Search Results: "bam"

23 May 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 108 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 14 and Saturday May 20 2017: News and Media coverage IRC meeting Our next IRC meeting has been scheduled for Thursday June 1 at 16:00 UTC. Packages reviewed and fixed, bugs filed, etc. Bernhard M. Wiedemann: Chris Lamb: Reviews of unreproducible packages 35 package reviews have been added, 28 have been updated and 12 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been added: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Holger wrote a new systemd-based scheduling system replacing 162 constantly running Jenkins jobs which were slowing down job execution in general: Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holver Levsen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Vagrant Cascadian and Maria Glukhova & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

14 March 2017

John Goerzen: Parsing the GOP s Health Insurance Statistics

There has been a lot of noise lately about the GOP health care plan (AHCA) and the differences to the current plan (ACA or Obamacare). A lot of statistics are being misinterpreted. The New York Times has an excellent analysis of some of this. But to pick it apart, I want to highlight a few things: Many Republicans are touting the CBO s estimate that, some years out, premiums will be 10% lower under their plan than under the ACA. However, this carries with it a lot of misleading information. First of all, many are spinning this as if costs would go down. That s not the case. The premiums would still rise they would just have risen less by the end of the period than under ACA. That also ignores the immediate spike and throwing millions out of the insurance marketplace altogether. Now then, where does this 10% number come from? First of all, you have to understand the older people are substantially more expensive to the health system, and therefore more expensive to insure. ACA limited the price differential from the youngest to the oldest people, which meant that in effect some young people were subsidizing older ones on the individual market. The GOP plan removes that limit. Combined with other changes in subsidies and tax credits, this dramatically increases the cost to older people. For instance, the New York Times article cites a CBO estimate that the price an average 64-year-old earning $26,500 would need to pay after using a subsidy would increase from $1,700 under Obamacare to $14,600 under the Republican plan. They further conclude that these exceptionally high rates would be so unaffordable to older people that the older people will simply stop buying insurance on the individual market. This means that the overall risk pool of people in that market is healthier, and therefore the average price is lower. So, to sum up: the reason that insurance premiums under the GOP plan will rise at a slightly slower rate long-term is that the higher-risk people will be unable to afford insurance in the first place, leaving only the cheaper people to buy in.

20 February 2017

Russ Allbery: Haul via parents

My parents were cleaning out a bunch of books they didn't want, so I grabbed some of the ones that looked interesting. A rather wide variety of random stuff. Also, a few more snap purchases on the Kindle even though I've not been actually finishing books recently. (I do have two finished and waiting for me to write reviews, at least.) Who knows when, if ever, I'll read these. Mark Ames Going Postal (nonfiction)
Catherine Asaro The Misted Cliffs (sff)
Ambrose Bierce The Complete Short Stores of Ambrose Bierce (collection)
E. William Brown Perilous Waif (sff)
Joseph Campbell A Hero with a Thousand Faces (nonfiction)
Jacqueline Carey Miranda and Caliban (sff)
Noam Chomsky 9-11 (nonfiction)
Noam Chomsky The Common Good (nonfiction)
Robert X. Cringely Accidental Empires (nonfiction)
Neil Gaiman American Gods (sff)
Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology (sff)
Stephen Gillet World Building (nonfiction)
Donald Harstad Eleven Days (mystery)
Donald Harstad Known Dead (mystery)
Donald Harstad The Big Thaw (mystery)
James Hilton Lost Horizon (mainstream)
Spencer Johnson The Precious Present (nonfiction)
Michael Lerner The Politics of Meaning (nonfiction)
C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian (nonfiction)
Grigori Medredev The Truth about Chernobyl (nonfiction)
Tom Nadeu Seven Lean Years (nonfiction)
Barak Obama The Audacity of Hope (nonfiction)
Ed Regis Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (nonfiction)
Fred Saberhagen Berserker: Blue Death (sff)
Al Sarrantonio (ed.) Redshift (sff anthology)
John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation (sff)
John Scalzi The End of All Things (sff)
Kristine Smith Rules of Conflict (sff)
Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (nonfiction)
Alan W. Watts The Book (nonfiction)
Peter Whybrow A Mood Apart (nonfiction) I've already read (and reviewed) American Gods, but didn't own a copy of it, and that seemed like a good book to have a copy of. The Carey and Brown were snap purchases, and I picked up a couple more Scalzi books in a recent sale.

26 January 2017

John Goerzen: What is happening to America?

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian. Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said: Wow. You re an American, and a Christian, and you re so . normal! This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump. Ouch It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of how could this happen? As I ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed. Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the deplorables won the day that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power. But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can t explain it all. How Trump could happen Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:
[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.
Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:
His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.
Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.

18 December 2016

Daniel Stender: How to cheat setuptools-scm (Debian diary)

[2016-12-19: some additions] This is another little issue from Python packaging for Debian which I came across lately packaging the compressed NumPy based data container Bcolz. Upstream uses setuptools-scm to determine the software s version during build time from the source code management environment the code is in. This method is convenient for the upstream development because with that the version number doesn t need to be hard-coded, and often people just forget to update that (and other version carrying files like doc/conf.py) when a new version of a project is released. python-setuptools just needs to be added to the setup.py to do its job, and in Bcolz the code goes like this: 
setup(
    name="bcolz",
    use_scm_version= 
        'version_scheme': 'guess-next-dev',
        'local_scheme': 'dirty-tag',
        'write_to': 'bcolz/version.py'
The file the version number is written to is bcolz/version.py. This file isn t in the upstream code revision nor in the tarball which was released by the upstream developers, it s always generated during build time. In Debian there is an error if you try to build a package from a source tree which contains files which aren t to be found in the corresponding tarball, like cruft from a previous build, or if any files have changed therefore every new package should be test build also twice in a row in a non-chroot environment. Generally there a two ways to solve this, either you add cruft to debian/clean, or you add the file resp. a matching file pattern to extend-diff-ignore in debian/source/options. Which method is the better one could be discussed, I m generally using the clean option if something isn t in the upstream tarball, and the source/options solution if something is already in the upstream tarball, but gets changed during a build. This is related to your preferred Git procedures, if you remove a file which is in the upstream tarball these removals have to be checked in separately, and that means everytime a new upstream tarball is released that is not very convenient. Another option which is available is to strip certain files from the upstream tarball by putting them on the Files-Excluded in deb/copyright. By the way, the same complex applies to egg-info/: that folder is shipped or is not shipped in the upstream tarball, and files in that folder get changed during build. When the source code is put into a Git environment for Debian packaging, there could be problems with the version number setuptools-scm comes up with. This setuptools extension gets the recent version from the latest Git tag when there is a version number to be found, and that s all right. In Git environments for Debian packaging (like e.g. of the Debian Science group, the Python groups and the others) that is available, like the commonly used upstream tags have that1. The problem is, sometimes the upstream version which Debian has2 doesn t match the original upstream version number which is wanted for version in bcolz/version.py. For example, the suffix +ds is used if the upstream tarball has been stripped from prebuild files or embedded convenience shipments (like it s the case with the Bcolz package where c-blosc/ has been stripped because that s build for another package), of the suffix +dfsg shows that non-DFSG free software has been removed (which can t be distributed through the main archive section). For example, the version string for Bcolz which is found after the build currently (1.1.0+ds1-1) is 1.1.0+ds1: 
# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0+ds1'
But that s not wanted because this version never has been released, but appears everywhere: 
$ pip list   grep bcolz
bcolz (1.1.0+ds1)
$ python3 -c 'import bcolz; bcolz.print_versions()'
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
bcolz version:     1.1.0+ds1
There are several different ways how to fix this. The one with the crowbar (like said in German) is to patch use_scm_version out from setup.py, but if you don t provide any version in exchange the version number which is used by Setuptools then is 0.0.0. The upstream version could be hard-coded into the patch, but then again it has not to be forgotten to update it manually by the maintainer, which is not very convenient. Plus, setup.py could change and the patch then might need to be unfuzzed, thus more work. Bad. A patch could be spared by manipulating and exporting the SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION environment variable for setuptools-scm in debian/rules, which is sometimes used when I see the returns for that string on Debian Code Search. But how to prevent to hard code the version number, here? The dpkg-dev package (pulled by build-essential) ships a Makefile snippet /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk which could be included into debian/rules. It defines several variables which are useful for packaging, like DEB_SOURCE contains the source package name, they are extracted from debian/changelog. But, DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM which is available through that puts out the upstream version without epoch and Debian revision, but it s not getting any finer grained out of the box. For a custom fix, a regular expression which removes the +... extensions (if present) from the bare upstream version string would be s/\+[^+]*//: 
$ echo "1.1.0+ds1"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0+dfsg12"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
With that, a custom variable VERSION_UPSTREAM could be set on the top of DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM (from pkg-info.mk) in debian/rules: 
include /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk
VERSION_UPSTREAM = $(shell echo '$(DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM)'   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//')
export SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION = $(VERSION_UPSTREAM)
Bam, that works (see the commit here): 
# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0'
An addition, I ve seen that dh-python also takes care of SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION since 2.20160609. The environment variable is set by the Debhelper build system if python 3, -setuptools-scm is among the build-dependencies in debian/control. The Perl code for that is in dh/pybuild.pm. I think the version number string above comes from dh-python s pretended version, and not from any of the Git tags (which are currently debian/1.1.0+ds1-1 and upstream/1.1.0+ds1).
  1. For Git in Debian packaging, e.g. see the DEP-14 proposal (Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories): http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep14/ [return]
  2. Following the scheme for package versions [epoch:]upstream_version[-debian-revision] [return]

