Search Results: "jab"

17 June 2016

Shirish Agarwal: Medical awareness, terrorism, racism and Debconf

Hi to all the souls on planet.debian.org:) . I hope to meet many of you in Debconf16 which is being held at UCT (University of Cape Town), Rhondenbosch, South Africa and am excited to be part of it. I pushed a blog post about my journey to debconf till date. I express my sympathy and condolences to all the people who died in the cowardly shooting spree done by a madman in Orlando . I have been upset about this development but as what s done is done, it s best to just keep moving. Closer to my own reality, I was shocked to discover during my whole visa experience that nowhere there is any knowledge about vaccinations that people should have when they are traveling internationally. I was kinda rudely awakened by this mail which prompted me to take Hep A shot and also start a thread on the mailing list. The more comprehensive info. I got was at the CDC site . It seems to be a go-to site to find about what is recommended. While I will not be taking any shots now as it s nearing to the date of travel, if I had known before, it would have been a valuable resource in itself. Definitely something to be bookmarked if you are going overseas and are worried or have health concerns. On another note, About few days back, there was a discussion as recently, travel advisories have been issued about possible terror action in South Africa by various embassies due to the holy month of Ramadan.
And the recent attack just proves that it takes just one twisted personality with a perverse sense of justice or whatever s/he/ thinks as just to do what s/he did and guns and more security and not the answer.
My take on it some would describe as simplistic, there are things which you can control, there are things beyond your control. No security agency, no country can guarantee it. By being either home or away, you can t wish you will not get bitten. Got images of Final Destination invoked when I was sharing that, for as an Indian, do believe a bit on fate and karma. Also, me being single also plays a part, perhaps I would have been more cautious or have different motivations if I had a family so I do understand some of the concerns which have been raised by people in that thread. At the end of it, it really is a non-choice in my book. If you don t take part due to fear,uncertainty of a possible attack, you have already given in to fear and uncertainty and I believe this goes against the very philosophy of what Debian stands for, being bold, taking chances and having trust in your fellow men. If we haven t allowed proprietary, commercial software to win over us, how can we allow less than 0.1% radically motivated people to scare us ? And the recent attack just proves that it takes just one twisted personality with a perverse sense of justice or whatever s/he/ thinks as just to do what s/he did. More guns and more security are certainly not the answer here. A more troubling part is not terrorism but caste-ism and racism which have been also making news (not in a good way) in India. Now while I cannot claim to have any knowledge about Africans apart from 2-3 conversations which didn t go anywhere, two-three preconceived notions about them can easily be countered. As far as drugs are concerned, IF some Africans are doing drugs smuggling, it would be wrong to pin all of it onto them. India has been fighting drugs smuggling from the 70 s itself. From what we know and have learnt over the years from consuming media, India shares porous borders with almost all our neighbors. Of those, Pakistan is supposed to be the largest grower and supplier and then Nepal where young boys are used as Traffickers. The recent film Rocky Handsome and the recent upcoming controversial movie Udta Punjab are trying to explore these issues. As far as drinking in open is concerned, I have seen and been part of Punjabi parties where both men and women drink without abandon in farm parties. Russians, Germans and Israelis can also out-drink a person on their day/mood. As far as sexuality is concerned, we are the second most populous country in the world, so the less said the better:) . I believe though that underneath this racism is money, greed, phobia, language barriers and just maybe some lifestyle choices as well. I have seen North-Eastern, Chinese, Buddhist people being colored with the same brush. The more interesting case is with the Buddhist as can be seen in Himachal Pradesh, where locals feel they are deprived as Europeans come and indulge Buddhists for their monasteries and their way of life while locals don t get much money from them. This is partly true, but also due to our own short-comings in dealing with westerners. I have never seen my own countrymen going out of their way to make westerners or any tourists for that matter feel welcome in a genuine way. More often, the behavior is between hostility, jealousy and a perverted sense of hero-worship due to the color of skin. As far as being racist and bigoted are concerned, it seems we are not alone, just day before came across this news from Malaysia which is interesting in the sense that how people from different communities frame their own history and people around them, forget that is false and misleading to what we in India know to be the truth, it probably is/would be interesting for somebody who does comparative history, myth and folklore analysis. I was actually planning to talk about some of the talks I am looking forward to hearing and seeing on Debconf but guess that will have to wait for few more days. Hope to publish one more before actually flying to Debconf. Till later.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #racism, #terrorism, #vaccinations

17 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 55 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 8th and May 14th 2016: Documentation updates Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 28 packages have become newly reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: actor-framework ask asterisk-prompt-fr-armelle asterisk-prompt-fr-proformatique coccinelle cwebx d-itg device-tree-compiler flann fortunes-es idlastro jabref konclude latexdiff libint minlog modplugtools mummer mwrap mxallowd mysql-mmm ocaml-atd ocamlviz postbooks pycorrfit pyscanfcs python-pcs weka The following 9 packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again due to changes in their build dependencies: csync2 dune-common dune-localfunctions libcommons-jxpath-java libcommons-logging-java libstax-java libyanfs-java python-daemon yacas The following packages have become newly reproducible after being fixed: The following packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 344 reviews have been added, 125 have been updated and 20 have been removed in this week. 14 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Dan Kegel sent a mail to report about his experiments with a reproducible dpkg PPA for Ubuntu. According to him sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dank/dpkg && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dpkg should be enough to get reproducible builds on Ubuntu 16.04. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

10 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 54 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 1st and May 7th 2016: Media coverage There has been a surprising tweet last week: "Props to @FiloSottile for his nifty gvt golang tool. We're using it to get reproducible builds for a Zika & West Nile monitoring project." and to our surprise Kenn confirmed privately that he indeed meant "reproducible builds" as in "bit by bit identical builds". Wow. We're looking forward to learn more details about this; for now we just know that they are doing this for software quality reasons basically. Two of the four GSoC and Outreachy participants for Reproducible builds posted their introductions to Planet Debian: Toolchain fixes and other upstream developments dpkg 1.18.5 was uploaded fixing two bugs relevant to us: This upload made it necessary to rebase our dpkg on the version on sid again, which Niko Tyni and Lunar promptly did. Then a few days later 1.18.6 was released to fix a regression in the previous upload, and Niko promptly updated our patched version again. Following this Niko Tyni found #823428: "dpkg: many packages affected by dpkg-source: error: source package uses only weak checksums". Alexis Bienven e worked on tex related packages and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: Emmanuel Bourg uploaded jflex/1.4.3+dfsg-2, which removes timestamps from generated files. Packages fixed The following 285 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies (mostly from GCC honouring SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, see the previous week report): 0ad abiword abcm2ps acedb acpica-unix actiona alliance amarok amideco amsynth anjuta aolserver4-nsmysql aolserver4-nsopenssl aolserver4-nssqlite3 apbs aqsis aria2 ascd ascii2binary atheme-services audacity autodocksuite avis awardeco bacula ballerburg bb berusky berusky2 bindechexascii binkd boinc boost1.58 boost1.60 bwctl cairo-dock cd-hit cenon.app chipw ckermit clp clustalo cmatrix coinor-cbc commons-pool cppformat crashmail crrcsim csvimp cyphesis-cpp dact dar darcs darkradiant dcap dia distcc dolphin-emu drumkv1 dtach dune-localfunctions dvbsnoop dvbstreamer eclib ed2k-hash edfbrowser efax-gtk efax exonerate f-irc fakepop fbb filezilla fityk flasm flightgear fluxbox fmit fossil freedink-dfarc freehdl freemedforms-project freeplayer freeradius fxload gdb-arm-none-eabi geany-plugins geany geda-gaf gfm gif2png giflib gifticlib glaurung glusterfs gnokii gnubiff gnugk goaccess gocr goldencheetah gom gopchop gosmore gpsim gputils grcompiler grisbi gtkpod gvpe hardlink haskell-github hashrat hatari herculesstudio hpcc hypre i2util incron infiniband-diags infon ips iptotal ipv6calc iqtree jabber-muc jama jamnntpd janino jcharts joy2key jpilot jumpnbump jvim kanatest kbuild kchmviewer konclude krename kscope kvpnc latexdiff lcrack leocad libace-perl libcaca libcgicc libdap libdbi-drivers libewf libjlayer-java libkcompactdisc liblscp libmp3spi-java libpwiz librecad libspin-java libuninum libzypp lightdm-gtk-greeter lighttpd linpac lookup lz4 lzop maitreya meshlab mgetty mhwaveedit minbif minc-tools moc mrtrix mscompress msort mudlet multiwatch mysecureshell nifticlib nkf noblenote nqc numactl numad octave-optim omega-rpg open-cobol openmama openmprtl openrpt opensm openvpn openvswitch owx pads parsinsert pcb pd-hcs pd-hexloader pd-hid pd-libdir pear-channels pgn-extract phnxdeco php-amqp php-apcu-bc php-apcu php-solr pidgin-librvp plan plymouth pnscan pocketsphinx polygraph portaudio19 postbooks-updater postbooks powertop previsat progressivemauve puredata-import pycurl qjackctl qmidinet qsampler qsopt-ex qsynth qtractor quassel quelcom quickplot qxgedit ratpoison rlpr robojournal samplv1 sanlock saods9 schism scorched3d scummvm-tools sdlbasic sgrep simh sinfo sip-tester sludge sniffit sox spd speex stimfit swarm-cluster synfig synthv1 syslog-ng tart tessa theseus thunar-vcs-plugin ticcutils tickr tilp2 timbl timblserver tkgate transtermhp tstools tvoe ucarp ultracopier undbx uni2ascii uniutils universalindentgui util-vserver uudeview vfu virtualjaguar vmpk voms voxbo vpcs wipe x264 xcfa xfrisk xmorph xmount xyscan yacas yasm z88dk zeal zsync zynaddsubfx Last week the 1000th bug usertagged "reproducible" was fixed! This means roughly 2 bugs per day since 2015-01-01. Kudos and huge thanks to everyone involved! Please also note: FTBFS packages have not been counted here and there are still 600 open bugs with reproducible patches provided. Please help bringing that number down to 0! The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads which fix reproducibility issues, but currently FTBFS: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 54 reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 18 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, James Cowgill and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development Thanks to Mattia, diffoscope 52~bpo8+1 is available in jessie-backports now. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC. Mattia also wrote a small ikiwiki macro for this blog to ease linking reproducible issues, packages in the package tracker and bugs in the Debian BTS.

