I wrote for LWN for about two years. During that time, I wrote (what seems to me an impressive) 34 articles, but I always had a pile of ideas in the back of my mind. Those are ideas, notes, and scribbles lying around. Some were just completely abandoned because they didn't seem a good fit for LWN. Concretely, I stored those in branches in a git repository, and used the branch name (and, naively, the last commit log) as indicators of the topic. This was the state of affairs when I left:

remotes/private/attic/novena                    822ca2bb add letter i sent to novena, never published
remotes/private/attic/secureboot                de09d82b quick review, add note and graph
remotes/private/attic/wireguard                 5c5340d1 wireguard review, tutorial and comparison with alternatives
remotes/private/backlog/dat                     914c5edf Merge branch 'master' into backlog/dat
remotes/private/backlog/packet                  9b2c6d1a ham radio packet innovations and primer
remotes/private/backlog/performance-tweaks      dcf02676 config notes for http2
remotes/private/backlog/serverless              9fce6484 postponed until kubecon europe
remotes/private/fin/cost-of-hosting             00d8e499 cost-of-hosting article online
remotes/private/fin/kubecon                     f4fd7df2 remove published or spun off articles
remotes/private/fin/kubecon-overview            21fae984 publish kubecon overview article
remotes/private/fin/kubecon2018                 1edc5ec8 add series
remotes/private/fin/netconf                     3f4b7ece publish the netconf articles
remotes/private/fin/netdev                      6ee66559 publish articles from netdev 2.2
remotes/private/fin/pgp-offline                 f841deed pgp offline branch ready for publication
remotes/private/fin/primes                      c7e5b912 publish the ROCA paper
remotes/private/fin/runtimes                    4bee1d70 prepare publication of runtimes articles
remotes/private/fin/token-benchmarks            5a363992 regenerate timestamp automatically
remotes/private/ideas/astropy                   95d53152 astropy or python in astronomy
remotes/private/ideas/avaneya                   20a6d149 crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator
remotes/private/ideas/backups-benchmarks        fe2f1f13 review of backup software through performance and features
remotes/private/ideas/cumin                     7bed3945 review of the cumin automation tool from WM foundation
remotes/private/ideas/future-of-distros         d086ca0d modern packaging problems and complex apps
remotes/private/ideas/on-dying                  a92ad23f another dying thing
remotes/private/ideas/openpgp-discovery         8f2782f0 openpgp discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), thanks to jonas meurer
remotes/private/ideas/password-bench            451602c0 bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes
remotes/private/ideas/prometheus-openmetrics    2568dbd6 openmetrics standardizing prom metrics enpoints
remotes/private/ideas/telling-time              f3c24a53 another way of telling time
remotes/private/ideas/wallabako                 4f44c5da talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking
remotes/private/stalled/bench-bench-bench       8cef0504 benchmarking http benchmarking tools
remotes/private/stalled/debian-survey-democracy 909bdc98 free software surveys and debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work

Wow, what a mess! Let's see if I can make sense of this:

Attic Those are articles that I thought about, then finally rejected, either because it didn't seem worth it, or my editors rejected it, or I just moved on:

• novena: the project is ooold now, didn't seem to fit a LWN article. it was basically "how can i build my novena now" and "you guys rock!" it seems like the MNT Reform is the brain child of the Novena now, and I dare say it's even cooler!
• secureboot: my LWN editors were critical of my approach, and probably rightly so - it's a really complex subject and I was probably out of my depth... it's also out of date now, we did manage secureboot in Debian
• wireguard: LWN ended up writing extensive coverage, and I was biased against Donenfeld because of conflicts in a previous project

Backlog Those were articles I was planning to write about next.

• dat: I already had written Sharing and archiving data sets with Dat, but it seems I had more to say... mostly performance issues, beaker, no streaming, limited adoption... to be investigated, I guess?
• packet: a primer on data communications over ham radio, and the cool new tech that has emerged in the free software world. those are mainly notes about Pat, Direwolf, APRS and so on... just never got around to making sense of it or really using the tech...
• performance-tweaks: "optimizing websites at the age of http2", the unwritten story of the optimization of this website with HTTP/2 and friends
• serverless: god. one of the leftover topics at Kubecon, my notes on this were thin, and the actual subject, possibly even thinner... the only lie worse than the cloud is that there's no server at all! concretely, that's a pile of notes about Kubecon which I wanted to sort through. Probably belongs in the attic now.

Fin Those are finished articles, they were published on my website and LWN, but the branches were kept because previous drafts had private notes that should not be published.

Ideas

• astropy: "Python in astronomy" - had a chat with saimn while writing about sigal, and it turns out he actually works on free software in astronomy, in Python... I actually expect LWN to cover this sooner than later, after Lee Phillips's introduction to SciPy
• avaneya: crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator, i just have that link so far
• backups-benchmarks: review of backup software through performance and features, possibly based on those benchmarks, maybe based on this list from restic although they refused casync. benchmark articles are hard though, especially when you want to "cover them all"... I did write a silly Attic vs Bup back when those programs existed (2014), in a related note...
• ideas/cumin: review of the Cumin automation tool from WikiMedia Foundation... I ended up using the tool at work and writing service documentation for it
• ideas/future-of-distros: modern packaging problems and complex apps, starting from this discussion about the removal of Dolibarr from Debian, a summary of the thread from liw, and ideas from joeyh (now from the outside of Debian), then debates over the power of FTP masters - ugh, glad I didn't step in that rat's nest
• ideas/on-dying: "what happens when a hacker dies?" rather grim subject, but a more and more important one... joeyh has ideas again, phk as well, then there's a protocol for dying (really grim)... then there are site policies like GitHub, Facebook, etc... more in the branch, but that one I can't help but think about now that family has taken a bigger place in my life...
• ideas/openpgp-discovery: OpenPGP discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), suggested by Jonas Meurer (somewhere?), only links to Mailveloppe, LEAP, WKD (or is it WKS?), another standard, probably would need to talk about OpenPGP CA now and how Debian and Tor manage their keyrings... pain in the back.
• ideas/password-bench: bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes, spinoff of my smartcard article, in the crypto-bench, look at this shiny graph, surely that must mean an article, right?
• ideas/prometheus-openmetrics: "Evolving the Prometheus exposition format into a standard", seems like this happened
• ideas/telling-time: telling time to users is hard. xclock vs ttyclock, etc. maybe gameclock and undertime as well? syncing time is hard, but it turns out showing it is non trivial as well... basically turning this bug report into an article. for some reason I linked to this meme, derived from this meme, presumably a premonition of my stupid idea of writing undertime TIMEZONES!
• ideas/wallabako: "talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking", that's it, not even a link to the project!

A lot of those branches were actually just an empty commit, with the commitlog being the "pitch", more or less. I'd send that list to my editors, sometimes with a few more links (basically the above), and they would nudge me one way or the other. Sometimes they would actively discourage me to write about something, and I would do it anyways, send them a draft, and they would patiently make me rewrite it until it was a decent article. This was especially hard with the terminal emulator series, which took forever to write and even got my editors upset when they realized I had never installed Fedora (I ended up installing it, and I was proven wrong!)

Stalled Oh, and then there's those: those are either "ideas" or "backlog" that got so far behind that I just moved them out of the way because I was tired of seeing them in my list.

• stalled/bench-bench-bench benchmarking http benchmarking tools, a horrible mess of links, copy-paste from terminals, and ideas about benchmarking... some of this trickled out into this benchmarking guide at Tor, but not much more than the list of tools
• stalled/debian-survey-democracy: "free software surveys and Debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work"... A long standing concern of mine is that all Debian work is supposed to be volunteer, and paying explicitly for work inside Debian has traditionally been frowned upon, even leading to serious drama and dissent (remember Dunc-Tank)? back when I was writing for LWN, I was also doing paid work for Debian LTS. I also learned that a lot (most?) Debian Developers were actually being paid by their job to work on Debian. So I was confused by this apparent contradiction, especially given how the LTS project has been mostly accepted, while Dunc-Tank was not... See also this talk at Debconf 16. I had hopes that this study would show the "hunch" people have offered (that most DDs are paid to work on Debian) but it seems to show the reverse (only 36% of DDs, and 18% of all respondents paid). So I am still confused and worried about the sustainability of Debian.

What do you think? So that's all I got. As people might have noticed here, I have much less time to write these days, but if there's any subject in there I should pick, what is the one that you would find most interesting? Oh! and I should mention that you can write to LWN! If you think people should know more about some Linux thing, you can get paid to write for it! Pitch it to the editors, they won't bite. The worst that can happen is that they say "yes" and there goes two years of your life learning to write. Because no, you don't know how to write, no one does. You need an editor to write. That's why this article looks like crap and has a smiley.

The nurse releases my shoulder and drops the needle in a sharps bin, slaps on a smiley bandaid. "And we're done!" Her cheeryness seems genuine but a little strained. There was a long line. "You're all boosted, and here's your vaccine card." Waiting out the 15 minutes in observation, I look at the card.