31 August 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in August 2016

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

Diffoscope diffoscope is our "diff on steroids" that will not only recursively unpack archives but will transform binary formats into human-readable forms in order to compare them:
  • Added a command-line interface to the try.diffoscope.org web service.
  • Added a JSON comparator.
  • In the HTML output, highlight lines when hovering to make it easier to visually track.
  • Ensure that we pass str types to our Difference class, otherwise we can't be sure we can render them later.
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Generate test coverage reports.
    • Add tests for Haskell and GitIndex comparators.
    • Completely refactored all of the comparator tests, extracting out commonly-used routines.
    • Confirm rendering of text and HTML presenters when checking non-existing files.
    • Dropped a squashfs test as it was simply too unreliable and/or has too many requirements to satisfy.
  • A large number of miscellaneous cleanups, including:
    • Reworking the comparator setup/preference internals by dynamically importing classes via a single list.
    • Split exceptions out into dedicated diffoscope.exc module.
    • Tidying the PROVIDERS dict in diffoscope/__init__.py.
    • Use html.escape over xml.sax.saxutils.escape, cgi.escape, etc.
    • Removing hard-coding of manual page targets names in debian/rules.
    • Specify all string format arguments as logging function parameters, not using interpolation.
    • Tidying imports, correcting indentation levels and drop unnecessary whitespace.

disorderfs disorderfs is our FUSE filesystem that deliberately introduces nondeterminism in system calls such as readdir(3).
  • Added a testsuite to prevent regressions. (f124965)
  • Added a --sort-dirents=yes no option for forcing deterministic ordering. (2aae325)

Other
  • Improved strip-nondeterminism, our tool to remove specific nondeterministic information after a build:
    • Match more styles of Java .properties files.
    • Remove hyphen from "non-determinism" and "non-deterministic" throughout package for consistency.
  • Improvements to our testing infrastucture:
    • Improve the top-level navigation so that we can always get back to "home" of a package.
    • Give expandable elements cursor: pointer CSS styling to highlight they are clickable.
    • Drop various trailing underlined whitespaces after links.
    • Explicitly log that build was successful or not.
    • Various code-quality improvements, including prefering str.format over concatentation.
  • Miscellaneous updates to our filter-packages internal tool:
    • Add --random=N and --url options.
    • Add support for --show=comments.
    • Correct ordering so that --show-version runs after --filter-ftbfs.
    • Rename --show-ftbfs to --filter-ftbfs and --show-version to --show=version.
  • Created a proof-of-concept reproducible-utils package to contain commonly-used snippets aimed at developers wishing to make their packages reproducible.


I also submitted 92 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in advi, amora-server, apt-cacher-ng, ara, argyll, audiotools, bam, bedtools, binutils-m68hc1x, botan1.10, broccoli, congress, cookiecutter, dacs, dapl, dateutils, ddd, dicom3tools, dispcalgui, dnssec-trigger, echoping, eekboek, emacspeak, eyed3, fdroidserver, flashrom, fntsample, forkstat, gkrellm, gkrellm, gnunet-gtk, handbrake, hardinfo, ircd-irc2, ircd-ircu, jack-audio-connection-kit, jpy, kxmlgui, libbson, libdc0, libdevel-cover-perl, libfm, libpam-ldap, libquvi, librep, lilyterm, mozvoikko, mp4h, mp4v2, myghty, n2n, nagios-nrpe, nikwi, nmh, nsnake, openhackware, pd-pdstring, phpab, phpdox, phpldapadmin, pixelmed-codec, pleiades, pybit, pygtksourceview, pyicu, python-attrs, python-gflags, quvi, radare2, rc, rest2web, roaraudio, rt-extension-customfieldsonupdate, ruby-compass, ruby-pg, sheepdog, tf5, ttf-tiresias, ttf-tiresias, tuxpaint, tuxpaint-config, twitter-bootstrap3, udpcast, uhub, valknut, varnish, vips, vit, wims, winswitch, wmweather+ & xshisen.

Debian GNU/Linux
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Authored the patch & issued DLA 596-1 for extplorer, a web-based file manager, fixing an archive traversal exploit.
  • Issued DLA 598-1 for suckless-tools, fixing a segmentation fault in the slock screen locking tool.
  • Issued DLA 599-1 for cracklib2, a pro-active password checker library, fixing a stack-based buffer overflow when parsing large GECOS fields.
  • Improved the find-work internal tool adding optional colour highlighting and migrating it to Python 3.
  • Wrote an lts-missing-uploads tool to find mistakes where there was no correponding package in the archive after an announcement.
  • Added optional colour highlighting to the lts-cve-triage tool.
Uploads
  • redis 2:3.2.3-1 New upstream release, move to the DEP-5 debian/copyright format, ensure that we are running as root in LSB initscripts and add a README.Source regarding our local copies of redis.conf and sentinel.conf.
  • python-django:
    • 1:1.10-1 New upstream release.
    • 1:1.10-2 Fix test failures due to mishandled upstream translation updates.

  • gunicorn:
    • 19.6.0-2 Reload logrotate in the postrotate action to avoid processes writing to the old files and move to DEP-5 debian/copyright format.
    • 19.6.0-3 Drop our /usr/sbin/gunicorn ,3 -debian and related Debian-specific machinery to be more like upstream.
    • 19.6.0-4 Drop "template" systemd .service files and point towards examples and documentation instead.

  • adminer:
    • 4.2.5-1 Take over package maintenance, completely overhauling the packaging with a new upstream version, move to virtual-mysql-server to support MariaDB, updating package names of dependencies and fix the outdated Apache configuration.
    • 4.2.5-2 Correct the php5 package names.

FTP Team As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 90 packages: android-platform-external-jsilver, android-platform-frameworks-data-binding, camlpdf, consolation, dfwinreg, diffoscope, django-restricted-resource, django-testproject, django-testscenarios, gitlab-ci-multi-runner, gnome-shell-extension-taskbar, golang-github-flynn-archive-go-shlex, golang-github-jamesclonk-vultr, golang-github-weppos-dnsimple-go, golang-golang-x-time, google-android-ndk-installer, haskell-expiring-cache-map, haskell-hclip, haskell-hdbc-session, haskell-microlens-ghc, haskell-names-th, haskell-persistable-record, haskell-should-not-typecheck, haskell-soap, haskell-soap-tls, haskell-th-reify-compat, haskell-with-location, haskell-wreq, kbtin, libclipboard-perl, libgtk3-simplelist-perl, libjs-jquery-selectize.js, liblemon, libplack-middleware-header-perl, libreoffice, libreswan, libtest-deep-json-perl, libtest-timer-perl, linux, linux-signed, live-tasks, llvm-toolchain-3.8, llvm-toolchain-snapshot, lua-luv, lua-torch-image, lua-torch-nn, magic-wormhole, mini-buildd, ncbi-vdb, node-ast-util, node-es6-module-transpiler, node-es6-promise, node-inline-source-map, node-number-is-nan, node-object-assign, nvidia-graphics-drivers, openhft-chronicle-bytes, openhft-chronicle-core, openhft-chronicle-network, openhft-chronicle-threads, openhft-chronicle-wire, pycodestyle, python-aptly, python-atomicwrites, python-click-log, python-django-casclient, python-git-os-job, python-hypothesis, python-nosehtmloutput, python-overpy, python-parsel, python-prov, python-py, python-schema, python-tackerclient, python-tornado, pyvo, r-cran-cairo, r-cran-mi, r-cran-rcppgsl, r-cran-sem, ruby-curses, ruby-fog-rackspace, ruby-mixlib-archive, ruby-tzinfo-data, salt-formula-swift, scapy3k, self-destructing-cookies, trollius-redis & websploit.

