Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door. It was a magic Door that's why it has a capital D. She opened the Door.

Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they became the very best of friends. She and her dog were inseparable from that day forward.

She writes a door of blood and silver. The door opens just for her.

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

• The increased security and controls required for a public user-facing service, using RBAC, PodSecurityPolicies, quotas, etc.
• Native multi-tenancy support, using namespaces
• Advanced web routing, using the Ingress API

• Ingress
• Validating admission controllers
• Security policies and quotas
• PKI and user management

1. Signal quality. Forget detecting proximity with Bluetooth Low Energy. Yes, there are attempts to use BLE beacons for indoor positioning. But these use that you can learn fingerprints of which beacons are visible at which points, combined with additional information such as movement sensors and history (you do not teleport around in a building). BLE signals and antennas apparently tend to be very prone to orientation differences, signal reflections, and of course you will not have the idealized controlled environment used in such prototypes. The contacts have a single device, and they move this is not comparable to indoor positioning. I strongly doubt you can tell whether you are close to someone, or not.
2. Close vs. protection. The app cannot detect protection in place. Being close to someone behind a plexiglass window or even a solid wall is very different from being close otherwise. You will get a lot of false contacts this way. That neighbor that you have never seen living in the appartment above will likely be considered a close contact of yours, as you sleep next to each other every day
3. Low adoption rates. Apparently even in technology affine Singapore, fewer than 20% of people installed the app. That does not even mean they use it regularly. In Austria, the number is apparently below 5%, and people complain that it does not detect contact But in order for this approach to work, you will need Chinese-style mass surveillance that literally puts you in prison if you do not install the app.
4. False alerts. Because of these issues, you will get false alerts, until you just do not care anymore.
5. False sense of security. Honestly: the app does not pretect you at all. All it tries to do is to make the tracing of contacts easier. It will not tell you reliably if you have been infected (as mentioned above, too many false positives, too few users) nor that you are relatively safe (too few contacts included, too slow testing and reporting). It will all be on the quality of about 10 days ago you may or may not have contact with someone that tested positive, please contact someone to expose more data to tell you that it is actually another false alert .
6. Trust. In Germany, the app will be operated by T-Systems and SAP. Not exactly two companies that have a lot of fans SAP seems to be one of the most hated software around. Neither company is known for caring about privacy much, but they are prototypical for business first . Its trust the cat to keep the cream. Yes, I know they want to make it open-source. But likely only the client, and you will still have to trust that the binary in the app stores is actually built from this source code, and not from a modified copy. As long as the name T-Systems and SAP are associated to the app, people will not trust it. Plus, we all know that the app will be bad, given the reputation of these companies at making horrible software systems
7. Too late. SAP and T-Systems want to have the app ready in mid June. Seriously, this must be a joke? It will be very buggy in the beginning (because it is SAP!) and it will not be working reliably before end of July. There will not be a substantial user before fall. But given the low infection rates in Germany, nobody will bother to install it anymore, because the perceived benefit is 0 one the infection rates are low.
8. Infighting. You may remember that there was the discussion before that there should be a pan-european effort. Except that in the end, everybody fought everybody else, countries went into different directions and they all broke up. France wanted a centralized systems, while in Germany people pointed out that the users will not accept this and only a distributed system will have a chance. That failed effort was known as Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) vs. Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) , and it turned out to have become a big clusterfuck . And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

• CPU-Z: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/cpu-z/
• ATI/AMB Flash program: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/ati-atiflash/

• Start a command line shell (cmd or powershell) with Administrator rights (on Linux become root)
• Save your current BIOS in case you need to restore it with amdvbflash -s 0 oldbios.rom (this can also be done out of the GUI application)
• Unlock the BIOS rom with amdvbflash -unlockrom 0
• Force flash the new BIOS with amdvbflash -f -p 0 NEW.rom (where NEW.rom is the 5700 XT BIOS rom file)

Adelheid Luise "Adele" Spitzeder ([ a dl ha t a de l p t tse d ]; 9 February 1832 27 or 28 October 1895), also known by her stage name Adele Vio, was a German actress, folk singer, and con artist. Initially a promising young actress, Spitzeder became a well-known private banker in 19th-century Munich when her theatrical success dwindled. Running what was possibly the first recorded Ponzi scheme, she offered large returns on investments by continually using the money of new investors to pay back the previous ones. At the height of her success, contemporary sources considered her the wealthiest woman in Bavaria.

