The Bulwark has an interesting article on why they can t Reopen America [1]. I wonder how many changes will be long term. According to the Wikipedia List of Epidemics [2] Covid-19 so far hasn t had a high death toll when compared to other pandemics of the last 100 years. People s reactions to this vary from doing nothing to significant isolation, the question is what changes in attitudes will be significant enough to change society. Transport One thing that has been happening recently is a transition in transport. It s obvious that we need to reduce CO2 and while electric cars will address the transport part of the problem in the long term changing to electric public transport is the cheaper and faster way to do it in the short term. Before Covid-19 the peak hour public transport in my city was ridiculously overcrowded, having people unable to board trams due to overcrowding was really common. If the economy returns to it s previous state then I predict less people on public transport, more traffic jams, and many more cars idling and polluting the atmosphere. Can we have mass public transport that doesn t give a significant disease risk? Maybe if we had significantly more trains and trams and better ventilation with more airflow designed to suck contaminated air out. But that would require significant engineering work to design new trams, trains, and buses as well as expense in refitting or replacing old ones. Uber and similar companies have been taking over from taxi companies, one major feature of those companies is that the vehicles are not dedicated as taxis. Dedicated taxis could easily be designed to reduce the spread of disease, the famed Black Cab AKA Hackney Carriage [3] design in the UK has a separate compartment for passengers with little air flow to/from the driver compartment. It would be easy to design such taxis to have entirely separate airflow and if setup to only take EFTPOS and credit card payment could avoid all contact between the driver and passengers. I would prefer to have a Hackney Carriage design of vehicle instead of a regular taxi or Uber. Autonomous cars have been shown to basically work. There are some concerns about safety issues as there are currently corner cases that car computers don t handle as well as people, but of course there are also things computers do better than people. Having an autonomous taxi would be a benefit for anyone who wants to avoid other people. Maybe approval could be rushed through for autonomous cars that are limited to 40Km/h (the maximum collision speed at which a pedestrian is unlikely to die), in central city areas and inner suburbs you aren t likely to drive much faster than that anyway. Car share services have been becoming popular, for many people they are significantly cheaper than owning a car due to the costs of regular maintenance, insurance, and depreciation. As the full costs of car ownership aren t obvious people may focus on the disease risk and keep buying cars. Passenger jets are ridiculously cheap. But this relies on the airline companies being able to consistently fill the planes. If they were to add measures to reduce cross contamination between passengers which slightly reduces the capacity of planes then they need to increase ticket prices accordingly which then reduces demand. If passengers are just scared of flying in close proximity and they can t fill planes then they will have to increase prices which again reduces demand and could lead to a death spiral. If in the long term there aren t enough passengers to sustain the current number of planes in service then airline companies will have significant financial problems, planes are expensive assets that are expected to last for a long time, if they can t use them all and can t sell them then airline companies will go bankrupt. It s not reasonable to expect that the same number of people will be travelling internationally for years (if ever). Due to relying on economies of scale to provide low prices I don t think it s possible to keep prices the same no matter what they do. A new economic balance of flights costing 2-3 times more than we are used to while having significantly less passengers seems likely. Governments need to spend significant amounts of money to improve trains to take over from flights that are cancelled or too expensive. Entertainment The article on The Bulwark mentions Las Vegas as a city that will be hurt a lot by reductions in travel and crowds, the same thing will happen to tourist regions all around the world. Australia has a significant tourist industry that will be hurt a lot. But the mention of Las Vegas makes me wonder what will happen to the gambling in general. Will people avoid casinos and play poker with friends and relatives at home? It seems that small stakes poker games among friends will be much less socially damaging than casinos, will this be good for society? The article also mentions cinemas which have been on the way out since the video rental stores all closed down. There s lots of prime real estate used for cinemas and little potential for them to make enough money to cover the rent. Should we just assume that most uses of cinemas will be replaced by Netflix and other streaming services? What about teenage dates, will kissing in the back rows of cinemas be replaced by Netflix and chill ? What will happen to all the prime real estate used by cinemas? Professional sporting matches have been played for a TV-only audience during the pandemic. There s no reason that they couldn t make a return to live stadium audiences when there is a vaccine for the disease or the disease has been extinguished by social distancing. But I wonder if some fans will start to appreciate the merits of small groups watching large TVs and not want to go back to stadiums, can this change the typical behaviour of groups? Restaurants and cafes are going to do really badly. I previously wrote about my experience running an Internet Cafe and why reopening businesses soon is a bad idea [4]. The question is how long this will go for and whether social norms about personal space will change things. If in the long term people expect 25% more space in a cafe or restaurant that s enough to make a significant impact on profitability for many small businesses. When I was young the standard thing was for people to have dinner at friends homes. Meeting friends for dinner at a restaurant was uncommon. Recently it seemed to be the most common practice for people to meet friends at a restaurant. There are real benefits to meeting at a restaurant in terms of effort and location. Maybe meeting friends at their home for a delivered dinner will become a common compromise, avoiding the effort of cooking while avoiding the extra expense and disease risk of eating out. Food delivery services will do well in the long term, it s one of the few industry segments which might do better after the pandemic than before. Work Many companies are discovering the benefits of teleworking, getting it going effectively has required investing in faster Internet connections and hardware for employees. When we have a vaccine the equipment needed for teleworking will still be there and we will have a discussion about whether it should be used on a more routine basis. When employees spend more than 2 hours per day travelling to and from work (which is very common for people who work in major cities) that will obviously limit the amount of time per day that they can spend working. For the more enthusiastic permanent employees there seems to be a benefit to the employer to allow working from home. It s obvious that some portion of the companies that were forced to try teleworking will find it effective enough to continue in some degree. One company that I work for has quit their coworking space in part because they were concerned that the coworking company might go bankrupt due to the pandemic. They seem to have become a 100% work from home company for the office part of the work (only on site installation and stock management is done at corporate locations). Companies running coworking spaces and other shared offices will suffer first as their clients have short term leases. But all companies renting out office space in major cities will suffer due to teleworking. I wonder how this will affect the companies providing services to the office workers, the cafes and restaurants etc. Will there end up being so much unused space in central city areas that it s not worth converting the city cinemas into useful space? There s been a lot of news about Zoom and similar technologies. Lots of other companies are trying to get into that business. One thing that isn t getting much notice is remote access technologies for desktop support. If the IT people can t visit your desk because you are working from home then they need to be able to remotely access it to fix things. When people make working from home a large part of their work time the issue of who owns peripherals and how they are tracked will get interesting. In a previous blog post I suggested that keyboards and mice not be treated as assets [5]. But what about monitors, 4G/Wifi access points, etc? Some people have suggested that there will be business sectors benefiting from the pandemic, such as telecoms and e-commerce. If you have a bunch of people forced to stay home who aren t broke (IE a large portion of the middle class in Australia) they will probably order delivery of stuff for entertainment. But in the long term e-commerce seems unlikely to change much, people will spend less due to economic uncertainty so while they may shift some purchasing to e-commerce apart from home delivery of groceries e-commerce probably won t go up overall. Generally telecoms won t gain anything from teleworking, the Internet access you need for good Netflix viewing is generally greater than that needed for good video-conferencing. Money I previously wrote about a Basic Income for Australia [6]. One of the most cited reasons for a Basic Income is to deal with robots replacing people. Now we are at the start of what could be a long term economic contraction caused by the pandemic which could reduce the scale of the economy by a similar degree while also improving the economic case for a robotic workforce. We should implement a Universal Basic Income now. I previously wrote about the make-work jobs and how we could optimise society to achieve the worthwhile things with less work [7]. My ideas about optimising public transport and using more car share services may not work so well after the pandemic, but the rest should work well. Business There are a number of big companies that are not aiming for profitability in the short term. WeWork and Uber are well documented examples. Some of those companies will hopefully go bankrupt and make room for more responsible companies. The co-working thing was always a precarious business. The companies renting out office space usually did so on a monthly basis as flexibility was one of their selling points, but they presumably rented buildings on an annual basis. As the profit margins weren t particularly high having to pay rent on mostly empty buildings for a few months will hurt them badly. The long term trend in co-working spaces might be some sort of collaborative arrangement between the people who run them and the landlords similar to the way some of the hotel chains have profit sharing agreements with land owners to avoid both the capital outlay for buying land and the risk involved in renting. Also city hotels are very well equipped to run office space, they have the staff and the procedures for running such a business, most hotels also make significant profits from conventions and conferences. The way the economy has been working in first world countries has been about being as competitive as possible. Just in time delivery to avoid using storage space and machines to package things in exactly the way that customers need and no more machines than needed for regular capacity. This means that there s no spare capacity when things go wrong. A few years ago a company making bolts for the car industry went bankrupt because the car companies forced the prices down, then car manufacture stopped due to lack of bolts this could have been a wake up call but was ignored. Now we have had problems with toilet paper shortages due to it being packaged in wholesale quantities for offices and schools not retail quantities for home use. Food was destroyed because it was created for restaurant packaging and couldn t be packaged for home use in a reasonable amount of time. Farmer s markets alleviate some of the problems with packaging food etc. But they aren t a good option when there s a pandemic as disease risk makes them less appealing to customers and therefore less profitable for vendors. Religion Many religious groups have supported social distancing. Could this be the start of more decentralised religion? Maybe have people read the holy book of their religion and pray at home instead of being programmed at church? We can always hope.