21 August 2016

Cyril Brulebois: Freelance Debian consultant: running DEBAMAX

Executive summary Since October 2015, I've been running a FLOSS consulting company, specialized on Debian, called DEBAMAX. DEBAMAX logo Longer version Everything started two years ago. Back then I blogged about one of the biggest changes in my life: trying to find the right balance between volunteer work as a Debian Developer, and entrepreneurship as a Freelance Debian consultant. Big change because it meant giving up the comfort of the salaried world, and figuring out whether working this way would be sufficient to earn a living I experimented for a while under a simplified status. It comes with a number of limitations but that s a huge win compared to France s heavy company-related administrativia. Here s what it looked like, everything being done online: A number of things became quite clear after a few months: Thankfully I was eligible to being accompanied by the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI Rennes), which provides teaching sessions for new entrepreneurs, coaching, and meeting opportunities (accountants, lawyers, insurance companies, ). Summer in France is traditionally rather quiet (read: almost everybody is on vacation), so DEBAMAX officially started operating in October 2015. Besides different administrative and accounting duties, running this company doesn't change the way I've been working since July 2014, so everything is fine! As before, I won't be writing much about it through my personal blog, except for an occasional update every other year; if you want to follow what's happening with DEBAMAX:

14 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 68 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 7 and Saturday August 13 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates Reproducible work in other projects Thomas Schmitt scdbackup@gmx.net implemented a new -as mkisofs option: 
--set_all_file_dates timestring
Set mtime, atime, and ctime of all files and directories to  the
given time.
Valid  timestring  formats  are:  'Nov  8  14:51:13  CET  2007',
110814512007.13, 2007110814511300. See also --modification-date=
and man xorriso, Examples of input timestrings.
This  action  stays  delayed until mkisofs emulation ends. Up to
then it  can  be  revoked  by  --set_all_file_dates  with  empty
timestring.   In  any  case  files  which get into the ISO after
mkisofs emulation ended will not  be  affected,  unless  another
mkisofs emulation applies --set_all_file_date again.
LEDE developer Jonas Gorski submitted a patch to fix build times in their kernel: 
kernel: allow reproducable builds
Similar how we fix the file times in the filesystems, fix the build time
of the kernel, and make the build number static. This should allow the
kernel build to be reproducable when combined with setting the
KERNEL\_BUILD\_USER and \_DOMAIN in case of different machines.
The reproducability only applies to non-initramfs kernels, those still
require additional changes.
Signed-off-by: Jonas Gorski <jonas.gorski@gmail.com>
Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches have been submitted by: Package reviews 28 reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 7 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Issue types have been added/updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Chris started to ping old bugs with patches and no maintainer reaction so far. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

30 June 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in June 2016

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian My work in the Reproducible Builds project was covered in our weekly reports. (#58, #59 & #60)
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Extended the lts-cve-triage.py script to ignore packages that are not subject to Long Term Support.

  • Issued DLA 512-1 for mantis fixing an XSS vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 513-1 for nspr correcting a buffer overflow in a sprintf utility.
  • Issued DLA 515-1 for libav patching a memory corruption issue.
  • Issued DLA 524-1 for squidguard fixing a reflected cross-site scripting vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 525-1 for gimp correcting a use-after-free vulnerability in the channel and layer properties parsing process.
Uploads
  • redis (2:3.2.1-1) New upstream bugfix release, plus subsequent upload to the backports repository.
  • python-django (1.10~beta1-1) New upstream experimental release.
  • libfiu (0.94-5) Misc packaging updates.
RC bugs

I also filed 170 FTBFS bugs against a7xpg, acepack, android-platform-dalvik, android-platform-frameworks-base, android-platform-system-extras, android-platform-tools-base, apache-directory-api, aplpy, appstream-generator, arc-gui-clients, assertj-core, astroml, bamf, breathe, buildbot, cached-property, calf, celery-haystack, charmtimetracker, clapack, cmake, commons-javaflow, dataquay, dbi, django-celery, django-celery-transactions, django-classy-tags, django-compat, django-countries, django-floppyforms, django-hijack, django-localflavor, django-markupfield, django-model-utils, django-nose, django-pipeline, django-polymorphic, django-recurrence, django-sekizai, django-sitetree, django-stronghold, django-taggit, dune-functions, elementtidy, epic4-help, fcopulae, fextremes, fnonlinear, foreign, fort77, fregression, gap-alnuth, gcin, gdb-avr, ggcov, git-repair, glance, gnome-twitch, gnustep-gui, golang-github-audriusbutkevicius-go-nat-pmp, golang-github-gosimple-slug, gprbuild, grafana, grantlee5, graphite-api, guacamole-server, ido, jless, jodreports, jreen, kdeedu-data, kdewebdev, kwalify, libarray-refelem-perl, libdbusmenu, libdebian-package-html-perl, libdevice-modem-perl, libindicator, liblrdf, libmail-milter-perl, libopenraw, libvisca, linuxdcpp, lme4, marble, mgcv, mini-buildd, mu-cade, mvtnorm, nose, octave-epstk, onioncircuits, opencolorio, parsec47, phantomjs, php-guzzlehttp-ringphp, pjproject, pokerth, prayer, pyevolve, pyinfra, python-asdf, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-django-bootstrap-form, python-django-compressor, python-django-contact-form, python-django-debug-toolbar, python-django-extensions, python-django-feincms, python-django-formtools, python-django-jsonfield, python-django-mptt, python-django-openstack-auth, python-django-pyscss, python-django-registration, python-django-tagging, python-django-treebeard, python-geopandas, python-hdf5storage, python-hypothesis, python-jingo, python-libarchive-c, python-mhash, python-oauth2client, python-proliantutils, python-pytc, python-restless, python-tidylib, python-websockets, pyvows, qct, qgo, qmidinet, quodlibet, r-cran-gss, r-cran-runit, r-cran-sn, r-cran-stabledist, r-cran-xml, rgl, rglpk, rkt, rodbc, ruby-devise-two-factor, ruby-json-schema, ruby-puppet-syntax, ruby-rspec-puppet, ruby-state-machine, ruby-xmlparser, ryu, sbd, scanlogd, signond, slpvm, sogo, sphinx-argparse, squirrel3, sugar-jukebox-activity, sugar-log-activity, systemd, tiles, tkrplot, twill, ucommon, urca, v4l-utils, view3dscene, xqilla, youtube-dl & zope.interface.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 186 packages: akonadi4, alljoyn-core-1509, alljoyn-core-1604, alljoyn-gateway-1504, alljoyn-services-1504, alljoyn-services-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1504, alljoyn-thin-client-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1604, apertium-arg, apertium-arg-cat, apertium-eo-fr, apertium-es-it, apertium-eu-en, apertium-hbs, apertium-hin, apertium-isl, apertium-kaz, apertium-spa, apertium-spa-arg, apertium-tat, apertium-urd, arc-theme, argus-clients, ariba, beast-mcmc, binwalk, bottleneck, colorfultabs, dh-runit, django-modeltranslation, dq, dublin-traceroute, duktape, edk2, emacs-pdf-tools, eris, erlang-p1-oauth2, erlang-p1-sqlite3, erlang-p1-xmlrpc, faba-icon-theme, firefox-branding-iceweasel, golang-1.6, golang-defaults, golang-github-aelsabbahy-gonetstat, golang-github-howeyc-gopass, golang-github-oleiade-reflections, golang-websocket, google-android-m2repository-installer, googler, goto-chg-el, gr-radar, growl-for-linux, guvcview, haskell-open-browser, ipe, labplot, libalt-alien-ffi-system-perl, libanyevent-fcgi-perl, libcds-savot-java, libclass-ehierarchy-perl, libconfig-properties-perl, libffi-checklib-perl, libffi-platypus-perl, libhtml-element-library-perl, liblwp-authen-oauth2-perl, libmediawiki-dumpfile-perl, libmessage-passing-zeromq-perl, libmoosex-types-portnumber-perl, libmpack, libnet-ip-xs-perl, libperl-osnames-perl, libpodofo, libprogress-any-perl, libqtpas, librdkafka, libreoffice, libretro-beetle-pce-fast, libretro-beetle-psx, libretro-beetle-vb, libretro-beetle-wswan, libretro-bsnes-mercury, libretro-mupen64plus, libservicelog, libtemplate-plugin-datetime-perl, libtext-metaphone-perl, libtins, libzmq-ffi-perl, licensecheck, link-grammar, linux, linux-signed, lua-busted, magics++, mkalias, moka-icon-theme, neutron-vpnaas, newlisp, node-absolute-path, node-ejs, node-errs, node-has-flag, node-lodash-compat, node-strip-ansi, numba, numix-icon-theme, nvidia-graphics-drivers, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-340xx, obs-studio, opencv, pacapt, pgbackrest, postgis, powermock, primer3, profile-sync-daemon, pyeapi, pypandoc, pyssim, python-cutadapt, python-cymruwhois, python-fisx, python-formencode, python-hkdf, python-model-mommy, python-nanomsg, python-offtrac, python-social-auth, python-twiggy, python-vagrant, python-watcherclient, python-xkcd, pywps, r-bioc-deseq2, r-bioc-dnacopy, r-bioc-ensembldb, r-bioc-geneplotter, r-cran-adegenet, r-cran-adephylo, r-cran-distory, r-cran-fields, r-cran-future, r-cran-globals, r-cran-htmlwidgets, r-cran-listenv, r-cran-mlbench, r-cran-mlmrev, r-cran-pheatmap, r-cran-pscbs, r-cran-r.cache, refind, relatorio, reprotest, ring, ros-ros-comm, ruby-acts-as-tree, ruby-chronic-duration, ruby-flot-rails, ruby-numerizer, ruby-u2f, selenium-firefoxdriver, simgrid, skiboot, smtpping, snap-confine, snapd, sniffles, sollya, spin, subuser, superlu, swauth, swift-plugin-s3, syncthing, systemd-bootchart, tdiary-theme, texttable, tidy-html5, toxiproxy, twinkle, vmtk, wait-for-it, watcher, wcslib & xapian-core.