Moderna COVID-19/22 vaccine booster
3/21/2025              lot #5829126
    NOT A VACCINE PASSPORT  
(Tear at perforated line.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here's your shot at
$$ ONE HUNDRED MILLION $$
       Scratch
       and win

I bite my nails, when I'm not wearing this mask. So I scrub inneffectively at the grainy silver box. Not like the woman across from me, three kids in tow, who's zipping through her sheaf of scratchers. The message on mine becomes clear: 1 month free Amazon Prime Ah well.

One of my goals for Consfigurator is to make it capable of installing Debian to my laptop, so that I can stop booting to GRML and manually partitioning and debootstrapping a basic system, only to then turn to configuration management to set everything else up. My configuration management should be able to handle the partitioning and debootstrapping, too. The first stage was to make Consfigurator capable of debootstrapping a basic system, chrooting into it, and applying other arbitrary configuration, such as installing packages. That s been in place for some weeks now. It s sophisticated enough to avoid starting up newly installed services, but I still need to add some bind mounting. Another significant piece is teaching Consfigurator how to partition block devices. That s quite tricky to do in a sufficiently general way I want to cleanly support various combinations of LUKS, LVM and regular partitions, including populating /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab. I have some ideas about how to do it, but it ll probably take a few tries to get the abstractions right. Let s imagine that code is all in place, such that Consfigurator can be pointed at a block device and it will install a bootable Debian system to it. Then to install Debian to my laptop I d just need to take my laptop s disk drive out and plug it into another system, and run Consfigurator on that system, as root, pointed at the block device representing my laptop s disk drive. For virtual machines, it would be easy to write code which loop-mounts an empty disk image, and then Consfigurator could be pointed at the loop-mounted block device, thereby making the disk image file bootable. This is adequate for virtual machines, or small single-board computers with tiny storage devices (not that I actually use any of those, but I want Consfigurator to be able to make disk images for them!). But it s not much good for my laptop. I casually referred to taking out my laptop s disk drive and connecting it to another computer, but this would void my laptop s warranty. And Consfigurator would not be able to update my laptop s NVRAM, as is needed on UEFI systems. What s wanted here is a live system which can run Consfigurator directly on the laptop, pointed at the block device representing its physical disk drive. Ideally this live system comes with a chroot with the root filesystem for the new Debian install already built, so that network access is not required, and all Consfigurator has to do is partition the drive and copy in the contents of the chroot. The live system could be set up to automatically start doing that upon boot, but another option is to just make Consfigurator itself available to be used interactively. The user boots the live system, starts up Emacs, starts up Lisp, and executes a Consfigurator deployment, supplying the block device representing the laptop s disk drive as an argument to the deployment. Consfigurator goes off and partitions that drive, copies in the contents of the chroot, and executes grub-install to make the laptop bootable. This is also much easier to debug than a live system which tries to start partitioning upon boot. It would look something like this:

    ;; melete.silentflame.com is a Consfigurator host object representing the
    ;; laptop, including information about the partitions it should have
    (deploy-these :local ...
      (chroot:partitioned-and-installed
        melete.silentflame.com "/srv/chroot/melete" "/dev/nvme0n1"))

Now, building live systems is a fair bit more involved than installing Debian to a disk drive and making it bootable, it turns out. While I want Consfigurator to be able to completely replace the Debian Installer, I decided that it is not worth trying to reimplement the relevant parts of the Debian Live tool suite, because I do not need to make arbitrary customisations to any live systems. I just need to have some packages installed and some files in place. Nevertheless, it is worth teaching Consfigurator how to invoke Debian Live, so that the customisation of the chroot which isn t just a matter of passing options to lb_config(1) can be done with Consfigurator. This is what I ve ended up with in Consfigurator s source code:

(defpropspec image-built :lisp (config dir properties)
  "Build an image under DIR using live-build(7), where the resulting live
system has PROPERTIES, which should contain, at a minimum, a property from
CONSFIGURATOR.PROPERTY.OS setting the Debian suite and architecture.  CONFIG
is a list of arguments to pass to lb_config(1), not including the '-a' and
'-d' options, which Consfigurator will supply based on PROPERTIES.
This property runs the lb_config(1), lb_bootstrap(1), lb_chroot(1) and
lb_binary(1) commands to build or rebuild the image.  Rebuilding occurs only
when changes to CONFIG or PROPERTIES mean that the image is potentially
out-of-date; e.g. if you just add some new items to PROPERTIES then in most
cases only lb_chroot(1) and lb_binary(1) will be re-run.
Note that lb_chroot(1) and lb_binary(1) both run after applying PROPERTIES,
and might undo some of their effects.  For example, to configure
/etc/apt/sources.list, you will need to use CONFIG not PROPERTIES."
  (:desc (declare (ignore config properties))
         #?"Debian Live image built in $ dir ")
  (let* (...)
    ;; ...
     (eseqprops
      ;; ...
      (on-change
          (eseqprops
           (on-change
               (file:has-content ,auto/config ,(auto/config config) :mode #o755)
             (file:does-not-exist ,@clean)
             (%lbconfig ,dir)
             (%lbbootstrap t ,dir))
           (%lbbootstrap nil ,dir)
           (deploys ((:chroot :into ,chroot)) ,host))
        (%lbchroot ,dir)
        (%lbbinary ,dir)))))

Here, %lbconfig is a property running lb_config(1), %lbbootstrap one which runs lb_bootstrap(1), etc. Those properties all just change directory to the right place and run the command, essentially, with a little extra code to handle failed debootstraps and the like. The ON-CHANGE and ESEQPROPS combinators work together to sequence the interaction of the Debian Live suite and Consfigurator.

• In the innermost ON-CHANGE expression: create the file auto/config and populate it with the call to lb_config(1) that we need to make, as described in the Debian Live manual, chapter 6.
  • If doing so resulted in a change to the auto/config file e.g. the user added some more options ensure that lb_config(1) and lb_bootstrap(1) both get rerun.
• Now in the inner ESEQPROPS expression, use DEPLOYS to configure the chroot, essentially by forking into the chroot and recursively reinvoking Consfigurator.
• Finally, if any of the above resulted in a change being made, call lb_chroot(1) and lb_binary(1).

This way, we only rebuild the chroot if the configuration changed, and we only rebuild the image if the chroot changed. Now over in my personal consfig:

(try-register-data-source
 :git-snapshot :name "consfig" :repo #P"src/cl/consfig/" ...)
(defproplist hybrid-live-iso-built :lisp ()
  "Build a Debian Live system in /srv/live/spw.
Typically this property is not applied in a DEFHOST form, but rather run as
needed at the REPL.  The reason for this is that otherwise the whole image will
get rebuilt each time a commit is made to my dotfiles repo or to my consfig."
  (:desc "Sean's Debian Live system image built")
  (live-build:image-built.
      '("--archive-areas" "main contrib non-free" ...)
      "/srv/live/spw"
    (os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64)
    (basic-props)
    (apt:installed "whatever" "you" "want")
    (git:snapshot-extracted "/etc/skel/src" "dotfiles")
    (file:is-copy-of "/etc/skel/.bashrc" "/etc/skel/src/dotfiles/.bashrc")
    (git:snapshot-extracted "/root/src/cl" "consfig")))

The first argument to LIVE-BUILD:IMAGE-BUILT. is additional arguments to lb_config(1). The third argument onwards are the properties for the live system. The cool thing is GIT:SNAPSHOT-EXTRACTED the calls to this ensure that a copy of my Emacs configuration and my consfig end up in the live image, ready to be used interactively to install Debian, as described above. I ll need to add something like (chroot:host-chroot-bootstrapped melete.silentflame.com "/srv/chroot/melete") too. As with everything Consfigurator-related, Joey Hess s Propellor is the giant upon whose shoulders I m standing.

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:

The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high

It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:

Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.

Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:

Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.

Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:

The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?

It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:

"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."

Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:

We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?

New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:

A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.

Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

How can I put four years into a pie? I m thinking of Inauguration Day 2017 through to today, Inauguration Day 2021. In truth things started back in 2015, when Donald Trump announced his run for the United States presidency, and I don t know how long things will continue past the moment when President-Elect Joe Biden becomes President Joe Biden. For the United States, it s been a hell of a time. For the world, it d been even worse. Every generation thinks that they lived through more than anyone else, that they had it worse. I had a Boomer tell me that the existential stress of COVID is nothing compared to the Vietnam War. I m sure when we are living through a global water crisis, I ll tell the kids that we had it bad too. Everyday I listen to the radio and read Twitter, aware that the current state of endless wars wars against terrorism and drugs, organized crime and famine, climate change and racism is global, and not limited to just what s happening to and around me. That makes it feel worse and bigger and I wonder if earlier generations can really grasp how big that is. The last four years brought me in closer working relationships with people in India and Nigeria. I would call these people my friends in that if they were in town I would want to see them and show them around. Most of them I would offer a space in my small apartment, in case they needed somewhere to sleep and wanted to save the money. We chat, though we only have the internet as opposed to elevator rides in tall office buildings and slow walks down to the shops during lunch breaks. From these relationships I have learned very little about life in India or Nigeria, and I only visited India separately from any of my colleagues there. (I went for a wedding. My visa to Nigeria was denied on account of a medical issue.) But, I follow these people on social media and see what they share, the same political and social utterances that could be the same here or virtually any other place, as long as we replace the right keywords. Exchange the name of one leader, conservative party, or government unit for another. When I first saw the #EndSARS hashtag show up, I thought the images were from Black Lives Matter protests. Stop police brutality. And that was only in the last few months. I ve had three jobs since Trump first announced his candidacy in three very different places. In the first I felt like I wasn t able to talk about the sexism and discrimination I was dealing with in the office, and how much more so my views on an organizational partnership with a government whose policies I strongly disagreed with. In the second I was able to talk about these things, but there was nothing to do about them. I ve been in love and had my heart broken three times in three very different ways that all came down to someone valuing someone else more than they valued me. Can I bake heartbreak into a pie? Is it even fair to distract from the political world with my own loss? What about COVID-19? There s bitterness and anger and tears and pain emotional and physical. There is desperation and desolation and loneliness. Covid has colored everything during the past year. It is a burden our new political leaders will take on. Biden and Harris, all of the new people in Congress, and everyone else who has taken on an elected position now must content with Covid with new levels of responsibility. Not only do their decisions affect the people they come into contact with, they now affect everyone their policies touch and perhaps even more than that. The government hired people to build walls. Our government approved it and people willingly took on the job of building those walls. Families were separated. Children were placed in inhumane conditions; children were tortured. Remember when the guards at border detention facilities were raping children? Remember when children had guards? Women were forcefully operated upon and had their bodies permanently changed without their permission, against their desires. People were executed by the state. There were so many things I ve lost track of them all. I remember bits and pieces as I write this, coming back to me like singing a song I haven t thought about in years. With each line, I remember another one. Being worried about coming home from Cuba, when the visitation rules were changed in the middle of my trip. Climate change, again and again. Pollution and microplastics and watching the country being broken into pieces and sold off in the name of economy and progress. People losing their access to healthcare, through clinics closing down and loss of insurance. What do you bake into a pie that tastes like sedition? What are the flavors of loss and racism and hate? How to you balance the sourness with subtle hints of hope, which feels to tender and fragile? Do we pair equal parts of the palatable with the unpalatable, in the name of our neatly divided senate? I have hope, of course I have hope, and I have always had hope, but now it feels thinner than ever, like a ganache or a caramel after your hand slips and you pour too much cream in. A custard or compote or curd that that refuses to thicken no matter how long you cook it. I see that things could be better, but better does not mean good and better does not mean enough. So I will put my hope into this pie. I put my pain and anger into the dough. I will put my tears and helplessness and bitterness into the filling. I will cover it sweetness and the delicate hope I ve spun out of sugar. Soon I will bake it and share it with the three other people I see because the most important thing about surviving these past years, these past months and weeks and days, is that we did it together. We will commiserate on what we ve overcome, and we will share our hope and the sweetness of the moment, as the spun sugar dissolves on our tongues. There is so much we have left to do, so much we must do. We will be angry in the future, we may be angry later today, but until then, we have pie.

I am no longer maintaining github-backup. I'll contine hosting its website and git repo for the time being, but it needs a new maintainer if it's going to survive. I don't really think it needs to survive. If the farce of youtube-dl being removed from github, thus losing access to all its issues and pull requests, taught us anything, it's that having that happen does not make many people reconsider their dependence on github. (Not even youtube-dl it turns out, which is back on there.) Clearly people don't generally have any interest in backing that stuff up. As far as the git repositories on Github, they are getting archived very effectively by softwareheritage.org which vaccumes up all git repositories from Github. Which points to a problem, because the same can't be said for git repositories not hosted on Github. There's a form to submit them but the submissions often get hung up needing manual review, and it doesn't seem to pull in new commits actively if at all, based on the few git repositories I've had archived there so far. That seems like something it might be worth building some software to manage. But it's also just another case of Github's mass bending reality around it; the average Github user doesn't care about this and still gets archived; the average self-hosting git user may care about this slightly more, but most won't get archived, even if that software did get built.

For my PhD work, I've been working on preparing an experimental branch of StrIoT for merging down to the main branch. This has been a long-lived branch (a year!) within which I've been exploring some ideas. Some of the code I want to keep, and some I don't. The history of the experimental branch is consequently messy. Looking it over and considering what a reviewer needs to see, there's a lot of things that are irrelevant and potentially distracting. And so, I've been going through an iterative process of steadily whittling down the history to the stuff that matters: some strings of commits are dropped, others squashed together, and others re-ordered. The resulting branch is a historic fiction. This is common practice. Joey Hess ruminated about it 5 years ago in "our beautiful fake histories", pointing out that the real history is also useful, and perhaps worth preserving. After a recent conversation with my supervisor I realised the situation was analagous to writing a research paper (or a thesis): the process of getting to the conclusion which the thesis documents is messy, with false starts, wrong directions, and plenty of roads-not-travelled. The eventual write-up focusses on the path that lead to the conclusion, and a lot of the side-quest stuff disappears. The "true history" then, is captured elsewhere: in lab books, diaries and the like, and these have their own value. So do my messy exploratory branches, before they've been cleaned up for merging.

Business Insider has an informative article about the way that Google users can get locked out with no apparent reason and no recourse [1]. Something to share with clients when they consider putting everything in the cloud . Vice has an interestoing article about people jailbreaking used Teslas after Tesla has stolen software licenses that were bought with the car [2]. The Atlantic has an interesting article titled This Article Won t Change Your Mind [3]. It s one of many on the topic of echo chambers but has some interesting points that others don t seem to cover, such as regarding the benefits of groups when not everyone agrees. Inequality.org has lots of useful information about global inequality [4]. Jeffrey Goldberg has an insightful interview with Barack Obama for the Atlantic about the future course of American politics and a retrospective on his term in office [5]. A Game Designer s Analysis Of QAnon is an insightful Medium article comparing QAnon to an augmented reality game [6]. This is one of the best analysis of QAnon operations that I ve seen. Decrypting Rita is one of the most interesting web comics I ve read [7]. It makes good use of side scrolling and different layers to tell multiple stories at once. PC Mag has an article about the new features in Chrome 87 to reduce CPU use [8]. On my laptop I have 1/3 of all CPU time being used when it is idle, the majority of which is from Chrome. As the CPU has 2 cores this means the equivalent of 1 core running about 66% of the time just for background tabs. I have over 100 tabs open which I admit is a lot. But it means that the active tabs (as opposed to the plain HTML or PDF ones) are averaging more than 1% CPU time on an i7 which seems obviously unreasonable. So Chrome 87 doesn t seem to live up to Google s claims. The movie Bad President starring Stormy Daniels as herself is out [9]. Poe s Law is passe. Interesting summary of Parler, seems that it was designed by the Russians [10]. Wired has an interesting article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation, how to encrypt the operation of a program [11]. Joerg Jaspert wrote an interesting blog post about the difficulties packagine Rust and Go for Debian [12]. I think that the problem is many modern languages aren t designed well for library updates. This isn t just a problem for Debian, it s a problem for any long term support of software that doesn t involve transferring a complete archive of everything and it s a problem for any disconnected development (remote sites and sites dealing with serious security. Having an automatic system for downloading libraries is fine. But there should be an easy way of getting the same source via an archive format (zip will do as any archive can be converted to any other easily enough) and with version numbers.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/y4mnsech
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/yxctvs7t
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/glvopyp
• [4] https://inequality.org/
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/y3a8o87s
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/yxcxoc6z
• [7] http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yyr3fquz
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jk2i3HTMpw
• [10] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327253991936454663.html
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/y22gfbaw
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/y4rg4wps

Farmer Protests While I was hoping to write about RCEP exclusively, just today farmer protests have happened against three farm laws which had been passed by our Govt. about a month ago without consulting anybody. The bills benefit only big business houses at the cost of farmers. This has been amply shared by an open letter to one of the biggest business house which will benefit the most. Now while that is a national experience and what it tells, let me share, some experience from the State I come from, Maharashtra. About 4-5 years back Maharashtra delisted fruit and vegetables from the APMC market. But till date, the APMC market is working, why, the reasons are many. However, what it did was it forced the change to sugarcane, a water guzzling crop much more than previously. This has resulted in lowering the water table in Maharashtra and put them more into debt trap and later they had to commit suicide. Now let us see why the Punjab farmers have been so agitated that they are walking all the way to Delhi. They are right now, somewhere between Haryana-Delhi border. The reason is that because even their experiments with contract farming have not been good. This is why they are struggling to go to Delhi to make their collective voices heard and get the farm bills rolled back. Even the farmers from Gujarat were sued, but because of elections were put back, the intentions though are clear. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and for sugarcane and that too by Bajaj Company. At the end of the day, the laws made by the Govt. leaves our farmer at the mercy of big corporations. It is preposterous to believe that the farmer, with their small land holdings will be able to stand up to the Corporation. Add to that, they cannot go to Court. It is the SDM (Sub-Divisonal Magistrate) who will decide on the matters and has the last word. If this is allowed, in a couple of years there will be only few farmers or corporations who would have large hand-holdings, and they would be easily co-opted by the Government in power. Just in A gentleman who turned off water cannon being shot at farmers has been charged for murder Currently, the Government procures rice in vast quantities and the farmers are assured at least some basic income, in the states of Punjab and Haryana

Procurement of Rice by Various States

Recently there was also an article in Indian Express which shares the farmer s apprehensions and does share that it s a complex problem with no easy solutions. The solution can only be dialogue between the two parties. This was also shared by Vivek Kaul, who is far more knowledgable than me on the subject and made a long read on the subject.