• [1] https://thebulwark.com/we-cannot-reopen-america/
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackney_carriage
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/05/06/about-reopening-businesses/
• [5] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/05/10/it-asset-management/
• [6] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/08/basic-income-australia/
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/08/less-work/

Artemisia Gentileschi - Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was gonna use this blog post to share about the migrant worker woes as there has been multiple stories doing the rounds. For e.g. a story which caught the idea of few people but most of us, i.e. middle-class people are so much into our own thing that we care a fig leaf about what happens to migrants. This should not be a story coming from a humane society but it seems India is no different than any other country of the world and in not a good way. Allow me to share Or for those who don t like youtube, here s an alternative link https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JGEgZq_1jmc Now the above two editorial shares two stories, one of Trump retaliatory threat to India in the Q&A of the journalist. In fact, Trump has upped the ante on visa sanctions as India buckled so easily under pressure. There have been other stories doing the rounds how people who have illnesses who need HCQ in India are either dying or are close to death because of unavailability of HCQ in the medicine shop. There have been reports in Pune as well as South Mumbai (one of the poshest localities in Mumbai/Bombay) that medicine shops are running empty or emptier. There have been so many stories on that, with reporters going to shops and asking owners of the medicine shops and shop-owners being clueless. I think the best article which vividly describes the Government of India (GOI) response to the pandemic is the free-to-read article shared by Arundhati Roy in Financial Times. It has reduced so much of my work or sharing that it s unbelievable. And she has shared it with pictures and all so I can share other aspects of how the pandemic has been affecting India and bringing the worst out in the Government in its our of need. In fact, not surprisingly though, apparently there was also a pro-Israel similar thing which happened in Africa too . As India has too few friends now globally, hence it decided to give a free pass to them.

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

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

News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi

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

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

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

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

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

Aryan Plastic bottle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com

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

First of all, congratulations to all those who got us 2022 Debconf, so we will finally have a debconf in India. There is of course, lot of work to be done between now and then. For those who would be looking forward to visit India and especially Kochi I would suggest you to hear this enriching tale I am sorry I used youtube link but it is too good a podcast not to be shared. Those who don t want youtube can use the invidio.us link for the same as shared below. https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BvjgKuKmnQ4 I am sure there are lot more details, questions, answers etc. but would direct them gently to Praveen, Shruti, Balasankar and the rest who are from Kochi to answer if you have any questions about that history.

National Science Day, GMRT 2020 First, as always, we are and were grateful to both NCRA as well as GMRT for taking such good care of us. Even though Akshat was not around, probably getting engaged, a few of us were there. About 6-7 from the Mozilla Nasik while the rest representing the foss community. Here is a small picture which commentrates the event

National Science Day, GMRT 2020

While there is and was a lot to share about the event. For e.g. Akshay had bought RPI- Zero as well as RPI-2 (Raspberry Pi s ) and showed some things. He had also bought up a Debian stable live drive with persistence although the glare from the sun was too much that we couldn t show it to clearly to students. This was also the case with RPI but still we shared what and how much we could. Maybe next year, we either ask them to have double screens or give us dark room so we can showcase things much better. We did try playing with contrast and all but it didn t have much of an effect . Of course in another stall few students had used RPI s as part of their projects so at times we did tell some of the newbies to go to those stalls and see and ask about those projects so they would have a much wider experience of things. The Mozilla people were pushing VR as well as Mozilla lite the browser for the mobile. We also gossiped quite a bit. I shared about indicatelts , a third-party certificate extension although I dunno if I should file a wnpp about it or not. We didn t have a good experience of when I had put an RFP (Request for Package) which was accepted for an extension which had similar functionality which we later come to know was sharing the sites people were using the extension to call home and share both the URL and the IP Address they were using it from. Sadly, didn t leave a good taste in mouth

Delhi Riots One thing I have been disappointed with is the lack of general awareness about things especially in the youth. We have people who didn t know that for e.g. in the Delhi riots which happened recently the law and order (Police) lies with Home Minister of India, Amit Shah. This is perhaps the only capital in the world which has its own Chief Minister but doesn t have any say on its law and order. And this has been the case for last 70 years i.e. since independance. The closest I know so far is the UK but they too changed their tune in 2012. India and especially Delhi seems to be in a time-capsule which while being dysfunctional somehow is made to work. In many ways, it s three body or a body split into three personalities which often makes governance a messy issue but that probably is a topic for another day. In fact, scroll had written a beautiful editorial that full statehood for Delhi was not only Arvind Kejriwal s call (AAP) but also something that both BJP as well as Congress had asked in the past. In fact, nothing about the policing is in AAP s power. All salaries, postings, transfers of police personnel everything is done by the Home Ministry, so if any blame has to be given it has to be given to the Home Ministry for the same.

American Capitalism and Ventilators America had been having a history of high cost healthcare as can be seen in this edition of USA today from 2017 . The Affordable Care Act was signed as a law by President Obama in 2010 which Mr. Trump curtailed when he came into power couple of years back. An estimated 80,000 people died due to seasonal flu in 2018-19 . Similarly, anywhere between 24-63,000 have supposed to have died from Last October to February-March this year. Now if the richest country can t take care of their population which is 1/3rd of the population of this country while at the same time United States has thrice the area that India has. This I am sharing as seasonal flu also strikes the elderly as well as young children more than adults. So in one senses, the vulnerable groups overlap although from some of the recent stats, for Covid-19 even those who are 20+ are also vulnerable but that s another story altogether. If you see the CDC graph of the seasonal flu it is clear that American health experts knew about it. One another common factor which joins both the seasonal flu and covid is both need ventilators for the most serious cases. So, in 2007 it was decided that the number of ventilators needed to be ramped up, they had approximately 62k ventilators at that point in time all over U.S. The U.S. in 2010, asked for bids and got bid from a small californian company called Newport Medic Instruments. The price of the ventilators was approximately INR 700000 at 2010 prices, while Newport said they would be able to mass-produce at INR 200000 at 2010 prices. The company got the order and they started designing the model which needed to be certified by FDA. By 2011, they got the product ready when a big company called Covidgen bought Newport Medic and shutdown the project. This was shared in a press release in 2012. The whole story was broken by New York Times again, just a few days ago which highlighted how America s capitalism rough shod over public health and put people s life unnecessarily in jeopardy. If those new-age ventilators would have been a reality then not just U.S. but India and many other countries would have bought the ventilators as every county has same/similar needs but are unable to pay the high cost which in many cases would be passed on to their citizens either as price of service, or by raising taxes or a mixture of both with public being none the wiser. Due to dearth of ventilators and specialized people to operate it and space, there is possibility that many countries including India may have to make tough choices like Italian doctors had to make as to who to give ventilator to and have the mental and emotional guilt which would be associated with the choices made.