1 May 2016

Russ Allbery: Review: The Oath

Review: The Oath, by Jeffrey Toobin
Publisher: Anchor
Copyright: 2012
Printing: June 2013
ISBN: 0-307-39071-3
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 298
Jeffrey Toobin is a legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker and plays a similar role for the intricacies of the legal system as popular science writers play for physics. I'd previously read and reviewed his The Nine, an excellent history of the Rehnquist Supreme Court. The Oath is half sequel and half extension, bringing the same analysis to the first four years of the Obama presidency and the appointments of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sequels to popular history books that are not explicitly multi-volume works are a tricky publishing niche. People expect them to stand alone; I doubt it would work to tell people "read The Nine before reading this book," and regardless, Toobin did not take that approach. But the court profiled in The Oath only differs by two justices than that in The Nine. There was therefore a fair bit of repetition, since Toobin felt obligated to repeat his profiles of the five members of the court he had already deeply analyzed in the previous book. He even retold the story of Sandra Day O'Conner leaving the court despite it falling outside the focus of this book. I think these 300 pages could have been 150 pages of additional material in The Nine if Toobin had started this project later. That said, if you enjoyed The Nine (and I very much did), this is more of the same. Toobin picks up with Obama's inauguration ceremony and a fascinating bit of legal trivia over the oath of office, and then provides a detailed profile of the Roberts court and the major decisions of the first four years of Obama's presidency. His discussion of the nomination process and Obama's judicial philosophy rang very true following the death of Scalia: Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland is exactly what one would predict from Toobin's discussion. And, as with the previous book, I discovered that I had a lot of misconceptions about both Sotomayor and Kagan that Toobin cleared up. He does a great job showing the complexities of the interplay between law, politics, apparently unlikely friendships (such as Scalia and Ginsburg), and the executive and judicial branch. Worth particular mention is Toobin's discussion of the office of Solicitor General of the United States. I had no idea the role it plays in Supreme Court decisions. If I had given it any thought at all, I would have assumed it was essentially a variation on White House Counsel crossed with the Attorney General's office. But it's quite a bit more than that, as Elena Kagan's profile shows. If you, like I, raised an eyebrow at Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court from Solicitor General, wondering if that was at all similar to Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers, this section will be very informative. White House Counsel and Solicitor General are very, very different positions. However, The Oath has one major drawback that The Nine didn't: it's partisan. Now, Toobin is a liberal, with a clear preference towards the progressive side of the court. This was also true in The Nine, and I don't think that's a serious problem. Everyone writes from a particular perspective; stating it is more honest than concealing it, and it's the reader's responsibility to weigh multiple sides. But I thought Toobin was largely fair to those he disagreed with in The Nine. Even Thomas received some defense against popular misconceptions. It probably helped that much of that book focuses on conservatives who became liberals as the court shifted, people like Sandra Day O'Conner for whom Toobin has clear respect. I commented in my review of the previous book that it didn't feel quite balanced, but it felt like Toobin was trying hard to be fair. The Oath does not give that same feeling. Toobin hates the direction of the Roberts court, hates most of its 5-4 decisions, and strongly disagrees with the judicial philosophies of both Roberts and Alito. But more than that, he is clearly dubious that they even have coherent judicial philosophies. Maybe that's a legitimate critique, maybe it's not; regardless, I don't think he proves his case. The tone of much of the book is disgusted and angry rather than deliberate and relentless. Where Toobin engages with the thought process of Alito or, particularly, Roberts, the primary focus is to disagree with it rather than explain it. This happens to match my own emotional reaction, but I doubt it will be persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with Toobin, and it hurts the quality of the history. I suspect this would have been a better book if Toobin had waited ten years before writing it (still covering the same time frame). Some distance from the subject helps provide a more complete and thoughtful history. But, of course, it likely wouldn't have sold as well. That said, one of the themes of this book is how the conservatives on the Roberts court are currently playing the role of radicals from the perspective of the judicial tradition, overturning settled case law and calling into question precedents that have been used to decide numerous cases. The liberals, in contrast, are currently mostly playing the role of conservatives: standing up for the principle of stare decisis, trying to maintain consistency with past decisions, trying to minimize disruptive change. Conservatives will argue (correctly) that this depends on one's time frame and that they're trying to overturn radical past decisions, but those radical decisions, whatever their merits, are now often more than fifty years into the past. I hadn't thought about the current Supreme Court ideological battles from that perspective and found it eye-opening. It also ties in well with Obama's judicial philosophy as Toobin presents it: preferring democracy, laws, and change from the ballot box, and with little appetite for controversial court decisions. Obama is a judicial conservative. He therefore favors the liberal wing as the court is currently constructed, but not because he has much appetite for pushing forward civil rights in the courts. This is not the book The Nine was. It's repetitive if you've read the previous book (which you should, as it's the better book of the two), and I thought Toobin's critical balance was off. But it has a lot of interesting things to say about Obama's approach to the law, how the executive branch interacts with the Supreme Court, and the philosophy and approaches of the newer justices on the court. Recommended, although not as strongly. Rating: 7 out of 10

16 April 2016

Scott Kitterman: Future of secure systems in the US

As a rule, I avoid writing publicly on political topics, but I m making an exception. In case you haven t been following it, the senior Republican and the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee recently announced a legislative proposal misleadingly called the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016. The full text of the draft can be found here. It would effectively ban devices and software in the United States that the manufacturer cannot retrieve data from. Here is a good analysis of the breadth of the proposal and a good analysis of the bill itself. While complying with court orders might sound great in theory, in practice this means these devices and software will be insecure by design. While that s probably reasonably obvious to most normal readers here, don t just take my word for it, take Bruce Schneier s. In my opinion, policy makers (and it s not just in the United States) are suffering from a perception gap about security and how technically hard it is to get right. It seems to me that they are convinced that technologists could just do security right while still allowing some level of extraordinary access for law enforcement if they only wanted to. We ve tried this before and the story never seems to end well. This isn t a complaint from wide eyed radicals that such extraordinary access is morally wrong or inappropriate. It s hard core technologists saying it can t be done. I don t know how to get the message across. Here s President Obama, in my opinion, completely missing the point when he equates a desire for security with fetishizing our phones above every other value. Here are some very smart people trying very hard to be reasonable about some mythical middle ground. As Riana Pfefferkorn s analysis that I linked in the first paragraph discusses, this middle ground doesn t exist and all the arm waving in the world by policy makers won t create it. Coincidentally, this same week, the White House announced a new Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity . Cybersecurity is certainly something we could use more of, unfortunately Congress seems to be heading off in the opposite direction and no one from the executive branch has spoken out against it. Security and privacy are important to many people. Given the personal and financial importance of data stored in computers (traditional or mobile), users don t want criminals to get a hold of it. Companies know this, which is why both Apple IOS and Google Android both encrypt their local file systems by default now. If a bill anything like what s been proposed becomes law, users that care about security are going to go elsewhere. That may end up being non-US companies products or US companies may shift operations to localities more friendly to secure design. Either way, the US tech sector loses. A more accurate title would have been Technology Jobs Off-Shoring Act of 2016. EDIT: Fixed a typo.

