Search Results: "dom"

11 January 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2023

Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:
The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:
What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]
The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:
I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.
Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes: 
Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:
deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.
The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including: In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In December, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes
    • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
    • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
    • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
    • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
    • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
    • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
    • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]
In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

Matthias Klumpp: Wayland really breaks things Just for now?

This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate s post Does Wayland really break everything? , but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months1.

Some facts Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland2 this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols and working with it at a much lower level than I ever wanted to, it is also very clear to me that Wayland is an exceptionally well-designed core protocol, and so are the additional extension protocols (xdg-shell & Co.). The modularity of Wayland is great, it gives it incredible flexibility and will for sure turn out to be good for the long-term viability of this project (and also provides a path to correct protocol issues in future, if one is found). In other words: Wayland is an amazing foundation to build on, and a lot of its design decisions make a lot of sense! The shift towards people seeing Linux more as an application developer platform, and taking PipeWire and XDG Portals into account when designing for Wayland is also an amazing development and I love to see this this holistic approach is something I always wanted! Furthermore, I think Wayland removes a lot of functionality that shouldn t exist in a modern compositor and that s a good thing too! Some of X11 s features and design decisions had clear drawbacks that we shouldn t replicate. I highly recommend to read Nate s blog post, it s very good and goes into more detail. And due to all of this, I firmly believe that any advancement in the Wayland space must come from within the project.

But! But! Of course there was a but coming I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches. But this also creates problems: By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way. For Nate s Photoshop analogy: Of course Linux does not break Photoshop, it is Adobe s responsibility to port it. But what if Linux was missing a crucial syscall that Photoshop needed for proper functionality and Adobe couldn t port it without that? In that case it becomes much less clear on who is to blame for Photoshop not being available. A lot of Wayland protocol work is focused on the environment and design, while applications and work to port them often is considered less. I think this happens because the overlap between application developers and developers of the desktop environments is not necessarily large, and the overlap with people willing to engage with Wayland upstream is even smaller. The combination of Windows developers porting apps to Linux and having involvement with toolkits or Wayland is pretty much nonexistent. So they have less of a voice.

A quick detour through the neuroscience research lab I have been involved with Freedesktop, GNOME and KDE for an incredibly long time now (more than a decade), but my actual job (besides consulting for Purism) is that of a PhD candidate in a neuroscience research lab (working on the morphology of biological neurons and its relation to behavior). I am mostly involved with three research groups in our institute, which is about 35 people. Most of us do all our data analysis on powerful servers which we connect to using RDP (with KDE Plasma as desktop). Since I joined, I have been pushing the envelope a bit to extend Linux usage to data acquisition and regular clients, and to have our data acquisition hardware interface well with it. Linux brings some unique advantages for use in research, besides the obvious one of having every step of your data management platform introspectable with no black boxes left, a goal I value very highly in research (but this would be its own blogpost). In terms of operating system usage though, most systems are still Windows-based. Windows is what companies develop for, and what people use by default and are familiar with. The choice of operating system is very strongly driven by application availability, and WSL being really good makes this somewhat worse, as it removes the need for people to switch to a real Linux system entirely if there is the occasional software requiring it. Yet, we have a lot more Linux users than before, and use it in many places where it makes sense. I also developed a novel data acquisition software that even runs on Linux-only and uses the abilities of the platform to its fullest extent. All of this resulted in me asking existing software and hardware vendors for Linux support a lot more often. Vendor-customer relationship in science is usually pretty good, and vendors do usually want to help out. Same for open source projects, especially if you offer to do Linux porting work for them But overall, the ease of use and availability of required applications and their usability rules supreme. Most people are not technically knowledgeable and just want to get their research done in the best way possible, getting the best results with the least amount of friction.
KDE/Linux usage at a control station for a particle accelerator at Adlershof Technology Park, Germany, for reference (by 25years of KDE)3

Back to the point The point of that story is this: GNOME, KDE, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu: They all do not matter if the necessary applications are not available for them. And as soon as they are, the easiest-to-use solution wins. There are many facets of easiest : In many cases this is RHEL due to Red Hat support contracts being available, in many other cases it is Ubuntu due to its mindshare and ease of use. KDE Plasma is also frequently seen, as it is perceived a bit easier to onboard Windows users with it (among other benefits). Ultimately, it comes down to applications and 3rd-party support though. Here s a dirty secret: In many cases, porting an application to Linux is not that difficult. The thing that companies (and FLOSS projects too!) struggle with and will calculate the merits of carefully in advance is whether it is worth the support cost as well as continuous QA/testing. Their staff will have to do all of that work, and they could spend that time on other tasks after all. So if they learn that porting to Linux not only means added testing and support, but also means to choose between the legacy X11 display server that allows for 1:1 porting from Windows or the new Wayland compositors that do not support the same features they need, they will quickly consider it not worth the effort at all. I have seen this happen. Of course many apps use a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, which greatly simplifies porting. But this just moves the issue one layer down, as now the toolkit needs to abstract Windows, macOS and Wayland. And Wayland does not contain features to do certain things or does them very differently from e.g. Windows, so toolkits have no way to actually implement the existing functionality in a way that works on all platforms. So in Qt s documentation you will often find texts like works everywhere except for on Wayland compositors or mobile 4. Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.

What s missing?

Window positioning SDI applications with multiple windows are very popular in the scientific world. For data acquisition (for example with microscopes) we often have one monitor with control elements and one larger one with the recorded image. There is also other configurations where multiple signal modalities are acquired, and the experimenter aligns windows exactly in the way they want and expects the layout to be stored and to be loaded upon reopening the application. Even in the image from Adlershof Technology Park above you can see this style of UI design, at mega-scale. Being able to pop-out elements as windows from a single-window application to move them around freely is another frequently used paradigm, and immensely useful with these complex apps. It is important to note that this is not a legacy design, but in many cases an intentional choice these kinds of apps work incredibly well on larger screens or many screens and are very flexible (you can have any window configuration you want, and switch between them using the (usually) great window management abilities of your desktop). Of course, these apps will work terribly on tablets and small form factors, but that is not the purpose they were designed for and nobody would use them that way. I assumed for sure these features would be implemented at some point, but when it became clear that that would not happen, I created the ext-placement protocol which had some good discussion but was ultimately rejected from the xdg namespace. I then tried another solution based on feedback, which turned out not to work for most apps, and now proposed xdg-placement (v2) in an attempt to maybe still get some protocol done that we can agree on, exploring more options before pushing the existing protocol for inclusion into the ext Wayland protocol namespace. Meanwhile though, we can not port any application that needs this feature, while at the same time we are switching desktops and distributions to Wayland by default.

Window position restoration Similarly, a protocol to save & restore window positions was already proposed in 2018, 6 years ago now, but it has still not been agreed upon, and may not even help multiwindow apps in its current form. The absence of this protocol means that applications can not restore their former window positions, and the user has to move them to their previous place again and again. Meanwhile, toolkits can not adopt these protocols and applications can not use them and can not be ported to Wayland without introducing papercuts.

Window icons Similarly, individual windows can not set their own icons, and not-installed applications can not have an icon at all because there is no desktop-entry file to load the icon from and no icon in the theme for them. You would think this is a niche issue, but for applications that create many windows, providing icons for them so the user can find them is fairly important. Of course it s not the end of the world if every window has the same icon, but it s one of those papercuts that make the software slightly less user-friendly. Even applications with fewer windows like LibrePCB are affected, so much so that they rather run their app through Xwayland for now. I decided to address this after I was working on data analysis of image data in a Python virtualenv, where my code and the Python libraries used created lots of windows all with the default yellow W icon, making it impossible to distinguish them at a glance. This is xdg-toplevel-icon now, but of course it is an uphill battle where the very premise of needing this is questioned. So applications can not use it yet.

Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols Firefox has a picture-in-picture feature, allowing it to pop out media from a mediaplayer as separate floating window so the user can watch the media while doing other things. On X11 this is easily realized, but on Wayland the restrictions posed on windows necessitate a different solution. The xdg-pip protocol was proposed for this specialized usecase, but it is also not merged yet. So this feature does not work as well on Wayland.

Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation Automation of GUI tasks is a powerful feature, so is the ability to auto-test GUIs. This is being worked on, with libei and wlheadless-run (and stuff like ydotool exists too), but we re not fully there yet.