Some science coverage about diseases in wire and other publications Since Covid coverage broke out, the wire has been bringing various reports of India s handling of various epidemics, mysteries, some solved, some still remaining unsolved due to lack of interest or funding or both. The Nipah virus has been amply discussed in the movie Virus (2019) which I shared in the last blog post and how easily it could have been similar to Italy in Kerala. Thankfully, only 24 people including a nurse succumbed to that outbreak as shared in the movie. I had shared about Kerala nurses professionalism when I was in hospital couple of years back. It s no wonder that their understanding of hygeine and nursing procedures are a cut above the rest hence they are sought after not just in India but world-over including US and UK and the middle-east. Another study on respitory illness was bought to my attention by my friend Pavithran.

Possibility of extended lockdown in India There was talk in the media of extended lockdown or better put an environment is being created so that an extended lockdown can be done. This is probably in part due to a mathematical model and its derivatives shared by two Indian-origin Cambridge scholars who predict that a minimum 49 days lockdown may be necessary to flatten the covid curve about a week back.

Predictions of the outcome of the current 21-day lockdown (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

Alternative lockdown strategies suggested by the Cambridge model (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

India caving to US pressure on Hydroxychloroquine While there has been lot of speculation in U.S. about Hydroxychloroquine as the wonder cure, last night Mr. Trump threatened India in a response to a reporter that Mr. Modi has to say no for Hydroxychloroquine and there may be retaliations.

As shared before if youtube is not your cup you can see the same on invidio.us https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=YP-ewgoJPLw Now while there have been several instances in the past of U.S. trying to bully India, going all the way back to 1954. In fact, in recent memory, there were sanctions on India by US under Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government (BJP) 1998 but he didn t buckle under the pressure and now we see our current PM taking down our own notification from a day ago and not just sharing Hydroxychloroquine but also Paracetemol to other countries so it would look as if India is sharing with other countries. Keep in mind, that India, Brazil haven t seen eye to eye on trade agreements of late and Paracetemol prices have risen in India. The price rise has been because the API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) for the same come from China where the supply chain will take time to be fixed and we would also have to open up, although should we, should we not is another question altogether. I talk about supply chains as lean supply chains were the talk since late 90 s when the Japanese introduced Just-in-time manufacturing which lead to lean supply chains as well as lot of outsourcing as consequence. Of course, the companies saved money but at the cost of flexibility and how this model was perhaps flawed was shared by a series of articles in Economist as early as 2004 when there were lot of shocks to that model and would be exaberated since then. There have been frequent shocks to these fragile ecosystem more since 2008 after the financial meltdown and this would put more companies out of business than ever before. The MSME sector in India had already been severely impacted first by demonetization and then by the horrendous implementation of GST whose cries can be heard from all sectors. Also the frequent changing of GST taxes has made markets jumpy and investors unsure. With judgements such as retrospective taxes, AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) etc. it made not only the international investors scared, but also domestic investors. The flight of the capital has been noticeable. This I had shared before when Indian Government shared about LRS report which it hasn t since then. In fact Outlook Business had an interesting article about it where incidentally it talked about localcircles, a community networking platform where you get to know of lot of things and whom I am also a member of. At the very end I apologize for not sharing the blog post before but then I was feeling down but then I m not the only one.

If you have to choose one year when you won't fly, this year, 2020, is the one to choose. Why? Because CORSIA. What the heck is CORSIA? CORSIA is not a novel virus, but "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation". In a nutshell, the aviation industry says they will freeze their co2 emissions from growing. Actually, aviation emissions are still going to grow. The airlines will just pay someone else to reduce emissions with the same amount aviation emissions rise - the "Offsetting" word in CORSIA. If that sounds like greenwashing, well it pretty much is. But that was expected. Getting every country and airline abroad CORSIA would not have been possible if the scheme would actually bite. So it's pretty much a joke. What does it have to do with *this* Year? The first phase of CORSIA will start next year, so the emissions are frozen to year 2020 levels. Due to certain recent events, lots of flights have already been cancelled - which means the reference year aviation emissions are already a lot less than the aviation industry was expecting. By avoiding flying this year, the aviation emissions are going to be frozen at an even lower level. This will increase cost of co2 offsetting for airlines, and the joke is going to be on them. So consider skipping business travel and taking your holiday trip this year with something else than a plane. Wouldn't recommend a cruise ship, tho...

I started web development around late 1994. Some of my earliest paid web work is still online (dated June 1995). Clearly, that was a simpler time for content! I went on to be Webmaster (yes, for those joining us in the last decade, that was a job title once) for UWA, and then for Hartley Poynton/JDV.com at time when security became important as commerce boomed online. At the dawn of the web era, the consideration of backwards compatibility with older web clients (browsers) was deemed to be important; content had to degrade nicely, even without any CSS being applied. As the years stretched out, the legacy became longer and longer. Until now. In mid-2018, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) 3.2 comes into effect, requiring card holder environments to use (at minimum) TLS 1.2 for the encrypted transfer of data. Of course, that s also the maximum version typically available today (TLS 1.3 is in draft 21 at this point in time of writing). This effort by the PCI is forcing people to adopt new browsers that can do the TLS 1.2 protocol (and the encryption ciphers that permits), typically by running modern/recent Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge browsers. And for the majority of people, Chrome is their choice, and the majority of those are all auto-updating on every release. Many are pushing to be compliant with the 2018 PCI DSS 3.2 as early as possible; your logging of negotiated protocols and ciphers will show if your client base is ready as well. I ve already worked with one government agency to demonstrate they were ready, and have already helped disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on their public facing web sites (and previously SSL v3). We ve removed RC4 ciphers, 3DES ciphers, and enabled ephemeral key ciphers to provide forward secrecy. Web developers (writing Javascript and using various frameworks) can rejoice the age of having to support legacy MS IE 6/7/8/9/10 is pretty much over. None of those browsers support TLS 1.2 out of the box (IE 10 can turn this on, but for some reason, it is off by default). This makes Javascript code smaller as it doesn t have to have conditional code to work with the quirks of those older clients. But as we find ourselves with modern clients, we can now ask those clients to be complicit in our attempts to secure the content we serve. They understand modern security constructs such as Content Security Policies and other HTTP security-related headers. There s two tools I am currently using to help in this battle to improve web security. One is SSLLabs.com, the work of Ivan Risti (and now owned/sponsored by Qualys). This tool gives a good view of the encryption in flight (protocols, ciphers), chain of trust (certificate), and a new addition of checking DNS records for CAA records (which I and others piled on a feature request for AWS Route53 to support). The second tool is Scott Helm s SecurityHeaders.io, which looks at the HTTP headers that web content uses to ask browsers to enforce security on the client side. There s a really important reason why these tools are good; they are maintained. As new recommendations on ciphers, protocols, signature algorithms or other actions become recommended, they re updated on these tools. And these tools are produced by very small, but agile teams like one person teams, without the bureaucracy (and lag) associated with large enterprise tools. But these shouldn t be used blindly. These services make suggestions, and you should research them yourselves. For some, not all the recommendations may meet your personal risk profile. Personally, I m uncomfortable with Public-Key-Pins, so that can wait for a while indeed, Chrome has now signalled they will drop this. So while PCI is hitting merchants with their DSS-compliance stick (and making it plainly obvious what they have to do), we re getting a side-effect of having a concrete reason for drawing a line under where our backward compatibility must stretch back to, and the ability to have the web client assist in ensure security of content.