29 February 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: New CRAN package gunsales

This is based on joint work with Gregor Aisch and Josh Keller of the New York Times. A new package gunsales is now on the CRAN network for R. It is based the NYTimes/gunsales repository underlying the excellent New York Times visualizations, first published first in December 2015 and updated with more recent data since. The analysis takes public government data on gun sales from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The original data is scraped from the pdf, included in the package, and analysed in a cross-section and time-series manner. The standard US Census tool X-13ARIMA-SEATS is used to deseasonalize the timeseries at the national or state level. (Note that Buzzfeed also published data and (Python) code in another GitHub repo.) As an aside, it was the use of X-13ARIMA-SEATS here -- and its somewhat awkward and manual installation also seen in the initial versions of the code in the NYTimes/gunsales repo -- which lead to the recent work by Christoph Sax and myself. We now provide a new package x13binary on CRAN so that Christoph's excellent seasonal package can simply depend upon it and have a working binary provided and installed ready to use; see the recent blog post for more. The net result is that a package like this new gunsales project can simply depend upon seasonal and also be assurred that x13binary "just works". As Martha would say, "A Good Thing". Back to the gunsales project. Following the initial publication of the repository with the data and R code in a simple script, I felt compelled to reorganize it as a package. Packages for R, as we teach our students, colleagues, or anybody else who wants to listen are really the best way to bundle code, data, documentation (i.e. vignettes) and tests. All that exists now in the gunsales package. The package now has one main function, analysis(), which returns a single dataframe object. This dataframe object can then be fed to two plotting functions. The first, plot_gunsales(), will then recreate all the (base R) plots from the original code base. The second, ggplot_gunsales(), does the same but via ggplot2. This should give anybody the ability to look at the data, study the transformations done, form and maybe test new hypotheses and visualize in manner comparable to the original publication. As an amuse gueule, here are the key plots also shown in the main README.md at GitHub: Total Estimated Gun Sales Total Estimated Gun Sales, Seasonally Adjusted Total Estimated Gun Sales, Population-Growth Adjusted Handguns vs Longguns Six States DC We look forward to more remixes and analysis of this data. The plan of the GitHub repository is to keep the data set updated as new data points are published.

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

1 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 40 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 24th and January 30th:

Media coverage Holger Levsen was interviewed by the FOSDEM team to introduce his talk on Sunday 31st.

Toolchain fixes Jonas Smedegaard uploaded d-shlibs/0.63 which makes the order of dependencies generated by d-devlibdeps stable accross locales. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: appstream-glib, aptitude, arbtt, btrfs-tools, cinnamon-settings-daemon, cppcheck, debian-security-support, easytag, gitit, gnash, gnome-control-center, gnome-keyring, gnome-shell, gnome-software, graphite2, gtk+2.0, gupnp, gvfs, gyp, hgview, htmlcxx, i3status, imms, irker, jmapviewer, katarakt, kmod, lastpass-cli, libaccounts-glib, libam7xxx, libldm, libopenobex, libsecret, linthesia, mate-session-manager, mpris-remote, network-manager, paprefs, php-opencloud, pisa, pyacidobasic, python-pymzml, python-pyscss, qtquick1-opensource-src, rdkit, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, shellex, slony1-2, spacezero, spamprobe, sugar-toolkit-gtk3, tachyon, tgt. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:
  • gnubg/1.05.000-4 by Russ Allbery.
  • grcompiler/4.2-6 by Hideki Yamane.
  • sdlgfx/2.0.25-5 fix by Felix Geyer, uploaded by Gianfranco Costamagna.
Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #812876 on glib2.0 by Lunar: ensure that functions are sorted using the C locale when giotypefuncs.c is generated.

diffoscope development diffoscope 48 was released on January 26th. It fixes several issues introduced by the retrieval of extra symbols from Debian debug packages. It also restores compatibility with older versions of binutils which does not support readelf --decompress.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.015-1 was uploaded on January 27th. It fixes handling of signed JAR files which are now going to be ignored to keep the signatures intact.

Package reviews 54 reviews have been removed, 36 added and 17 updated in the previous week. 30 new FTBFS bugs have been submitted by Chris Lamb, Michael Tautschnig, Mattia Rizzolo, Tobias Frost.

Misc. Alexander Couzens and Bryan Newbold have been busy fixing more issues in OpenWrt. Version 1.6.3 of FreeBSD's package manager pkg(8) now supports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Ross Karchner did a lightning talk about reproducible builds at his work place and shared the slides.

25 January 2016

Antoine Beaupr : Internet in Cuba

A lot has been written about the Internet in Cuba over the years. I have read a few articles, from New York Times' happy support for Google's invasion of Cuba to RSF's dramatic and fairly outdated report about censorship in Cuba. Having written before about Internet censorship in Tunisia, I was curious to see if I could get a feel of what it is like over there, now that a new Castro is in power and the Obama administration has started restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. With those political changes coming signifying the end of an embargo that has been called genocidal by the Cuban government, it is surprisingly difficult to get fresh information about the current state of affairs. This article aims to fill that gap in clarifying how the internet works in Cuba, what kind of censorship mechanisms are in place and how to work around them. It also digs more technically into the network architecture and performance. It is published in the hope of providing both Cubans and the rest of the world with a better understanding of their network and, if possible, Cubans ways to access the internet more cheaply or without censorship.

"Censorship" and workarounds Unfortunately, I have been connected to the internet only through the the Varadero airport and the WiFi of a "full included" resort near Jibacoa. I have to come to assume that this network is likely to be on a segregated, uncensored internet while the rest of the country suffers the wrath of the Internet censorship in Cuba I have seen documented elsewhere. Through my research, I couldn't find any sort of direct censorship. The Netalyzr tool couldn't find anything significantly wrong with the connection, other than the obvious performance problems related both to the overloaded uplinks of the Cuban internet. I ran an incomplete OONI probe as well, and it seems there was no obvious censorship detected there as well, at least according to folks in the helpful #ooni IRC channel. Tor also works fine, and could be a great way to avoid the global surveillance system described later in this article. Nevertheless, it still remains to be seen how the internet is censored in the "real" Cuban internet, outside of the tourist designated areas - hopefully future visitors or locals can expand on this using the tools mentioned above, using the regular internet. Usual care should be taken when using any workaround tools, mentioned in this post or not, as different regimes over the world have accused, detained, tortured and killed sometimes for the mere fact of using or distributing circumvention tools. For example, a Russian developer was arrested and detained in 2001 by United States' FBI for exposing vulnerabilities in the Adobe e-books copy protection mechanisms. Similarly, people distributing Tor and other tools have been arrested during the period prior to the revolution in Tunisia.

The Cuban captive portal There is, however, a more pernicious and yet very obvious censorship mechanism at work in Cuba: to get access to the internet, you have to go through what seems to be a state-wide captive portal, which I have seen both at the hotel and the airport. It is presumably deployed at all levels of the internet access points. To get credentials through that portal, you need a username and password which you get by buying a Nauta card. Those cards cost 2$CUC and get you an hour of basically unlimited internet access. That may not seem like a lot for a rich northern hotel party-goer, but for Cubans, it's a lot of money, given that the average monthly salary is around 20$CUC. The system is also pretty annoying to use, because it means you do not get continuous network access: every hour, you need to input a new card, which will obviously make streaming movies and other online activities annoying. It also makes hosting servers basically impossible. So while Cuba does not have, like China or Iran, a "great firewall", there is definitely a big restriction to going online in Cuba. Indeed, it seems to be how the government ensures that Cubans do not foment too much dissent online: keep the internet slow and inaccessible, and you won't get too many Arab spring / blogger revolutions.

Bypassing the Cuban captive portal The good news is that it is perfectly possible for Cubans (or at least for a tourist like me with resources outside of the country) to bypass the captive portal. Like many poorly implemented portals, the portal allows DNS traffic to go through, which makes it possible to access the global network for free by using a tool like iodine which tunnels IP traffic over DNS requests. Of course, the bandwidth and reliability of the connection you get through such a portal is pretty bad. I have regularly seen 80% packet loss and over two minutes of latency: 
--- 10.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
163 packets transmitted, 31 received, 80% packet loss, time 162391ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 133.700/2669.535/64188.027/11257.336 ms, pipe 65
Still, it allowed me to login to my home server through SSH using Mosh to workaround the reliability issues. Every once in a while, mosh would get stuck and keep on trying to send packets to probe the server, which would clog the connection even more. So I regularly had to restart the whole stack using these commands: 
killall iodine # stop DNS tunnel
nmcli n off # turn off wifi to change MAC address
macchanger -A wlan0 # change MAC address
nmcli n on # turn wifi back on
sleep 3 # wait for wifi to settle
iodine-client-start # restart DNS tunnel
The Koumbit Wiki has good instructions on how to setup a DNS tunnel. I am wondering if such a public service could be of use for Cubans, although I am not sure how it could be deployed only for Cubans, and what kind of traffic it could support... The fact is that iodine does require a server to operate, and that server must be run on the outside of the censored perimeter, something that Cubans may not be able to afford in the first place. Another possible way to save money with the captive portal would be to write something that automates connecting and disconnecting from the portal. You would feed that program a list of credentials and it would connect to the portal only on demand, and disconnect as soon as no traffic goes through. There are details on the implementation of the captive portal below that may help future endeavours in that field.