Anne Bonny (possibly 1697 possibly April 1782)[1][2] was an Irish pirate operating in the Caribbean, and one of the most famous female pirates of all time.[3] The little that is known of her life comes largely from Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates.

Mary Read (1685 28 April 1721), also known as Mark Read, was an English pirate. She and Anne Bonny are two of the most famed female pirates of all time, and among the few women known to have been convicted of piracy during the early 18th century, at the height of the "Golden Age of Piracy".

While piracy was predominantly a male occupation, a minority of pirates were women.[1] On many ships, women (as well as young boys) were prohibited by the ship's contract, which all crew members were required to sign.[2] :303

echo "Outer print 1111" > /dev/stderr
perl -E 'say STDERR ("1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111\n")'
echo "Outer print 2222" > /dev/stderr
perl -E 'say STDERR ("2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222\n")'

./dothing.sh 2> /tmp/log

$ bash dothing.sh 2> /tmp/log && cat /tmp/log
Outer print 2222
2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222
$ bash dothing.sh 2> /tmp/log && xxd /tmp/log
0000000: 4f75 7465 7220 7072 696e 7420 3232 3232  Outer print 2222
0000010: 0a00 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
0000020: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0032 3232 3220 3232  .........2222 22
0000030: 3232 2032 3232 3220 3232 3232 2032 3232  22 2222 2222 222
0000040: 3220 3232 3232 2032 3232 3220 3232 3232  2 2222 2222 2222
0000050: 0a0a                                     ..

echo "Outer print 1111" >&2
perl -E 'say STDERR ("1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111\n")'
echo "Outer print 2222" >&2
perl -E 'say STDERR ("2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222\n")'

$ ls -l /dev/stderr(:A)
-rw-r--r-- 1 dima dima 36 May  4 17:02 /tmp/log

Software setup I started by configuring it like a typical server but without a few packages that either take a lot of memory or CPU:

• fail2ban
• rkhunter
• sysstat

I changed the default hostname:

• /etc/hostname: foobar
• /etc/mailname: foobar.example.com
• /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 foobar.example.com vogar localhost

and then installed the avahi-daemon package to be able to reach this box using foobar.local. I noticed the presence of a world-writable directory and so I tightened the security of some of the default mount points by putting the following in /etc/rc.local:

mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /etc/network
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /lib/modules
chmod 755 /etc/network
exit 0

Hardware setup My OS drive (/dev/sda) is a small SSD so that the GnuBee can run silently when the spinning disks aren't needed. To hold the backup data on the other hand, I got three 4-TB drives drives which I setup in a RAID-5 array. If the data were valuable, I'd use RAID-6 instead since it can survive two drives failing at the same time, but in this case since it's only holding backups, I'd have to lose the original machine at the same time as two of the 3 drives, a very unlikely scenario. I created new gpt partition tables on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdbc, /dev/sdd and used fdisk to create a single partition of type 29 (Linux RAID) on each of them. Then I created the RAID array:

mdadm /dev/md127 --create -n 3 --level=raid5 -a /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

and waited more than 24 hours for that operation to finish. Next, I formatted the array:

mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/md127

and added the following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/md127 /mnt/data/ ext4 noatime,nodiratime 0 2

To reduce unnecessary noise and reduce power consumption, I also installed hdparm:

apt install hdparm

and configured all spinning drives to spin down after being idle for 10 minutes by putting the following in /etc/hdparm.conf:

/dev/sdb  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdc  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdd  
       spindown_time = 120
 

and then reloaded the configuration:

 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm resume

Finally I setup smartmontools by putting the following in /etc/smartd.conf:

/dev/sda -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdb -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdc -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdd -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)

and restarting the daemon:

systemctl restart smartd.service

Backup setup I started by using duplicity since I have been using that tool for many years, but a 190GB backup took around 15 hours on the GnuBee with gigabit ethernet. After a friend suggested it, I took a look at restic and I have to say that I am impressed. The same backup finished in about half the time.