So my last blog-post was about creating a digital-radio, powered by an ESP8266 device, there's a joke there about wireless-control of a wireless. I'm not going to make it. Sticking with a theme this post is also about radio, software-defined radio. I know almost nothing about SDR, except that it can be used to let your computer "do stuff" with radio. The only application I've ever read about that seemed interesting was tracking aircraft. This post is about setting up a Debian GNU/Linux system to do exactly that, show aircraft in real-time above your head! This was almost painless to setup.

• Buy the hardware.
• Plug in the hardware.
• Confirm it is detected.
• Install the appropriate sdr development-package(s).
• Install the magic software.
  • Written by @antirez, no less, you know it is gonna be good!

So I bought this USB device from AliExpress for the grand total of 8.46. I have no idea if that URL is stable, but I suspect it is probably not. Good luck finding something similar if you're living in the future! Once I connected the Antenna to the USB stick, and inserted it into a spare slot it showed up in the output of lsusb:

  $ lsusb
  ..
  Bus 003 Device 043: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T
  ..

In more detail I see the major/minor numbers:

  idVendor           0x0bda Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
  idProduct          0x2838 RTL2838 DVB-T

So far, so good. I installed the development headers/library I needed:

  # apt-get install librtlsdr-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev

Once that was done I could clone antirez's repository, and build it:

  $ git clone https://github.com/antirez/dump1090.git
  $ cd dump1090
  $ make

And run it:

  $ sudo ./dump1090 --interactive --net

This failed initially as a kernel-module had claimed the device, but removing that was trivial:

  $ sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
  $ sudo ./dump1090 --interactive --net

Once it was running I'd see live updates on the console, every second:

  Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen       .
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  4601fc          14200     0       0.000     0.000     0     11        1 sec
  4601f2          9550      0       0.000     0.000     0     58        0 sec
  45ac52 SAS1716  2650      177     60.252    24.770    47    26        1 sec

And opening a browser pointing at http://localhost:8080/ would show that graphically, like so: NOTE: In this view I'm in Helsinki, and the airport is at Vantaa, just outside the city. Of course there are tweaks to be made:

• With the right udev-rules in place it is possible to run the tool as non-root, and blacklist the default kernel module.
• There are other forks of the dump1090 software that are more up-to-date to explore.
• SDR can do more than track planes.

Here s my weekly report for week 39 of 2017. In this week I have travelled to Berlin and caught up on some podcasts in doing so. I ve also had some trouble with the RSS feeds on my blog but hopefully this is all fixed now. Thanks to Martin Milbret I now have a replacement for my dead workstation, an HP Z600, and there will be a blog post about this new set up to come next week. Thanks also to S lvan and a number of others that made donations towards getting me up and running again. A breakdown of the donations and expenses can be found at the end of this post.

Debian Two of my packages measurement-kit from OONI and python-azure-devtools used to build the Azure Python SDK (packaged as python-azure) have been accepted by ftp-master into Debian s unstable suite. I have also sponsored uploads for comptext, comptty, fllog, flnet and gnustep-make. I had previously encouraged Eric Heintzmann to become a DM and I have given him DM upload privileges for the gnustep-make package as he has shown to care for the GNUstep packages well. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #875125¹, #875126¹, #861753, #873083

Tor Project My Tor Project contributions this week were primarily attending the Tor Metrics meeting which I have reported on in a separate blog post.

Sustainability I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report. The replacement workstation arrived on Friday and is now up and running. In total I received 308.73 in donations and spent 36.89 on video adapters and 141.94 on replacement hard drives for my NAS (which includes my local Debian mirror and backups). For the Tor Metrics meeting in Berlin, Tor Project paid my flights and accommodation and I paid only for ground transport and food myself. The total cost for ground transport during the trip was 45.92 (taxi to airport, 1 Tageskarte) and total cost for food was 23.46. The current funds I have available for equipment, travel and other free software expenses is now 60.52. I do not believe that any hardware I rely on is looking at imminent failure.

---

1. Fixed by a sponsored upload, not by my changes ^[return]

Here s my weekly report for week 38 of 2017. This week has not been a great week as I saw my primary development machine die in a spectacular reboot loop. Thanks to the wonderful community around Debian and free software (that if you re reading this, you re probably part of), I should be back up to speed soon. A replacement workstation is currently moving towards me and I ve received a number of smaller donations that will go towards video converters and upgrades to get me back to full productivity.

Debian I ve prepared and tested backports for 3 packages in the tasktools packaging team: tasksh, bugwarrior and powerline-taskwarrior. Unfortunately I am not currently in the backports ACLs and so I can t upload these but I m hoping this to be resolved soon. Once these are uploaded, the latest upstream release for all packages in the tasktools team will be available either in the stable suite or in the stable backports suite. In preparation for the shutdown of Alioth mailing lists, I ve set up a new mailing list for the tasktools team and have already updated the maintainer fields for all the team s packages in git. I ve subscribed the old mailing list s user to the new mailing list in DDPO so there will still be a comprehensive view there during the migration. I am currently in the process of reaching out to the admins of git.tasktools.org with a view to moving our git repositories there. I ve also continued to review the scapy package and have closed a couple more bugs that were already fixed in the latest upstream release but had been missed in the changelog. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #774962, #850570

Tor Project I ve deployed a small fix to an update from last week where the platform field on Atlas had been pulled across to the left column. It has now been returned to the right hand column and is not pushed down the page by long family lists. I ve been thinking about the merge of Compass functionality into a future Atlas and this is being tracked in #23517. Tor Project has approved expenses (flights and hotel) for me to attend an in-person meeting of the Metrics Team. This meeting will occur in Berlin on the 28th September and I will write up a report detailing outcomes relevant to my work after the meeting. I have spent some time this week preparing for this meeting. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #22146, #22297, #23511

Sustainability I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report. The loss of my primary development machine was a setback, however, I have been donated a new workstation which should hopefully arrive soon. The hard drives in my NAS can now also be replaced as I have budget available for this now. I do not see any hardware failures being imminent at this time, however should they occur I would not have budget to replace hardware, I only have funds to replace the hardware that has already failed.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. DebConf 17 in Montreal I traveled to DebConf 17 in Montreal/Canada. I arrived on 04. August and met a lot of different people which I only knew by name so far. I think this is definitely one of the best aspects of real life meetings, putting names to faces and getting to know someone better. I totally enjoyed my stay and I would like to thank all the people who were involved in organizing this event. You rock! I also gave a talk about the The past, present and future of Debian Games , listened to numerous other talks and got a nice sunburn which luckily turned into a more brownish color when I returned home on 12. August. The only negative experience I made was with my airline which was supposed to fly me home to Frankfurt again. They decided to cancel the flight one hour before check-in for unknown reasons and just gave me a telephone number to sort things out. No support whatsoever. Fortunately (probably not for him) another DebConf attendee suffered the same fate and together we could find another flight with Royal Air Maroc the same day. And so we made a short trip to Casablanca/Morocco and eventually arrived at our final destination in Frankfurt a few hours later. So which airline should you avoid at all costs (they still haven t responded to my refund claims) ? It s WoW-Air from Iceland. (just wow) Debian Games

• There were a lot of GCC-7 bugs to fix this month which claimed most of my games related time.
• Bug fixes: torcs (RC #853685), berusky2 (RC #853325), lordsawar (RC #853529), simutrans(#869029), gngb (RC #853425), libclaw (RC #853488), funguloids (RC #853408), plee-the-bear (RC #853618), alien-arena (RC #871218), fretsonfire (RC #872934), minetest, (RC #873324) widelands, (RC #871114), pingus (RC #853614)
• I released version 2.1 of the Debian Games Blend.
• I completely overhauled the gngb package, a color gameboy emulator.
• I packaged new upstream versions of freeciv, peg-e and blockattack.
• I backported the memory leak fix for unknown-horizons and fife to Stretch (#871037).
• I investigated some graphical glitches in Neverball which appear to be related to OpenGL and the graphic stack in general but I couldn t find an immediate solution. (#871223)