Private information revealed to the captive portal It should be mentioned, however, that the captive portal has a significant amount of information on clients, which is a direct threat to the online privacy of Cuban internet users. Of course the unique identifiers issued with the Nauta cards can be correlated with your identity, right from the start. For example, I had to give my room number to get a Nauta card issued. Then the central portal also knows which access point you are connected to. For example, the central portal I was connected to Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa which, for anyone that cares to research, will give them a location of about 20 square meters where I was located when connected (there is only one access point in the whole hotel). Finally, the central portal also knows my MAC address, a unique identifier for the computer I am using which also reveals which brand of computer I am using (Mac, Lenovo, etc). While this address can be changed, very few people know that, let alone how. This led me to question whether I would be allowed back in Cuba (or even allowed out!) after publishing this blog post, as it is obvious that I can be easily identified based on the time this article was published, my name and other details. Hopefully the Cuban government will either not notice or not care, but this can be a tricky situation, obviously. I have heard that Cuban prisons are not the best hangout place in Cuba, to say the least...

Network configuration assessment This section is more technical and delves more deeply in the Cuban internet to analyze the quality and topology of the network, along with hints as to which hardware and providers are being used to support the Cuban government.

Line quality The internet is actually not so bad in the hotel. Again, this may be because of the very fact that I am in that hotel, and I get a privileged access to the new fiber line to Venezuela, the ALBA-1 link. The line speed I get is around 1mbps, according to speedtest, which selected a server from LIME in George Town, Cayman Islands: 
[1034]anarcat@angela:cuba$ speedtest
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba (152.206.92.146)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by LIME (George Town) [391.78 km]: 317.546 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 1.01 Mbits/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 1.00 Mbits/s
Latency to the rest of the world is of couse slow: 
--- koumbit.org ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 120 received, 1,64% packet loss, time 18731,6ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 127,457/156,097/725,211/94,688 ms
--- google.com ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 121 received, 0,82% packet loss, time 19371,4ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 132,517/160,095/724,971/93,273 ms
--- redcta.org.ar ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 120 received, 1,64% packet loss, time 40748,6ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 303,035/339,572/965,092/97,503 ms
--- ccc.de ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 72 received, 40,98% packet loss, time 19560,2ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 244,266/271,670/594,104/61,933 ms
Interestingly, Koumbit is actually the closest host in the above test. It could be that Canadian hosts are less affected by bandwidth problems compared to US hosts because of the embargo.

Network topology The various traceroutes show a fairly odd network topology, but that is typical of what I would described as "colonized internet users", which have layers and layers of NAT and obscure routing that keep them from the real internet. Just like large corporations are implementing NAT in a large scale, Cuba seems to have layers and layers of private RFC 1918 IPv4 space. A typical traceroute starts with: 
traceroute to koumbit.net (199.58.80.33), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  10.156.41.1 (10.156.41.1)  9.724 ms  9.472 ms  9.405 ms
 2  192.168.134.137 (192.168.134.137)  16.089 ms  15.612 ms  15.509 ms
 3  172.31.252.113 (172.31.252.113)  15.350 ms  15.805 ms  15.358 ms
 4  pos6-0-0-agu-cr-1.mpls.enet.cu (172.31.253.197)  15.286 ms  14.832 ms  14.405 ms
 5  172.31.252.29 (172.31.252.29)  13.734 ms  13.685 ms  14.485 ms
 6  200.0.16.130 (200.0.16.130)  14.428 ms  11.393 ms  10.977 ms
 7  200.0.16.74 (200.0.16.74)  10.738 ms  10.019 ms  10.326 ms
 8  ix-11-3-1-0.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net (64.86.33.45)  108.577 ms  108.449 ms
Let's take this apart line by line: 
 1  10.156.41.1 (10.156.41.1)  9.724 ms  9.472 ms  9.405 ms
This is my local gateway, probably the hotel's wifi router. 
 2  192.168.134.137 (192.168.134.137)  16.089 ms  15.612 ms  15.509 ms
This is likely not very far from the local gateway, probably still in Cuba. It in one bit away from the captive portal IP address (see below) so it is very likely related to the captive portal implementation. 
 3  172.31.252.113 (172.31.252.113)  15.350 ms  15.805 ms  15.358 ms
 4  pos6-0-0-agu-cr-1.mpls.enet.cu (172.31.253.197)  15.286 ms  14.832 ms  14.405 ms
 5  172.31.252.29 (172.31.252.29)  13.734 ms  13.685 ms  14.485 ms
All those are withing RFC 1918 space. Interestingly, the Cuban DNS servers resolve one of those private IPs as within Cuban space, on line #4. That line is interesting because it reveals the potential use of MPLS. 
 6  200.0.16.130 (200.0.16.130)  14.428 ms  11.393 ms  10.977 ms
 7  200.0.16.74 (200.0.16.74)  10.738 ms  10.019 ms  10.326 ms
Those two lines are the only ones that actually reveal that the route belongs in Cuba at all. Both IPs are in a tiny (/24, or 256 IP addresses) network allocated to ETECSA, the state telco in Cuba: 
inetnum:     200.0.16/24
status:      allocated
aut-num:     N/A
owner:       EMPRESA DE TELECOMUNICACIONES DE CUBA S.A. (IXP CUBA)
ownerid:     CU-CUBA-LACNIC
responsible: Rafael L pez Guerra
address:     Ave. Independencia y 19 Mayo, s/n,
address:     10600 - La Habana - CH
country:     CU
phone:       +53 7 574242 []
owner-c:     JOQ
tech-c:      JOQ
abuse-c:     JEM52
inetrev:     200.0.16/24
nserver:     NS1.NAP.ETECSA.NET
nsstat:      20160123 AA
nslastaa:    20160123
nserver:     NS2.NAP.ETECSA.NET
nsstat:      20160123 AA
nslastaa:    20160123
created:     20030512
changed:     20140610
Then the last hop: 
 8  ix-11-3-1-0.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net (64.86.33.45)  108.577 ms  108.449 ms  108.257 ms
...interestingly, lands directly in Toronto, in this case going later to Koumbit but that is the first hop that varies according to the destination, hops 1-7 being a common trunk to all external communications. It's also interesting that this shoves a good 90 milliseconds extra in latency, showing that a significant distance and number of equipment crossed. Yet a single hop is crossed, not showing the intermediate step of the Venezuelan link or any other links for that matter. Something obscure is going on there... Also interesting to note is the traceroute to the redirection host, which is only one hop away: 
traceroute to 192.168.134.138 (192.168.134.138), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.134.138 (192.168.134.138)  6.027 ms  5.698 ms  5.596 ms
Even though it is not the gateway: 
$ ip route
default via 10.156.41.1 dev wlan0  proto static  metric 1024
10.156.41.0/24 dev wlan0  proto kernel  scope link  src 10.156.41.4
169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0  scope link  metric 1000
This means a very close coordination between the different access points and the captive portal system. Finally, note that there seems to be only three peers to the Cuban internet: Teleglobe, formerly Canadian, now owned by the Indian [[!wiki Tata group]], and Telef nica, the Spanish Telco that colonized most of Latin America's internet, all the way down to Argentina. This is confirmed by my traceroutes, which show traffic to Koumbit going through Tata and Google's going through Telef nica.

Captive portal implementation The captive portal is https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/ (not accessible outside of Cuba) and uses a self-signed certificate. The domain name resolves to 190.6.81.230 in the hotel. Accessing http://1.1.1.1/ gives you a status page which allows you to disconnect from the portal. It actually redirects you to https://192.168.134.138/logout.user. That is also a self-signed, but different certificate. That certificate actually reveals the implication of Gemtek which is a "world-leading provider of Wireless Broadband solutions, offering a wide range of solutions from residential to business". It is somewhat unclear if the implication of Gemtek here is deliberate or a misconfiguration on the part of Cuban officials, especially since the certificate is self-signed and was issued in 2002. It could be, however, a trace of the supposed involvement of China in the development of Cuba's networking systems, although Gemtek is based in Taiwan, and not in the China mainland. That IP, in turn, redirects you to the same portal but in a page that shows you the statistics: 
https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/?mac=0024D1717D18&script=logout.user&remain_time=00%3A55%3A52&session_time=00%3A04%3A08&username=151003576287&clientip=10.156.41.21&nasid=Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa&r=ac%2Fpopup
Notice how you see the MAC address of the machine in the URL (randomized, this is not my MAC address), along with the remaining time, session time, client IP and the Wifi access point ESSID. There may be some potential in defrauding the session time there, I haven't tested it directly. Hitting Actualizar redirects you back to the IP address, which redirects you to the right URL on the portal. The "real" logout is at: 
http://192.168.134.138/logout.user?cmd=logout
The login is performed against https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/index.php?r=ac/login with a referer of: 
https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/?&nasid=Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa&nasip=192.168.134.138&clientip=10.156.41.21&mac=EC:55:F9:C5:F2:55&ourl=http%3a%2f%2fgoogle.ca%2f&sslport=443&lang=en-US%2cen%3bq%3d0.8&lanip=10.156.41.1
Again, notice the information revealed to the central portal.