The Canada Way Recently, while sparring on the Internet, came to know of the Canada way. Here, the Government makes the farmer a corporation and the Government helps them. But the Canada way seems to largely work as the Canadian Government owns the majority of the lands in question. And yes, Indians have benefited from it but that is also due to a. the currency differential between Canadian dollar and Indian Rupee and the 99-year land lease. There may be other advantages that the Canadian Government bestows and that is the reason possibly that most Punjabi farmers go to Canada and UK to farm. While looking at it, I also came across the situation in the United States and it seems the situation there seems to be becoming even more grim.

RCEP RCEP stands for Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. We were supposed to be part of this partnership. Now why didn t we join, for two reasons, our judicial infrastructure is the worst. It took 8 years to decide on a tax retrospective case (Vodafone) and that too finally outside India. And that decision, by no means an end. The other thing is all those who have joined RCEP have lesser duties, tariffs then India. What this means is that they are much more competitive than India. While there is fear that perhaps that China may take over its assets as it has done with few countries around the world, the opportunity for those countries was too good to pass up even with the dangers. But, then even India has taken loans from the Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB) Bank where China is the biggest shareholder. So it doesn t make sense to be insecure on that front. And again, it is up to India or any other sovereign country to decide to take loans from some country, some multilateral organization or any other way and on what terms.

What China has done and doing is similar to what IMF (being used primarily by the United States) had done in its past. The only difference is that time it was the United States, now it is China. America co-opted Governments, and got assets, China doing the same, no difference in tactics, more or less the same. There has also been a somewhat interesting paper which discusses how the RCEP may unfold in different circumstances. In short, it tells that the partners will benefit, some more than others. It also does compare the RCEP to CPTPP (The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). While the study is a bit academic in nature as the United States has walked out and the new president-elect Joe Biden hasn t made any moves and is unlikely to make any moves as there is deep divide and resentment about multilateral trade partnerships domestically within the United States. This news and understanding was quite shocking to me as it shows that unlike the United States of the past, which was supposed to be a beacon of capitalism and seemed to enjoy capitalism, it seems to be an opportunist only. There is also this truth that under Biden, there is only so many things on which he would need and can spend his political capital on.

Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats

As can be seen, economy at least for the democrats, this time around is pretty far round the corner. He has a host of battles and would have to choose which to fight and which to ignore. In the end, we are left to our own devices. At the moment, India does not know when it s economy will recover

PTI News, Nov 27, 2020

There has been another worrying bit of news, now all newspapers will need to get some sort of permission, certification from Govt. of India about any news of the world. This is harking back on the 1970 s, 1980 s era

In some ways it is sad and interesting to see how personal liberty is viewed in India. And how it differs from those having the highest fame and power can get a different kind of justice then the rest cannot.

Arnab Goswami This particular gentleman is a class apart. He is the editor as well as Republic TV, a right-leaning channel which demonizes the minority, women whatever is antithesis to the Central Govt. of India. As a result there have been a spate of cases against him in the past few months. But surprisingly, in each of them he got hearing the day after the suit was filed. This is unique in Indian legal history so much so that a popular legal site which publishes on-going cases put up a post sharing how he was getting prompt hearings. That post itself needs to be updated as there have been 3 more hearings which have been done back to back for him. This is unusual as there have been so many cases pending for the SC attention, some arguably more important than this gentleman . So many precedents have been set which will send a wrong message. The biggest one, that even though a trial is taking place in the sessions court (below High Court) the SC can interject on matters. What this will do to the morale of both lawyers as well as judges of the various Sessions Court is a matter of speculation and yet as shared unprecedented. The saddest part was when Justice Chandrachud said

Justice Chandrachud If you don t like a channel then don t watch it. 11th November 2020 .

This is basically giving a free rope to hate speech. How can a SC say like that ? And this is the Same Supreme Court which could not take two tweets from Shri Prashant Bhushan when he made remarks against the judiciary .

J&K pleas in Supreme Court pending since August 2019 (Abrogation 370) After abrogation of 370, citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, the population of which is 13.6 million people including 4 million Hindus have been stuck with reduced rights and their land being taken away due to new laws. Many of the Hindus which regionally are a minority now rue the fact that they supported the abrogation of 370A . Imagine, a whole state whose answers and prayers have not been heard by the Supreme Court and the people need to move a prayer stating the same.

100 Journalists, activists languishing in Jail without even a hearing 55 Journalists alone have been threatened, booked and in jail for reporting of pandemic . Their fault, they were bring the irregularities, corruption made during the pandemic early months. Activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, who giving up her American citizenship and settling to fight for tribals is in jail for 2 years without any charges. There are many like her, There are several more petitions lying in the Supreme Court, for e.g. Varavara Rao, not a single hearing from last couple of years, even though he has taken part in so many national movements including the emergency as well as part-responsible for creation of Telengana state out of Andhra Pradesh .

Then there is Devangana kalita who works for gender rights. Similar to Sudha Bharadwaj, she had an opportunity to go to UK and settle here. She did her master s and came back. And now she is in jail for the things that she studied. While she took part in Anti-CAA sittings, none of her speeches were incendiary but she still is locked up under UAPA (Unlawful Practises Act) . I could go on and on but at the moment these should suffice.

Petitions for Hate Speech which resulted in riots in Delhi are pending, Citizen s Amendment Act (controversial) no hearings till date. All of the best has been explained in a newspaper article which articulates perhaps all that I wanted to articulate and more. It is and was amazing to see how in certain cases Article 32 is valid and in many it is not. Also a fair reading of Justice Bobde s article tells you a lot how the SC is functioning. I would like to point out that barandbench along with livelawindia makes it easier for never non-lawyers and public to know how arguments are done in court, what evidences are taken as well as give some clue about judicial orders and judgements. Both of these resources are providing an invaluable service and more often than not, free of charge.

Student Suicide and High Cost of Education
For quite sometime now, the cost of education has been shooting up. While I have visited this topic earlier as well, recently a young girl committed suicide because she was unable to pay the fees as well as additional costs due to pandemic. Further investigations show that this is the case with many of the students who are unable to buy laptops. Now while one could think it is limited to one college then it would be wrong. It is almost across all India and this will continue for months and years. People do know that the pandemic is going to last a significant time and it would be a long time before R value becomes zero . Even the promising vaccine from Pfizer need constant refrigeration which is sort of next to impossible in India. It is going to make things very costly.

Last Nail on Indian Media Just today the last nail on India has been put. Thankfully Freedom Gazette India did a much better job so just pasting that

Information and Broadcasting Ministry bringing OTT services as well as news within its ambit.

With this, projects like Scam 1992, The Harshad Mehta Story or Bad Boy Billionaires:India, Test Case, Delhi Crime, Laakhon Mein Ek etc. etc. such kind of series, investigative journalism would be still-births. Many of these web-series also shared tales of woman empowerment while at the same time showed some of the hard choices that women had to contend to live with. Even western media may be censored where it finds the political discourse not to its liking. There had been so many accounts of Mr. Ravish Kumar, the winner of Ramon Magsaysay, how in his shows the electricity was cut in many places. I too have been the victim when the BJP governed in Maharashtra as almost all Puneities experienced it. Light would go for just half or 45 minutes at the exact time. There is another aspect to it. The U.S. elections showed how independent media was able to counter Mr. Trump s various falsehoods and give rise to alternative ideas which lead the team of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Biden now being the President-elect while Kamala Harris being the vice-president elect. Although the journey to the white house seems as tough as before. Let s see what happens. Hopefully 2021 will bring in some good news. Update On 27th November 2020 Martin who runs the planet got an e-mail/notice by a Mr. Nikhil Sethi who runs the wikibio.com property. Mr. Sethi asked to remove the link pointing Devangana Kalita from my blog post to his site as he has used the no follow link. On inquiring further, the gentleman stated that it is an Updated mandate (his exact quote) from Google algorithm. To further understand the issue, I went to SERP as they are one of the more known ones on the subject. I also looked it up on Google as well. Found that the gentleman was BSing the whole time. The page basically talks about weightage of a page/site and authoritativeness which is known and yet highly contested ideas. In any case, the point for me was for whatever reason (could be fear, could be something else entirely), Mr. Sethi did not want me to link the content. Hence, I have complied above. I could have dragged it out but I do not wish Mr. Sethi any ill-being or/and further harm unduly and unintentionally caused by me. Hence, have taken down the link.