Debian Java

• I sponsored libimglib2-java for Ghislain Vaillant.
• New upstream releases: apktool, jboss-modules, jboss-logging-tools, jboss-logmanager.
• For jboss-xnio I packaged two new build-dependencies which are wildfly-common and wildfly-client-config and they are currently waiting in the NEW queue.
• The last build-dependency for PDFsam was accepted this month and I was able to upload the new version to experimental. Unfortunately the program is currently not really usable due to a bug in libhibernate-validator-java (#874579)

Debian LTS This was my eighteenth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 20,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 31. July until 06. August I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in tinyproxy, mantis, sox, timidity, ioquake3, varnish, libao, clamav, binutils, smplayer, libid3tag, mpg123 and shadow.
• DLA-1064-1. Issued a security update for freeradius fixing 6 CVE.
• DLA-1068-1. Issued a security update for git fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1077-1. Issued a security update for faad2 fixing 11 CVE.
• DLA-1083-1. Issued a security update for openexr fixing 3 CVE.
• DLA-1095-1. Issued a security update for freerdp fixing 5 CVE.

Non-maintainer upload

• I uploaded a security fix for openexr (#864078) to fix CVE-2017-9110, CVE-2017-9112 and CVE-2017-9116.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

This story involves boys pretending to be pizza deliverymen using a working automated Strowger telephone exchange demonstrator on display in a museum, which is very old and is, to my knowledge, the only such working exhibit in the world. (Yes, I have video.) But first, a thought on exploration. There are those that would say that there is nothing left to explore anymore that the whole earth is mapped, photographed by satellites, and, well, known. I prefer to look at it a different way: the earth is full of places that billions of people will never see, and probably don t even know about. Those places may be quiet country creeks, peaceful neighborhoods one block away from major tourist attractions, an MTA museum in Brooklyn, a state park in Arkansas, or a beautiful church in Germany. Martha is not yet two months old, and last week she and I spent a surprisingly long amount of time just gazing at tree branches she was mesmerized, and why not, because to her, everything is new. As I was exploring in Portland two weeks ago, I happened to pick up a nearly-forgotten book by a nearly-forgotten person, Beryl Markham, a woman who was a pilot in Africa about 80 years ago. The passage that I happened to randomly flip to in the bookstore, which really grabbed my attention, was this:

The available aviation maps of Africa in use at that time all bore the cartographer s scale mark, 1/2,000,000 one over two million. An inch on the map was about thitry-two miles in the air, as compared to the flying maps of Europe on which one inch represented no more than four air miles. Moreover, it seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hold, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit. Beyond this, it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: UNSURVEYED . It was as if the mapmakers had said, We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won t know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle and the chances are we won t know then! Beryl Markham, West With the Night

My aviation maps today have no such markings. The continent is covered with radio beacons, the world with GPS, the maps with precise elevations of the ground and everything from skyscrapers to antenna towers. And yet, despite all we know, the world is still a breathtaking adventure. Yesterday, the boys and I were going to fly to Abilene, KS, to see a museum (Seelye Mansion). Circumstances were such that we neither flew, nor saw that museum. But we still went to Abilene, and wound up at the Museum of Independent Telephony, a wondrous place for anyone interested in the history of technology. As it is one of those off-the-beaten-path sorts of places, the boys got 2.5 hours to use the hands-on exhibits of real old phones, switchboards, and also the schoolhouse out back. They decided why not? to use this historic equipment to pretend to order pizzas. Jacob and Oliver proceeded to invent all sorts of things to use the phones for: ordering pizza, calling the cops to chase the pizza delivery guys, etc. They were so interested that by 2PM we still hadn t had lunch and they claimed we re not hungry despite the fact that we were going to get pizza for lunch. And I certainly enjoyed the exhibits on the evolution of telephones, switching (from manual plugboards to automated switchboards), and such. This place was known it even has a website, I had been there before, and in fact so had the boys (my parents took them there a couple of years ago). But yesterday, we discovered the Strowger switch had been repaired since the last visit, and that it, in fact, is great for conversations about pizza. Whether it s seeing an eclipse, discovering a fascination with tree branches, or historic telephones, a spirit of curiosity and exploration lets a person find fun adventures almost anywhere.

Once again, my focus was on Gitano, which we're working toward a 1.1 for. We had another one of our Gitano developer days which was attended by Richard maw and myself. You are invited to read the wiki page but a summary of what happened, which directly involved me, is:

• Once again, we reviewed our current task state
• We had a good discussion about our code of conduct including adopting a small change from upstream to improve matters
• I worked on, and submitted a patch for, improving nested error message reports in Lace.
• I reviewed and merged some work from Richard about pattern centralisation
• I responded to comments on a number of in-flight series Richard had reviewed for me.
• We discussed our plans for 1.1 and agreed that we'll be skipping a developer day in August because so much of it is consumed by DebConf and so on.

Other than that, related to Gitano during July I:

• Submitted some code series before the developer day covering Gall cleanups and hook support in Gitano.
• Reviewed and merged some more Makefile updates from Richard Ipsum
• Reviewed and merged a Supple fix for environment cleardown from Richard Ipsum
• Fixed an issue in one of the Makefiles which made it harder to build with dh-lua
• I began work in earnest on Gitano CI, preparing a lot of scripts and support to sit around Jenkins (for now) for CIing packaging etc for Gitano and Debian
• I began work on a system branch concept for Gitano CI which will let us handle the CI of branches in the repos, even if they cross repos.

I don't think I've done much non-Gitano F/LOSS work in July, but I am now in Montr al for debconf 2017 so hopefully more to say next month.

Yesterday, I was giving a talk at the The South SF Bay Haskell User Group about how implementing lock-step simulation is trivial in Haskell and how Chris Smith and me are using this to make CodeWorld even more attractive to students. I gave the talk before, at Compose::Conference in New York City earlier this year, so I felt well prepared. On the flight to the West Coast I slightly extended the slides, and as I was too cheap to buy in-flight WiFi, I tested them only locally. So I arrived at the offices of Target¹ in Sunnyvale, got on the WiFi, uploaded my slides, which are in fact one large interactive CodeWorld program, and tried to run it. But I got a type error Turns out that the API of CodeWorld was changed just the day before:

commit 054c811b494746ec7304c3d495675046727ab114
Author: Chris Smith <cdsmith@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed Jun 21 23:53:53 2017 +0000
    Change dilated to take one parameter.
    
    Function is nearly unused, so I'm not concerned about breakage.
    This new version better aligns with standard educational usage,
    in which "dilation" means uniform scaling.  Taken as a separate
    operation, it commutes with rotation, and preserves similarity
    of shapes, neither of which is true of scaling in general.

Ok, that was quick to fix, and the CodeWorld server started to compile my code, and compiled, and aborted. It turned out that my program, presumably the larges CodeWorld interaction out there, hit the time limit of the compiler. Luckily, Chris Smith just arrived at the venue, and he emergency-bumped the compiler time limit. The program compiled and I could start my presentation. Unfortunately, the biggest blunder was still awaiting for me. I came to the slide where two instances of pong are played over a simulated network, and my point was that the two instances are perfectly in sync. Unfortunately, they were not. I guess it did support my point that lock-step simulation can easily go wrong, but it really left me out in the rain there, and I could not explain it I did not modify this code since New York, and there it worked flawless². In the end, I could save my face a bit by running the real pong game against an attendee over the network, and no desynchronisation could be observed there. Today I dug into it and it took me a while, and it turned out that the problem was not in CodeWorld, or the lock-step simulation code discussed in our paper about it, but in the code in my presentation that simulated the delayed network messages; in some instances it would deliver the UI events in different order to the two simulated players, and hence cause them do something different. Phew.