26 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 52 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between April 17th and April 23rd 2016: Toolchain fixes Thomas Weber uploaded lcms2/2.7-1 which will not write uninitialized memory when writing color names. Original patch by Lunar. The GCC 7 development phase has just begun, so Dhole reworked his patch to make gcc use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH if set which prompted interesting feedback, but it has not been merged yet. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch for sphinx to strip Python object memory addresses from the generated documentation. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cobertura, commons-pool, easymock, eclipselink, excalibur-logkit, gap-radiroot, gluegen2, jabref, java3d, jcifs, jline, jmock2, josql, jtharness, libfann, libgroboutils-java, libjemmy2-java, libjgoodies-binding-java, libjgrapht0.8-java, libjtds-java, liboptions-java, libpal-java, libzeus-jscl-java, node-transformers, octave-msh, octave-secs2d, openmama, rkward. The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: tests.reproducible-builds.org diffoscope development diffoscope 52 was released with changes from Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, Satyam Zode and Reiner Herrmann, who also did the release. Notable changes included: As usual, diffoscope 52 is available on Debian, Archlinux and PyPI, other distributions will hopefully soon update. Package reviews 28 reviews have been added, 11 have been updated and 94 have been removed in this week. 14 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb (one being was a duplicate of a bug filed by Sebastian Ramacher an hour earlier). Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger 'h01ger' Levsen and Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

1 April 2016

Francois Marier: How Safe Browsing works in Firefox

Firefox has had support for Google's Safe Browsing since 2005 when it started as a stand-alone Firefox extension. At first it was only available in the USA, but it was opened up to the rest of the world in 2006 and moved to the Google Toolbar. It then got integrated directly into Firefox 2.0 before the public launch of the service in 2007. Many people seem confused by this phishing and malware protection system and while there is a pretty good explanation of how it works on our support site, it doesn't go into technical details. This will hopefully be of interest to those who have more questions about it.

Browsing Protection The main part of the Safe Browsing system is the one that watches for bad URLs as you're browsing. Browsing protection currently protects users from: If a Firefox user attempts to visit one of these sites, a warning page will show up instead, which you can see for yourself here: The first two warnings can be toggled using the browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled preference (in about:config) whereas the last one is controlled by browser.safebrowsing.enabled.

List updates It would be too slow (and privacy-invasive) to contact a trusted server every time the browser wants to establish a connection with a web server. Instead, Firefox downloads a list of bad URLs every 30 minutes from the server (browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.updateURL) and does a lookup against its local database before displaying a page to the user. Downloading the entire list of sites flagged by Safe Browsing would be impractical due to its size so the following transformations are applied:
  1. each URL on the list is canonicalized,
  2. then hashed,
  3. of which only the first 32 bits of the hash are kept.
The lists that are requested from the Safe Browsing server and used to flag pages as malware/unwanted or phishing can be found in urlclassifier.malwareTable and urlclassifier.phishTable respectively. If you want to see some debugging information in your terminal while Firefox is downloading updated lists, turn on browser.safebrowsing.debug. Once downloaded, the lists can be found in the cache directory:
  • ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/XXXX/safebrowsing/ on Linux
  • ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/XXXX/safebrowsing/ on Mac
  • C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\mozilla\firefox\profiles\XXXX\safebrowsing\ on Windows

Resolving partial hash conflicts Because the Safe Browsing database only contains partial hashes, it is possible for a safe page to share the same 32-bit hash prefix as a bad page. Therefore when a URL matches the local list, the browser needs to know whether or not the rest of the hash matches the entry on the Safe Browsing list. In order resolve such conflicts, Firefox requests from the Safe Browsing server (browser.safebrowsing.provider.mozilla.gethashURL) all of the hashes that start with the affected 32-bit prefix and adds these full-length hashes to its local database. Turn on browser.safebrowsing.debug to see some debugging information on the terminal while these "completion" requests are made. If the current URL doesn't match any of these full hashes, the load proceeds as normal. If it does match one of them, a warning interstitial page is shown and the load is canceled.

Download Protection The second part of the Safe Browsing system protects users against malicious downloads. It was launched in 2011, implemented in Firefox 31 on Windows and enabled in Firefox 39 on Mac and Linux. It roughly works like this:
  1. Download the file.
  2. Check the main URL, referrer and redirect chain against a local blocklist (urlclassifier.downloadBlockTable) and block the download in case of a match.
  3. On Windows, if the binary is signed, check the signature against a local whitelist (urlclassifier.downloadAllowTable) of known good publishers and release the download if a match is found.
  4. If the file is not a binary file then release the download.
  5. Otherwise, send the binary file's metadata to the remote application reputation server (browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.url) and block the download if the server indicates that the file isn't safe.
Blocked downloads can be unblocked by right-clicking on them in the download manager and selecting "Unblock". While the download protection feature is automatically disabled when malware protection (browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled) is turned off, it can also be disabled independently via the browser.safebrowsing.downloads.enabled preference. Note that Step 5 is the only point at which any information about the download is shared with Google. That remote lookup can be suppressed via the browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.enabled preference for those users concerned about sending that metadata to a third party.

Types of malware The original application reputation service would protect users against "dangerous" downloads, but it has recently been expanded to also warn users about unwanted software as well as software that's not commonly downloaded. These various warnings can be turned on and off in Firefox through the following preferences:
  • browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_dangerous
  • browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_dangerous_host
  • browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_potentially_unwanted
  • browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_uncommon
and tested using Google's test page. If you want to see how often each "verdict" is returned by the server, you can have a look at the telemetry results for Firefox Beta.

Privacy One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe. While this was an option in version 1 of the Safe Browsing protocol (as disclosed in their privacy policy at the time), support for this "enhanced mode" was removed in Firefox 3 and the version 1 server was decommissioned in late 2011 in favor of version 2 of the Safe Browsing API which doesn't offer this type of real-time lookup. Google explicitly states that the information collected as part of operating the Safe Browsing service "is only used to flag malicious activity and is never used anywhere else at Google" and that "Safe Browsing requests won't be associated with your Google Account". In addition, Firefox adds a few privacy protections:
  • Query string parameters are stripped from URLs we check as part of the download protection feature.
  • Cookies set by the Safe Browsing servers to protect the service from abuse are stored in a separate cookie jar so that they are not mixed with regular browsing/session cookies.
  • When requesting complete hashes for a 32-bit prefix, Firefox throws in a number of extra "noise" entries to obfuscate the original URL further.
On balance, we believe that most users will want to keep Safe Browsing enabled, but we also make it easy for users with particular needs to turn it off.

