (early access 8$)
Cloud space	0	100000		25000
Extra service	Radio stations	Radio stations	Radio/all music	Nothing	Radio/all music

Music on the go the application Let us first consider the applications provided to listen to music on your smart phone: Apple Music can of course only be used on Apple devices, and uses the built-in Music application. Start up time is about a few seconds after a cold boot (all on my 4s), and music streaming starts with hardly any delay. Responsiveness is good, and the user interface is clear and easy. Google s application is available on iOS and Android. I have tested the latest version on iOS, but it is a pain in the butt:

• Starting the application, even after cold boot, is successful at a rate of 1/10. Most of the time the application crashes right away. This might be a problem due to my low end device (iPhone 4s with 64Gb), but not due to space problems (half empty) nor internet connectivity (wlan).
• Responsiveness is abysmal
• Access to additional content (radio, songs) and your own library is well done, similar to iMusic.

Managing your library Here iTunes is the way to go, bit of a pain when using Linux, but there are other reasons I have a Windows installation in parallel, so I don t mind to boot now and then into Windows. iTunes gives you very powerful tools to change all kind of data. Google gives you a few options: Use your iTunes library in this case all your playlists and ratings (but see later) are also uploaded. I am not sure what happens if I retag a song in iTunes, or change anything else in there. I guess the song will not be re-uploaded, but who knows for sure. Furthermore, you can edit your library via the web interface, but this is rather poor. Searching your library Over times your library grows and there are hundreds if not thousands of artists. So you want to search them. The natural way would be to scroll to the first letter of the artist you are searching, and then look it up. Well, that works perfectly in both Apple s and Google s application unless you are having artists written in some strange script like Japanese or Korean. iTunes allows you to set a field called something like Artist name for sorting , which allows me to put for example or into the artist field, and into the sort field Tomokawa Kazuki and Kim Doo Soo . This way I find the artists in the correct place. Google on the other hand uses simple Unicode order sorting how could you do that? This is simply plain wrong, and everyone should know that by now. Japanese people will never be able to find anything in their list. And in contrast to Goole Contacts Google Music does not support phonetic name fields (similar to the order sort artist) for artists. What I had to do now is to rename all the artists to include first the phonetic name, followed by the proper name, like in Tomokawa Kazuki ( ) . Something I strongly detest! Radio stations I might have a slightly peculiar music taste, but the radio stations mixed by Google are simply a pain. The reason is easy to explain: I live in Japan, and so what Google does is mixing about 80% of J-Pop into the radio, all those happy yodeling girlies I really dislike (see my Anti J-Pop campaign for alternatives yes, they do exist also in Japan!). iTunes radio is here more relaxed it seems. I appreciate Google s trial to cater to local (dis)taste, but besides voting down each and every song I hear I don t see any other option. And honestly, I cannot go through all this voting down without dying from pain inflicted by J-Pop. Other than this, the two radio stations are probably more or less the same but as I said, due to the local colorit it is hard to compare. Rating Ohhh, what a dire point. So there you have you well curated iTunes library with 5-star ratings. I used the ratings in a way that those songs I like get 1 star, those I even like more get 2 stars, and my absolute favorites got 5 stars. I didn t do any negative ratings. iTunes/iOS Music app allows you to easily adjust rating, and they are synced between devices. All as you would expect. Now for Google they did have a 5-star rating system at some time, but:

Thank you for your feedback. We ve decided to remove the 5-star Rating lab. This decision wasn t made lightly, but Thumbs Up/Down is integral for the future vision for Play Music and will be a central design point for our future releases. Please note that we ll continue to store your ratings that you ve set via the star lab or via iTunes, and we ll translate them to thumbs up/down (1-2 stars = thumbs down, 4-5 stars = thumbs up).

Here we go with the move to a new design they threw away the 5-star system, without any reason but integral for future vision rubbish sales speak. Besides being a very very poor rating system to have only an up and down (good-bad-don t care), the translation from my rating system to the thumbs up-down is just plain wrong. <rant>
Why on earth is the current movement to reduce functionality and rob users of control? Gnome 3 is the prime example of how we stupiditize users by taken any freedom from them in the name of simple design. Google now does the same. I am so sick of getting patronized this way, so Gnome3 was completely banished from my computer and replaced by Cinnamon, which uses the same (good) underlying technique, but takes users seriously!
</rant> Overall verdict As much as I would like to see Google Music a valid alternative to iTunes, by now it makes the impression of a quickly hacked together rotten piece of code that tries to get a share of the market without providing equivalent service. Google is using its market presence and convenience to convert people, not features and quality. I can only hope that this changes in the future. That still leaves me with the question move to Android or remain with iOS

Debian Live has passed on. And it has done so in not happy circumstances. (You can search the list archives for more if you are confused.) I have reposted here my response to this one thread because it s all I really want to say, after all of the years of working with the team. I d like to add as a postscript, that while the focus of this article was to remain positive in the face of Daniel s announcement of the closure of his project, that event has left a lot of users confused about the status of live support in Debian going forward. Read my posts here and here addressing that confusion.