Wayland is frustrating for (some) application authors As you see, there is valid applications and valid usecases that can not be ported yet to Wayland with the same feature range they enjoyed on X11, Windows or macOS. So, from an application author s perspective, Wayland does break things quite significantly, because things that worked before can no longer work and Wayland (the whole stack) does not provide any avenue to achieve the same result. Wayland does break screen sharing, global hotkeys, gaming latency (via no tearing ) etc, however for all of these there are solutions available that application authors can port to. And most developers will gladly do that work, especially since the newer APIs are usually a lot better and more robust. But if you give application authors no path forward except use Xwayland and be on emulation as second-class citizen forever , it just results in very frustrated application developers. For some application developers, switching to a Wayland compositor is like buying a canvas from the Linux shop that forces your brush to only draw triangles. But maybe for your avant-garde art, you need to draw a circle. You can approximate one with triangles, but it will never be as good as the artwork of your friends who got their canvases from the Windows or macOS art supply shop and have more freedom to create their art.

Triangles are proven to be the best shape! If you are drawing circles you are creating bad art! Wayland, via its protocol limitations, forces a certain way to build application UX often for the better, but also sometimes to the detriment of users and applications. The protocols are often fairly opinionated, a result of the lessons learned from X11. In any case though, it is the odd one out Windows and macOS do not pose the same limitations (for better or worse!), and the effort to port to Wayland is orders of magnitude bigger, or sometimes in case of the multiwindow UI paradigm impossible to achieve to the same level of polish. Desktop environments of course have a design philosophy that they want to push, and want applications to integrate as much as possible (same as macOS and Windows!). However, there are many applications out there, and pushing a design via protocol limitations will likely just result in fewer apps.

The porting dilemma I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues. Many scientists do not even understand why their Python script that creates some GUIs suddenly behaves weirdly because Qt is now using the Wayland backend on Ubuntu instead of X11. They do not know the difference and also do not want to deal with these details even though they may be programmers as well, the real goal is not to fiddle with the display server, but to get to a scientific result somehow. Another issue is portability layers like Wine which need to run Windows applications as-is on Wayland. Apparently Wine s Wayland driver has some heuristics to make window positioning work (and I am amazed by the work done on this!), but that can only go so far.

A way out? So, how would we actually solve this? Fundamentally, this excessively long blog post boils down to just one essential question: Do we want to force applications to submit to a UX paradigm unconditionally, potentially loosing out on application ports or keeping apps on X11 eternally, or do we want to throw them some rope to get as many applications ported over to Wayland, even through we might sacrifice some protocol purity? I think we really have to answer that to make the discussions on wayland-protocols a lot less grueling. This question can be answered at the wayland-protocols level, but even more so it must be answered by the individual desktops and compositors. If the answer for your environment turns out to be Yes, we want the Wayland protocol to be more opinionated and will not make any compromises for application portability , then your desktop/compositor should just immediately NACK protocols that add something like this and you simply shouldn t engage in the discussion, as you reject the very premise of the new protocol: That it has any merit to exist and is needed in the first place. In this case contributors to Wayland and application authors also know where you stand, and a lot of debate is skipped. Of course, if application authors want to support your environment, you are basically asking them now to rewrite their UI, which they may or may not do. But at least they know what to expect and how to target your environment. If the answer turns out to be We do want some portability , the next question obviously becomes where the line should be drawn and which changes are acceptable and which aren t. We can t blindly copy all X11 behavior, some porting work to Wayland is simply inevitable. Some written rules for that might be nice, but probably more importantly, if you agree fundamentally that there is an issue to be fixed, please engage in the discussions for the respective MRs! We for sure do not want to repeat X11 mistakes, and I am certain that we can implement protocols which provide the required functionality in a way that is a nice compromise in allowing applications a path forward into the Wayland future, while also being as good as possible and improving upon X11. For example, the toplevel-icon proposal is already a lot better than anything X11 ever had. Relaxing ACK requirements for the ext namespace is also a good proposed administrative change, as it allows some compositors to add features they want to support to the shared repository easier, while also not mandating them for others. In my opinion, it would allow for a lot less friction between the two different ideas of how Wayland protocol development should work. Some compositors could move forward and support more protocol extensions, while more restrictive compositors could support less things. Applications can detect supported protocols at launch and change their behavior accordingly (ideally even abstracted by toolkits). You may now say that a lot of apps are ported, so surely this issue can not be that bad. And yes, what Wayland provides today may be enough for 80-90% of all apps. But what I hope the detour into the research lab has done is convince you that this smaller percentage of apps matters. A lot. And that it may be worthwhile to support them. To end on a positive note: When it came to porting concrete apps over to Wayland, the only real showstoppers so far5 were the missing window-positioning and window-position-restore features. I encountered them when porting my own software, and I got the issue as feedback from colleagues and fellow engineers. In second place was UI testing and automation support, the window-icon issue was mentioned twice, but being a cosmetic issue it likely simply hurts people less and they can ignore it easier. What this means is that the majority of apps are already fine, and many others are very, very close! A Wayland future for everyone is within our grasp! I will also bring my two protocol MRs to their conclusion for sure, because as application developers we need clarity on what the platform (either all desktops or even just a few) supports and will or will not support in future. And the only way to get something good done is by contribution and friendly discussion.

Footnotes
  1. Apologies for the clickbait-y title it comes with the subject
  2. When I talk about Wayland I mean the combined set of display server protocols and accepted protocol extensions, unless otherwise clarified.
  3. I would have picked a picture from our lab, but that would have needed permission first
  4. Qt has awesome platform issues pages, like for macOS and Linux/X11 which help with porting efforts, but Qt doesn t even list Linux/Wayland as supported platform. There is some information though, like window geometry peculiarities, which aren t particularly helpful when porting (but still essential to know).
  5. Besides issues with Nvidia hardware CUDA for simulations and machine-learning is pretty much everywhere, so Nvidia cards are common, which causes trouble on Wayland still. It is improving though.

9 January 2024

Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian

Posted on March 12, 2022
Tags: debian
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features. I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debian bullseye. Now lsp-java is waiting in the NEW queue. I m always worried about downloading and executing binaries from random places of the internet. It should be a matter of hygiene to only run binaries from official Debian repositories. Unfortunately this is not feasible when programming and many people don t see a problem with running multiple curl-sh pipes to set up their programming environment. I prefer to do such stuff only in virtual machines. With Emacs and LSP I can finally have a lightweight textmode programming environment even for Java. Unfortunately the lsp-java mode does not yet work over tramp. Once this is solved, I could run emacs on my host and only isolate the code and language server inside the VM. The next step would be to also keep the code on the host and mount it with Virtio FS in the VM. But so far the necessary daemon is not yet in Debian (RFP: #1007152). In Detail I uploaded these packages:

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2023 A Musical Retrospective

I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :) Albums In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available. Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly O !) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montr al Skinhead/Punk concert scene.
Nechochwen - Kanawha Black
Nansarunai - Ruins of the Moonlight Temple
Sonja - Loud Arriver
Sigh - Shiki
The Otolith - Folium Limina
Helm - Culture, bravade et m lancolie
Aurora - All My Demons Greeting Me As a Friend
Moonsorrow - Jumalten Aika
High Command - Eclipse of the Dual Moons
Trial - Feed the Fire
Kampfar - Til Klovers Takt
Second to Sun - Nocturnal Philosophy
Lei a - Reue
FROZEN DAWN - The Decline of the Enlightened Gods
OAK - Disintegrate
Carnosus - Visions of Infinihility
KAUAN - ATM Revised
Chick Corea - Crystal Silence
Chick Corea - Light as a Feather
Chick Corea - Children's Songs
Komitern Sect - Des jours plus durs que d'autres
Alexandra Str liski - N o-Romance
Brigada Flores Magon - IMMORTELS
Brigada Flores Magon - S-T
Makeup and Vanity Set - Wavefinder
22 Longs Riffs - Balle Populaire
Esclaves Salari s - a augure mal
Wind Rose - Wintersag
Wind Rose - Warfront
Ultra Razzia - Jusqu'au bout de la nuit
Ultra Razzia - La D mo
La Gachette - travers le temps
Jinjer - Macro
Jinjer - Wallflowers
Mastodon - Leviathan
Mastodon - The Hunter
Hold a Grudge - No Compromise
Total Nada - Total Nada E.P
BLEMISH - BLEMISH
Hold a Grudge - Hold a Grudge
Hold a Grudge - Doing Time
Ch rogne - TRIGGER WARNING
CUIR - ALBUM
Lucifer - Lucifer IV
Coven - Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls
Guernica - crasez vos r ves
RANCO UR - RANC UR
RANCO UR - LAME EN PEINE
Jeremy Dutcher - Motewolonuwok
22 Longs Riffs - bout portant
Street Code - Street Code
Los Tabascos - Sous lacrymos et les pav s
GODTHRYMM - Distortions
Horrendous - Ontological Mysterium
CRAN - Nat
B ton Arm - Au bord du gouffre
B ton Arm - Second Souffle
Force Majeure - Encore Debout
Claimed Choice - Claimed Choice
Claimed Choice - We Won't Give in
Syndrome 81 - Prisons Imaginaires
Sodomisery - Mazzaroth
V A N I S H I N G K I D S - Miracle of Death
WAYFARER - American Gothic
Fire in the Distance - Air Not Meant For Us
Megaton Sword - Might & Power
Krigsgrav - Fires in the Fall
Unto Others - Strenght II ...Deep Cuts
Sworn - A Journey Told through Fire
Ne Obliviscaris - Exul
Svalbard - The Weight of the Mask
By Fire and Sword - Glory
Angelic Upstarts - Who Killed Liddle?
Concerts A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month... Here are the concerts I went to in 2023: Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montr al underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :) That's it for 2023!