Picture one Sunday morning. Three guys are seemingly-randomly walking into a Mennonite church in rural Nebraska. One with long hair and well-maintained clothes from the 70s. Another dressed well enough to be preaching. And the third simply dressed to be comfortable, with short hair showing evidence of having worn a headset for a couple of hours that morning. This was the scene as we made a spur-of-the-moment visit to that church which resulted in quite some surprise all around, since my brother knew a number of people there. For instance:

Pastor: Peter! What are you doing here? Peter: [jokingly] Is that how you greet visitors here?

And then, of course, Peter would say, Well, we were flying home from South Dakota and figured we d stop in at Beatrice for fuel. And drop in on you. Followed by some surprise that we would stop at their little airport (which is quite a nice one). This all happened because it was windy. This is the fun adventure of aviation. Sometimes you plan to go to Texas, but the weather there is terrible, so you discover a 100-year-old landmark in Indiana instead. Or sometimes, like a couple of weeks ago, we planned to fly straight home but spent a few hours exploring rural Nebraska. The three of us flew to Sioux Falls, SD, in a little Cessna to visit my uncle and aunt up there. On our flight up, we stopped at the little airport in Seward, NE. It was complete with this unique elevated deck. In my imagination, this is used for people to drink beer while watching the planes land. In South Dakota, we had a weekend full of card and board games, horseshoes, and Crokinole with my uncle and aunt, who are always fun to visit. We had many memories of visits up there as children and the pleasant enjoyment of the fact that we didn t need an 8-hour drive to get there. We flew back with a huge bag of large rhubarb from their garden (that too is something of a tradition!) It was a fun weekend to spend with my brothers first time we d been able to do this in a long while. And it marked the 11th state I ve flown into, and over 17,000 miles of flying.

TeleMini V3.0 Dual-deploy altimeter with telemetry now available TeleMini v3.0 is an update to our original TeleMini v1.0 flight computer. It is a miniature (1/2 inch by 1.7 inch) dual-deploy flight computer with data logging and radio telemetry. Small enough to fit comfortably in an 18mm tube, this powerful package does everything you need on a single board:

• 512kB on-board data logging memory, compared with 5kB in v1.
• 40mW, 70cm ham-band digital transceiver for in-flight telemetry and on-the-ground configuration, compared to 10mW in v1.
• Transmitted telemetry includes altitude, speed, acceleration, flight state, igniter continutity, temperature and battery voltage. Monitor the state of the rocket before, during and after flight.
• Radio direction finding beacon transmitted during and after flight. This beacon can be received with a regular 70cm Amateur radio receiver.
• Barometer accurate to 100k' MSL. Reliable apogee detection, independent of flight path. Barometric data recorded on-board during flight. The v1 boards could only fly to 45k'.
• Dual-deploy with adjustable apogee delay and main altitude. Fires standard e-matches and Q2G2 igniters.
• 0.5 x 1.7 . Fits easily in an 18mm tube. This is slightly longer than the v1 boards to provide room for two extra mounting holes past the pyro screw terminals.
• Uses rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery technology. All-day power in a small and light-weight package.
• Learn more at http://www.altusmetrum.org/TeleMini/
• Purchase these at http://shop.gag.com/home-page/telemini-v3.html

I don't have anything in these images to show just how tiny this board is but the spacing between the screw terminals is 2.54mm (0.1in), and the whole board is only 13mm wide (1/2in). This was a fun board to design. As you might guess from the version number, we made a couple prototypes of a version 2 using the same CC1111 SoC/radio part as version 1 but in the EasyMini form factor (0.8 by 1.5 inches). Feed back from existing users indicated that bigger wasn't better in this case, so we shelved that design. With the availability of the STM32F042 ARM Cortex-M0 part in a 4mm square package, I was able to pack that, the higher power CC1200 radio part, a 512kB memory part and a beeper into the same space as the original TeleMini version 1 board. There is USB on the board, but it's only on some tiny holes, along with the cortex SWD debugging connection. I may make some kind of jig to gain access to that for configuration, data download and reprogramming. For those interested in an even smaller option, you could remove the screw terminals and battery connector and directly wire to the board, and replace the beeper with a shorter version. You could even cut the rear mounting holes off to make the board shorter; there are no components in that part of the board.

Tomorrow we are leaving for TUG 2017 @ BachoTeX, one of the most unusual and great series of conferences (BachoTeX) merged with the most important series of TeX conference (TUG). I am looking forward to this trip and to see all the good friends there. And having the chance to visit my family at the same time in Vienna makes this trip, how painful the long flight with our daughter will be, worth it. See you in Vienna and Bachotek! PS: No pun intended with the photo-logo combination, just a shot of the great surroundings in Bachotek

A fair amount of things happened since I last blogged something else than music. First of all we did actually hold a Debian Diversity meeting. It was quite nice, less people around than hoped for, and I account that to some extend to the trolls and haters that defaced the titanpad page for the agenda and destroyed the doodle entry for settling on a date for the meeting. They even tried to troll my blog with comments, and while I did approve controversial responses in the past, those went over the line of being acceptable and didn't carry any relevant content. One response that I didn't approve but kept in my mailbox is even giving me strength to carry on. There is one sentence in it that speaks to me: Think you can stop us? You can't you stupid b*tch. You have ruined the Debian community for us. The rest of the message is of no further relevance, but even though I can't take credit for being responsible for that, I'm glad to be a perceived part of ruining the Debian community for intolerant and hateful people. A lot of other things happened since too. Mostly locally here in Vienna, several queer empowering groups were founding around me, some of them existed already, some formed with the help of myself. We now have several great regular meetings for non-binary people, for queer polyamory people about which we gave an interview, a queer playfight (I might explain that concept another time), a polyamory discussion group, two bi-/pansexual groups, a queer-feminist choir, and there will be an European Lesbian* Conference in October where I help with the organization and on June 21st I'll finally receive the keys to my flat in Que[e]rbau Seestadt. I'm sooo looking forward to it. It will be part of the Let me come Home experience that I'm currently in. Another part of that experience is that I started changing my name (and gender marker) officially. I had my first appointment in the corresponding bureau, and I hope that it won't last too long because I have to get my papers in time for booking my flight to Montreal, and somewhen along the process my current passport won't contain correct data anymore. So for the people who have it in their signing policy to see government IDs this might be your chance to finally sign my key then. I plan to do a diversity BoF at debconf where we can speak more directly on where we want to head with the project. I hope I'll find the time to do an IRC meeting beforehand. I'm just uncertain how to coordinate that one to make it accessible for interested parties while keeping the destructive trolls out. I'm open for ideas here.

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Linux usage in networking hardware has been on the rise for some time. During the latest Netdev conference held in Montreal this April, people talked seriously about Linux running on high end, "top of rack" (TOR) networking equipment. Those devices have long been the realm of proprietary hardware and software companies like Cisco or Juniper, but Linux seems to be making some significant headway into the domain. According to Shrijeet Mukherjee, VP of Engineering at Cumulus Networks: "we are seeing a 28% adoption rate in the Fortune 50" companies. As someone who has worked in system administration and networking for over a decade, I was surprised by this: switches have always been black boxes of proprietary hardware that we barely get a shell into. But as more and more TOR hardware gets Linux support, some of that work trickles down outside of that niche. Are we really seeing the rise of Linux in high-end networking hardware?