Debian NEW Queue So for some reason I got myself motivated again to deal with some packages in Debians NEW Queue. We had 420 source packages waiting for some kind of processing when I started, now we are down to something around 10. (Silly, people keep uploading stuff ) That s not entirely my own work, others from the team have been active too, but for those few days I went through a lot of stuff waiting. And must say it still feels mostly like it did when I somehow stopped doing much in NEW. Except - well, I feel that maintainers are much better in preparing their packages, especially that dreaded task of getting the copyright file written seems to be one that is handled much better. Now, thats not supported by any real numbers, just a feeling, but a good one, I think.

Rust Dealing with NEW meant I got in contact with one part that currently generates some friction between the FTP Team and one group of package maintainers - the Rust team. Note: this is, of course, entirely written from my point of view. Though with the intention of presenting it as objective as possible. Also, I know what rust is, and have tried a Hello world in it, but that s about my deep knowledge of it

The problem Libraries in rust are bundled/shipped/whatever in something called crates, and you manage what your stuff needs and provides with a tool called cargo. A library (one per crate) can provide multiple features, say a TLS lib can link against gnutls or openssl or some other random implementation. Such features may even be combinable in various different ways, so one can have a high number of possible feature combinations for one crate. There is a tool called debcargo which helps creating a Debian package out of a crate. And that tool generates so-called feature-packages, one per feature / combination thereof. Those feature packages are empty packages, only containing a symlink for their /usr/share/doc/ directory, so their size is smaller than the metadata they will produce. Inside the archive and the files generated by it, stuff that every user everywhere has to download and their apt has to process. Additionally, any change of those feature sets means one round through NEW, which is also not ideal. So, naturally, the FTP Team dislikes those empty feature packages. Really, a lot. There appears to be a different way. Not having the feature packages, but putting all the combinations into a Provides header. That sometimes works, but has two problems:

• It can generate really long Provides: lines. I mean, REALLY REALLY REALLY long. Somewhat around 250kb is the current record. Thats long enough that a tool (not dak itself) broke on it. Sure, that tool needs to be fixed, but still, that s not nice. Currently preferred from us, though.
• Some of the features may need different dependencies (say, gnutls vs openssl), should those conflict with each other, you can not combine them into one package.

Solutions Currently we do not have a good one. The rust maintainers and the ftp team are talking, exploring various ideas, we will see what will come out.

Devel archive / Component One of the possible solutions for the feature package problem would be something that another set of packages could also make good use of, I think. The introduction of a new archive or component, meant only for packages that are needed to build something, but where users are discouraged from ever using them. What? Well, take golang as an example. While we have a load of golang-something packages in Debian, and they are used for building applications written in go - none of those golang-something are meant to be installed by users. If you use the language and develop in it, the go get way is the one you are expected to use. So having an archive (or maybe component like main or contrib) that, by default, won t be activated for users, but only for things like buildds or archive rebuilds, will make one problem (hated metadata bloat) be evaluated wildly different. It may also allow a more relaxed processing of binary-NEW (easier additions of new feature packages).

But but but Yes, it is not the most perfect solution. Without taking much energy to think about, it requires

• an adjustment in how main is handled. Right now we have the golden rule that main is self contained, that is, things in it may not need anything outside it for building or running. That would need to be adjusted for building. (Go as well as currently rust are always building static binaries, so no library dependencies there).
• It would need handling for the release, that is, the release team would need to deal with that archive/component too. We haven t, yet, talked to them (still, slowly, discussing inside FTP Team). So, no idea how many rusty knives they want to sink into our nice bodies for that idea

Final Well, it is still very much open. Had an IRC meeting with the rust people, will have another end of November, it will slowly go forward. And maybe someone comes up with an entire new idea that we all love. Don t know, time will tell.

So here's an interesting thing. Certain commit hashes are rapidly heading toward being illegal on Github. So, if you clone a git repo from somewhere else, you had better be wary of pushing it to Github. Because if it happened to contain one of those hashes, that could get you banned from Github. Which, as we know, is your resume. Now here's another interesting thing. It's entirely possible for me to add one of those commit hashes to any of my repos, which of course, I self host. I can do it without adding any of the content which Github/Microsoft, as a RIAA member, wishes to suppress. When you clone the my repo, here's how it looks:

# git log
commit 1fff890c0980a72d669aaffe9b13a7a077c33ecf (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: Joey Hess <joeyh@joeyh.name>
Date:   Mon Nov 2 18:29:17 2020 -0400
    remove submodule
commit 8864d5c1182dccdd1cfc9ee6e5d694ae3c70e7af
Author: Joey Hess <joeyh@joeyh.name>
Date:   Mon Nov 2 18:29:00 2020 -0400
    add
# git ls-tree HEAD^
160000 commit b5[redacted cuz DMCA+Nov 3 = too much]    back up your cat videos with this
100644 blob 45b983be36b73c0788dc9cbcb76cbb80fc7bb057    hello

I did this by adding a submodule in one commit, without committing the .gitmodules file, and them removing the submodule in a subsequent commit. What would then happen if you cloned my git repo and pushed it to Github? The next person to complain at me about my not having published one of my git repos to Github, and how annoying it is that they have to clone it from somewhere else in order to push their own fork of it to Github, and how no, I would not be perpertuating Github's monopolism in doing so, and anyway, Github's monopoloy is not so bad actually ...

---

#!/bin/sh
printf "Enter the url of the illegal repo, Citizen: "
read wha
git submodule add "$wha" wha
git rm .gitmodules
git commit -m wha
git rm wha
git commit -m wha

Weather: We can only forecast the weather a few days into the future. Nuclear: I had no idea Thorium-based nuclear power was a thing. Fluid dynamics applied to traffic: Traffic Flow and Phantom Jams. Psychology, economics, and a history of culturally biased experiment results: We aren t the world.