8 January 2024

Antoine Beaupr : Last year on this blog

So this blog is now celebrating its 21st birthday (or 20 if you count from zero, or 18 if you want to be pedantic), and I figured I would do this yearly thing of reviewing how that went.

Number of posts 2022 was the official 20th anniversary in any case, and that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison, was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened! Well, I was busy with other things, mostly away from keyboard, that I will not bore you with here... The other thing that happened is that the one-liner I used to collect stats was broken (it counted folders and other unrelated files) and wildly overestimated 2022! Turns out I didn't write that much then: 
anarc.at$ ls blog   grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*.md'   se
d s/-.*//   sort   uniq -c    sort -n -k2
     57 2005
     43 2006
     20 2007
     20 2008
      7 2009
     13 2010
     16 2011
     11 2012
     13 2013
      5 2014
     13 2015
     18 2016
     29 2017
     27 2018
     17 2019
     18 2020
     14 2021
     28 2022
     10 2023
      1 2024
But even that is inaccurate because, in ikiwiki, I can tag any page as being featured on the blog. So we actually need to process the HTML itself because we don't have much better on hand without going through ikiwiki's internals: 
anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c 
     56 2005
     42 2006
     19 2007
     18 2008
      6 2009
     12 2010
     15 2011
     10 2012
     11 2013
      3 2014
     15 2015
     32 2016
     50 2017
     37 2018
     19 2019
     19 2020
     15 2021
     28 2022
     13 2023
Which puts the top 10 years at: 
$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c    sort -nr   head -10
     56 2005
     50 2017
     42 2006
     37 2018
     32 2016
     28 2022
     19 2020
     19 2019
     19 2007
     18 2008
Anyway. 2023 is certainly not a glorious year in that regard, in any case.

Visitors In terms of visits, however, we had quite a few hits. According to Goatcounter, I had 122 300 visits in 2023! 2022, in comparison, had 89 363, so that's quite a rise.

What you read I seem to have hit the Hacker News front page at least twice. I say "seem" because it's actually pretty hard to tell what the HN frontpage actually is on any given day. I had 22k visits on 2023-03-13, in any case, and you can't see me on the front that day. We do see a post of mine on 2023-09-02, all the way down there, which seem to have generated another 10k visits. In any case, here were the most popular stories for you fine visitors:
  • Framework 12th gen laptop review: 24k visits, which is surprising for a 13k words article "without images", as some critics have complained. 15k referred by Hacker News. Good reference and time-consuming benchmarks, slowly bit-rotting. That is, by far, my most popular article ever. A popular article in 2021 or 2022 was around 6k to 9k, so that's a big one. I suspect it will keep getting traffic for a long while.
  • Calibre replacement considerations: 15k visits, most of which without a referrer. Was actually an old article, but I suspect HN brought it back to light. I keep updating that wiki page regularly when I find new things, but I'm still using Calibre to import ebooks.
  • Hacking my Kobo Clara HD: is not new but always gathering more and more hits, it had 1800 hits in the first year, 4600 hits last year and now brought 6400 visitors to the blog! Not directly related, but this iFixit battery replacement guide I wrote also seem to be quite popular
Everything else was published before 2023. Replacing Smokeping with Prometheus is still around and Looking at Wayland terminal emulators makes an entry in the top five.

Where you've been People send less and less private information when they browse the web. The number of visitors without referrers was 41% in 2021, it rose to 44% in 2023. Most of the remaining traffic comes from Google, but Hacker News is now a significant chunk, almost as big as Google. In 2021, Google represented 23% of my traffic, in 2022, it was down to 15% so 18% is actually a rise from last year, even if it seems much smaller than what I usually think of.
Ratio Referrer Visits
18% Google 22 098
13% Hacker News 16 003
2% duckduckgo.com 2 640
1% community.frame.work 1 090
1% missing.csail.mit.edu 918
Note that Facebook and Twitter do not appear at all in my referrers.

Where you are Unsurprisingly, most visits still come from the US:
Ratio Country Visits
26% United States 32 010
14% France 17 046
10% Germany 11 650
6% Canada 7 425
5% United Kingdom 6 473
3% Netherlands 3 436
Those ratios are nearly identical to last year, but quite different from 2021, where Germany and France were more or less reversed. Back in 2021, I mentioned there was a long tail of countries with at least one visit, with 160 countries listed. I expanded that and there's now 182 countries in that list, almost all of the 193 member states in the UN.

What you were Chrome's dominance continues to expand, even on readers of this blog, gaining two percentage points from Firefox compared to 2021.
Ratio Browser Visits
49% Firefox 60 126
36% Chrome 44 052
14% Safari 17 463
1% Others N/A
It seems like, unfortunately, my Lynx and Haiku users have not visited in the past year. It seems like trying to read those metrics is like figuring out tea leaves... In terms of operating systems:
Ratio OS Visits
28% Linux 34 010
23% macOS 28 728
21% Windows 26 303
17% Android 20 614
10% iOS 11 741
Again, Linux and Mac are over-represented, and Android and iOS are under-represented.

What is next I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world... So anyway, thanks for coming, faithful reader, and see you in the coming 2024 year...

6 January 2024

Valhalla's Things: Blog updates

Posted on January 6, 2024
Tags: madeof:bits, meta
After just a tiny1 delay I ve finally added support for tags to this blog. In the next few days I may go back and add / change tags to the older posts, or I may not, I ll decide. Also, I still need to render a tag cloud somewhere; maybe it will happen soon, maybe it will take another year. :D I hope I ve also succesfully worked around the bug in Friendica where the src for images got deleted instead of properly converted. The logo of this blog, just to see whether a random image is shown on Friendica and the Fediverse.
  1. less than one year!

5 January 2024

Valhalla's Things: Random Sashiko + Crazy Quilt Pocket

Posted on January 5, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms
A 18th century pocket in black jeans with a random pattern of pink running stitches forming squares and other shapes. The unfinished edges of the pieces of jeans can be seen, running more or less diagonally. Lately I ve seen people on the internet talking about victorian crazy quilting. Years ago I had watched a Numberphile video about Hitomezashi Stitch Patterns based on numbers, words or randomness. Few weeks ago I had cut some fabric piece out of an old pair of jeans and I had a lot of scraps that were too small to do anything useful on their own. It easy to see where this can go, right? The wrong side of a pocket piece, showing a light coloured fabric with a grid drawn in pencil, a line of small stitches all around the edges and a mess of thread ends left hanging. I cut a pocket shape out of old garment mockups (this required some piecing), drew a square grid, arranged scraps of jeans to cover the other side, kept everything together with a lot of pins, carefully avoided basting anything, and started covering everything in sashiko / hitomezashi stitches, starting each line with a stitch on the front or the back of the work based on the result of: 
import random
random.choice(["front", "back"])
The wrong side of the other pocket piece, with just three lines of stitching and a piece of paper to mark the pattern. There are bits of jeans peeking out of the sides. For the second piece I tried to use a piece of paper with the square grid instead of drawing it on the fabric: it worked, mostly, I would not do it again as removing the paper was more of a hassle than drawing the lines in the first place. I suspected it, but had to try it anyway. The front of the pocket seen from the wrong side, with a machine seam around the lit, whose end has been cut in a triangle so that it can be turned. Then I added a lining from some plain black cotton from the stash; for the slit I put the lining on the front right sides together, sewn at 2 mm from the marked slit, cut it, turned the lining to the back side, pressed and then topstitched as close as possible to the slit from the front. The finished pocket attached to a belt made from the waistband of a pair of jeans (with button, buttonhole and belt loops still attached) whose raw edges (left when unpicking away the jeans) have been sewn shut by hand. I bound everything with bias tape, adding herringbone tape loops at the top to hang it from a belt (such as one made from the waistband of one of the donor pair of jeans) and that was it. The back of the pocket, showing another random pattern in two different shades of pink for the vertical and horizontal lines of stitching. I like the way the result feels; maybe it s a bit too stiff for a pocket, but I can see it work very well for a bigger bag, and maybe even a jacket or some other outer garment.