Linux as the standard interface During his keynote at Netdev, Jesse Brandeburg explained that traffic is exploding on the Internet: "From 2006 to 2016 the compound annual growth rate was 78% of network traffic. So the network traffic is growing like crazy. In 2010 to 2023, it's going to grow by a thousand times." He also mentioned Intel was working on devices that could do up to 400 Gbps. In his talk, he argued that Linux has a critical place in the modern world by repeating the mantra that "everything is on the network, and the network runs Linux", but does it really? Through Android, Linux has become the most popular end-user device operating system and is also dominant on the server but what about the actual fabric of the network: the routers and switches that interconnect all those machines? Mukherjee, in his own keynote, argued that even though Linux has achieved dominance in the server and virtualization markets, there is a "discontinuity [...] at the boundary where the host and the network meet" and argued "that the host without the network will not survive". In other words, proprietary hardware and software in the network threaten free software in the server. Even though some manufacturers are already providing a "Linux interface" in their hardware, it is often only some sort of compatibility shell which might be compared with the Ubuntu compatibility layer in Windows: it's not a real Linux. Mukherjee pushed this idea further by saying that those companies are limiting themselves by not using the full Linux stack. He presented Linux as the "top vehicle for innovation" that provides a featureful network stack, citing VXLAN, eBPF, and Quagga as prime features used on switches. Mukherjee also praised the diversity of the user-space Linux ecosystem as something that commercial alternatives can't rival; he compared the faster Linux development to the commercial sector where similar top features stay in the beta stage for up to 3 years. Because of its dominance in the server market, consumers are expecting a Linux-like interface on their networking gear now, which means Linux could be the standard interface all providers strive toward. As a Debian developer, I can't help but smile at the thought; if there's one thing we have not been able to do among Linux distributions, it's pretty much standardize user space in a consistent interface. POSIX is old and incomplete, the FHS is showing its age, and most distributions have abandoned LSB. Yet, the idea is certainly enticing: there is a base set of tools and applications, especially for the Linux kernel, that are standardized: iproute2, ethtool, and iptables are generally consistent across distributions, even though each distribution has its own way of using them. Yet Linux is not dominant, why? Mukherjee identified the problem as "packaging issues" and listed a set of features he would like Linux to improve:

• Standardization of the ethtool interface. The idea is to make ethtool a de-facto standard to manage switches and ports. Mukherjee gave the example that data centers spend more money on cables than any other hardware and explained that making it easier to identify cables is therefore a key functionality. Getting consistent interface naming was also a key problem identified by numerous participants at the conference. While systemd tried to fix this with the predictable network interface names specification, the interface names are not necessarily predictable across virtual machines or on special hardware; in fact, this was the topic of the first talk of the conference. ethtool also needs to support interfaces that run faster than 1 Gbps, something that still has limited support in Linux at the moment.
• Scaling of the Linux bridge. Through the rise of "software defined networking", we are likely to see multi-switch virtual environments that need to scale to hundreds of interfaces and devices easily. This is something the Linux bridge was never designed to do and it's showing scalability issues. During the conference, there was hope that the new XDP and eBPF developments could help, but also concerns this would create yet another bridge layer inside the kernel.

Cumulus's goal seems to be to establish Linux as the industry standard for this new era of networking and it is not alone. Through its Open Compute project, Facebook is sharing open designs of data center products and, while we have yet to see commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 24 and 48-port gigabit switches trickle down to the consumer market, the company is definitely deploying new hardware based on those specifications in its own data centers, and those devices are often based on Linux.

The Linux switch implementation So how exactly do switches work in Linux? The Linux kernel manipulates switches with three different operation structures: switchdev_ops, which we previously covered, ethtool_ops, and netdev_ops. Certain switches, however, also need distributed switch architecture (DSA) features to be properly handled. DSA is a more obscure part of the network stack that allows Linux to represent hardware switches or chains of switches using regular Linux tools like bridge, ifconfig, and so on. While switchdev is a new layer, DSA has been in the kernel since 2.6.28 in 2008. Originally developed to support Marvell switches, DSA is now a generic layer deployed in WiFi access points, set-top boxes, on-board flight entertainment systems, trains, and other industrial equipment. Switches that have an Ethernet controller need DSA, whereas the kernel can support switches without Ethernet controllers directly with switchdev drivers. The first years of DSA's development consisted only of basic maintenance but, in the last three years, DSA has seen a resurgence of contributions, as part of Linux networking push to support hardware offloading and network switches. Between 2014 and 2015, DSA added support for Broadcom hardware, wake on LAN, and hardware port bridging, among other features. DSA's development was parallel to swconfig, written by the OpenWrt project to support the small office and home office (SOHO) routers that the project is targeting. The main difference between swconfig and DSA is that DSA-supported switches show one network interface per port, whereas swconfig-configured switches show up as a single port, which limits the amount of information that can be extracted from the switch. For example, you cannot have per-port traffic statistics with swconfig. That limitation is what led to the creation of the switchdev framework, when swconfig was proposed (then refused) for inclusion in mainline. Another goal of switchdev was to support bridge hardware offloading and network interface card (NIC) virtualization. Also, whereas swconfig uses virtual LAN (VLAN) tagging to address ports, DSA enables the use of device-specific tagging headers to address different ports, which enables DSA to have better control over the switches. This allows, for example, DSA to do internet group management protocol (IGMP) snooping or implement the spanning tree protocol, whereas swconfig doesn't have those features. Some switches are actually connected to the host CPU through an Ethernet interface instead of regular PCI-Express interface, and DSA supports this as well. One advantage that remains in the swconfig approach is that it treats the internal switch as a simple external switch, and addresses ports with standard VLAN tags. This is something DSA could do, as well, but no one has bothered implementing this just yet. For now, DSA drivers use device-specific tagging mechanisms that limit the number of supported devices. Other areas of future improvement for DSA are better multi-chip support, IGMP snooping, and bonding, as well as firewall, NAT, and TC offloading.

Where is the freedom? Given all those technical improvements, you might rightfully wonder if your own wireless router or data center switch runs Linux. In recent years, we have seen more and more networking devices shipped with Linux and sometimes even OpenWrt (e.g. in the case of the Turris Omnia, which we previously covered), and especially on SOHO routers, but it sometimes means a crippled operating system that only offers you a proprietary web interface. But at least those efforts make it easier to deploy free operating systems on those devices. Based on my experience running OpenWrt on wireless routers to build the Montreal mesh network, deploying Linux on routers and switches has always been a manual process. The Ubiquiti hardware being used in the mesh network comes with an OpenWrt derivative, but it includes proprietary drivers and a proprietary web interface. To use the mesh networking protocol that was chosen, it was necessary to deploy custom OpenWrt images by hand. For years, it was a continuous struggle for OpenWrt developers to liberate generation after generation of proprietary hardware with companies like Cisco locking down the venerable WRT platform in 2006 and the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that forced TP-Link to block free software on its routers, a change that was later reverted. Most hardware providers are obviously not dedicated to software freedom: deploying Linux on their hardware is for them an economic, not political choice. As you might expect, a "Linux router" these days often means a closed device and operating system, using Linux as the only free component. I had the privilege of doing some reverse engineering on the SmartRG SR603n VDSL modem, which also doubles as a WiFi router and VoIP phone adapter. I was able to get a shell on that machine, and what I found was a custom operating system built on top of the Linux kernel. I wrote a detailed report about this two years ago and the situation then was pretty grim. Another experience I had was working over a decade in data centers, which tells an even worse story: most switches and routers there are not running free software at all. We have deployed HP ProCurve switches that provide free (as in beer) software updates and have struggled for years to find free (as in speech) software alternatives for those. We built our own routers using COTS server hardware, at a significant performance cost over the dedicated application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) built into commercial routers, which do not offer us the trust and flexibility we were looking for. But Linux is definitely making some headway, and has been for a while. When we covered switchdev in February 2016, it was just getting started, but now vendors like Mellanox, Broadcom, Cumulus, and Intel are writing and shipping code using the framework. Cumulus, in particular, is developing a Debian-based distribution (Cumulus Linux) that it deploys for clients on targeted hardware. Most of the hardware in that list, however, is not actually open in the more radical sense: they are devices that can run free software but are not generally open-source hardware. There are some exceptions, but they sit at the higher end of the spectrum: most organizations probably don't need a 100 Gbps ports, let alone the 128 ports in the Backpack switch that Cumulus is shipping. How much this translates to actual freedom for the end-user is therefore questionable. While I have seen encouraging progress on the high end of the hardware spectrum at Netdev, I'm not sure this will translate into immediate wins in the data center or even for home users in the short term. In the long term, however, we will hopefully see some progress in Linux's rise in general-purpose networking hardware following its dominance in general-purpose computing.