tl;dr: Do not configure Mailman to replace the mail domains in From: headers. Instead, try out my small new program which can make your Mailman transparent, so that DKIM signatures survive. Background and narrative DKIM NB: This explanation is going to be somewhat simplified. I am going to gloss over some details and make some slightly approximate statements. DKIM is a new anti-spoofing mechanism for Internet email, intended to help fight spam. DKIM, paired with the DMARC policy system, has been remarkably successful at stemming the flood of joe-job spams. As usually deployed, DKIM works like this: When a message is originally sent, the author's MUA sends it to the MTA for their From: domain for outward delivery. The From: domain mailserver calculates a cryptographic signature of the message, and puts the signature in the headers of the message. Obviously not the whole message can be signed, since at the very least additional headers need to be added in transit, and sometimes headers need to be modified too. The signing MTA gets to decide what parts of the message are covered by the signature: they nominate the header fields that are covered by the signature, and specify how to handle the body. A recipient MTA looks up the public key for the From: domain in the DNS, and checks the signature. If the signature doesn't match, depending on policy (originator's policy, in the DNS, and recipient's policy of course), typically the message will be treated as spam. The originating site has a lot of control over what happens in practice. They get to publish a formal (DMARC) policy in the DNS which advises recipients what they should do with mails claiming to be from their site. As mentioned, they can say which headers are covered by the signature - including the ability to sign the absence of a particular headers - so they can control which headers downstreams can get away with adding or modifying. And they can set a normalisation policy, which controls how precisely the message must match the one that they sent. Mailman Mailman is, of course, the extremely popular mailing list manager. There are a lot of things to like about it. I choose to run it myself not just because it's popular but also because it provides a relatively competent web UI and a relatively competent email (un)subscription interfaces, decent bounce handling, and a pretty good set of moderation and posting access controls. The Xen Project mailing lists also run on mailman. Recently we had some difficulties with messages sent by Citrix staff (including myself), to Xen mailing lists, being treated as spam. Recipient mail systems were saying the DKIM signatures were invalid. This was in fact true. Citrix has chosen a fairly strict DKIM policy; in particular, they have chosen "simple" normalisation - meaning that signed message headers must precisely match in syntax as well as in a semantic sense. Examining the the failing-DKIM messages showed that this was definitely a factor. Applying my Opinions about email My Bayesian priors tend to suggest that a mail problem involving corporate email is the fault of the corporate email. However in this case that doesn't seem true to me. My starting point is that I think mail systems should not not modify messages unnecessarily. None of the DKIM-breaking modifications made by Mailman seemed necessary to me. I have on previous occasions gone to corporate IT and requested quite firmly that things I felt were broken should be changed. But it seemed wrong to go to corporate IT and ask them to change their published DKIM/DMARC policy to accomodate a behaviour in Mailman which I didn't agree with myself. I felt that instead I shoud put (with my Xen Project hat on) my own house in order. Getting Mailman not to modify messages So, I needed our Mailman to stop modifying the headers. I needed it to not even reformat them. A brief look at the source code to Mailman showed that this was not going to be so easy. Mailman has a lot of features whose very purpose is to modify messages. Personally, as I say, I don't much like these features. I think the subject line tags, CC list manipulations, and so on, are a nuisance and not really Proper. But they are definitely part of why Mailman has become so popular and I can definitely see why the Mailman authors have done things this way. But these features mean Mailman has to disassemble incoming messages, and then reassemble them again on output. It is very difficult to do that and still faithfully reassemble the original headers byte-for-byte in the case where nothing actually wanted to modify them. There are existing bug reports[1] [2] [3] [4]; I can see why they are still open. Rejected approach: From:-mangling This situation is hardly unique to the Xen lists. Many other have struggled with it. The best that seems to have been come up with so far is to turn on a new Mailman feature which rewrites the From: header of the messages that go through it, to contain the list's domain name instead of the originator's. I think this is really pretty nasty. It breaks normal use of email, such as reply-to-author. It is having Mailman do additional mangling of the message in order to solve the problems caused by other undesirable manglings! Solution! As you can see, I asked myself: I want Mailman not modify messages at all; how can I get it to do that? Given the existing structure of Mailman - with a lot of message-modifying functionality - that would really mean adding a bypass mode. It would have to spot, presumably depending on config settings, that messages were not to be edited; and then, it would avoid disassembling and reassembling the message at at all, and bypass the message modification stages. The message would still have to be parsed of course - it's just that the copy send out ought to be pretty much the incoming message. When I put it to myself like that I had a thought: couldn't I implement this outside Mailman? What if I took a copy of every incoming message, and then post-process Mailman's output to restore the original? It turns out that this is quite easy and works rather well! outflank-mailman outflank-mailman is a 233-line script, plus documentation, installation instructions, etc. It is designed to run from your MTA, on all messages going into, and coming from, Mailman. On input, it saves a copy of the message in a sqlite database, and leaves a note in a new Outflank-Mailman-Id header. On output, it does some checks, finds the original message, and then combines the original incoming message with carefully-selected headers from the version that Mailman decided should be sent. This was deployed for the Xen Project lists on Tuesday morning and it seems to be working well so far. If you administer Mailman lists, and fancy some new software to address this problem, please do try it out. Matters arising - Mail filtering, DKIM Overall I think DKIM is a helpful contribution to the fight against spam (unlike SPF, which is fundamentally misdirected and also broken). Spam is an extremely serious problem; most receiving mail servers experience more attempts to deliver spam than real mail, by orders of magnitude. But DKIM is not without downsides. Inherent in the design of anything like DKIM is that arbitrary modification of messages by list servers is no longer possible. In principle it might be possible to design a system which tolerated modifications reasonable for mailing lists but it would be quite complicated and have to somehow not tolerate similar modifications in other contexts. So DKIM means that lists can no longer add those unsubscribe footers to mailing list messages. The "new way" (RFC2369, July 1998), to do this is with the List-Unsubscribe header. Hopefully a good MUA will be able to deal with unsubscription semiautomatically, and I think by now an adequate MUA should at least display these headers by default. Sender: There are implications for recipient-side filtering too. The "traditional" correct way to spot mailing list mail was to look for Resent-To:, which can be added without breaking DKIM; the "new" (RFC2919, March 2001) correct way is List-Id:, likewise fine. But during the initial deployment of outflank-mailman I discovered that many subscribers were detecting that a message was list traffic by looking at the Sender: header. I'm told that some mail systems (apparently Microsoft's included) make it inconvenient to filter on List-Id. Really, I think a mailing list ought not to be modifying Sender:. Given Sender:'s original definition and semantics, there might well be reasonable reasons for a mailing list posting to have different From: and and then the original Sender: ought not to be lost. And a mailing list's operation does not fit well into the original definition of Sender:. I suspect that list software likes to put in Sender mostly for historical reasons; notably, a long time ago it was not uncommon for broken mail systems to send bounces to the Sender: header rather than the envelope sender (SMTP MAIL FROM). DKIM makes this more of a problem. Unfortunately the DKIM specifications are vague about what headers one should sign, but they pretty much definitely include Sender: if it is present, and some materials encourage signing the absence of Sender:. The latter is Exim's default configuration when DKIM-signing is enabled. Franky there seems little excuse for systems to not readily support and encourage filtering on List-Id, 20 years later, but I don't want to make life hard for my users. For now we are running a compromise configuration: if there wasn't a Sender: in the original, take Mailman's added one. This will result in (i) misfiltering for some messages whose poster put in a Sender:, and (ii) DKIM failures for messages whose originating system signed the absence of a Sender:. I'm going to mine the db for some stats after it's been deployed for a week or so, to see which of these problems is worst and decide what to do about it. Mail routing For DKIM to work, messages being sent From: a particular mail domain must go through a system trusted by that domain, so they can be signed. Most users tend to do this anyway: their mail provider gives them an IMAP server and an authenticated SMTP submission server, and they configure those details in their MUA. The MUA has a notion of "accounts" and according to the user's selection for an outgoing message, connects to the authenticated submission service (usually using TLS over the global internet). Trad unix systems where messages are sent using the local sendmail or localhost SMTP submission (perhaps by automated systems, or perhaps by human users) are fine too. The smarthost can do the DKIM signing. But this solution is awkward for a user of a trad MUA in what I'll call "alias account" setups: where a user has an address at a mail domain belonging to different people to the system on which they run their MUA (perhaps even several such aliases for different hats). Traditionally this worked by the mail domain forwarding incoming the mail, and the user simply self-declaring their identity at the alias domain. Without DKIM there is nothing stopping anyone self-declaring their own From: line. If DKIM is to be enabled for such a user (preventing people forging mail as that user), the user will have to somehow arrange that their trad unix MUA's outbound mail stream goes via their mail alias provider. For a single-user sending unix system this can be done with tolerably complex configuration in an MTA like Exim. For shared systems this gets more awkward and might require some hairy shell scripting etc.

edited 2020-10-01 21:22 and 21:35 and -02 10:50 +0100 to fix typos and 21:28 to linkify "my small program" in the tl;dr

comments

My inverter has unfortunately died, and I wanted to replace it with the same model. Ideally before I lose the contents of the fridge. It's a 24v inverter, which is not at all as easy to find a replacement for as a 12v inverter would be. Somehow Walmart was the only retailer that had it available with a delivery estimate: Just 2 days. It's the second day now, with no indication they've shipped it. I noticed the "sold and shipped by Zoro", so went and found it on that website. So, the reality is it ships direct from China via container ship. As does every product from Zoro, which all show as 2 day delivery on Walmart's website. I don't think this is a pandemic thing. I think it's a trying to compete with Amazon and failing thing.

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My other comically bad shipping estimate this pandemic was from Amazon though. There was a run this summer on Kayaks, because social distancing is great on the water. I found a high quality inflatable kayak. Amazon said "only 2 left in stock" and promised delivery in 1 week. One week later, it had not shipped, and they updated the delivery estimate forward 1 week. A week after that, ditto. Eventually I bought a new model from the same manufacturer, Advanced Elements. Unfortunately, that kayak exploded the second time I inflated it, due to a manufacturing defect. So I got in touch with Advanced Elements and they offered a replacement. I asked if, instead, they maybe still had any of the older model of kayak I had tried to order. They checked their warehouse, and found "the last one" in a corner somewhere. No shipping estimate was provided. It arrived in 3 days.

Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, edited by Maya Schenwar, et al.