User and ssh setup After hardening the ssh setup as I usually do, I created a user account for each machine needing to backup onto the GnuBee:

adduser machine1
adduser machine1 sshuser
adduser machine1 sftponly
chsh machine1 -s /bin/false

and then matching directories under /mnt/data/home/:

mkdir /mnt/data/home/machine1
chown machine1:machine1 /mnt/data/home/machine1
chmod 700 /mnt/data/home/machine1

Then I created a custom ssh key for each machine:

ssh-keygen -f /root/.ssh/foobar_backups -t ed25519

and placed it in /home/machine1/.ssh/authorized_keys on the GnuBee. On each machine, I added the following to /root/.ssh/config:

Host foobar.local
    User machine1
    Compression no
    Ciphers aes128-ctr
    IdentityFile /root/backup/foobar_backups
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 240

The reason for setting the ssh cipher and disabling compression is to speed up the ssh connection as much as possible given that the GnuBee has avery small RAM bandwidth. Another performance-related change I made on the GnuBee was switching to the internal sftp server by putting the following in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

Subsystem      sftp    internal-sftp

Restic script After reading through the excellent restic documentation, I wrote the following backup script, based on my old duplicity script, to reuse on all of my computers:

# Configure for each host
PASSWORD="XXXX"  # use  pwgen -s 64  to generate a good random password
BACKUP_HOME="/root/backup"
REMOTE_URL="sftp:foobar.local:"
RETENTION_POLICY="--keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --keep-monthly 12 --keep-yearly 2"
# Internal variables
SSH_IDENTITY="IdentityFile=$BACKUP_HOME/foobar_backups"
EXCLUDE_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/exclude"
PKG_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/dpkg-selections"
PARTITION_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/partitions"
# If the list of files has been requested, only do that
if [ "$1" = "--list-current-files" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL ls latest
    exit 0
# Show list of available snapshots
elif [ "$1" = "--list-snapshots" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$GPG_PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL snapshots
    exit 0
# Restore the given file
elif [ "$1" = "--file-to-restore" ]; then
    if [ "$2" = "" ]; then
        echo "You must specify a file to restore"
        exit 2
    fi
    RESTORE_DIR="$(mktemp -d ./restored_XXXXXXXX)"
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL restore latest --target "$RESTORE_DIR" --include "$2"   exit 1
    echo "$2 was restored to $RESTORE_DIR"
    exit 0
# Delete old backups
elif [ "$1" = "--prune" ]; then
    # Expire old backups
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL forget $RETENTION_POLICY
    # Delete files which are no longer necessary (slow)
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL prune
    exit 0
# Catch invalid arguments
elif [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    echo "Invalid argument: $1"
    exit 1
fi
# Check the integrity of existing backups
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL check   exit 1
# Dump list of Debian packages
dpkg --get-selections > $PKG_FILE
# Dump partition tables from harddrives
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sda > $PARTITION_FILE
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sdb > $PARTITION_FILE
# Do the actual backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup / --exclude-file $EXCLUDE_FILE

I run it with the following cronjob in /etc/cron.d/backups:

30 8 * * *    root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar
30 2 * * Sun  root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar --prune

in a way that doesn't impact the rest of the system too much. Finally, I printed a copy of each of my backup script, using enscript, to stash in a safe place:

enscript --highlight=bash --style=emacs --output=- backup-machine1-to-foobar   ps2pdf - > foobar.pdf

This is actually a pretty important step since without the password, you won't be able to decrypt and restore what's on the GnuBee.

The slides used in the video are at this link. A few quick follow-ups to the live nature of this. The pbdZMQ package did in fact install smoothly once the (Ubuntu) -dev packages for Zero MQ were (re-)installed; then IRkernel also followed. BioConductor completed once I realized that GOSemSim needed the annotation package GO.db to be updated, that allowed MNF to install. So the only bug, really, was the circular depdency between pkgload and testthat. Overall, not bad at all for a quick afternoon session! And as mentioned, if you are interested and have questions concerning use of R on a .deb based system like Debain or Ubuntu (or Mint or ), the r-sig-debian list is a very good and friendly place to ask them. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi (US: / d nt l ski, -ti -/, Italian: [arte mi zja d enti leski]; July 8, 1593 c. 1656) was an Italian Baroque painter, now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists working in the dramatic style of Caravaggio. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Artemisia was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and had an international clientele.