Learn More If you want to learn more about how Safe Browsing works in Firefox, you can find all of the technical details on the Safe Browsing and Application Reputation pages of the Mozilla wiki or you can ask questions on our mailing list. Google provides some interesting statistics about what their systems detect in their transparency report and offers a tool to find out why a particular page has been blocked. Some information on how phishing sites are detected is also available on the Google Security blog, but for more detailed information about all parts of the Safe Browsing system, see the following papers:

31 March 2016

Antoine Beaupr : My free software activities, march 2016

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 4th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I spent half of the month away on a vacation so little work was done, especially since I tried to tackle rather large uploads like NSS and Xen. I also worked on the frontdesk shift last week.

Frontdesk That work mainly consisted of figuring out how to best help the security team with the last uploads to the Wheezy release. For those who don't know, Debian 7 Wheezy, or "oldstable", is going to be unsupported by the security team starting end of april, and the Debian 6 Squeeze (the previous LTS) is now unsupported. The PGP signatures on the archived release have started yielding expiration errors which can be ignored but that are really a strong reminder that it is really time to upgrade. So the LTS team is now working towards backporting a few security issues from squeeze to wheezy, and this is what I focused on during triage work. I have identified the following high priority packages I will work on after I complete my work on the Xen and NSS packages (detailed below):
  • libidn
  • icu
  • phpmyadmin
  • tomcat6
  • optipng
  • srtp
  • dhcpcd
  • python-tornado

Updates to NSS and Xen I have spent a lot of time testing and building packages for NSS and Xen. To be fair, Brian May did most of the work on the Xen packages, and I merely did some work to test the packages on Koumbit's infrastructure, something which I will continue doing in the next month. For NSS, wheezy and jessie are in this weird state where patches were provided to the security team all the way back in November yet were never tested. Since then, yet more issues came up and I worked hard to review and port patches for those new security issues to wheezy. I'll followup on both packages in the following month.

Other free software work

Android TL;DR: there's an even longer version of this with the step-by-step procedures and that I will update as time goes on in my wiki. I somehow inherited an Android phone recently, on a loan from a friend because the phone broke one too many times and she got a new one from her provider. This phone is a HTC One S "Ville", which is fairly old, but good enough to play with and give me a mobile computing platform to listen to podcasts, play music, access maps and create GPS traces. I was previously doing this with my N900, but that device is really showing its age: very little development is happening on it, the SDK is closed source and the device itself is fairly big, compared to the "Ville". Plus, the SIM card actually works on the Ville so, even though I do not have an actual contract with a cell phone provider (too expensive, too invasive on my privacy), I can still make emergency phone calls (911)! Plus, since there is good wifi on the machine, I can use it to connect to the phone system with the built-in SIP client, send text messages through SMS (thanks to VoIP.ms SMS support) or Jabber. I have also played around with LibreSignal, the free software replacement for Signal, which uses proprietary google services. Yes, the VoIP.ms SMS app also uses GCM, but hopefully that can be fixed. (While I was writing this, another Debian Developer wrote a good review of Signal so I am happy to skip that step. Go read that.)
See also my apps list for a more complete list of the apps I have installed on the phone. I welcome recommendations on cool free software apps I should use!
I have replaced the stock firmware on the phone with Cyanogenmod 12.1, which was a fairly painful experience, partly because of the difficult ambiance on the #cyanogenmod channel on Freenode, where I had extreme experiences: a brave soul helped me through the first flashing process for around 2 hours, nicely holding my hand at every step. Other times, I have seen flames and obtuse comments from people being vulgar, brutal, obnoxious, if not sometimes downright homophobic and sexist from other users. It is clearly a community that needs to fix their attitude. I have documented everything I could in details in this wiki page, in case others want to resuscitate their old phones, but also because I ended up reinstalling the freaking phone about 4 times, and was getting tired of forgetting how to do it every time. I am somewhat fascinated by Android: here is the Linux-based device that should save us all from the proprietary Apple nightmares of fenced in gardens and censorship. Yet, public Android downloads are hidden behind license agreements, even though the code itself is free, which has led fellow Debian developers to work on making libre rebuilds of Androids to workaround this insanity. But worse: all phones are basically proprietary devices down to the core. You need custom firmware to be loaded on the machine for it to boot at all, from the bootloader all the way down to the GSM baseband and Wifi drivers. It is a minefield of closed source software, and trying to run free software on there is a bit of a delusion, especially since the baseband has so much power over the phone. Still, I think it is really interesting to run free software on those machines, and help people that are stuck with cell phones get familiar with software freedom. It seems especially important to me to make Android developers aware of software freedom considering how many apps are available for free yet on which it is not possible to contribute significantly because the source code is not published at all, or published only on the Google Store, instead of the more open and public F-Droid repository which publishes only free software. So I did contribute. This month, I am happy to announce that I contributed to the following free software projects on Android: I have also reviewed the literature surrounding Telegram, a popular messaging app rival to Signal and Whatsapp. Oddly enough, my contributions to Wikipedia on that subject were promptly reverted which made me bring up the subject on the page's Talk page. This lead to an interesting response from the article's main editors which at least added that the "its security features have been contested by security researchers and cryptography experts". Considering the history of Telegram, I would keep people away from it and direct people to use Signal instead, even though Signal has similar metadata issues, mostly because Telegram's lack of response to the security issues that were outlined by fellow security researchers. Both systems suffer from a lack of federation as well, which is a shame in this era of increasing centralization. I am not sure I will put much more work in developing for Android for now. It seems like a fairly hostile platform to work on, and unless I have specific pain points I want to fix, it feels so much better to work on my own stuff in Debian. Which brings me to my usual plethora of free software projects I got stuck in this month.

IRC projects irssi-plugin-otr had a bunch of idiotic bugs lying around, and I had a patch that I hadn't submitted upstream from the Debian package, which needed a rebuild because the irssi version changed, which is a major annoyance. The version in sid is now a snapshot because upstream needs to make a new release but at least it should fix things for my friends running unstable and testing. Hopefully those silly uploads won't be necessary in the future. That's for the client side. On the server side, I have worked on updating the Atheme-services package to the latest version, which actually failed because the upstream libmowgli is missing release tags, which means the Debian package for it is not up-to-date either. Still, it is nice to have a somewhat newer version, even though it is not the latest and some bugs were fixed. I have also looked at making atheme reproducible but was surprised at the hostility of the upstream. In the end, it looks like they are still interested in patches, but they will be a little harder to deploy than for Charybdis, so this could take some time. Hopefully I will find time in the coming weeks to test the new atheme services daemon on the IRC network I operate.

Syncthing I have also re-discovered Syncthing, a file synchronization software. Amazingly, I was having trouble transferring a single file between two phones. I couldn't use Bluetooth (not sure why), the "Wifi sharing" app was available only on one phone (and is proprietary, and has a limit of 4MB files), and everything else requires an account, the cloud, or cabling. So. Just heading to f-droid, install syncthing, flash a few qr-codes around and voil : files are copied over! Pretty amazing: the files were actually copied over the local network, using IPv6 link-local addresses, encryption and the DHT. Which is a real geeky way of saying it's completely fast, secure and fast. Now, I found a few usability issues, so much that I wrote a whole usability story for the developers, which were really appreciative of my review. Some of the issues were already fixed, others were pretty minor. Syncthing has a great community, and it seems like a great project I encourage everyone to get familiar with.

Battery stats The battery-status project I mentionned previously has been merged with the battery-stats project (yes, the names are almost the same, which is confusing) and so I had to do some work to fix my Python graph script, which was accepted upstream and will be part of Debian officially from now on, which is cool. The previous package was unofficial. I have also noticed that my battery has a significantly than when I wrote the script. Whereas it was basically full back then, it seems now it has lost almost 15% of its capacity in about 6 months. According to the calculations of the script:
this battery will reach end of life (5%) in 935 days, 19:07:58.336480, on 2018-10-23 12:06:07.270290
Which is, to be fair, a good life: it will somewhat work for about three more years.