Editor:	Maya Schenwar
Editor:	Joe Macar
Editor:	Alana Yu-lan Price
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Copyright:	June 2016
ISBN:	1-60846-684-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	250

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an anthology of essays about policing in the United States. It's divided into two sections: one that enumerates ways that police are failing to serve or protect communities, and one that describes how communities are building resistance and alternatives. Haymarket Books (a progressive press in Chicago) has made it available for free in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and resulting protests in the United States. I'm going to be a bit unfair to this book, so let me start by admitting that the mismatch between it and the book I was looking for is not entirely its fault. My primary goal was to orient myself in the discussion on the left about alternatives to policing. I also wanted to sample something from Haymarket Books; a free book was a good way to do that. I was hoping for a collection of short introductions to current lines of thinking that I could selectively follow in longer writing, and an essay collection seemed ideal for that. What I had not realized (which was my fault for not doing simple research) is that this is a compilation of articles previously published by Truthout, a non-profit progressive journalism site, in 2014 and 2015. The essays are a mix of reporting and opinion but lean towards reporting. The earliest pieces in this book date from shortly after the police killing of Michael Brown, when racist police violence was (again) reaching national white attention. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to providing evidence of police abuse and violence. This is important to do, but it's sadly no longer as revelatory in 2020, when most of us have seen similar things on video, as it was to white America in 2014. If you live in the United States today, while you may not be aware of the specific events described here, you're unlikely to be surprised that Detroit police paid off jailhouse informants to provide false testimony ("Ring of Snitches" by Aaron Miguel Cant ), or that Chicago police routinely use excessive deadly force with no consequences ("Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture of Impunity" by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers), or that there is a long history of police abuse and degradation of pregnant women ("Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement Violence" by Victoria Law). There are about eight essays along those lines. Unfortunately, the people who excuse or disbelieve these stories are rarely willing to seek out new evidence, let alone read a book like this. That raises the question of intended audience for the catalog of horrors part of this book. The answer to that question may also be the publication date; in 2014, the base of evidence and example for discussion had not been fully constructed. This sort of reporting is also obviously relevant in the original publication context of web-based journalism, where people may encounter these accounts individually through social media or other news coverage. In 2020, they offer reinforcement and rhetorical evidence, but I'm dubious that the people who would benefit from this knowledge will ever see it in this form. Those of us who will are already sickened, angry, and depressed. My primary interest was therefore in the second half of the book: the section on how communities are building resistance and alternatives. This is where I'm going to be somewhat unfair because the state of that conversation may have been different in 2015 than it is now in 2020. But these essays were lacking the depth of analysis that I was looking for. There is a human tendency, when one becomes aware of an obvious wrong, to simply publicize the horrible thing that is happening and expect someone to do something about it. It's obviously and egregiously wrong, so if more people knew about it, certainly it would be stopped! That has happened repeatedly with racial violence in the United States. It's also part of the common (and school-taught) understanding of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s: activists succeeded in getting the violence on the cover of newspapers and on television, people were shocked and appalled, and the backlash against the violence created political change. Putting aside the fact that this is too simplistic of a picture of the Civil Rights era, it's abundantly clear at this point in 2020 that publicizing racist and violent policing isn't going to stop it. We're going to have to do something more than draw attention to the problem. Deciding what to do requires political and social analysis, not just of the better world that we want to see but of how our current world can become that world. There is very little in that direction in this book. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? does not answer the question of its title beyond "not us" and "white supremacy." While those answers are not exactly wrong, they're also not pushing the analysis in the direction that I wanted to read. For example (and this is a long-standing pet peeve of mine in US political writing), it would be hard to tell from most of the essays in this book that any country besides the United States exists. One essay ("Killing Africa" by William C. Anderson) talks about colonialism and draws comparisons between police violence in the United States and international treatment of African and other majority-Black countries. One essay talks about US military behavior oversees ("Beyond Homan Square" by Adam Hudson). That's about it for international perspective. Notably, there is no analysis here of what other countries might be doing better. Police violence against out-groups is not unique to the United States. No one has entirely solved this problem, but versions of this problem have been handled with far more success than here. The US has a comparatively appalling record; many countries in the world, particularly among comparable liberal democracies in Europe, are doing far better on metrics of racial oppression by agents of the government and of law enforcement violence. And yet it's common to approach these problems as if we have to develop a solution de novo, rather than ask what other countries are doing differently and if we could do some of those things. The US has some unique challenges, both historical and with the nature of endemic violence in the country, so perhaps such an analysis would turn up too many US-specific factors to copy other people's solutions. But we need to do the analysis, not give up before we start. Novel solutions can lead to novel new problems; other countries have tested, working improvements that could provide a starting framework and some map of potential pitfalls. More fundamentally, only the last two essays of this book propose solutions more complex than "stop." The authors are very clear about what the police are doing, seem less interested in why, and are nearly silent on how to change it. I suspect I am largely in political agreement with most of the authors, but obviously a substantial portion of the country (let alone its power structures) is not, and therefore nothing is changing. Part of the project of ending police violence is understanding why the violence exists, picking apart the motives and potential fracture lines in the political forces supporting the status quo, and building a strategy to change the politics. That isn't even attempted here. For example, the "who do you serve?" question of the book's title is more interesting than the essays give it credit. Police are not a monolith. Why do Black people become police officers? What are their experiences? Are there police forces in the United States that are doing better than others? What makes them different? Why do police act with violence in the moment? What set of cultural expectations, training experiences, anxieties, and fears lead to that outcome? How do we change those factors? Or, to take another tack, why are police not held accountable even when there is substantial public outrage? What political coalition supports that immunity from consequences, what are its fault lines and internal frictions, and what portions of that coalition could be broken off, pealed away, or removed from power? To whom, institutionally, are police forces accountable? What public offices can aspiring candidates run for that would give them oversight capability? This varies wildly throughout the United States; political approaches that work in large cities may not work in small towns, or with county sheriffs, or with the FBI, or with prison guards. To treat these organizations as a monolith and their motives as uniform is bad political tactics. It gives up points of leverage. I thought the best essays of this collection were the last two. "Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate from Police," by Candice Bernd, is a profile of several local emergency response systems that divert emergency calls from the police to paramedics, mental health experts, or social workers. This is an idea that's now relatively mainstream, and it seems to be finding modest success where it has been tried. It's more of a harm mitigation strategy than an attempt to deal with the root problem, but we're going to need both. The last essay, "Building Community Safety" by Ejeris Dixon, is the only essay in this book that is pushing in the direction that I was hoping to read. Dixon describes building an alternative system that can intervene in violent situations without using the police. This is fascinating and I'm glad that I read it. It's also frustrating in context because Dixon's essay should be part of a discussion. Dixon describes spending years learning de-escalation techniques, doing hard work of community discussion and collective decision-making, and making deep investment in the skills required to handle violence without calling in a dangerous outside force. I greatly admire this approach (also common in parts of the anarchist community) and the people who are willing to commit to it. But it's an immense amount of work, and as Dixon points out, that work often falls on the people who are least able to afford it. Marginalized communities, for whom the police are often dangerous, are also likely to lack both time and energy to invest in this type of skill training. And many people simply will not do this work even if they do have the resources to do it. More fundamentally, this approach conflicts somewhat with division of labor. De-escalation and social work are both professional skills that require significant time and practice to hone, and as much as I too would love to live in a world where everyone knows how to do some amount of this work, I find it hard to imagine scaling this approach without trained professionals. The point of paying someone to do this work as their job is that the money frees up their time to focus on learning those skills at a level that is difficult to do in one's free time. But once you have an organized group of professionals who do this work, you have to find a way to keep them from falling prey to the problems that plague the police, which requires understanding the origins of those problems. And that's putting aside the question of how large the residual of dangerous crime that cannot be addressed through any form of de-escalation might be, and what organization we should use to address it. Dixon's essay is great; I wouldn't change anything about it. But I wanted to see the next essay engaging with Dixon's perspective and looking for weaknesses and scaling concerns, and then the next essay that attempts to shore up those weaknesses, and yet another essay that grapples with the challenging philosophical question of a government monopoly on force and how that can and should come into play in violent crime. And then essays on grass-roots organizing in the context of police reform or abolition, and on restorative justice, and on the experience of attempting police reform from the inside, and on how to support public defenders, and on the merits and weaknesses of focusing on electing reform-minded district attorneys. Unfortunately, none of those are here. Overall, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? was a disappointment. It was free, so I suppose I got what I paid for, and I may have had a different reaction if I read it in 2015. But if you're looking for a deep discussion on the trade-offs and challenges of stopping police violence in 2020, I don't think this is the place to start. Rating: 3 out of 10

When a unix process is running in a directory, and that directory gets renamed, the process is taken on a ride to a new location in the filesystem. Suddenly, any "../" paths it might be using point to new, and unexpected locations. This can be a source of interesting behavior, and also of security holes. Suppose root is poking around in ~user/foo/bar/ and decides to vim ../../etc/conffile If the user notices this process is running, they can mv ~/foo/bar /tmp and when vim saves the file, it will write to /tmp/bar/../../etc/conffile AKA /etc/conffile. (Vim does warn that the file has changed while it was being edited. Other editors may not. Or root may be feeling especially BoFH and decide to overwrite the user's changes to their file. Or the rename could perhaps be carefully timed to avoid vim's overwrite protection.) Or, suppose root, in the same place, decides to archive ../../etc with tar, and then delete it:

tar cf etc.tar ../../etc; rm -rf ../../etc

Now the user has some time to take root's shell on a ride, before the rm starts ... and make it delete all of /etc! Anyone know if this class of security hole has a name?