The author would like to thank the Netdev organizers for travel assistance. Also, thanks to Andrew Lunn for a technical review of this article. Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

It's april. I am still practicing my piano. I tried in-flight WiFi for the first time and it seems to be usable. Of course, most of my apps are Android apps or web apps which don't really care about slow latency in connections.

The post will be adult/mature in nature. So those below 18 please excuse. The post is about an anecdote almost 20 years to date, The result its being posted is I had a dinner with a friend to whom I shared this and he thought it would be nice if I shared this hence sharing it. The conversation was about being young and foolish in which I shared the anecdote. The blog post was supposed to be about Aadhar which shocked me both in the way no political discourse happened and the way the public as well as public policy was gamed but that would have to wait for another day. History I left college in 1995. The anecdote/incident probably happened couple of years earlier so probably 1992-1993. At that time, I was in my teens and as a typical teenager I made few friends. One of those friends, who would remain nameless as since we drifted apart, and as I have not take permission from him, taking his name would not be a good idea. Anyway, this gentleman, let s call him Mr. X as an example. Couple of months before, he had bought an open jeep, similar but very different from the jeep being shown below. Open Jeep had become a fashion statement few months back (in those days) as a Salman khan starred movie had that and anybody who had money wanted one just like that. Those days we didn t have cell-phones and I had given my land-line phone number to very few friends as in those days, as the land-lines were a finicky instrument. One fine morning, I get a call from my friend telling he is going to come near my place and I should meet him at some xyz place and we would go for a picnic for the whole day and it is possible that we might return next day. As it was holidays and only a fool would throw away a chance to have a ride in open air jeep, I immediately agreed. I shared that my friends had organized a picnic and giving another friend s number (who didn t know anything) got permission and went to meet Mr. X. This was very early morning, around 0600 hrs. . After meeting him, he told that we would be going to Mumbai, take some more friends from there and then move on. In those days, a railway ticket from Shivaji Nagar to V.T. (now C.S.T.) costed INR 30/- . I had been to Mumbai few times before for various technical conferences and knew few cheap places to eat, I knew that going via train, we could go and come back spending at the most INR 150/- and still have some change left-over (today s meal at a roadside/street vendor easily passes that mark). The Journey I shared with him that it will be costly and I don t have any money to cover the fuel expenses and he said he would shoulder the expenses, he just wanted my company for the road. Those days, it was the scenic Old Mumbai-Pune highway and we took plenty of stops to admire that ghats (hills and valleys together). That journey must have taken around 7-8 hours while today by new Expressway, you could do the same thing by 2.5/3 hours. Anyhow, we reached to some swanky hotel in South Mumbai. South Mumbai was not the financial powerhouse that it today is, there was mix of very old buildings and new buildings like the swanky hotel that we had checked in. I have no memory nor any idea whether it was 1 class, 3 class or 5 class and could have cared less as had been tired from the journey. We checked in, I had a long warm water bath and then slept in the king-size bed with curtains drawn. Evening came and we took the jeep and picked up 2-3 of his friends who were from my age or a year or two older and we went to Nariman Point. Seeing the Queen s necklace from Nariman Point at night is a sight in itself. Keeping with the innocence, I was under the impression that we had arrived at our destination, at this our host, Mr. X and his Bombaiya friends had a quiet laugh saying its a young night still. We must have whiled away couple of hours, having chai and throwing rocks in the sea. The Meeting After a while, Mr. X took us to another swanky place. My eyes were out of my sockets as this seemed to be as elitist a place as could be. I saw many White European women in various stages of undress pole-dancing and lap-dancing. I had recently (in those days) come to know the term but was under the impression that it was something that happened in Europe and States only. I had no idea that lap-dancing was older than my birth as according to Wikipedia. So looking back now, I am not surprised that in two decades the concept crossed the oceans. Again, Mr. X being the host, agreed to bear all the costs and all of us had food, drink and a lap-dance from any of the dancers on the floor. As I was young and probably shy (still am) I asked Mr. X s help to pick a girl/woman for me. The woman whom he picked was auburn-aired, was either my age or a year or two older/younger to me. What proceeded next was about 20-30 minutes of totally sexualized erotic experience. While he and all his friends picked girls to go all the way, I was hesitant to let loose. Maybe it was due to my lack of courage or inexperience, maybe it was not in my city so couldn t predict the outcome, maybe was just afraid that reality might mar fantasy, I dunno till date. Although we kissed and necked a lot, I guess that should count for something. The conversation After all my friends had gone to the various rooms, sometime after I excused myself, went to the loo myself, peed a bit, splashed cold water on self, came out and had couple of glasses of water and came back to my seat. The lady came back and I shared that I was not interested in going further and while she was beautiful, I just didn t have the guts. I did ask her if she would give me company though for sometime as I didn t know anyone else at that place. Our conversation was more about her than me as I had more or less an average life upto that moment. There were only three unorthodox things that I had done before meeting her. I had drunk wines of different types, smoked weed and had a Magic Mushrooms experience the year before with another group of friends I had made there. Goa in those days was simply magical in those days but that probably would need its story/own blog post. When I enquired about her, she shared she was from Russia and she rattled off more than half a dozen places around the world where she had been to and this was her second or third stint in Mumbai and she wasn t at all unhappy about the lifestyle and choices she was leading. I had no answer for her as a young penniless college-going student. Her self-confidence and the way she carried herself was impressive, with or without clothes. During course of the conversation she shared a couple of contacts from whom I could get better weed at slightly higher price if I were in Goa. Few months later, those contacts turned out to be true. After sometime, we took all the women and ourselves, around 8-9 people in his jeep (how he negotiated that is beyond me) went to a hygienic Pani puri and Bhel (puffed rice mixed with variety of spices typically tomato, potato, coriander chutney as well as Tamarind Chutney among other things) place and moved them to tears (the spices in bhel and Pani puri did it for them) and this was when we had explicitly asked the bhel-wala guy to make it extremely mild with just a hint of spice in it. Anyways, sometime later, we dropped them at the same place, dropped his friends and came back to the hotel we booked and got drunk again. After-effects Few years later, it came in the newspapers/media that while India had broken out of financial isolation just few years back (1991) and were profiting from it, many countries of the former USSR were going the other way around and hence there was huge human trafficking and immigration that had taken place. This was in-line with what the lady/woman/Miss X had shared with me. The latest trigger The latest trigger happened couple of months back where I learnt of a hero flight attendant saving a girl from human-trafficking. Till date, I am unsure whether she was doing it willingly or putting a brave smile in front of me, because even if she had confided me in any way, I probably would have been too powerless to help her in any-way. I just don t know. Foolishness thy name While my friend took advantage of my innocence and introduced me to a world which otherwise I would probably not know exists, it could have easily have gone some other way as well. While I m still unsure of the choices I made, I was and am happy that I was able to strike a conversation with her and attempt to reach the person therein. Was it the truth or an elaborate fabricated lie to protect myself and herself, this I will never know. Oppression I understand the fact that as a customer or somebody who is taking part in either of those performances or experiences it isn t easy in any way to know/say that whether the performer is doing it wilfully or not as the experiences are in tightly controlled settings.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #anecdote, #confusion, #elitist, #growing up, #lap dance, #NSFW, #Open Jeep, Mumbai