Playlist, git-annex and MPD in Python On top of my previously mentioned photos-import script, I have worked on two more small programs. One is called get-playlist and is an extension to git-annex to easily copy to the local git-annex repository all files present in a given M3U playlist. This is useful for me because my phone cannot possibly fit my whole MP3 collection, and I use playlists in GMPC to tag certain files, particularly the Favorites list which is populated by the "star" button in the UI. I had a lot of fun writing this script. I started using elpy as an IDE in Emacs. (Notice how Emacs got a new webpage, which is a huge improvement was had been basically unchanged since the original version, now almost 20 years old, and probably written by RMS himself.) I wonder how I managed to stay away from Elpy for so long, as it glues together key components of Emacs in an elegant and functional bundle:
  • Company: the "vim-like" completion mode i had been waiting for forever
  • Jedi: context-sensitive autocompletion for Python
  • Flymake: to outline style and syntax errors (unfortunately not the more modern Flycheck)
  • inline documentation...
In short, it's amazing and makes everything so much easier to work with that I wrote another script. The first program wouldn't work very well because some songs in the playlists had been moved, so I made another program, this time to repair playlists which refer to missing files. The script is simply called fix-playlists, and can operate transparently on multiple playlists. It has a bunch of heuristics to find files and uses a MPD server as a directory to search into. It can edit files in place or just act as a filter.

Useful snippets Writing so many scripts, so often, I figured I needed to stop wasting time always writing the same boilerplate stuff on top of every file, so I started publishing Yasnippet-compatible file snippets, in my snippets repository. For example, this report is based on the humble lts snippet. I also have a base license snippet which slaps the AGPLv3 license on top of a Python file. But the most interesting snippet, for me, is this simple script snippet which is a basic scaffolding for a commandline script that includes argument processing, logging and filtering of files, something which I was always copy-pasting around.

Other projects And finally, a list of interesting issues en vrac:
  • there's a new Bootstrap 4 theme for Ikiwiki. It was delivering content over CDNs, which is bad for privacy issues, so I filed an issue which was almost immediately fixed by the author!
  • I found out about BitHub, a tool to make payments with Bitcoins for patches submitted on OWS projects. It wasn't clear to me where to find the demo, but when I did, I quickly filed a PR to fix the documentation. Given the number of open PRs there and the lack of activity, I wonder if the model is working at all...
  • a fellow Debian Developer shared his photos workflow, which was interesting to me because I have my own peculiar script, which I never mentionned here, but which I ended up sharing with the author

17 December 2015

Simon Josefsson: Let s Encrypt Clients

As many others, I have been following the launch of Let s Encrypt. Let s Encrypt is a new zero-cost X.509 Certificate Authority that supports the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. ACME allow you to automate creation and retrieval of HTTPS server certificates. As anyone who has maintained a number of HTTPS servers can attest, this process has unfortunately been manual, error-prone and differ between CAs. On some of my personal domains, such as this blog.josefsson.org, I have been using the CACert authority to sign the HTTPS server certificate. The problem with CACert is that the CACert trust anchors aren t shipped with sufficient many operating systems and web browsers. The user experience is similar to reaching a self-signed server certificate. For organization-internal servers that you don t want to trust external parties for, I continue to believe that running your own CA and distributing it to your users is better than using a public CA (compare my XMPP server certificate setup). But for public servers, availability without prior configuration is more important. Therefor I decided that my public HTTPS servers should use a CA/Browser Forum-approved CA with support for ACME, and as long as Let s Encrypt is trustworthy and zero-cost, they are a good choice. I was in need of a free software ACME client, and set out to research what s out there. Unfortunately, I did not find any web pages that listed the available options and compared them. The Let s Encrypt CA points to the official Let s Encrypt client, written by Jakub Warmuz, James Kasten, Peter Eckersley and several others. The manual contain pointers to two other clients in a seamingly unrelated section. Those clients are letsencrypt-nosudo by Daniel Roesler et al, and simp_le by (again!) Jakub Warmuz. From the letsencrypt.org s client-dev mailing list I also found letsencrypt.sh by Gerhard Heift and LetsEncryptShell by Jan Moj . Is anyone aware of other ACME clients? By comparing these clients, I learned what I did not like in them. I wanted something small so that I can audit it. I want something that doesn t require root access. Preferably, it should be able to run on my laptop, since I wasn t ready to run something on the servers. Generally, it has to be Secure, which implies something about how it approaches private key handling. The letsencrypt official client can do everything, and has plugin for various server software to automate the ACME negotiation. All the cryptographic operations appear to be hidden inside the client, which usually means it is not flexible. I really did not like how it was designed, it looks like your typical monolithic proof-of-concept design. The simp_le client looked much cleaner, and gave me a good feeling. The letsencrypt.sh client is simple and written in /bin/sh shell script, but it appeared a bit too simplistic. The LetsEncryptShell looked decent, but I wanted something more automated. What all of these clients did not have, and that letsencrypt-nosudo client had, was the ability to let me do the private-key operations. All the operations are done interactively on the command-line using OpenSSL. This would allow me to put the ACME user private key, and the HTTPS private key, on a YubiKey, using its PIV applet and techniques similar to what I used to create my SSH host CA. While the HTTPS private key has to be available on the HTTPS server (used to setup TLS connections), I wouldn t want the ACME user private key to be available there. Similarily, I wouldn t want to have the ACME or the HTTPS private key on my laptop. The letsencrypt-nosudo tool is otherwise more rough around the edges than the more cleaner simp_le client. However the private key handling aspect was the deciding matter for me. After fixing some hard-coded limitations on RSA key sizes, getting the cert was as simple as following the letsencrypt-nosudo instructions. I ll follow up with a later post describing how to put the ACME user private key and the HTTPS server certificate private key on a YubiKey and how to use that with letsencrypt-nosudo. So you can now enjoy browsing my blog over HTTPS! Thank you Let s Encrypt!