Equipment and providers I ran Nmap probes against both the captive portal and the redirection host, in the hope of finding out how they were built and if they could reveal the source of the equipment used. The complete nmap probes are available in nmap, but it seems that the captive portal is running some embedded device. It is confusing because the probe for the captive portal responds as if it was the gateway, which blurs even more the distinction between the hotel's gateway and the captive portal. This raises the distinct possibility that all access points are actually captive portal that authenticate to another central server. The nmap traces do show three distinct hosts however:
  • the captive portal (www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu, 190.6.81.230)
  • some redirection host (192.168.134.138)
  • the hotel's gateway (10.156.41.1)
They do have distinct signatures so the above may be just me misinterpreting traceroute and nmap results. Your comments may help in clarifying the above. Still, the three devices show up as running Linux, in the two last cases versions between 2.4.21 and 2.4.31. Now, to find out which version of Linux it is running is way more challenging, and it is possible it is just some custom Linux distribution. Indeed, the webserver shows up as G4200.GSI.2.22.0155 and the SSH server is running OpenSSH 3.0.2p1, which is basically prehistoric (2002!) which corroborates the idea that this is some Gemtek embedded device. The fact that those devices are running 14 years old software should be a concern to the people responsible for those networks. There is, for example, a remote root vulnerability that affects that specific version of OpenSSH, among many other vulnerabilities.

A note on Nauta card's security Finally, one can note that it is probably trivial to guess card UIDs. All cards i have here start with the prefix 15100, the following digits being 3576 or 4595, presumably depending on the "batch" that was sent to different hotels, which seems to be batches of 1000 cards. You can also correlate the UID with the date at which the card was issued. For example, 15100357XXX cards are all valid until 19/03/2017, and 151004595XXX cards are all valid until 23/03/2017. Here's the list of UIDs I have seen: 
151004595313
151004595974
151003576287
151003576105
151003576097
The passwords, on the other hand, do seem fairly random (although my sample size is small). Interestingly, those passwords are also 12 digits long, which is about as strong as a seven-letter password (mixed uppercase and lowercase). If there are no rate-limiting provisions on that captive portal, it could be possible to guess those passwords, since you have free rein on accessing those routers. Depending on the performance of the routers, you could be lucky and find a working password for free...

Conclusion Clearly, Internet access in Cuba needs to be modernized. We can clearly see that Cuba years behind the rest of the Americas, if only through the percentage of the population with internet access, or download speeds. The existence of a centralized captive portal also enables a huge surveillance potential that should be a concern for any Cuban, or for that matter, anyone wishing to live in a free society. The answer, however, lies not in the liberalization of commerce and opening the doors to the US companies and their own systems of surveillance. It should be possible, and even desirable for Cubans to establish their own neutral network, a proposal I have made in the past even for here in Qu bec. This network could be used and improved by Cubans themselves, prioritizing local communities that would establish their own infrastructure according to their own needs. I have been impressed by this article about the El Paquete system - it shows great innovation and initiative from Cubans which are known for engaging in technology in a creative way. This should be leveraged by letting Cubans do what they want with their networks, not telling them what to do. The best the Googles of this world can do to help Cuba is not to colonize Cuba's technological landscape but to cleanup their own and make their own tools more easily accessible and shareable offline. It is something companies can do right now, something I detailed in a previous article.

25 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: Drone strikes coming to Molenbeek?

The St Denis siege last week and the Brussels lockdown this week provides all of us in Europe with an opportunity to reflect on why over ten thousand refugees per day have been coming here from the middle east, especially Syria. At this moment, French warplanes and American drones are striking cities and villages in Syria, killing whole families in their effort to shortcut the justice system and execute a small number of very bad people without putting them on trial. Some observers estimate air strikes and drones kill twenty innocent people for every one bad guy. Women, children, the sick, elderly and even pets are most vulnerable. The leak of the collateral murder video simultaneously brought Wikileaks into the public eye and demonstrated how the crew of a US attack helicopter had butchered unarmed civilians and journalists like they were playing a video game. Just imagine that the French president had sent the fighter jets to St Denis and Molenbeek instead of using law enforcement. After all, how are the terrorists there any better or worse than those in Syria, don't they deserve the same fate? Or what if Obama had offered to help out with a few drone strikes on suburban Brussels? After all, if the drones are such a credible solution for Syria's future, why won't they solve Brussels' (perceived) problems too? If the aerial bombing "solution" had been attempted in a western country, it would have lead to chaos. Half the population of Paris and Brussels would find themselves camping at the migrant camps in Calais, hoping to sneak into the UK in the back of a truck. Over a hundred years ago, Russian leaders proposed a treaty agreeing never to drop bombs from balloons and the US and UK happily signed it. Sadly, the treaty wasn't updated after the invention of fighter jets, attack helicopters, rockets, inter-continental ballistic missiles, satellites and drones. The reality is that asymmetric warfare hasn't worked and never will work in the middle east and as long as it is continued, experts warn that Europe may continue to face the consequences of refugees, terrorists and those who sympathize with their methods. By definition, these people can easily move from place to place and it is ordinary citizens and small businesses who will suffer a lot more under lockdowns and other security measures. In our modern world, people often look to technology for shortcuts. The use of drones in the middle east is a shortcut from a country that spent enormous money on ground invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and doesn't want to do it again. Unfortunately, technological shortcuts can't always replace the role played by real human beings, whether it is bringing law and order to the streets or in any other domain. Aerial bombardment - by warplane or by drone - carries an implicitly racist message, that the people abused by these drone attacks are not equivalent to the rest of us, they can't benefit from the normal procedures of justice, they don't have rights, they are not innocent until proven guilty and they are expendable. The French police deserve significant credit for the relatively low loss of life in the St Denis siege. If their methods and results were replicated in Syria and other middle eastern hotspots, would it be more likely to improve the situation in the long term than drone strikes?

23 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 30 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo uploaded a version of perl to the reproducible repository including the patch written by Niko Tyni to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. Dhole sent an updated version of his patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in GCC to the upstream mailing list. Several comments have been made in response which have been quickly addressed by Dhole. Dhole also forwarded his patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in libxslt upstream. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: antlr3/3.5.2-3, clusterssh, cme, libdatetime-set-perl, libgraphviz-perl, liblingua-translit-perl, libparse-cpan-packages-perl, libsgmls-perl, license-reconcile, maven-bundle-plugin/2.4.0-2, siggen, stunnel4, systemd, x11proto-kb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: reproducible.debian.net Vagrant Cascadian has set up a new armhf node using a Raspberry Pi 2. It should soon be added to the Jenkins infrastructure. diffoscope development diffoscope version 42 was release on November 20th. It adds a missing dependency on python3-pkg-resources and to prevent similar regression another autopkgtest to ensure that the command line is functional when Recommends are not installed. Two more encoding related problems have been fixed (#804061, #805418). A missing Build-Depends has also been added on binutils-multiarch to make the test suite pass on architectures other than amd64. Package reviews 180 reviews have been removed, 268 added and 59 updated this week. 70 new fail to build from source bugs have been reported by Chris West, Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. New issue this week: randomness_in_ocaml_preprocessed_files. Misc. Jim MacArthur started to work on a system to rebuild and compare packages built on reproducible.debian.net using .buildinfo and snapshot.debian.org. On December 1-3rd 2015, a meeting of about 40 participants from 18 different free software projects will be held in Athens, Greece with the intent of improving the collaboration between projects, helping new efforts to be started, and brainstorming on end-user aspects of reproducible builds.

1 October 2015

Clint Adams: I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers

shroomies

16 July 2015

Osamu Aoki: debmake and debamke-doc and debian-handbook

While updating the maintainer's guide, I had faced with several issues to update it as it is, since it was based on the dh-make package and does not play nice with new features such as multi-arch etc. Also. the lack of capability to create a decent copyright information template was my concern.