Maria Pellegrina Amoretti (1756 1787), was an Italian lawyer. She is referred to as the first woman to graduate in law in Italy, and the third woman to earn a degree.

Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (October 1711 20 February 1778) was an Italian physicist and academic. She received a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in May 1732. She was the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university. She is recognized as the first woman in the world to be appointed a university chair in a scientific field of studies. Bassi contributed immensely to the field of science while also helping to spread the study of Newtonian mechanics through Italy.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (UK: / n je zi/ an-YAY-zee,[1] US: / n -/ ahn-,[2][3] Italian: [ma ri a ae ta na a zi, - e z-];[4] 16 May 1718 9 January 1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.[5]

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (US: /k r n ro p sko pi /,[4] Italian: [ lena lu kr ttsja kor na ro pi sk pja]) or Elena Lucrezia Corner (Italian: [kor n r]; 5 June 1646 26 July 1684), also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori (/ m nt s ri/ MON-tiss-OR-ee, Italian: [ma ri a montes s ri]; August 31, 1870 May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori broke gender barriers and expectations when she enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is still in use today in many public and private schools throughout the world.

Rita Levi-Montalcini OMRI OMCA (US: / le vi mo nt l t i ni, l v-, li vi m nt l -/, Italian: [ ri ta l vi montal t i ni]; 22 April 1909 30 December 2012) was an Italian Nobel laureate, honored for her work in neurobiology. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate ever to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate.

Margherita Hack Knight Grand Cross OMRI (Italian: [mar e ri ta (h)ak]; 12 June 1922 29 June 2013) was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour.

Samantha Cristoforetti (Italian pronunciation: [sa manta kristofo retti]; born 26 April 1977, in Milan) is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours), and until June 2017 held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson and later by Christina Koch. She is also the first Italian woman in space. Samantha Cristoforetti is also known as the first person who brewed an espresso in space.

Government of India, news agencies and paid News One of the attempts the state tried to do, although very late IMHO is that it tried to reach out to the opposition i.e. Congress party and the others. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who is the Congress president asked that the Government should not run any of its ads on private television channels for a period of two years. There had been plenty of articles, both by medianama and others who have alleged that at least from the last 6 odd years, Government ads. comprise of almost 50-60% advertising budget of a channel advertising budget. This has been discussed also in medianama s roundtable on online content which happened few months back. While an edited version is out there on YT, this was full two day s event which happened across two different cities.

or the alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=c1PhWR1-Urs It was as if the roundtable discussions were not enough, Mrs. Gandhi clarion call was answered by News Broadcaster s Association (NBA) and this is what they had to say

News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi

To put it simply, NBA deplored the suggestion by Mrs. Gandhi and even called the economy in recession and all they had were the Government s own advertising budget to justify their existence. The statements in themselves are highly pregnant and reveal both the relationship that the media, print or mainstream news channels have with the Government of India. Now if you see that, doesn t it make sense that media always slants the story from the Government s perspective rather than remaining neutral. If my bread basket were on the onus of me siding with the Govt. that is what most sane persons would do, otherwise they would resign and leave which many reporters who had a conscience did. Interestingly enough, the NBA statement didn t just end there but also used the word recession , this is the term that Government of India (GOI) hates and has in turn has been maintaining the word, terminology slowdown . While from a layman s perspective the two terms may seem to be similar, if India has indeed been in recession then the tools and the decisions that should have been taken by GOI should have been much different than what they took. Interestingly, enough GOI has refrained from saying anything on the matter which only reveals their own interests in the matter. Also if an association head is making the statement, it is more than likely that he consulted a lawyer or two and used application of mind while drafting the response. In other words, or put more simply, this was a very carefully drafted letter because they know that tomorrow the opposition party may come into power so they don t want to upset the power dynamics too much.