1 January 2024

Petter Reinholdtsen: Welcome out of prison, Mickey, hope you find some freedom!

Today, the animation figure Mickey Mouse finally was released from the corporate copyright prison, as the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in USA. This movie was the first public appearance of Mickey Mouse. Sadly the figure is still on probation, thanks to trademark laws and a the Disney corporations powerful pack of lawyers, as described in the 2017 article in "How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain" from Priceonomics. On the positive side, the primary driver for repeated extentions of the duration of copyright has been Disney thanks to Mickey Mouse and the 2028 movie, and as it now in the public domain I hope it will cause less urge to extend the already unreasonable long copyright duration. The first book I published, the 2004 book "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig, published 2015 in English, French and Norwegian Bokm l, touch on the story of Disney pushed for extending the copyright duration in USA. It is a great book explaining problems with the current copyright regime and why we need Creative Commons movement, and I strongly recommend everyone to read it. This movie (with IMDB ID tt0019422) is now available from the Internet Archive. Two copies have been uploaded so far, one uploaded 2015-11-04 (torrent) and the other 2023-01-01 (torrent) - see VLC bittorrent plugin for streaming the video using the torrent link. I am very happy to see the number of public domain movies increasing. I look forward to when those are the majority. Perhaps it will reduce the urge of the copyright industry to control its customers. A more comprehensive list of works entering the public domain in 2024 is available from the Public Domain Review. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tim Retout: Prevent DOM-XSS with Trusted Types - a smarter DevSecOps approach

It can be incredibly easy for a frontend developer to accidentally write a client-side cross-site-scripting (DOM-XSS) security issue, and yet these are hard for security teams to detect. Vulnerability scanners are slow, and suffer from false positives. Can smarter collaboration between development, operations and security teams provide a way to eliminate these problems altogether? Google claims that Trusted Types has all but eliminated DOM-XSS exploits on those of their sites which have implemented it. Let s find out how this can work!

DOM-XSS vulnerabilities are easy to write, but hard for security teams to catch It is very easy to accidentally introduce a client-side XSS problem. As an example of what not to do, suppose you are setting an element s text to the current URL, on the client side: 
// Don't do this
para.innerHTML = location.href;
Unfortunately, an attacker can now manipulate the URL (and e.g. send this link in a phishing email), and any HTML tags they add will be interpreted by the user s browser. This could potentially be used by the attacker to send private data to a different server. Detecting DOM-XSS using vulnerability scanning tools is challenging - typically this requires crawling each page of the website and attempting to detect problems such as the one above, but there is a significant risk of false positives, especially as the complexity of the logic increases. There are already ways to avoid these exploits developers should validate untrusted input before making use of it. There are libraries such as DOMPurify which can help with sanitization.1 However, if you are part of a security team with responsibility for preventing these issues, it can be complex to understand whether you are at risk. Different developer teams may be using different techniques and tools. It may be impossible for you to work closely with every developer so how can you know that the frontend team have used these libraries correctly?

Trusted Types closes the DevSecOps feedback loop for DOM-XSS, by allowing Ops and Security to verify good Developer practices Trusted Types enforces sanitization in the browser2, by requiring the web developer to assign a particular kind of JavaScript object rather than a native string to .innerHTML and other dangerous properties. Provided these special types are created in an appropriate way, then they can be trusted not to expose XSS problems. This approach will work with whichever tools the frontend developers have chosen to use, and detection of issues can be rolled out by infrastructure engineers without requiring frontend code changes.

Content Security Policy allows enforcement of security policies in the browser itself Because enforcing this safer approach in the browser for all websites would break backwards-compatibility, each website must opt-in through Content Security Policy headers. Content Security Policy (CSP) is a mechanism that allows web pages to restrict what actions a browser should execute on their page, and a way for the site to receive reports if the policy is violated. Diagram showing a browser communicating with a web server. Content-Security-Policy headers are returned by the URL “/”, and the browser reports any security violations to “/csp”. Figure 1: Content-Security-Policy browser communication This is revolutionary, because it allows servers to receive feedback in real time on errors that may be appearing in the browser s console.

Trusted Types can be rolled out incrementally, with continuous feedback Web.dev s article on Trusted Types explains how to safely roll out the feature using the features of CSP itself:
  • Deploy a CSP collector if you haven t already
  • Switch on CSP reports without enforcement (via Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only headers)
  • Iteratively review and fix the violations
  • Switch to enforcing mode when there are a low enough rate of reports
Static analysis in a continuous integration pipeline is also sensible you want to prevent regressions shipping in new releases before they trigger a flood of CSP reports. This will also give you a chance of finding any low-traffic vulnerable pages.

Smart security teams will use techniques like Trusted Types to eliminate entire classes of bugs at a time Rather than playing whack-a-mole with unreliable vulnerability scanning or bug bounties, techniques such as Trusted Types are truly in the spirit of Secure by Design build high quality in from the start of the engineering process, and do this in a way which closes the DevSecOps feedback loop between your Developer, Operations and Security teams.
  1. Sanitization libraries are especially needed when the examples become more complex, e.g. if the application must manipulate the input. DOMPurify version 1.0.9 also added Trusted Types support, so can still be used to help developers adopt this feature.
  2. Trusted Types has existed in Chrome and Edge since 2020, and should soon be coming to Firefox as well. However, it s not necessary to wait for Firefox or Safari to add support, because the large market share of Chrome and Edge will let you identify and fix your site s DOM-XSS issues, even if you do not set enforcing mode, and users of all browsers will benefit. Even so, it is great that Mozilla is now on board.

31 December 2023

Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2023

This post should have marked the beginning of my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies I read and watched in 2023. However, due to coming down with a nasty bout of flu recently and other sundry commitments, I wasn't able to undertake writing the necessary four or five blog posts In lieu of this, however, I will simply present my (unordered and unadorned) highlights for now. Do get in touch if this (or any of my previous posts) have spurred you into picking something up yourself

Books

Peter Watts: Blindsight (2006) Reymer Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (2006) Joanne McNeil: Lurking: How a Person Became a User (2020) J. L. Carr: A Month in the Country (1980) Hilary Mantel: A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (2023) Adam Higginbotham: Midnight in Chernobyl (2019) Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008) Peter Apps: Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen (2021) Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City (2003)

Films Recent releases

Unenjoyable experiences included Alejandro G mez Monteverde's Sound of Freedom (2023), Alex Garland's Men (2022) and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022).
Older releases (Films released before 2022, and not including rewatches from previous years.) Distinctly unenjoyable watches included Ocean's Eleven (1960), El Topo (1970), L olo (1992), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Bulworth (1998) and and The Big Red One (1980).

Iustin Pop: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! Goodbye 2023: you were a difficult year. Along multiple axes. Learned new things, learned not pleasant things, and mostly failed at becoming better. Hello 2024: I m hoping I can do better in the coming year. We ll see. My goal list is quite long, and ambitious. But all plans meet reality at one point, so who knows where 2024 will end. In any case - wishing all good people health, wisdom, and a good year.