I have created the debmake tool to address shortcomings of dh-make. It was good attempt for Jessie, but it has not so nice bug on parsing copyright. So I decided to drop it for Jessie.
https://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debmake.html

The current testing repository has the updated debmake command. With the -k option, you can check if the your debian/copyright is covering all the files properly in source or not.

Since I got this updated package, I rewrote the maintainer's guide from scratch. Now it is available in the debmake-doc package. You can see all the packaging cases including autotools, cmake, and libraries. If I made a mistake, let me know. As you may noticed, debian-doc related web pages are now generated from the latest uploaded packages mostly. debmake-doc is no exception.
"Guide for Debian Maintainers"
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/index.en.html

By using debmake as the template generation tool, the document can be made shorter and there are many practical examples. More over, all the source code examples can be found in the source tree. Try:

$ apt-get source debmake-doc
$ sudo apt-get install devscripts build-essentials
$ sudo apt-get build-dep debmake-doc
$ cd debmake-doc*
$ make

You get the simulated log of building all the details of the packaging examples in this way.

With upcoming uploads, I should fix some CSS for the better cell phone compatibility but this is in good shape from the PC browsers.

Oh, not last ... NOW debian-handbook is on our www.debian.org server and its mirrors.

I think this is the most comprehensive work on Debian system and deserves to be presented in our web pages prominently. Kudos for people who wrote this fine manual.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/

(I think outdated reference to old TLDP pages should be mostly dropped in our https://www.debian.org/doc/ page.)

Please note web pages on www.debian.org has been modified to make the language based content negotiation. So you should see the page based on your browser settings.

Osamu

12 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 11 in Stretch cycle

Debian is undertaking a huge effort to develop a reproducible builds system. I'd like to thank you for that. This could be Debian's most important project, with how badly computer security has been going.

PerniciousPunk in Reddit's Ask me anything! to Neil McGovern, DPL. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes More tools are getting patched to use the value of the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as the current time:

In the reproducible experimental toolchain which have been uploaded: Johannes Schauer followed up on making sbuild build path deterministic with several ideas. Packages fixed The following 311 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies : 4ti2, alot, angband, appstream-glib, argvalidate, armada-backlight, ascii, ask, astroquery, atheist, aubio, autorevision, awesome-extra, bibtool, boot-info-script, bpython, brian, btrfs-tools, bugs-everywhere, capnproto, cbm, ccfits, cddlib, cflow, cfourcc, cgit, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cinnamon-settings-daemon, clfswm, clipper, compton, cppcheck, crmsh, cupt, cutechess, d-itg, dahdi-tools, dapl, darnwdl, dbusada, debian-security-support, debomatic, dime, dipy, dnsruby, doctrine, drmips, dsc-statistics, dune-common, dune-istl, dune-localfunctions, easytag, ent, epr-api, esajpip, eyed3, fastjet, fatresize, fflas-ffpack, flann, flex, flint, fltk1.3, fonts-dustin, fonts-play, fonts-uralic, freecontact, freedoom, gap-guava, gap-scscp, genometools, geogebra, git-reintegrate, git-remote-bzr, git-remote-hg, gitmagic, givaro, gnash, gocr, gorm.app, gprbuild, grapefruit, greed, gtkspellmm, gummiboot, gyp, heat-cfntools, herold, htp, httpfs2, i3status, imagetooth, imapcopy, imaprowl, irker, jansson, jmapviewer, jsdoc-toolkit, jwm, katarakt, khronos-opencl-man, khronos-opengl-man4, lastpass-cli, lava-coordinator, lava-tool, lavapdu, letterize, lhapdf, libam7xxx, libburn, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libdaemon, libdbusmenu-qt, libdc0, libevhtp, libexosip2, libfreenect, libgwenhywfar, libhmsbeagle, libitpp, libldm, libmodbus, libmtp, libmwaw, libnfo, libpam-abl, libphysfs, libplayer, libqb, libsecret, libserial, libsidplayfp, libtime-y2038-perl, libxr, lift, linbox, linthesia, livestreamer, lizardfs, lmdb, log4c, logbook, lrslib, lvtk, m-tx, mailman-api, matroxset, miniupnpd, mknbi, monkeysign, mpi4py, mpmath, mpqc, mpris-remote, musicbrainzngs, network-manager, nifticlib, obfsproxy, ogre-1.9, opal, openchange, opensc, packaging-tutorial, padevchooser, pajeng, paprefs, pavumeter, pcl, pdmenu, pepper, perroquet, pgrouting, pixz, pngcheck, po4a, powerline, probabel, profitbricks-client, prosody, pstreams, pyacidobasic, pyepr, pymilter, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-django, python-ethtool, python-mock, python-odf, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what, qdjango, qpid-proton, qsapecng, radare2, reclass, repsnapper, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-albino, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-ole, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-ronn, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, rumor, rurple-ng, ryu, sam2p, scikit-learn, serd, shellex, shorewall-doc, shunit2, simbody, simplejson, smcroute, soqt, sord, spacezero, spamassassin-heatu, spamprobe, sphinxcontrib-youtube, splitpatch, sratom, stompserver, syncevolution, tgt, ticgit, tinyproxy, tor, tox, transmissionrpc, tweeper, udpcast, units-filter, viennacl, visp, vite, vmfs-tools, waffle, waitress, wavtool-pl, webkit2pdf, wfmath, wit, wreport, x11proto-input, xbae, xdg-utils, xdotool, xsystem35, yapsy, yaz. Please note that some packages in the above list are falsely reproducible. In the experimental toolchain, debhelper exported TZ=UTC and this made packages capturing the current date (without the time) reproducible in the current test environment. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Ben Hutchings upstreamed several patches to fix Linux reproducibility issues which were quickly merged. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Uploads that should fix packages not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set has been added for lua maintainers. (h01ger) tracker.debian.org now only shows reproducibility issues for unstable. Holger and Mattia worked on several bugfixes and enhancements: finished initial test setup for NetBSD, rewriting more shell scripts in Python, saving UDD requests, and more debbindiff development Reiner Herrmann fixed text comparison of files with different encoding. Documentation update Juan Picca added to the commands needed for a local test chroot installation of the locales-all package. Package reviews 286 obsolete reviews have been removed, 278 added and 243 updated this week. 43 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been filled by Chris West (Faux), Mattia Rizzolo, and h01ger. The following new issues have been added: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_ronn, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode, and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib. Misc. Reiner Herrmann has submitted patches for OpenWrt. Chris Lamb cleaned up some code and removed cruft in the misc.git repository. Mattia Rizzolo updated the prebuilder script to match what is currently done on reproducible.debian.net.

20 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 4 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Toolchain fixes Lunar rebased our custom dpkg on the new release, removing a now unneeded patch identified by Guillem Jover. An extra sort in the buildinfo generator prevented a stable order and was quickly fixed once identified. Mattia Rizzolo also rebased our custom debhelper on the latest release. Packages fixed The following 30 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: animal-sniffer, asciidoctor, autodock-vina, camping, cookie-monster, downthemall, flashblock, gamera, httpcomponents-core, https-finder, icedove-l10n, istack-commons, jdeb, libmodule-build-perl, libur-perl, livehttpheaders, maven-dependency-plugin, maven-ejb-plugin, mozilla-noscript, nosquint, requestpolicy, ruby-benchmark-ips, ruby-benchmark-suite, ruby-expression-parser, ruby-github-markup, ruby-http-connection, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-uuidtools, webkit2gtk, wot. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Also, the following bugs have been reported: reproducible.debian.net Holger Levsen made several small bug fixes and a few more visible changes: strip-nondeterminism Version 0.007-1 of strip-nondeterminism the tool to post-process various file formats to normalize them has been uploaded by Holger Levsen. Version 0.006-1 was already in the reproducible repository, the new version mainly improve the detection of Maven's pom.properties files. debbindiff development At the request of Emmanuel Bourg, Reiner Herrmann added a comparator for Java .class files. Documentation update Christoph Berg created a new page for the timestamps in manpages created by Doxygen. Package reviews 93 obsolete reviews have been removed, 76 added and 43 updated this week. New identified issues: timestamps in manpages generated by Doxygen, modification time differences in files extracted by unzip, tstamp task used in Ant build.xml, timestamps in documentation generated by ASDocGen. The description for build id related issues has been clarified. Meetings Holger Levsen announced a first meeting on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015, 19:00 UTC. The agenda is amendable on the wiki. Misc. Lunar worked on a proof-of-concept script to import the build environment found in .buildinfo files to UDD. Lucas Nussbaum has positively reviewed the proposed schema. Holger Levsen cleaned up various experimental toolchain repositories, marking merged brances as such.

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