Privacy issues arising due to the Pandemic On the same Financial Times, two stories which dealt with the possible privacy violations due to the Pandemic have been doing the rounds. The first one, by Yuval Noah Harari is more exploratory by nature and makes some very good points without going far too deep into specific instances of recent times but rather goes into history and past instances where Governments have used the pandemics to exert more control over their populace and drive their agenda. I especially liked the last few lines which he shared in his op-ed Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others. Yuval Noah Harari . The whole statement could right fit onto the American President which he was talking about while at the same time, fits right into the current Indian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson of UK and perhaps Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil. All these three-four individuals have in common is that most of them belong to right-wing and hence cater only to the rich industrialist s agenda. While I don t know about Jair Bolsanaro much, at least three out of four had to turn to socialism and had to give some bailout packages to the public at large, even though continuing to undermine their own actions. More on this probably a bit down the line. The second story shared by Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza who broke the story of various surveillance attempts and the privacy concerns that people have. Even the Indian PMO has asked this data and because there was no protest by the civil society, a token protest was done by COAI (Cellular Operator Association of India) but beyond that nothing, I am guessing because the civil society didn t make much noise as everybody is busy with their own concerns of safety and things going on, it s possible that such data may have gone to the Government. There is not much new here that people who had been working on the privacy issues know, it s just how easy Governments are finding to do it. The part of informed consent is really a misnomer . Governments lie all the time, for e.g. in the UK, did the leave party and people take informed consent, no they pushed their own agenda. This is and will be similar in many countries of the world.

False Socialism by RW parties In at least the three countries I have observing, simply due to available time, that lot of false promises are being made by our leaders and more often than not, the bailouts will be given to already rich industrialists. An op-ed by Vivek Kaul, who initially went by his handle which means somebody who is educated but unemployed. While Vivek has been one-man army in revealing most of the Government s mischiefs especially as fudging numbers are concerned among other things, there have been others too. As far as the US is concerned, an e-zine called free press (literally) has been sharing Trump s hollowness and proclamations for U.S. . Far more interestingly, I found New York times investigated and found a cache of e-mails starting from early January, which they are calling Red Dawn . The cache is undeniable proof that medical personnel in the U.S. were very much concerned since January 2020 but it was only after other countries started lock-down that U.S. had to follow suit. I am sure Indian medical professionals may have done similar mail exchanges but we will never know as the Indian media isn t independent enough.

Domestic violence and Patriarchy There have been numerous reports of domestic violence against women going up, in fact two prominent publications have shared pieces about how domestic violence has gone up in India since the lockdown but the mainstream press is busy with its own tropes, the reasons already stated above. In fact, interestingly enough, most women can t wear loose fitting clothes inside the house because of the near ones being there 24 7 . This was being shared as India is going through summer where heat waves are common and most families do not have access to A/C s and rely on either a fan or just ventilation to help them out. I can t write more about this as simply I m not a woman so I haven t had to face the pressures that they have to every day. Interestingly though, there was a piece shared by arre. Interestingly, also arre whose content I have shared a few times on my blog has gone from light, funny to be much darker and more serious tone. Whether this is due to the times we live in is something that a social scientist or a social anthropologist may look into in the times to come. One of the good things though, there hasn t been any grid failures as no industrial activity is happening (at all). In fact SEB s (State Electricity Boards) has shown a de-growth in electricity uptake as no industrial activity has been taken. While they haven t reduced any prices (which they ideally should have) as everybody is suffering.

Loot and price rise Again, don t think it is an Indian issue but perhaps may be the same globally. Because of broken supply chains, there are both real and artificial shortages happening which is leading to reasonable and unreasonable price hikes in the market. Fresh veggies which were normally between INR 10/- to INR 20/- for 250 gm have reached INR 40/- 50/- and even above. Many of the things that we have to become depend upon are not there anymore. The shortage of plastic bottles being case in point.

Aryan Plastic bottle

This and many others like these pictures have been shared on social media but it seems the Government is busy doing something else. The only thing we know for sure is that the lock-down period is only gonna increase, no word about PPE s (Personal Protection Equipment) or face masks or anything else. While India has ordered some, those orders are being diverted to US or EU. In fact, many doctors who have asked for the same have been arrested, sacked or suspended for asking such inconvenient questions, although whether in BJP ruled states or otherwise. In fact, the Centre has suspended MPLADS funds , members of parliament get funds which they can use to provide relief work or whatever they think the money is best to spend upon.