29 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Afterward

Review: The Afterward, by E.K. Johnston
Publisher: Dutton Books
Copyright: February 2019
Printing: 2020
ISBN: 0-7352-3190-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 339
The Afterward is a standalone young adult high fantasy with a substantial romance component. The title is not misspelled. Sir Erris and her six companions, matching the number of the new gods, were successful in their quest for the godsgem. They defeated the Old God and destroyed Him forever, freeing King Dorrenta from his ensorcellment, and returned in triumph to Cadrium to live happily ever after. Or so the story goes. Sir Erris and three of the companions are knights. Another companion is the best mage in the kingdom. Kalanthe Ironheart, who distracted the Old God at a critical moment and allowed Sir Erris to strike, is only an apprentice due to her age, but surely will become a great knight. And then there is Olsa Rhetsdaughter, the lowborn thief, now somewhat mockingly called Thief of the Realm for all the good that does her. The reward was enough for her to buy her freedom from the Thief's Court. It was not enough to pay for food after that, or enough for her to change her profession, and the Thief's Court no longer has any incentive to give her easy (or survivable) assignments. Kalanthe is in a considerably better position, but she still needs a good marriage. Her reward paid off half of her debt, which broadens her options, but she's still a debt-knight, liable for the full cost of her training once she reaches the age of nineteen. She's mostly made her peace with the decisions she made given her family's modest means, but marriages of that type are usually for heirs, and Kalanthe is not looking forward to bearing a child. Or, for that matter, sleeping with a man. Olsa and Kalanthe fell in love during the Quest. Given Kalanthe's debt and the way it must be paid, and her iron-willed determination to keep vows, neither of them expected their relationship to survive the end of the Quest. Both of them wish that it had. The hook is that this novel picks up after the epic fantasy quest is over and everyone went home. This is not an entirely correct synopsis; chapters of The Afterward alternate between "After" and "Before" (and one chapter delightfully titled "More or less the exact moment of"), and by the end of the book we get much of the story of the Quest. It's not told from the perspective of the lead heroes, though; it's told by following Kalanthe and Olsa, who would be firmly relegated to supporting characters in a typical high fantasy. And it's largely told through the lens of their romance. This is not the best fantasy novel I've read, but I had a fun time with it. I am now curious about the intended audience and marketing, though. It was published by a YA imprint, and both the ages of the main characters and the general theme of late teenagers trying to chart a course in an adult world match that niche. But it's also clearly intended for readers who have read enough epic fantasy quests that they will both be amused by the homage and not care that the story elides a lot of the typical details. Anyone who read David Eddings at an impressionable age will enjoy the way Johnston pokes gentle fun at The Belgariad (this book is dedicated to David and Leigh Eddings), but surely the typical reader of YA fantasy these days isn't also reading Eddings. I'm therefore not quite sure who this book was for, but apparently that group included me. Johnston thankfully is not on board with the less savory parts of Eddings's writing, as you might have guessed from the sapphic romance. There is no obnoxious gender essentialism here, although there do appear to be gender roles that I never quite figured out. Knights are referred to as sir, but all of the knights in this story are women. Men still seem to run a lot of things (kingdoms, estates, mage colleges), but apart from the mage, everyone on the Quest was female, and there seems to be an expectation that women go out into the world and have adventures while men stay home. I'm not sure if there was an underlying system that escaped me, or if Johnston just mixed things up for the hell of it. (If the latter, I approve.) This book does suffer a bit from addressing some current-day representation issues without managing to fold them naturally into the story or setting. One of the Quest knights is transgender, something that's revealed in a awkward couple of paragraphs and then never mentioned again. Two of the characters have a painfully earnest conversation about the word "bisexual," complete with a strained attempt at in-universe etymology. Racial diversity (Olsa is black, and Kalanthe is also not white) seemed to be handled a bit better, although I am not the reader to notice if the discussions of hair maintenance were similarly awkward. This is way better than no representation and default-white characters, to be clear, but it felt a bit shoehorned in at times and could have used some more polish. These are quibbles, though. Olsa was the heart of the book for me, and is exactly the sort of character I like to read about. Kalanthe is pure stubborn paladin, but I liked her more and more as the story continued. She provides a good counterbalance to Olsa's natural chaos. I do wish Olsa had more opportunities to show her own competence (she's not a very good thief, she's just the thief that Sir Erris happened to know), but the climax of the story was satisfying. My main grumble is that I badly wanted to dwell on the happily-ever-after for at least another chapter, ideally two. Johnston was done with the story before I was. The writing was serviceable but not great and there are some bits that I don't think would stand up to a strong poke, but the characters carried the story for me. Recommended if you'd like some sapphic romance and lightweight class analysis complicating your Eddings-style quest fantasy. Rating: 7 out of 10

28 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Nettle & Bone

Review: Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-250-24403-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 242
Nettle & Bone is a standalone fantasy novel with fairy tale vibes. T. Kingfisher is a pen name for Ursula Vernon. As the book opens, Marra is giving herself a blood infection by wiring together dog bones out of a charnel pit. This is the second of three impossible tasks that she was given by the dust-wife. Completing all three will give her the tools to kill a prince. I am a little cautious of which T. Kingfisher books I read since she sometimes writes fantasy and sometimes writes horror and I don't get along with horror. This one seemed a bit horrific in the marketing, so I held off on reading it despite the Hugo nomination. It turns out to be just on the safe side of my horror tolerance, with only a couple of parts that I read a bit quickly. One of those is the opening, which I am happy to report does not set the tone for the rest of the book. Marra starts the story in a wasteland full of disease, madmen, and cannibals (who, in typical Ursula Vernon fashion, turn out to be nicer than the judgmental assholes outside of the blistered land). She doesn't stay there long. By chapter two, the story moves on to flashbacks explaining how Marra ended up there, alternating with further (and less horrific) steps in her quest to kill the prince of the Northern Kingdom. Marra is a princess of a small, relatively poor coastal kingdom with a good harbor and acquisitive neighbors. Her mother, the queen, has protected the kingdom through arranged marriage of her daughters to the prince of the Northern Kingdom, who rules it in all but name given the mental deterioration of his father the king. Marra's eldest sister Damia was first, but she died suddenly and mysteriously in a fall. (If you're thinking about the way women are injured by "accident," you have the right idea.) Kania, the middle sister, is next to marry; she lives, but not without cost. Meanwhile, Marra is sent off to a convent to ensure that there are no complicating potential heirs, and to keep her on hand as a spare. I won't spoil the entire backstory, but you do learn it all. Marra is a typical Kingfisher protagonist: a woman who is way out of her depth who persists with stubbornness, curiosity, and innate decency because what else is there to do? She accumulates the typical group of misfits and oddballs common in Kingfisher's quest fantasies, characters that in the Chosen One male fantasy would be supporting characters at best. The bone-wife is a delight; her chicken is even better. There are fairy godmothers and a goblin market and a tooth extraction that was one of the creepiest things I've read without actually being horror. It is, in short, a Kingfisher fantasy novel, with a touch more horror than average but not enough to push it out of the fantasy genre. I think my favorite part of this book was not the main quest. It was the flashback scenes set in the convent, where Marra has the space (and the mentorship) to develop her sense of self.
"We're a mystery religion," said the abbess, when she'd had a bit more wine than usual, "for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but [the goddess] doesn't seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor."
If you have read any other Kingfisher novels, much of this will be familiar: the speculative asides, the dogged determination, the slightly askew nature of the world, the vibes-based world-building that feels more like a fairy tale than a carefully constructed magic system, and the sense that the main characters (and nearly all of the supporting characters) are average people trying to play the hands they were dealt as ethically as they can. You will know that the tentative and woman-initiated romance is coming as soon as the party meets the paladin type who is almost always the romantic interest in one of these books. The emotional tone of the book is a bit predictable for regular readers, but Ursula Vernon's brain is such a delightful place to spend some time that I don't mind.
Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died.
Nettle & Bone won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2023. I'm not sure why this specific T. Kingfisher novel won and not any of the half-dozen earlier novels she's written in a similar style, but sure, I have no objections. I'm glad one of them won; they're all worth reading and hopefully that will help more people discover this delightful style of fantasy that doesn't feel like what anyone else is doing. Recommended, although be prepared for a few more horror touches than normal and a rather grim first chapter. Content warnings: domestic abuse. The dog... lives? Is equally as alive at the end of the book as it was at the end of the first chapter? The dog does not die; I'll just leave it at that. (Neither does the chicken.) Rating: 8 out of 10