Along with the normal selection of science fiction and fantasy, a few radical publishers have done book giveaways due to the current political crisis in the United States. I've been feeling for a while like I've not done my homework on diverse political theory, so I downloaded those. (That's the easy part; making time to read them is the hard part, and we'll see how that goes.) Yarimar Bonilla & Marisol LeBr n (ed.) Aftershocks of Disaster (non-fiction anthology)
Jordan T. Camp & Christina Heatherton (ed.) Policing the Planet (non-fiction anthology)
Zachary D. Carter The Price of Peace (non-fiction)
Justin Akers Chac n & Mike Davis No One is Illegal (non-fiction)
Grace Chang Disposable Domestics (non-fiction)
Suzanne Collins The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (sff)
Angela Y. Davis Freedom is a Constant Struggle (non-fiction)
Danny Katch Socialism... Seriously (non-fiction)
Naomi Klein The Battle for Paradise (non-fiction)
Naomi Klein No is Not Enough (non-fiction)
Naomi Kritzer Catfishing on CatNet (sff)
Derek K nsken The Quantum Magician (sff)
Rob Larson Bit Tyrants (non-fiction)
Michael L wy Ecosocialism (non-fiction)
Joe Macar , Maya Schenwar, et al. (ed.) Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (non-fiction anthology)
Tochi Onyebuchi Riot Baby (sff)
Sarah Pinsker A Song for a New Day (sff)
Lina Rather Sisters of the Vast Black (sff)
Marta Russell Capitalism and Disbility (non-fiction)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (non-fiction)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.) How We Get Free (non-fiction anthology)
Linda Tirado Hand to Mouth (non-fiction)
Alex S. Vitale The End of Policing (non-fiction)
C.M. Waggoner Unnatural Magic (sff)
Martha Wells Network Effect (sff)
Kai Ashante Wilson Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (sff)

I've been digging into async exceptions in haskell, and getting more and more concerned. In particular, bracket seems to be often used in ways that are not async exception safe. I've found multiple libraries with problems. Here's an example:

withTempFile a = bracket setup cleanup a
  where
    setup = openTempFile "/tmp" "tmpfile"
    cleanup (name, h) = do
        hClose h
        removeFile name

This looks reasonably good, it makes sure to clean up after itself even when the action throws an exception. But, in fact that code can leave stale temp files lying around. If the thread receives an async exception when hClose is running, it will be interrupted before the file is removed. We normally think of bracket as masking exceptions, but it doesn't prevent async exceptions in all cases. See Control.Exception on "interruptible operations", which can receive async exceptions even when other exceptions are masked. It's a bit surprising, but hClose is such an interruptable operation, because it flushes the write buffer. The only way to know is to read the code. It can be quite hard to determine if an operation is interruptable, since it can come down to whether it retries a STM transaction, or uses a MVar that is not always full. I've been auditing libraries and I often have to look at code several dependencies away, and even then may not be sure if a library has this problem.

• process's withCreateProcess could fail to wait on the process, leaving a zombie. Might also leak file descriptors?
• http-client's withResponse might fail to close a network connection. (If a MVar happened to be empty when it's called.) Worth noting that there are plenty of examples of using http-client to eg, race downloading two urls and cancel the slower download. Which is just the kind of use of an async exception that could cause a problem.
• persistent's withSqlPool and withSqlConn might fail to clean up, when used with persistent-postgresql. (If another thread is using the connection and so a MVar over in postgresql-simple is empty.)
• concurrent-output has some locking code that is not async exception safe. (My library, so I've fixed part of it, and hope to fix the rest.)

So far, around half of the libraries I've looked at, that use bracket or onException or the like probably have this problem. What can libraries do?

• Document whether these things are async exception safe. Or perhaps there should be an expectation that "withFoo" always is, but if so the Haskell comminity has some work ahead of it.
• Use finally. Good mostly in simple situations; more complicated things would be hard to write this way.

  hClose h  finally  removeFile name
  

• Use uninterruptibleMask, but it's a big hammer and is often not the right tool for the job. If the operation takes a while to run, the program will not respond to ctrl-c during that time.
• May be better to run the actions in worker threads, to insulate them from receiving any async exceptions.

  bracketInsulated :: IO a -> (a -> IO b) -> (a -> IO c) -> IO c
  bracketInsulated a b = bracket
    (uninterruptibleMask $ \u -> async (u a) >>= u . wait)
    (\v -> uninterruptibleMask $ \u -> async (u (b v)) >>= u . wait)
  

  (Note use of uninterruptibleMask here in case async itself does an interruptable operation. My first version got that wrong.. This is hard!)

My impression of the state of things now is that you should be very cautious using race or cancel or withAsync or the like, unless the thread is small and easy to audit for these problems. Kind of a shame, since I had wanted to be able to cancel a thread that is big and sprawling and uses all the libraries mentioned above.

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This work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo and Graham Spencer on Patreon.

Previously: v5.4. I got a bit behind on this blog post series! Let s get caught up. Here are a bunch of security things I found interesting in the Linux kernel v5.5 release: restrict perf_event_open() from LSM
Given the recurring flaws in the perf subsystem, there has been a strong desire to be able to entirely disable the interface. While the kernel.perf_event_paranoid sysctl knob has existed for a while, attempts to extend its control to block all perf_event_open() calls have failed in the past. Distribution kernels have carried the rejected sysctl patch for many years, but now Joel Fernandes has implemented a solution that was deemed acceptable: instead of extending the sysctl, add LSM hooks so that LSMs (e.g. SELinux, Apparmor, etc) can make these choices as part of their overall system policy. generic fast full refcount_t
Will Deacon took the recent refcount_t hardening work for both x86 and arm64 and distilled the implementations into a single architecture-agnostic C version. The result was almost as fast as the x86 assembly version, but it covered more cases (e.g. increment-from-zero), and is now available by default for all architectures. (There is no longer any Kconfig associated with refcount_t; the use of the primitive provides full coverage.) linker script cleanup for exception tables
When Rick Edgecombe presented his work on building Execute-Only memory under a hypervisor, he noted a region of memory that the kernel was attempting to read directly (instead of execute). He rearranged things for his x86-only patch series to work around the issue. Since I d just been working in this area, I realized the root cause of this problem was the location of the exception table (which is strictly a lookup table and is never executed) and built a fix for the issue and applied it to all architectures, since it turns out the exception tables for almost all architectures are just a data table. Hopefully this will help clear the path for more Execute-Only memory work on all architectures. In the process of this, I also updated the section fill bytes on x86 to be a trap (0xCC, int3), instead of a NOP instruction so functions would need to be targeted more precisely by attacks. KASLR for 32-bit PowerPC
Joining many other architectures, Jason Yan added kernel text base-address offset randomization (KASLR) to 32-bit PowerPC. seccomp for RISC-V
After a bit of long road, David Abdurachmanov has added seccomp support to the RISC-V architecture. The series uncovered some more corner cases in the seccomp self tests code, which is always nice since then we get to make it more robust for the future! seccomp USER_NOTIF continuation
When the seccomp SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF interface was added, it seemed like it would only be used in very limited conditions, so the idea of needing to handle normal requests didn t seem very onerous. However, since then, it has become clear that the overhead of a monitor process needing to perform lots of normal open() calls on behalf of the monitored process started to look more and more slow and fragile. To deal with this, it became clear that there needed to be a way for the USER_NOTIF interface to indicate that seccomp should just continue as normal and allow the syscall without any special handling. Christian Brauner implemented SECCOMP_USER_NOTIF_FLAG_CONTINUE to get this done. It comes with a bit of a disclaimer due to the chance that monitors may use it in places where ToCToU is a risk, and for possible conflicts with SECCOMP_RET_TRACE. But overall, this is a net win for container monitoring tools. EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL for x86
Some EFI systems provide a Random Number Generator interface, which is useful for gaining some entropy in the kernel during very early boot. The arm64 boot stub has been using this for a while now, but Dominik Brodowski has now added support for x86 to do the same. This entropy is useful for kernel subsystems performing very earlier initialization whre random numbers are needed (like randomizing aspects of the SLUB memory allocator). FORTIFY_SOURCE for MIPS
As has been enabled on many other architectures, Dmitry Korotin got MIPS building with CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE, so compile-time (and some run-time) buffer overflows during calls to the memcpy() and strcpy() families of functions will be detected. limit copy_ to,from _user() size to INT_MAX
As done for VFS, vsnprintf(), and strscpy(), I went ahead and limited the size of copy_to_user() and copy_from_user() calls to INT_MAX in order to catch any weird overflows in size calculations. Other things
Alexander Popov pointed out some more v5.5 features that I missed in this blog post. I m repeating them here, with some minor edits/clarifications. Thank you Alexander!

• KASan support for vmap memory expands KASan s features to include analysis of memory allocated with vmalloc(). More specifically, this means KASan can examine the stack again, since it can be in that region since CONFIG_VMAP_STACK was introduced.
• MIPS can build with GCC plugins and KCOV now, providing those systems with the associated features like stack wiping, coverage analysis, etc.
• userfaultfd requires CAP_SYS_PTRACE for UFFD_FEATURE_EVENT_FORK. This was done to block unprivileged users from abusing the userfaultfd feature, as it is implemented in a way that provides the ability to inject file descriptors into unsuspecting processes.

Edit: added Alexander Popov s notes That s it for v5.5! Let me know if there s anything else that I should call out here. Next up: Linux v5.6.

2020, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.