Conditions of Labor in the Pandemic Another sort of depressing story has been how the Supreme Court CJI Justice SA Bobde has made statements and refrained from playing any role in directing the Center to provide relief to the daily wage laborers. In fact, Mr. Bobde made statements such as why they need salaries if they are getting food. This was shared by barandbench, a site curated by lawyers and reporters alike. Both livelaw as well as barandbench have worked to enhance people s awareness about the legal happenings in our High Courts and Supreme Court. And while sadly, they cannot cover all, they at least do attempt to cover a bit of what s hot atm. The Chief Justice who draws a salary of INR 250,000 per month besides other perks is perhaps unaware or doesn t care about fate of millions of casual workers, 400 460 million workers who will face abject poverty and by extension even if there are 4 members of the family so probably 1.2 billion people will fall below the poverty line. Three, four major sectors are going to be severely impacted, namely Agriculture, Construction and then MSME (Micro, small and medium enterprises) which cover everything from autos, industrial components, FMCG, electronics, you name it, it s done by the MSME sector. We know that the Rabi crop, even though it was gonna be a bumper crop this year will rot away in the fields. Even the Kharif crop whose window for sowing is at the most 2-3 weeks will not be able to get it done in time. In fact, with the extended lockdown of another 21 days, people will probably return home after 2 months by which time they would have nothing to do there as well as here in the cities. Another good report was done by the wire, the mainstream media has already left the station.

Ministry of Public Health There was an article penned by Dr. Edmond Fernandes which he published last year. The low salary along with the complexities that Indian doctors are and may face in the near future are just mind-boggling.

The Loss Losses have already started pouring in. Just today Air Deccan has ceased all its operations. I had loved Mr. Gopinath s airline which was started in the early 2000 s. While I won t bore you with the history, most of it can be seen from simplify Deccan . This I believe is just the start and it s only after the few months after the lock-down has been lifted would we really know the true extent of losses everywhere. And the more lenghthier the lockdown, the more difficult it would be businesses to ramp back. People have already diagnosed at the very least 15-20 sectors of the economy which would be hit and another similar or more number of sectors which will have first and second-order of losses and ramp-downs. While some guesses are being made, many are wildly optimistic and many are wildly pessimistic, as shared we would only know the results when the lockdown is opened up.

Predictions for the future While things are very much in the air, some predictions can be made or rationally deduced. For instance, investments made in automation and IT would remain and perhaps even accelerate a little. Logistics models would need to be re-worked and maybe, just maybe there would be talk and action in making local supply chains a bit more robust. Financing is going to be a huge issue for at least 6 months to a year. Infrastructure projects which require huge amount of cash upfront will either have to be re-worked or delayed, how they will affect projects like Pune Metro and other such projects only time will tell.

Raghuram Rajan Raghuram Rajan was recently asked if he would come back and let bygones be bygones. Raghuram in his own roundabout way said no. He is right now with Chicago Booth doing the work that he always love. Why would he leave that and be right in the middle of the messes other people have made. He probably gets more money, more freedom and probably has a class full of potential future economists. Immigration Control, Conferences and thought experiment There are so many clueless people out there, who don t know why it takes so long for any visa to be processed. From what little I know, it is to verify who you say you are and you have valid reason to enter the country. The people from home ministry verify credentials, as well as probably check with lists of known criminals and their networks world-wide. They probably have programs for such scenarios and are part and parcel of their everyday work. The same applies to immigration control at Airports. there has been a huge gap at immigration counters and the numbers of passengers who were flying internationally to and fro from India. While in India, we call them as Ministry of Home Affairs, in U.S. it s Department of Homeland security, other countries using similar jargons. Now even before this pandemic happened, the number of people who are supposed to do border control and check people was way less and there have been scenes of Air rage especially in Indian airports after people came after a long-distance flight. Now there are couple of thought experiments, just day before yesterday scientists discovered six new coronaviruses in bats and scientists in Iceland found 40 odd mutations of the virus on people. Now are countries going to ban people from Iceland as in time the icelandic people probably would have anti-bodies on all the forty odd mutations. Now if and when they come in contact onto others who have not, what would happen ? And this is not specifically about one space or ethnicity or whatever, microbes and viruses have been longer on earth than we have. In our greed we have made viruses resistant to antibiotics. While Mr. Trump says as he discovered it today, this has been known to the medical fraternity since tht 1950 s. CDC s own chart shows it. We cannot live in fear of a virus, the only way we can beat it is by understanding it and using science. Jon Cohen shared some of the incredible ways science is looking to beat this thing

or as again an alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=MPVG_n3w_vM One of the most troubling question is how the differently-abled communities which don t have media coverage at the best of times, haven t had any media coverage at all during the pandemic. What are their stories and what they are experiencing ? How are they coping ? Are there anyways we could help each other ? By not having those stories, we perhaps have left them more vulnerable than we intend. And what does that speak about us, as people or as a community or a society ?