27 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: A Study in Scarlet

Review: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Series: Sherlock Holmes #1
Publisher: AmazonClassics
Copyright: 1887
Printing: February 2018
ISBN: 1-5039-5525-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 159
A Study in Scarlet is the short mystery novel (probably a novella, although I didn't count words) that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to invoke the 100-year-rule and discuss the plot of this book rather freely on the grounds that even someone who (like me prior to a few days ago) has not yet read it is probably not that invested in avoiding all spoilers. If you do want to remain entirely unspoiled, exercise caution before reading on. I had somehow managed to avoid ever reading anything by Arthur Conan Doyle, not even a short story. I therefore couldn't be sure that some of the assertions I was making in my review of A Study in Honor were correct. Since A Study in Scarlet would be quick to read, I decided on a whim to do a bit of research and grab a free copy of the first Holmes novel. Holmes is such a part of English-speaking culture that I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. This was largely true, but cultural osmosis had somehow not prepared me for the surprise Mormons. A Study in Scarlet establishes the basic parameters of a Holmes story: Dr. James Watson as narrator, the apartment he shares with Holmes at 221B Baker Street, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's competition with police detectives, and his penchant for making leaps of logical deduction from subtle clues. The story opens with Watson meeting Holmes, agreeing to split the rent of a flat, and being baffled by the apparent randomness of Holmes's fields of study before Holmes reveals he's a consulting detective. The first case is a murder: a man is found dead in an abandoned house, without a mark on him although there are blood splatters on the walls and the word "RACHE" written in blood. Since my only prior exposure to Holmes was from cultural references and a few TV adaptations, there were a few things that surprised me. One is that Holmes is voluble and animated rather than aloof. Doyle is clearly going for passionate eccentric rather than calculating mastermind. Another is that he is intentionally and unabashedly ignorant on any topic not related to solving mysteries.
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you chose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
This is directly contrary to my expectation that the best way to make leaps of deduction is to know something about a huge range of topics so that one can draw unexpected connections, particularly given the puzzle-box construction and odd details so beloved in classic mysteries. I'm now curious if Doyle stuck with this conception, and if there were any later mysteries that involved astronomy. Speaking of classic mysteries, A Study in Scarlet isn't quite one, although one can see the shape of the genre to come. Doyle does not "play fair" by the rules that have not yet been invented. Holmes at most points knows considerably more than the reader, including bits of evidence that are not described until Holmes describes them and research that Holmes does off-camera and only reveals when he wants to be dramatic. This is not the sort of story where the reader is encouraged to try to figure out the mystery before the detective. Rather, what Doyle seems to be aiming for, and what Watson attempts (unsuccessfully) as the reader surrogate, is slightly different: once Holmes makes one of his grand assertions, the reader is encouraged to guess what Holmes might have done to arrive at that conclusion. Doyle seems to want the reader to guess technique rather than outcome, while providing only vague clues in general descriptions of Holmes's behavior at a crime scene. The structure of this story is quite odd. The first part is roughly what you would expect: first-person narration from Watson, supposedly taken from his journals but not at all in the style of a journal and explicitly written for an audience. Part one concludes with Holmes capturing and dramatically announcing the name of the killer, who the reader has never heard of before. Part two then opens with... a western?
In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout the grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged ca ons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery.
First, I have issues with the geography. That region contains some of the most beautiful areas on earth, and while a lot of that region is arid, describing it primarily as a repulsive desert is a bit much. Doyle's boundaries and distances are also confusing: the Yellowstone is a northeast-flowing river with its source in Wyoming, so the area between it and the Colorado does not extend to the Sierra Nevadas (or even to Utah), and it's not entirely clear to me that he realizes Nevada exists. This is probably what it's like for people who live anywhere else in the world when US authors write about their country. But second, there's no Holmes, no Watson, and not even the pretense of a transition from the detective novel that we were just reading. Doyle just launches into a random western with an omniscient narrator. It features a lean, grizzled man and an adorable child that he adopts and raises into a beautiful free spirit, who then falls in love with a wild gold-rush adventurer. This was written about 15 years before the first critically recognized western novel, so I can't blame Doyle for all the cliches here, but to a modern reader all of these characters are straight from central casting. Well, except for the villains, who are the Mormons. By that, I don't mean that the villains are Mormon. I mean Brigham Young is the on-page villain, plotting against the hero to force his adopted daughter into a Mormon harem (to use the word that Doyle uses repeatedly) and ruling Salt Lake City with an iron hand, border guards with passwords (?!), and secret police. This part of the book was wild. I was laughing out-loud at the sheer malevolent absurdity of the thirty-day countdown to marriage, which I doubt was the intended effect. We do eventually learn that this is the backstory of the murder, but we don't return to Watson and Holmes for multiple chapters. Which leads me to the other thing that surprised me: Doyle lays out this backstory, but then never has his characters comment directly on the morality of it, only the spectacle. Holmes cares only for the intellectual challenge (and for who gets credit), and Doyle sets things up so that the reader need not concern themselves with aftermath, punishment, or anything of that sort. I probably shouldn't have been surprised this does fit with the Holmes stereotype but I'm used to modern fiction where there is usually at least some effort to pass judgment on the events of the story. Doyle draws very clear villains, but is utterly silent on whether the murder is justified. Given its status in the history of literature, I'm not sorry to have read this book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It is very much of its time: everyone's moral character is linked directly to their physical appearance, and Doyle uses the occasional racial stereotype without a second thought. Prevailing writing styles have changed, so the prose feels long-winded and breathless. The rivalry between Holmes and the police detectives is tedious and annoying. I also find it hard to read novels from before the general absorption of techniques of emotional realism and interiority into all genres. The characters in A Study in Scarlet felt more like cartoon characters than fully-realized human beings. I have no strong opinion about the objective merits of this book in the context of its time other than to note that the sudden inserted western felt very weird. My understanding is that this is not considered one of the better Holmes stories, and Holmes gets some deeper characterization later on. Maybe I'll try another of Doyle's works someday, but for now my curiosity has been sated. Followed by The Sign of the Four. Rating: 4 out of 10

25 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Blackwing War

Review: The Blackwing War, by K.B. Spangler
Series: Deep Witches #1
Publisher: A Girl and Her Fed Books
Copyright: March 2021
ISBN: blackwing-war
Format: Kindle
Pages: 284
The Blackwing War is the first book of a projected space opera series. I previously reviewed Stoneskin, which was intended as a prelude to this series. In theory you can start here, but I would read Stoneskin first. Tembi is a Witch, which means she can ask the Deep to do things for her. At the start of the book, those things mostly involve disarming bombs. The galaxy is in the middle of a genocidal war between the well-equipped and all-but-officially supported Sagittarius Armed Forces, also known as the Blackwings, and the Sabenta resistance movement. To settle the galaxy, humans fiddled with their genes to adapt themselves to otherwise-hostile planets. The Blackwings take exception, in the tradition of racist humans throughout history, and think it's time to purify human bloodlines again. Both sides are using bombs. The Deep is the brilliant idea of this series. It seems to exist everywhere simultaneously, it's alive, it adores teleporting things, and it's basically a giant cosmic puppy. Humans are nearly incomprehensible to the Deep, and it's nearly incomprehensible to humans, but it somehow picks out specific humans who can (sort of) understand it and whom it gets attached to and somehow makes immortal. These are the Witches, and they have turned the Deep into the logistical backbone of human civilization. Essentially all commerce and travel is now done through Deep teleportation, requested by a Witch and coordinated by Lancaster, the Witches' governing council. The exception is war. Lancaster is strictly neutral; it does not take sides, even in the face of an ongoing genocide, and it refuses to transport military ships, any type of weapons, or even war refugees. Domino, Lancaster's cynically manipulative leader, is determined to protect its special privileges and position at all costs. Tembi is one of the quasi-leaders of a resistance against that position, but even they are reluctant to ask the Deep to take sides in a war. To them, the Deep is a living magical creature that they are exploiting, and which also tends to be a bundle of nerves. Using it as a weapon feels like a step too far. That's how the situation lies at the start of this book when, after a successful bomb defusing, the Deep whisks Tembi away to watch an unknown weapon blow up a moon. A lot of this book consists of Tembi unraveling a couple of mysteries, starting with the apparent experimental bomb and then expanding to include the apparent drugging and disappearance of her former classmate. The low-grade war gets worse throughout, leaving Tembi torn between the justifications for Lancaster's neutrality and her strong sense of basic morality. The moments when Tembi gets angry enough or impatient enough to take action are the best parts, but a lot of this book is quite grim. Do not expect all to be resolved in a happy ending. There is some catharsis, but The Blackwing War is also clearly setup for a longer series. Tembi is a great character and the Deep is even better. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about both of them, and Tembi's relationship with the Deep is a delight. Usually I get frustrated by baffling incomprehensibility as a plot devices, but Spangler pulls it off as well as I've seen it done. But unfortunately, this book is firmly in the "gets worse before it will get better" part of the overall story arc, and the sequels have not yet appeared. The Blackwing War ends on a cliffhanger that portends huge changes for the characters and the setting, and if I had the next book to rush into, I wouldn't mind the grimness as much. As is, it was a somewhat depressing reading experience despite its charms, and despite a somewhat optimistic ending (that I doubt will truly resolve anything). I think the world-building elements were a touch predictable, and I wish Spangler wouldn't have her characters keep trying to justify Domino's creepy, abusive, and manipulative actions. But the characters are so much fun, and the idea of the Deep as a character is such a delight, that I am hooked on this series regardless. Recommended, although I will (hopefully) be able to recommend it more heartily once at least one sequel has been published. Content warnings: genocide, racism, violent death. Rating: 7 out of 10