2 December 2015

Andrea Veri: Three years and counting

It s been a while since my last what s been happening behind the scenes e-mail so I m here to report on what has been happening within the GNOME Infrastructure, its future plans and my personal sensations about a challenge that started around three (3) years ago when Sriram Ramkrishna and Jeff Schroeder proposed my name as a possible candidate for coordinating the team that runs the systems behind the GNOME Project. All this followed by the official hiring achieved by Karen Sandler back in February 2013. The GNOME Infrastructure has finally reached stability both in terms of reliability and uptime, we didn t have any service disruption this and the past year and services have been running smoothly as they were expected to in a project like the one we are managing. As many of you know service disruptions and a total lack of maintenance were very common before I joined back in 2013, I m so glad the situation has dramatically changed and developers, users, passionates are now able to reach our websites, code repositories, build machines without experiencing slowness, downtimes or
unreachability. Additionally all these groups of people now have a reference point they can contact in case they need help when coping with the infrastructure they daily use. The ticketing system allows users to get in touch with the members of the Sysadmin Team and receive support right away within a very short period of time (Also thanks to Pagerduty, service the Foundation is kindly sponsoring) Before moving ahead to the future plans I d like to provide you a summary of what has been done during these roughly three years so you can get an idea of why I define the changes that happened to the infrastructure a complete revamp:
  1. Recycled several ancient machines migrating services off of them while consolidating them by placing all their configuration on our central configuration management platform ran by Puppet. This includes a grand total of 7 machines that were replaced by new hardware and extended warranties the Foundation kindly sponsored.
  2. We strenghten our websites security by introducing SSL certificates everywhere and recently replacing them with SHA2 certificates.
  3. We introduced several services such as Owncloud, the Commits Bot, the Pastebin, the Etherpad, Jabber, the GNOME Github mirror.
  4. We restructured the way we backup our machines also thanks to the Fedora Project sponsoring the disk space on their backup facility. The way we were used to handle backups drastically changed from early years where a magnetic tape facility was in charge of all the burden of archiving our data to today where a NetApp is used together with rdiff-backup.
  5. We upgraded Bugzilla to the latest release, a huge thanks goes to Krzesimir Nowak who kindly helped us building the migration tools.
  6. We introduced the GNOME Apprentice program open-sourcing our internal Puppet repository and cleansing it (shallow clones FTW!) from any sensitive information which now lives on a different repository with restricted access.
  7. We retired Mango and our OpenLDAP instance in favor of FreeIPA which allows users to modify their account information on their own without waiting for the Accounts Team to process the change.
  8. We documented how our internal tools are customized to play together making it easy for future Sysadmin Team members to learn how the infrastructure works and supersede existing members in case they aren t able to keep up their position anymore.
  9. We started providing hosting to the GIMP and GTK projects which now completely rely on the GNOME Infrastructure. (DNS, email, websites and other services infrastructure hosting)
  10. We started providing hosting not only to the GIMP and GTK projects but to localized communities as well such as GNOME Hispano and GNOME Greece
  11. We configured proper monitoring for all the hosted services thanks to Nagios and Check-MK
  12. We migrated the IRC network to a newer ircd with proper IRC services (Nickserv, Chanserv) in place.
  13. We made sure each machine had a configured management (mgmt) and KVM interface for direct remote access to the bare metal machine itself, its hardware status and all the operations related to it. (hard reset, reboot, shutdown etc.)
  14. We upgraded MoinMoin to the latest release and made a substantial cleanup of old accounts, pages marked as spam and trashed pages.
  15. We deployed DNSSEC for several domains we manage including gnome.org, guadec.es, gnomehispano.es, guadec.org, gtk.org and gimp.org
  16. We introduced an account de-activation policy which comes into play when a contributor not committing to any of the hosted repositories at git.gnome.org since two years is caught by the script. The account in question is marked as inactive and the gnomecvs (from the old cvs days) and ftpadmin groups are removed.
  17. We planned mass reboots of all the machines roughly every month for properly applying security and kernel updates.
  18. We introduced Mirrorbrain (MB), the mirroring service serving GNOME and related modules tarballs and software all over the world. Before introducing MB GNOME had several mirrors located in all the main continents and at the same time a very low amount of users making good use of them. Many organizations and companies behind these mirrors decided to not host GNOME sources anymore as the statistics of usage were very poor and preferred providing the same service to projects that really had a demand for these resources. MB solved all this allowing a proper redirect to the closest mirror (through mod_geoip) and making sure the sources checksum matched across all the mirrors and against the original tarball uploaded by a GNOME maintainer and hosted at master.gnome.org.
I can keep the list going for dozens of other accomplished tasks but I m sure many of you are now more interested in what the future plans actually are in terms of where the GNOME Infrastructure should be in the next couple of years. One of the main topics we ve been discussing will be migrating our Git infrastructure away from cgit (which is mainly serving as a code browsing tool) to a more complete platform that is surely going to include a code review tool of some sort. (Gerrit, Gitlab, Phabricator) Another topic would be migrating our mailing lists to Mailman 3 / Hyperkitty. This also means we definitely need a staging infrastructure in place for testing these kind of transitions ideally bound to a separate Puppet / Ansible repository or branch. Having a different repository for testing purposes will also mean helping apprentices to test their changes directly on a live system and not on their personal computer which might be running a different OS / set of tools than the ones we run on the GNOME Infrastructure. What I also aim would be seeing GNOME Accounts being the only authentication resource in use within the whole GNOME Infrastructure. That means one should be able to login to a specific service with the same username / password in use on the other hosted services. That s been on my todo list for a while already and it s probably time to push it forward together with Patrick Uiterwijk, responsible of Ipsilon s development at Red Hat and GNOME Sysadmin. While these are the top priority items we are soon receiving new hardware (plus extended warranty renewals for two out of the three machines that had their warranty renewed a while back) and migrating some of the VMs off from the current set of machines to the new boxes is definitely another task I d be willing to look at in the next couple of months (one machine (ns-master.gnome.org) is being decommissioned giving me a chance to migrate away from BIND into NSD). The GNOME Infrastructure is evolving and it s crucial to have someone maintaining it. On this side I m bringing to your attention the fact the assigned Sysadmin funds are running out as reported on the Board minutes from the 27th of October. On this side Jeff Fortin started looking for possible sponsors and came up with the idea of making a brochure with a set of accomplished tasks that couldn t have been possible without the Sysadmin fundraising campaign launched by Stormy Peters back in June 2010 being a success. The Board is well aware of the importance of having someone looking at the infrastructure that runs the GNOME Project and is making sure the brochure will be properly reviewed and published. And now some stats taken from the Puppet Git Repository:
$ cd /git/GNOME/puppet && git shortlog -ns
3520 Andrea Veri
506 Olav Vitters
338 Owen W. Taylor
239 Patrick Uiterwijk
112 Jeff Schroeder
71 Christer Edwards
4 Daniel Mustieles
4 Matanya Moses
3 Tobias Mueller
2 John Carr
2 Ray Wang
1 Daniel Mustieles Garc a
1 Peter Baumgarten
and from the Request Tracker database (52388 being my assigned ID):
mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  3613  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from Tickets where LastUpdatedBy = '52388' and Status = 'Resolved';
+----------+
  count(*)  
+----------+
  1596  
+----------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)
It s been a long run which made me proud, for the things I learnt, for the tasks I ve been able to accomplish, for the great support the GNOME community gave me all the time and most of all for the same fact of being part of the team responsible of the systems hosting the GNOME Project. Thank you GNOME community for your continued and never ending backing, we daily work to improve how the services we host are delivered to you and the support we receive back is fundamental for our passion and enthusiasm to remain high!

24 November 2015

Rhonda D'Vine: Salut Salon

I don't really remember where or how I stumbled upon this four women so I'm sorry that I can't give credit where credit is due, and I even do believe that I started writing a blog entry about them already somewhere. Anyway, I want to present you today Salut Salon. They might play classic instruments, but not in a classic way. But see and hear yourself: So like always, enjoy!

/music permanent link Comments: 1 Flattr this

13 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: Building teams around SIP and XMPP in Debian and Fedora

I've recently started a discussion on the Fedora devel mailing list about building a team to collaborate on RTC services (SIP, XMPP, TURN and WebRTC) for the Fedora community. We already started a similar team within Debian. This isn't only for developers or package maintainers and virtually anybody with a keen interest in free software can help. Testing different softphones and putting screenshots on the wiki can help a lot (the Debian wiki already provides some examples). The FedRTC.org site is not intended to be an advertisement for my web design skills and anybody with expertise in design would be very welcome to contribute. Teamwork in this endeavor can provide many benefits:
  • Sharing knowledge about RTC, for use within our communities and also for other communities using the free and open technology
  • Engaging with collaborators who are not involved in packaging teams, for example, the Debian RTC team has also had interest from upstream developers who are not on other Debian or Fedora mailing lists
  • Minimizing the effort required by the system administrators (the DSA team in Debian or Infrastructure team in Fedora) by triaging user problems and planning and testing any proposed changes.
  • Freeing up developer time to work on new features, such as the exciting work I'm doing on telepathy-resiprocate.
There are also many opportunities for project work that go beyond traditional packaging responsibilities. Wouldn't it be interesting to find ways to integrate the publish/subscribe capabilities of SIP and XMPP with the Fedmsg infrastructure? Bringing XMPP to FedoraProject.org We recently launched XMPP for debian.org and it would not be hard to replicate for FedoraProject.org users. Sure, some people are happy running their own XMPP servers. There are just as many people who prefer to focus on development and have something like XMPP provided for them. With the strong emphasis on building a roster/buddy-list, XMPP can also help to facilitate long-term engagement in the community and users may identify more closely with the project. I haven't offered XMPP on the FedRTC.org trial service because it would be inconvenient for people to migrate buddy lists to the FedoraProject.org domain when the service is officially adopted. Collaboration across communities There are various other places where we can share knowledge between teams in different communities and people are invited to participate. The Free-RTC mailing list is a great place to discuss free RTC strategies and initiatives. The XMPP operators mailing list provides a forum to discuss operational issues in the XMPP space, such as keeping out the spammers. Would you like to participate? Please consider joining some of the mailing lists I've mentioned, replying to the thread on the Fedora devel mailing list, volunteering for the Debian RTC team or emailing me personally.