Silver Linings While there is not a lot to be positive about, one interesting project I came about is openbreath.tech . This is an idea, venture started by IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) , IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics). They are collaborating with octogeneraian Capt (Retd) Rustom Barucha from Barucha Instrumentation and Control, besides IndoGenius, New Delhi, and King s College, London. The first two institutes are from my home town, Pune. While I don t know much of the specifics of this idea other than that there is an existing Barucha ventilator which they hope to open-source and make it easier for people to produce their own. While I have more questions than answers at this point, this is something hopefully to watch out for in the coming days and weeks. The other jolly bit of good news has come from Punjab where after several decades, people in Northern Punjab are finally able to see the Himalayas or the Himalayan mountain range.

Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com

There you have it, What I have covered is barely scratching the surface. As a large section of the media only focuses on one narrative, other stories and narratives are lost. Be safe, till later.

• LuaHBTeX: lualatex is now based on LuaHBTeX, meaning that one can use the HarfBuzz renderer which in particular for complicated scripts (Tibetan, Bengali, ) works better than the Lua-based renderer. Note that luatex itself remains normal LuaTeX, only the luaLAtex one uses LuaHBTeX.
• Versioned containers: this is a change under the hood we have been working on slowly over the last half year. Many distributions had problems with the changing content of our package containers (foobar.tar.xz while the name never changed. We have now changed all the infrastructure and TeX Live Manager to work with versioned containers foobar.rNNNNN.tar.xz. This should help quite some distributors!
• Haranoaji ( ): the default font for Japanese text was for long time the IPAex fonts, one of the few free fonts available. With 2020 we have switched to Haranoaji font family, which provides better support for JIS90/04 charsets, and more weights.

• The \input primitive in all TeX engines, including tex, now also accepts a group-delimited lename argument, as a system-dependent extension. The usage with a standard space/token-delimited lename is completely unchanged. The group-delimited argument was previously implemented in LuaTeX; now it is available in all engines. ASCII double quote characters ( ) are removed from the lename, but it is otherwise left unchanged after tokenization. This does not currently a ect LaTeX s \input command, as that is a macro rede nition of the standard \input primitive.
• New option cnf-line for kpsewhich, tex, mf, and all other engines, to support arbitrary con guration settings on the command line.
• The addition of various primitives to various engines in this and previous years is intended to result in a common set of functionality available across all engines (LaTeX News #31).

• Automatically retry (once) packages that fail to download.
• New option tlmgr check texmfdbs, to to check consistency of ls-R les and !! speci cations for each tree.
• Use versioned lenames for the package containers, as in tlnet/archive/pkgname.rNNN.tar.xz; should be invisible to users, but a notable change in distribution.
• catalogue-date information no longer propagated from the TeX Catalogue, since it was often unrelated to package updates.

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That s all, let the fun begin! And again, thanks to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release!

It would be particularly beneficial if those with unsual build dependencies tested it as we would increase overall coverage beyond what I get from testing against 1800+ CRAN packages. BioConductor would also be welcome.

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.4.6 (2020-04-02)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The exception handler code in #1043 was updated to ensure proper include behavior (Kevin in #1047 fixing #1046).
  • A missing Rcpp_list6 definition was added to support R 3.3.* builds (Davis Vaughan in #1049 fixing #1048).
  • Missing Rcpp_list 2,3,4,5 definition were added to the Rcpp namespace (Dirk in #1054 fixing #1053).
  • A further updated corrected the header include and provided a missing else branch (Mattias Ellert in #1055).
  • Two more assignments are protect with Rcpp::Shield (Dirk in #1059)
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Empty strings are not passed to R CMD SHLIB which was seen with R 4.0.0 on Windows (Kevin in #1062 fixing #1061).
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Travis CI unit tests now run a matrix over the versions of R also tested at CRAN (rel/dev/oldrel/oldoldrel), and coverage runs in parallel for a net speed-up (Dirk in #1056 and #1057).

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