24 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Liberty's Daughter

Review: Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Copyright: November 2023
ISBN: 1-958880-16-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 257
Liberty's Daughter is a stand-alone near-future science fiction fix-up novel. The original stories were published in Fantasy and Science Fiction between 2012 and 2015. Beck Garrison lives on New Minerva (Min), one of a cluster of libertarian seasteads 220 nautical miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Her father brought her to Min when she was four, so it's the only life she knows. As this story opens, she's picked up a job for pocket change: finding very specific items that people want to buy. Since any new goods have to be shipped in and the seasteads have an ambiguous legal status, they don't get Amazon deliveries, but there are enough people (and enough tourists who bring high-value goods for trade) that someone probably has whatever someone else is looking for. Even sparkly high-heeled sandals size eight. Beck's father is high in the informal power structure of the seasteads for reasons that don't become apparent until very late in this book. Beck therefore has a comfortable, albeit cramped, life. The social protections, self-confidence, and feelings of invincibility that come with that wealth serve her well as a finder. After the current owner of the sandals bargains with her to find a person rather than an object, that privilege also lets her learn quite a lot before she starts getting into trouble. The political background of this novel is going to require some suspension of disbelief. The premise is that one of those harebrained libertarian schemes to form a freedom utopia has been successful enough to last for 49 years and attract 80,000 permanent residents. (It's a libertarian seastead so a lot of those residents are indentured slaves, as one does in libertarian philosophy. The number of people with shares, like Beck's father, is considerably smaller.) By the end of the book, Kritzer has offered some explanations for why the US would allow such a place to continue to exist, but the chances of the famously fractious con artists and incompetents involved in these types of endeavors creating something that survived internal power struggles for that long seem low. One has to roll with it for story reasons: Kritzer needs the population to be large enough for a plot, and the history to be long enough for Beck to exist as a character. The strength of this book is Beck, and specifically the fact that Beck is a second-generation teenager who grew up on the seastead. Unlike a lot of her age peers with their Cayman Islands vacations, she's never left and has no experience with life on land. She considers many things to be perfectly normal that are not at all normal to the reader and the various reader surrogates who show up over the course of the book. She also has the instinctive feel for seastead politics of the child of a prominent figure in a small town. And, most importantly, she has formed her own sense of morality and social structure that matches neither that of the reader nor that of her father. Liberty's Daughter is told in first-person by Beck. Judging the authenticity of Gen-Z thought processes is not one of my strengths, but Beck felt right to me. Her narration is dryly matter-of-fact, with only brief descriptions of her emotional reactions, but her personality shines in the occasional sarcasm and obstinacy. Kritzer has the teenage bafflement at the stupidity of adults down pat, as well as the tendency to jump head-first into ideas and make some decisions through sheer stubbornness. This is not one of those fix-up novels where the author has reworked the stories sufficiently that the original seams don't show. It is very episodic; compared to a typical novel of this length, there's more plot but less character growth. It's a good book when you want to be pulled into a stream of events that moves right along. This is not the book for deep philosophical examinations of the basis of a moral society, but it does have, around the edges, is the humans build human societies and develop elaborate social conventions and senses of belonging no matter how stupid the original philosophical foundations were. Even societies built on nasty exploitation can engender a sort of loyalty. Beck doesn't support the worst parts of her weird society, but she wants to fix it, not burn it to the ground. I thought there was a profound observation there. That brings me to my complaint: I hated the ending. Liberty's Daughter is in part Beck's fight for her own autonomy, both moral and financial, and the beginnings of an effort to turn her home into the sort of home she wants. By the end of the book, she's testing the limits of what she can accomplish, solidifying her own moral compass, and deciding how she wants to use the social position she inherited. It felt like the ending undermined all of that and treated her like a child. I know adolescence comes with those sorts of reversals, but I was still so mad. This is particularly annoying since I otherwise want to recommend this book. It's not ground-breaking, it's not that deep, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable day's worth of entertainment with a likable protagonist. Just don't read the last chapter, I guess? Or have more tolerance than I have for people treating sixteen-year-olds as if they're not old enough to make decisions. Content warnings: pandemic. Rating: 7 out of 10

22 December 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Pushing some reviews this way

Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in ACM s Computing Reviews, and have even been honored as a Featured Reviewer. Given I have long enjoyed reading friends reviews of their reading material (particularly, hats off to the very active Russ Allbery, who both beats all of my frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and readability than I can aim for!), I decided to explicitly share my reviews via this blog, as the audience is somewhat congruent; I will also link here some reviews that were not approved for publication, clearly marking them so. I will probably work on wrangling my Jekyll site to display an (auto-)updated page and RSS feed for the reviews. In the meantime, the reviews I have published are:

Joachim Breitner: The Haskell Interlude Podcast

It was pointed out to me that I have not blogged about this, so better now than never: Since 2021 I am together with four other hosts producing a regular podcast about Haskell, the Haskell Interlude. Roughly every two weeks two of us interview someone from the Haskell Community, and we chat for approximately an hour about how they came to Haskell, what they are doing with it, why they are doing it and what else is on their mind. Sometimes we talk to very famous people, like Simon Peyton Jones, and sometimes to people who maybe should be famous, but aren t quite yet. For most episodes we also have a transcript, so you can read the interviews instead, if you prefer, and you should find the podcast on most podcast apps as well. I do not know how reliable these statistics are, but supposedly we regularly have around 1300 listeners. We don t get much feedback, however, so if you like the show, or dislike it, or have feedback, let us know (for example on the Haskell Disourse, which has a thread for each episode). At the time of writing, we released 40 episodes. For the benefit of my (likely hypothetical) fans, or those who want to train an AI voice model for nefarious purposes, here is the list of episodes co-hosted by me: Can t decide where to start? The one with Ryan Trinkle might be my favorite. Thanks to the Haskell Foundation and its sponsors for supporting this podcast (hosting, editing, transscription).

20 December 2023

Ulrike Uhlig: How volunteer work in F/LOSS exacerbates pre-existing lines of oppression, and what that has to do with low diversity

This is a post I wrote in June 2022, but did not publish back then. After first publishing it in December 2023, a perfectionist insecure part of me unpublished it again. After receiving positive feedback, i slightly amended and republish it now. In this post, I talk about unpaid work in F/LOSS, taking on the example of hackathons, and why, in my opinion, the expectation of volunteer work is hurting diversity. Disclaimer: I don t have all the answers, only some ideas and questions.

Previous findings In 2006, the Flosspols survey searched to explain the role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier [study] revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software (which is also a low number). Their key findings were, to name just a few:
  • that F/LOSS rewards the producing code rather than the producing software. It thereby puts most emphasis on a particular skill set. Other activities such as interface design or documentation are understood as less technical and therefore less prestigious.
  • The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is theirs , are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.
We also know from the 2016 Debian survey, published in 2021, that a majority of Debian contributors are employed, rather than being contractors, and rather than being students. Also, 95.5% of respondents to that study were men between the ages of 30 and 49, highly educated, with the largest groups coming from Germany, France, USA, and the UK. The study found that only 20% of the respondents were being paid to work on Debian. Half of these 20% estimate that the amount of work on Debian they are being paid for corresponds to less than 20% of the work they do there. On the other side, there are 14% of those who are being paid for Debian work who declared that 80-100% of the work they do in Debian is remunerated.

So, if a majority of people is not paid, why do they work on F/LOSS? Or: What are the incentives of free software? In 2021, Louis-Philippe V ronneau aka Pollo, who is not only a Debian Developer but also an economist, published his thesis What are the incentive structures of free software (The actual thesis was written in French). One very interesting finding Pollo pointed out is this one:
Indeed, while we have proven that there is a strong and significative correlation between the income and the participation in a free/libre software project, it is not possible for us to pronounce ourselves about the causality of this link.
In the French original text:
En effet, si nous avons prouv qu il existe une corr lation forte et significative entre le salaire et la participation un projet libre, il ne nous est pas possible de nous prononcer sur la causalit de ce lien.
Said differently, it is certain that there is a relationship between income and F/LOSS contribution, but it s unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software. I would like to scratch this question a bit further, mostly relying on my own observations, experiences, and discussions with F/LOSS contributors.

Volunteer work is unpaid work We often hear of hackathons, hack weeks, or hackfests. I ve been at some such events myself, Tails organized one, the IETF regularly organizes hackathons, and last week (June 2022!) I saw an invitation for a hack week with the Torproject. This type of event generally last several days. While the people who organize these events are being paid by the organizations they work for, participants on the other hand are generally joining on a volunteer basis. Who can we expect to show up at this type of event under these circumstances as participants? To answer this question, I collected some ideas:
  • people who have an employer sponsoring their work
  • people who have a funder/grant sponsoring their work
  • people who have a high income and can take time off easily (in that regard, remember the Gender Pay Gap, women often earn less for the same work than men)
  • people who rely on family wealth (living off an inheritance, living on rights payments from a famous grandparent - I m not making these situations up, there are actual people in such financially favorable situations )
  • people who don t need much money because they don t have to pay rent or pay low rent (besides house owners that category includes people who live in squats or have social welfare paying for their rent, people who live with parents or caretakers)
  • people who don t need to do care work (for children, elderly family members, pets. Remember that most care work is still done by women.)
  • students who have financial support or are in a situation in which they do not yet need to generate a lot of income
  • people who otherwise have free time at their disposal
So, who, in your opinion, fits these unwritten requirements? Looking at this list, it s pretty clear to me why we d mostly find white men from the Global North, generally with higher education in hackathons and F/LOSS development. ( Great, they re a culture fit! ) Yes, there will also always be some people of marginalized groups who will attend such events because they expect to network, to find an internship, to find a better job in the future, or to add their participation to their curriculum. To me, this rings a bunch of alarm bells.