On 09/11/15 12:47 PM, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> So long, and thanks for all the fish[7].
>
> Daniel
>
> [7] http://live.debian.net/project/downstream/ Enough bitter words have been said. I don t want to add any more. So: I m proud. Indeed, that long list of downstreams does speak to the impact you ve had in inspiring and equipping people to make their own live images. I m proud to have been a small part of this project. I m thankful. I m thankful that I was able to, through this project, contribute to something for a while that had a positive impact on many people, and made Debian more awesome. I remember the good times. I remember fondly the good times we had in the project s heyday. I certainly found your enthusiasm and vision for the project, Daniel, personally inspiring. It motivated me to contribute. Debconf10 was a highlight among those experiences, but also I had many good times and made many friendships online, too. I m sad. I m sad, because although I made some attempts to liaise between Debian Live and the CD and Installer teams, I don t feel I did an effective job there, and that contributed to the situation we now find ourselves in. If I did you or the project injury in trying to fulfill that role, please forgive me. I m hopeful. I m hopeful that whichever way we all go from here, that the bitterness will not be forever. That we ll heal. That we ll have learned. That we ll move on to accomplish new things, bigger and better things. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Debian Live team. Ben

Last week Simon retweeted a link to Don t Feed the Beast the Great Tech Recruiter Infestation. Which reminded me I d been meaning to comment on my own experiences from earlier in the year. I don t entertain the same level of bile as displayed in the post, but I do have a significant level of disappointment in the recruitment industry. I had conversations with 3 different agencies, all of whom were geographically relevant. One contacted me, the other 2 (one I d dealt with before, one that was recommended to me) I contacted myself. All managed to fail to communicate with any level of acceptability. The agency hat contacted me eventually went quiet, after having asked if they could put my CV forward for a role and pushing very hard about when I could interview. The contact in the agency I d dealt with before replied to say I was being passed to someone else who would get in contact. Who of course didn t. And the final agency, who had been recommended, passed me between 3 different people, said they were confident they could find me something, and then went dark except for signing me up to their generic jobs list which failed to have anything of relevance on it. As it happens my availability and skill set were not conducive to results at that point in time, so my beef isn t with the inability to find a role. Instead it s with the poor levels of communication presented by an industry which seems, to me, to have communication as part of the core value it should be offering. If anyone had said at the start Look, it s going to be tricky, we ll see what we can do or Look, that s not what we really deal in, we can t help , that would have been fine. I m fine with explanations. I get really miffed when I m just left hanging. I d love to be able to say I ll never deal with a recruiter again, but the fact of the matter is they do serve a purpose. There s only so far a company can get with word of mouth recruitment; eventually that network of personal connections from existing employees who are considering moving dries up. Advertising might get you some more people, but it can also result in people who are hugely inappropriate for the role. From the company point of view recruiters nominally fulfil 2 roles. Firstly they connect the prospective employer with a potentially wider base of candidates. Secondly they should be able to do some sort of, at least basic, filtering of whether a candidate is appropriate for a role. From the candidate point of view the recruiter hopefully has a better knowledge of what roles are out there. However the incentives to please each side are hugely unbalanced. The candidate isn t paying the recruiter. If you re not paying for it, you re the product may be bandied around too often, but I believe this is one of the instances where it s very applicable. A recruiter is paid by their ability to deliver viable candidates to prospective employers. The delivery of these candidates is the service. Whether or not the candidate is happy with the job is irrelevant beyond them staying long enough that the placement fee can be claimed. The lengthy commercial relationship is ideally between the company and the recruitment agency, not the candidate and the agency. A recruiter wants to be able to say Look at the fine candidate I provided last time, you should always come to me first in future . There s a certain element of wanting the candidate to come back if/when they are looking for a new role, but it s not a primary concern. It is notable that the recommendations I d received were from people who had been on the hiring side of things. The recruiter has a vested interest in keeping the employer happy, in the hope of a sustained relationship. There is little motivation for keeping the candidate happy, as long as you don t manage to scare them off. And, in fact, if you scare some off, who cares? A recruiter doesn t get paid for providing the best possible candidate. Or indeed a candidate who will fully engage with the role. All they re required to provide is a hire-able candidate who takes the role. I m not sure what the resolution is to this. Word of mouth only scales so far for both employer and candidate. Many of the big job websites seem to be full of recruiters rather than real employers. And I m sure there are some decent recruiters out there doing a good job, keeping both sides happy and earning their significant cut. I m sad to say I can t foresee any big change any time soon. [Note I m not currently looking for employment.] [No recruitment agencies were harmed in the writing of this post. I have deliberately tried to avoid outing anyone in particular.]