4 November 2015

Johannes Schauer: Let's Encrypt with Pound on Debian

TLDR: mister-muffin.de (and all its subdomains), bootstrap.debian.net and binarycontrol.debian.net are now finally signed by "Let's Encrypt Authority X1" \o/ I just tried out the letsencrypt client Debian packages prepared by Harlan Lieberman-Berg which can be found here: My server setup uses Pound as a reverse proxy in front of a number of LXC based containers running the actual services. Furthermore, letsencrypt only supports Nginx and Apache for now, so I had to manually setup things anyways. Here is how. After installing the Debian packages I built from above git repositories, I ran the following commands: 
$ mkdir -p letsencrypt/etc letsencrypt/lib letsencrypt/log
$ letsencrypt certonly --authenticator manual --agree-dev-preview \
    --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --text \
    --config-dir letsencrypt/etc --logs-dir letsencrypt/log \
    --work-dir letsencrypt/lib --email josch@mister-muffin.de \
    --domains mister-muffin.de --domains blog.mister-muffin.de \
    --domains [...]
I created the letsencrypt directory structure to be able to run letsencrypt as a normal user. Otherwise, running this command would require access to /etc/letsencrypt and others. Having to set this up and pass all these parameters is a bit bothersome but there is an upstream issue about making this easier when using the "certonly" option which in princible should not require superuser privileges. The --server option is necessary for now because "Let's Encrypt" is still in beta and one needs to register for it. Without the --server option one will get an untrusted certificate from the "happy hacker fake CA". The letsencrypt program will then ask me for my agreement to the Terms of Service and then, for each domain I specified with the --domains option present me the token content and the location under each domain where it expects to find this content, respectively. This looks like this each time: 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: The IP of this machine will be publicly logged as having requested this
certificate. If you're running letsencrypt in manual mode on a machine that is
not your server, please ensure you're okay with that.
Are you OK with your IP being logged?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Y)es/(N)o: Y
Make sure your web server displays the following content at
http://mister-muffin.de/.well-known/acme-challenge/XXXX before continuing:
 "header":  "alg": "RS256", "jwk":  "e": "AQAB", "kty": "RSA", "n": "YYYY" , "payload": "ZZZZ", "signature": "QQQQ" 
Content-Type header MUST be set to application/jose+json.
If you don't have HTTP server configured, you can run the following
command on the target server (as root):
mkdir -p /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge
cd /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html
echo -n ' "header":  "alg": "RS256", "jwk":  "e": "AQAB", "kty": "RSA", "n": "YYYY" , "payload": "ZZZZ", "signature": "QQQQ" ' > .well-known/acme-challenge/XXXX
# run only once per server:
$(command -v python2   command -v python2.7   command -v python2.6) -c \
"import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer; \
SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map =  '': 'application/jose+json' ; \
s = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('', 80), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler); \
s.serve_forever()" 
Press ENTER to continue
For brevity I replaced any large base64 encoded chunks of the messages with YYYY, ZZZZ and QQQQ. The token location is abbreviated with XXXX. After temporarily stopping Pound on my webserver I created the directory /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge and then opened two shells on my server, both at /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html. In one, I kept a tiny HTTP server running (like the suggested Python SimpleHTTPServer which will also work if one has Python installed). In the other I copy pasted the echo line that the letsencrypt program suggested me to run. I had to copypaste that echo command for each domain I wanted to verify. This could easily be automated, so I filed an issue about this with upstream. It seems that the letsencrypt servers query each of these tokens twice: once directly each time after having hit enter after seeing the message above and another time once all tokens are in place. At the end of this ordeal I get: 
2015-11-04 11:12:18,409:WARNING:letsencrypt.client:Non-standard path(s), might not work with crontab installed by your operating system package manager
IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - If you lose your account credentials, you can recover through
   e-mails sent to josch@mister-muffin.de.
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
   letsencrypt/etc/live/mister-muffin.de/fullchain.pem. Your cert will
   expire on 2016-02-02. To obtain a new version of the certificate in
   the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.
 - Your account credentials have been saved in your Let's Encrypt
   configuration directory at letsencrypt/etc. You should make a
   secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
   also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Let's
   Encrypt so making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
I can now scp the content of letsencrypt/etc/live/mister-muffin.de/* to my server. Unfortunately, Pound (and also my ejabberd XMPP server) requires the private key to be in the same file as the certificate and the chain, so on the server I also had to do: 
cat /etc/ssl/private/privkey.pem /etc/ssl/private/fullchain.pem > /etc/ssl/private/private_fullchain.pem
And edit the Pound config to use /etc/ssl/private/private_fullchain.pem. But that's all, folks! EDIT It seems that manually copying over the echo commands as I described above is not necessary. Instead of using the certonly plugin, I can use the webroot plugin. That plugin takes the --webroot-path option and will copy the tokens to there. Since my webroot is on a remote machine, I could just mount it locally via sshfs and pass the mountpoint as --webroot-path. That I didn't realize that the webroot plugin does what I want (and not the certonly plugin) can easily be explained by the only documentation of the webroot plugin in the help output and the man page generated from it being "Webroot Authenticator" which is not very helpful. Another user seems to have run into similar problems. Better documenting the plugins so that these situations can be prevented in the future is tracked in this upstream bug.

2 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: FOSDEM 2016 Real-Time Communications dev-room and lounge

FOSDEM is one of the world's premier meetings of free software developers, with over five thousand people attending each year. FOSDEM 2016 takes place 30-31 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. This call-for-participation contains information about:
  • Real-Time communications dev-room and lounge,
  • speaking opportunities,
  • volunteering in the dev-room and lounge,
  • related events around FOSDEM, including the XMPP summit,
  • social events (including the Saturday night dinner),
  • the Planet aggregation sites for RTC blogs
Call for participation - Real Time Communications (RTC) The Real-Time dev-room and Real-Time lounge is about all things involving real-time communication, including: XMPP, SIP, WebRTC, telephony, mobile VoIP, codecs, privacy and encryption. The dev-room is a successor to the previous XMPP and telephony dev-rooms. We are looking for speakers for the dev-room and volunteers and participants for the tables in the Real-Time lounge. The dev-room is only on Saturday, 30 January 2016 in room K.3.401. The lounge will be present for both days in building K. To discuss the dev-room and lounge, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Speaking opportunities Note: if you used Pentabarf before, please use the same account/username Main track: the deadline for main track presentations was midnight on 30 October. Leading developers in the Real-Time Communications field are encouraged to consider submitting a presentation to the main track. Real-Time Communications dev-room: deadline 27 November. Please also use the Pentabarf system to submit a talk proposal for the dev-room. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Real-Time devroom". Other dev-rooms: some speakers may find their topic is in the scope of more than one dev-room. It is permitted to apply to more than one dev-room but please be kind enough to tell us if you do this. See the full list of dev-rooms. Lightning talks: deadline 27 November. The lightning talks are an excellent opportunity to introduce a wider audience to your project. Given that dev-rooms are becoming increasingly busy, all speakers are encouraged to consider applying for a lightning talk as well as a slot in the dev-room. Pentabarf system to submit a lightning talk proposal. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Lightning Talks". First-time speaking? FOSDEM dev-rooms are a welcoming environment for people who have never given a talk before. Please feel free to contact the dev-room administrators personally if you would like to ask any questions about it. Submission guidelines The Pentabarf system will ask for many of the essential details. Please remember to re-use your account from previous years if you have one. In the "Submission notes", please tell us about:
  • the purpose of your talk
  • any other talk applications (dev-rooms, lightning talks, main track)
  • availability constraints and special needs
You can use HTML in your bio, abstract and description. If you maintain a blog, please consider providing us with the URL of a feed with posts tagged for your RTC-related work. We will be looking for relevance to the conference and dev-room themes, presentations aimed at developers of free and open source software about RTC-related topics. Please feel free to suggest a duration between 20 minutes and 55 minutes but note that the final decision on talk durations will be made by the dev-room administrators. As the two previous dev-rooms have been combined into one, we may decide to give shorter slots than in previous years so that more speakers can participate. Please note FOSDEM aims to record and live-stream all talks. The CC-BY license is used. For any questions, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Volunteers needed To make the dev-room and lounge run successfully, we are looking for volunteers:
  • FOSDEM provides video recording equipment and live streaming, volunteers are needed to assist in this
  • organizing one or more restaurant bookings (dependending upon number of participants) for the evening of Saturday, 30 January
  • participation in the Real-Time lounge
  • helping attract sponsorship funds for the dev-room to pay for the Saturday night dinner and any other expenses
  • circulating this Call for Participation to other mailing lists
FOSDEM is made possible by volunteers and if you have time to contribute, please feel free to get involved. Related events - XMPP and RTC summits The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has traditionally held a summit in the days before FOSDEM. There is discussion about a similar summit taking place on 28 and 29 January 2016. Please see the XSF Summit 19 wiki and join the mailing list to discuss. We are also considering a more general RTC or telephony summit, potentially on 29 January. Please join the Free-RTC mailing list and send an email if you would be interested in participating, sponsoring or hosting such an event. Social events and dinners The traditional FOSDEM beer night occurs on Friday, 29 January On Saturday night, there are usually dinners associated with each of the dev-rooms. Most restaurants in Brussels are not so large so these dinners have space constraints. Please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list for further details about the Saturday night dinner options and how you can register for a seat. Spread the word and discuss If you know of any mailing lists where this CfP would be relevant, please forward this email. If this dev-room excites you, please blog or microblog about it, especially if you are submitting a talk. If you regularly blog about RTC topics, please send details about your blog to the planet site administrators:
http://planet.jabber.org ralphm@ik.nu
http://planet.sip5060.net daniel@pocock.pro
http://planet.opentelecoms.org daniel@pocock.pro
Please also link to the Planet sites from your own blog or web site. Contact For discussion and queries, please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list. The dev-room administration team:

28 October 2015

John Goerzen: The Train to Galesburg

Sometimes, children are so excited you just can t resist. Jacob and Oliver have been begging for a train trip for awhile now, so Laura and I took advantage of a day off school to take them to the little town of Galesburg, IL for a couple days. Galesburg is a special memory for me; nearly 5 years ago, it was the first time Jacob and I took an Amtrak trip somewhere, just the two of us. And, separately, Laura s first-ever train trip had been to Galesburg to visit friends. There was excitement in the air. I was asked to supply a bedtime story about trains I did. On the way to the train station in the middle of the night there was excited jabbering about trains. Even when I woke them up, they lept out of bed and raced downstairs, saying, Dad, why aren t you ready yet? As the train was passing through here at around 4:45AM, and we left home with some time to spare, we did our usual train trip thing of stopping at the one place open at such a time: Druber s Donuts. IMG_20151023_040731 Much as Laura and I might have enjoyed some sleep once we got on the train, Jacob and Oliver weren t having it. Way too much excitement was in the air. Jacob had his face pressed against the window much of the time, while Oliver was busy making snake trains from colored clay complete with eyes. IMG_20151023_062304 The boys were dressed up in their train hats and engineer overalls, and Jacob kept musing about what would happen if somebody got confused and thought that he was the real engineer. When an Amtrak employee played along with that later, he was quite thrilled! We were late enough into Galesburg that we ate lunch in the dining car. A second meal there what fun! Here they are anxiously awaiting the announcement that the noon reservations could make their way to the dining car. Oh, and jockeying for position to see who would be first and get to do the all-important job of pushing the button to open the doors between train cars. IMG_20151023_120143 Even waiting for your food can be fun. IMG_20151023_120728 Upon arriving, we certainly couldn t leave the train station until our train did, even though it was raining. IMG_20151023_145755 Right next to the train station is the Discovery Depot Children s Museum. It was a perfect way to spend a few hours. Jacob really enjoyed the building wall, where you can assemble systems that use gravity (really a kinetic/potential energy experiment wall) to funnel rubber balls all over the place. He sticks out his tongue when he s really thinking. Fun to watch. IMG_20151023_153113 Meanwhile, Oliver had a great time with the air-powered tube system, complete with several valves that can launch things through a complicated maze of transparent tubes. IMG_20151024_150309 VID_20151024_150159 They both enjoyed pretending I was injured and giving me rides in the ambulance. I was diagnosed with all sorts of maladies a broken leg, broken nose. One time Jacob held up the pretend stethoscope to me, and I said ribbit. He said, Dad, you ve got a bad case of frog! You will be in the hospital 190 days! Later I would make up things like I think my gezotnix is all froibled and I was ordered to never leave the ambulance again. He told the story of this several times. After the museum closed, we ate supper. Keep in mind the boys had been up since the middle of the night without sleeping and were still doing quite well! They did start to look a bit drowsy I thought Oliver was about to fall asleep, but then their food came. And at the hotel, they were perfectly happy to invent games involving jumping off the bed. Saturday, we rode over to Peck Park. We had heard about this park from members of our church in Kansas, but oddly even the taxi drivers hadn t ever heard of it. It s well known as a good place to watch trains, as it has two active lines that cross each other at a rail bridge. And sure enough, in only a little while, we took in several trains. IMG_20151024_110035 VID_20151024_110229 The rest of that morning, we explored Galesburg. We visited an antique mall and museum, saw the square downtown, and checked out a few of the shops my favorite was the Stray Cat, featuring sort of a storefront version of Etsy with people selling art from recycled objects. But that wasn t really the boys thing, so we drifted out of there on our way to lunch at Baked, where we had some delicious deep-dish pizza. After that, we still had some time to kill before getting back on the train. We discussed our options. And what do you know we ended up back at the children s museum. We stopped at a bakery to get the fixins for a light supper on the train, and ate a nice meal in the dining car once we got on. Then, this time, they actually slept. Before long, it was 3AM again and time to get back off the train. Oliver was zonked out sleepy. Somehow I managed to get his coat and backpack on him despite him being totally limp, and carried him downstairs to get off the train. Pretty soon we walked to our car and drove home. We tucked them in, and then finally tucked ourselves in. Sometimes being really tired is well worth it.

14 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 24 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Scott Kitterman fixed an issue with non-deterministic Depends generated by dh-python identified by Santiago Vila and Chris Lamb. Lunar updated the patch against dpkg which makes the order of files in control.tar.gz deterministic using the new --sort=name option available in GNU Tar 1.28. josch released sbuild version 0.66.0-1 with several fixes and improvements. The most notable one for reproducible builds is the new --build-path option and $build_path configuration variable added by akira which allows to explicitly chose a given build path. Reiner Herrmann wrote a new patch for dh-systemd to sort the list of unit files in the generated maintainer scripts. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aoeui, apron, camlmix, cudf, findlib, glpk-java, hawtjni, haxe, java-atk-wrapper, llvm-py, misery, mtasc, ocamldsort, optcomp, spamoracle. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net ProfitBricks once again increased their support for reproducible builds in Debian and in other free software projects by adding 58 new cores and 138 GiB of RAM to the already existing setup. Two new amd64 build nodes and 16 new amd64 build jobs have been added which doubles the build capacity per day and allows us to spot many kind of problems earlier. The size of the tmpfs where builds are performed has also been increased from 70 to 200 GiB on all amd64 build nodes. Huge thanks! When examining a package, a link now points to a table listing all previous recorded tests for the same package. (Mattia) The menu on the package pages has also been improved. (h01ger) Packages in the depwait state are now rescheduled automatically after five days. (h01ger) Links to documentation and other projects being tested have been made more visible on the landing page. (h01ger) To reduce noise on the team IRC channel five different types of notifications have been turned into mail notifications. The remaining ones have been shortened and the status changes have been limited to unstable and experimental. (h01ger) Maintainer notifications about status changes in a package will only be sent out once per day, and not on each status change. (h01ger) diffoscope development Some more experiments of concurrent processing have been made. None were good and reliable enough to be shared, though. Package reviews 48 reviews have been removed, 189 added and 23 updated this week. 9 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger met with Levente Polyak to discuss testing Arch Linux on Debian continuous test system with an easily extensible framework. The idea is to also allow testing of other distributions, and provide a nice package based view like the one for Debian.

2 October 2015

Daniel Pocock: Want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2016?