Low diversity in F/LOSS projects a mirror of the distribution of wealth I believe that the lack of diversity in F/LOSS is first of all a mirror of the distribution of wealth on a larger level. And by wealth I m referring to financial wealth as much as to social wealth in the sense of Bourdieu: Families of highly educated parents socially reproducing privilege by allowing their kids to attend better schools, supporting and guiding them in their choices of study and work, providing them with relations to internships acting as springboards into well paid jobs and so on. That said, we should ask ourselves as well:

Do F/LOSS projects exacerbate existing lines of oppression by relying on unpaid work? Let s look again at the causality question of Pollo s research (in my words):
It is unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.
Maybe we need to imagine this cause-effect relationship over time: as a student, without children and lots of free time, hopefully some money from the state or the family, people can spend time on F/LOSS, collect experience, earn recognition - and later find a well-paid job and make unpaid F/LOSS contributions into a hobby, cementing their status in the community, while at the same time generating a sense of well-being from working on the common good. This is a quite common scenario. As the Flosspols study revealed however, boys often get their own computer at the age of 14, while girls get one only at the age of 20. (These numbers might be slightly different now, and possibly many people don t own an actual laptop or desktop computer anymore, instead they own mobile devices which are not exactly inciting them to look behind the surface, take apart, learn, appropriate technology.) In any case, the above scenario does not allow for people who join F/LOSS later in life, eg. changing careers, to find their place. I believe that F/LOSS projects cannot expect to have more women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people from outside of Germany, France, USA, UK, Australia, and Canada on board as long as volunteer work is the status quo and waged labour an earned privilege.

Wait, are you criticizing all these wonderful people who sacrifice their free time to work towards common good? No, that s definitely not my intention, I m glad that F/LOSS exists, and the F/LOSS ecosystem has always represented a small utopia to me that is worth cherishing and nurturing. However, I think we still need to talk more about the lack of diversity, and investigate it further.

Some types of work are never being paid Besides free work at hacking events, let me also underline that a lot of work in F/LOSS is not considered payable work (yes, that s an oxymoron!). Which F/LOSS project for example, has ever paid translators a decent fee? Which project has ever considered that doing the social glue work, often done by women in the projects, is work that should be paid for? Which F/LOSS projects pay the people who do their Debian packaging rather than relying on yet another already well-paid white man who can afford doing this work for free all the while holding up how great the F/LOSS ecosystem is? And how many people on opensourcedesign jobs are looking to get their logo or website done for free? (Isn t that heart icon appealing to your altruistic empathy?) In my experience even F/LOSS projects which are trying to do the right thing by paying everyone the same amount of money per hour run into issues when it turns out that not all hours are equal and that some types of work do not qualify for remuneration at all or that the rules for the clocking of work are not universally applied in the same way by everyone.

Not every interaction should have a monetary value, but Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it s about getting paid equally and adequately. We may not think about it while under the age of 40 or 45, but working without adequate financial compensation, even half of the time, will ultimately result in not being able to care for oneself when sick, when old. And while this may not be an issue for people who inherit wealth, or have an otherwise safe economical background, eg. an academic salary, it is a huge problem and barrier for many people coming out of the working or service classes. (Oh and please, don t repeat the neoliberal lie that everyone can achieve whatever they aim for, if they just tried hard enough. French research shows that (in France) one has only 30% chance to become a class defector , and change social class upwards. But I managed to get out and move up, so everyone can! - well, if you believe that I m afraid you might be experiencing survivor bias.)

Not all bodies are equally able We should also be aware that not all of us can work with the same amount of energy either. There is yet another category of people who are excluded by the expectation of volunteer work, either because the waged labour they do already eats all of their energy, or because their bodies are not disposed to do that much work, for example because of mental health issues - such as depression-, or because of physical disabilities.

When organizing events relying on volunteer work please think about these things. Yes, you can tell people that they should ask their employer to pay them for attending a hackathon - but, as I ve hopefully shown, that would not do it for many people, especially newcomers. Instead, you could propose a fund to make it possible that people who would not normally attend can attend. DebConf is a good example for having done this for many years.

Conclusively I would like to urge free software projects that have a budget and directly pay some people from it to map where they rely on volunteer work and how this hurts diversity in their project. How do you or your project exacerbate pre-existing lines of oppression by granting or not granting monetary value to certain types of work? What is it that you take for granted? As always, I m curious about your feedback!

Worth a read These ideas are far from being new. Ashe Dryden s well-researched post The ethics of unpaid labor and the OSS community dates back to 2013 and is as important as it was ten years ago.

19 December 2023

Matthew Garrett: Making SSH host certificates more usable

Earlier this year, after Github accidentally committed their private RSA SSH host key to a public repository, I wrote about how better support for SSH host certificates would allow this sort of situation to be handled in a user-transparent way without any negative impact on security. I was hoping that someone would read this and be inspired to fix the problem but sadly that didn't happen so I've actually written some code myself.

The core part of this is straightforward - if a server presents you with a certificate associated with a host key, then make the trust in that host be whoever signed the certificate rather than just trusting the host key. This means that if someone needs to replace the host key for any reason (such as, for example, them having published the private half), you can replace the host key with a new key and a new certificate, and as long as the new certificate is signed by the same key that the previous certificate was, you'll trust the new key and key rotation can be carried out without any user errors. Hurrah!

So obviously I wrote that bit and then thought about the failure modes and it turns out there's an obvious one - if an attacker obtained both the private key and the certificate, what stops them from continuing to use it? The certificate isn't a secret, so we basically have to assume that anyone who possesses the private key has access to it. We may have silently transitioned to a new host key on the legitimate servers, but a hostile actor able to MITM a user can keep on presenting the old key and the old certificate until it expires.

There's two ways to deal with this - either have short-lived certificates (ie, issue a new certificate every 24 hours or so even if you haven't changed the key, and specify that the certificate is invalid after those 24 hours), or have a mechanism to revoke the certificates. The former is viable if you have a very well-engineered certificate issuing operation, but still leaves a window for an attacker to make use of the certificate before it expires. The latter is something SSH has support for, but the spec doesn't define any mechanism for distributing revocation data.

So, I've implemented a new SSH protocol extension that allows a host to send a key revocation list to a client. The idea is that the client authenticates to the server, receives a key revocation list, and will no longer trust any certificates that are contained within that list. This seems simple enough, but a naive implementation opens the client to various DoS attacks. For instance, if you simply revoke any key contained within the received KRL, a hostile server could revoke any certificates that were otherwise trusted by the client. The easy way around this is for the client to ensure that any revoked keys are associated with the same CA that signed the host certificate - that way a compromised host can only revoke certificates associated with that CA, and can't interfere with anyone else.

Unfortunately that still means that a single compromised host can still trigger revocation of certificates inside that trust domain (ie, a compromised host a.test.com could push a KRL that invalidated the certificate for b.test.com), because there's no way in the KRL format to indicate that a given revocation is associated with a specific hostname. This means we need a mechanism to verify that the KRL update is legitimate, and the easiest way to handle that is to sign it. The KRL format specifies an in-band signature but this was deprecated earlier this year - instead KRLs are supposed to be signed with the sshsig format. But we control both the server and the client, which means it's easy enough to send a detached signature as part of the extension data.

Putting this all together: you ssh to a server you've never contacted before, and it presents you with a host certificate. Instead of the host key being added to known_hosts, the CA key associated with the certificate is added. From now on, if you ssh to that host and it presents a certificate signed by that CA, it'll be trusted. Optionally, the host can also send you a KRL and a signature. If the signature is generated by the CA key that you already trust, any certificates in that KRL associated with that CA key will be incorporated into local storage. The expected flow if a key is compromised is that the owner of the host generates a new keypair, obtains a new certificate for the new key, and adds the old certificate to a KRL that is signed with the CA key. The next time the user connects to that host, they receive the new key and new certificate, trust it because it's signed by the same CA key, and also receive a KRL signed with the same CA that revokes trust in the old certificate.

Obviously this breaks down if a user is MITMed with a compromised key and certificate immediately after the host is compromised - they'll see a legitimate certificate and won't receive any revocation list, so will trust the host. But this is the same failure mode that would occur in the absence of keys, where the attacker simply presents the compromised key to the client before trust in the new key has been created. This seems no worse than the status quo, but means that most users will seamlessly transition to a new key and revoke trust in the old key with no effort on their part.

The work in progress tree for this is here - at the point of writing I've merely implemented this and made sure it builds, not verified that it actually works or anything. Cleanup should happen over the next few days, and I'll propose this to upstream if it doesn't look like there's any showstopper design issues.

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