I've mentored a number of students in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2015 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected for Outreachy or GSoC in 2016. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreachy or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2016 or any future year until the Google announcement. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google. Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all projects declaring themselves to be "free" or "open source" meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back. Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you. This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian UK mini-DebConf in Cambridge, November 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos. Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions: If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:
  • System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
  • Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
  • Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
  • Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
  • Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
  • Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
  • Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator
Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following: Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:
  • Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
  • Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
  • Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
  • Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
  • Users: who will benefit from your work?
  • Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.
If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project. GSoC logo generic Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

11 September 2015

Daniel Pocock: Payment for shadow work

A significant court ruling yesterday means that companies in the EU have to pay employees for time spent traveling to and from work. If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Once you get past the headline, you find that it only applies to workers who are going to appointments outside their workplace. Some companies have been careless about scheduling such appointments, sometimes leaving an employee more than 2 hours from his home at the end of the day and this new ruling may just force them to either try a little harder to schedule appointments with consideration for the employee or pay for the extra time if excessive travel sometimes occurs. The ruling may be good news for IT workers, road congestion and the environment. With companies now becoming more efficient in managing travel time, they may well need to improve the software they use for scheduling the employee's time. With certain types of employee potentially having a shorter journey after the last appointment, this means less road congestion and less pollution. Professionals who have to fly may also be taking note: if you work in Paris but have to fly to London one day for meetings, then your working time starts when you leave your home at 05:30 and finishes at 22:00 when you get home. Shadow work comes in many forms It is good to see society taking note of the hidden cost of shadow work. What about all those other nasty and inefficient practices that take time but you don't get paid for them? Have you ever wondered why some companies send bills and statements to you by email or post, but others expect you to waste 5 minutes of your time logging in to their web site to download the bill or statement? Should people be paid for this time too and would that force these companies to stop being so lazy? Some companies have been trying to avoid doing the right thing by arguing that email is not secure, but this just doesn't add up: the original PGP MIME specs for email encryption were published through the IETF process in 1996. Barclaycard recently began offering to send credit card statements using encrypted PDF, proving that many of the excuses given by other companies are just that: excuses. For developers For people who are interested in improving the way their organization sends communications to customers, a popular choice is the Apache Camel integration framework. I've deployed Camel for customer trade notification and other purposes at several large and well known firms in financial services. It has a rich set of features for transforming messages, including a PGP data format for encryption and it is able to send messages out using a vast number of connectivity options, including many of the basic ones like SMTP, SMPP (for SMS), XMPP/Jabber and message queues.

25 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the reproducible builds talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the reproducible builds roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

20 August 2015

Simon Kainz: vim in Heidelberg

Following the tradition of Love Locks, apparently there is someone really in love with vim in Heidelberg! Valerie Found at the Old Bridge in Heidelberg during DebConf15.

7 August 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, July 2015

This was my eighth month working on Debian LTS. I was assigned 14.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. linux-2.6 I didn't upload any new version of the kernel this month, but I did send all the recent security fixes to Willy Tarreau who maintains the 2.6.32.y branch at kernel.org. I also spent more time working on a fix for bug #770492 aka CVE-2015-1350, which is not yet fixed upstream. I now have a candidate patch for 2.6.32.y/squeeze, and automated tests covering many of the affected filesystems. Front desk The LTS 'front desk' role is now assigned on a rota, and I was my first turn in the third week of July. I investigated which new CVEs affected LTS-supported packages in squeeze, recorded this in the secure-testing repository, and mailed the package maintainers to give them a chance to handle the updates. groovy Groovy had a single issue (CVE-2015-3253) with a simple fix that I could apply to the version in squeeze. Unfortunately the previous version in squeeze had not been properly updated during the squeeze release cycle and could no longer be built from source. I eventually worked out what the build-dependencies should be, uploaded the fix and issued DLA-274-1. ruby1.9.1 Ruby 1.9.1 also had a single issue (CVE-2014-6438), though the fixes were more complicated and hard to find. (The original bug report for this is still not public in the upstream bug tracker.) I also had to find an earlier upstream change that they depended on. As I've mentioned before, Ruby has an extensive test suite so I could be quite confident in my backported changes. I uploaded and issued DLA-275-1. libidn The GNU library for Internationalized Domain Names, libidn, required applications to pass only valid UTF-8 strings as domain names. The Jabber instant messaging server turned out not to be validating untrusted domain names, leading to a security issue there (CVE-2015-2059). As there are likely to be other applications with similar bugs, this was resolved by adding UTF-8 validation to libidn. The fix for this involved importing additional functions from the GNU portability library, gnulib, and there my difficulties began. Confusingly, libidn has two separate sets of functions imported from gnulib, and due to interdependencies it turned out that I would have to update both of these wholesale rather than just importing the new functions that were wanted. This resulted in a 35,000 line patch. Following that I needed to autoreconf the package (and debug that process when it failed), ending up with another 26,000 line patch. Finally, it turned out that the new gnulib code needed gperf to build a header file for Solaris (when building for Linux? huh?). I ended up adding that with another patch instead. libidn has a decent test suite, so I could at least be confident in the result of my changes. I uploaded and issued DLA-277-1. Dear upstream developers, please use sane libraries instead of gnulib.

23 July 2015

Daniel Pocock: Unpaid work training Google's spam filters

This week, there has been increased discussion about the pain of spam filtering by large companies, especially Google. It started with Google's announcement that they are offering a service for email senders to know if their messages are wrongly classified as spam. Two particular things caught my attention: the statement that less than 0.05% of genuine email goes to the spam folder by mistake and the statement that this new tool to understand misclassification is only available to "help qualified high-volume senders". From there, discussion has proceeded with Linus Torvalds blogging about his own experience of Google misclassifying patches from Linux contributors as spam and that has been widely reported in places like Slashdot and The Register. Personally, I've observed much the same thing from the other perspective. While Torvalds complains that he isn't receiving email, I've observed that my own emails are not always received when the recipient is a Gmail address. It seems that Google expects their users work a little bit every day going through every message in the spam folder and explicitly clicking the "Not Spam" button: so that Google can improve their proprietary algorithms for classifying mail. If you just read or reply to a message in the folder without clicking the button, or if you don't do this for every message, including mailing list posts and other trivial notifications that are not actually spam, more important messages from the same senders will also continue to be misclassified. If you are not willing to volunteer your time to do this, or if you are simply one of those people who has better things to do, Google's Gmail service is going to have a corrosive effect on your relationships. A few months ago, we visited Australia and I sent emails to many people who I wanted to catch up with, including invitations to a family event. Some people received the emails in their inboxes yet other people didn't see them because the systems at Google (and other companies, notably Hotmail) put them in a spam folder. The rate at which this appeared to happen was definitely higher than the 0.05% quoted in the Google article above. Maybe the Google spam filters noticed that I haven't sent email to some members of the extended family for a long time and this triggered the spam algorithm? Yet it was at that very moment that we were visiting Australia that email needs to work reliably with that type of contact as we don't fly out there every year. A little bit earlier in the year, I was corresponding with a few students who were applying for Google Summer of Code. Some of them also observed the same thing, they sent me an email and didn't receive my response until they were looking in their spam folder a few days later. Last year I know a GSoC mentor who lost track of a student for over a week because of Google silently discarding chat messages, so it appears Google has not just shot themselves in the foot, they managed to shoot their foot twice. What is remarkable is that in both cases, the email problems and the XMPP problems, Google doesn't send any error back to the sender so that they know their message didn't get through. Instead, it is silently discarded or left in a spam folder. This is the most corrosive form of communication problem as more time can pass before anybody realizes that something went wrong. After it happens a few times, people lose a lot of confidence in the technology itself and try other means of communication which may be more expensive, more synchronous and time intensive or less private. When I discussed these issues with friends, some people replied by telling me I should send them things through Facebook or WhatsApp, but each of those services has a higher privacy cost and there are also many other people who don't use either of those services. This tends to fragment communications even more as people who use Facebook end up communicating with other people who use Facebook and excluding all the people who don't have time for Facebook. On top of that, it creates more tedious effort going to three or four different places to check for messages. Despite all of this, the suggestion that Google's only response is to build a service to "help qualified high-volume senders" get their messages through leaves me feeling that things will get worse before they start to get better. There is no mention in the Google announcement about what they will offer to help the average person eliminate these problems, other than to stop using Gmail or spend unpaid time meticulously training the Google spam filter and hoping everybody else does the same thing. Some more observations on the issue Many spam filtering programs used in corporate networks, such as SpamAssassin, add headers to each email to suggest why it was classified as spam. Google's systems don't appear to give any such feedback to their users or message senders though, just a very basic set of recommendations for running a mail server. Many chat protocols work with an explicit opt-in. Before you can exchange messages with somebody, you must add each other to your buddy lists. Once you do this, virtually all messages get through without filtering. Could this concept be adapted to email, maybe giving users a summary of messages from people they don't have in their contact list and asking them to explicitly accept or reject each contact? If a message spends more than a week in the spam folder and Google detects that the user isn't ever looking in the spam folder, should Google send a bounce message back to the sender to indicate that Google refused to deliver it to the inbox? I've personally heard that misclassification occurs with mailing list posts as well as private messages.

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