A look at the 2021 model of Dell XPS 13 - available with Linux pre-installed

I received a new laptop for work - a Dell XPS 13. Dell has been long famous for offering certain models with pre-installed Linux as a supported option, and opting for those is nice for moving some euros/dollars from certain PC desktop OS monopoly towards Linux desktop engineering costs. Notably Lenovo also offers Ubuntu and Fedora options on many models these days (like Carbon X1 and P15 Gen 2).

Obviously a smooth, ready-to-rock Ubuntu installation is nice for most people already, but I need openSUSE, so after checking everything is fine with Ubuntu, I continued to install openSUSE Tumbleweed as a dual boot option. As I m a funny little tinkerer, I obviously went with some special things. I wanted:

• Ubuntu to remain as the reference supported OS on a small(ish) partition, useful to compare to if trying out new development versions of software on openSUSE and finding oddities.
• openSUSE as the OS consuming most of the space.
• LUKS encryption for openSUSE without LVM.
• ext4 s new fancy fast_commit feature in use during filesystem creation.
• As a result of all that, I ended up juggling back and forth installation screens a couple of times (even more than shown below, and also because I forgot I wanted to use encryption the first time around).

First boots to pre-installed Ubuntu and installation of openSUSE Tumbleweed as the dual-boot option:

(if the embedded video is not shown, use a direct link)

Some notes from the openSUSE installation:

• openSUSE installer s partition editor apparently does not support resizing or automatically installing side-by-side another Linux distribution, so I did part of the setup completely on my own.
• Installation package download hanged a couple of times, only passed when I entered a mirror manually. On my TW I ve also noticed download problems recently, there might be a problem with some mirror I need to escalate.
• The installer doesn t very clearly show encryption status of the target installation - it took me a couple of attempts before I even noticed the small encrypted column and icon (well, very small, see below), which also did not spell out the device mapper name but only the main partition name. In the end it was going to do the right thing right away and use my pre-created encrypted target partition as I wanted, but it could be a better UX. Then again I was doing my very own tweaks anyway.
• Let s not go to the details why I m so old-fashioned and use ext4 :)
• openSUSE s installer does not work fine with HiDPI screen. Funnily the tty consoles seem to be fine and with a big font.
• At the end of the video I install the two GNOME extensions I can t live without, Dash to Dock and Sound Input & Output Device Chooser.

type FrameType [2]byte
type Frame struct  
Destination net.HardwareAddr
Source net.HardwareAddr
Callsign [8]byte
Type FrameType
Payload []byte
CRC uint32
 

Time to pick some consts I picked a unique and distinctive sync sequence, which the sender will transmit before the Frame, while the receiver listens for that sequence to know when it s in byte alignment with the symbol stream. My sync sequence is [3]byte 'U', 'f', '~' which works out to be a very pleasant bit sequence of 01010101 01100110 01111110. It s important to have soothing preambles for your Frames. We need all the good energy we can get at this point.

var (
FrameStart = [3]byte 'U', 'f', '~' 
FrameMaxPayloadSize = 1500
)

Next, I defined some FrameType values for the type field, which I can use to determine what is done with that data next, something Ethernet was originally missing, but has since grown to depend on (who needs Length anyway? Not me. See below!)

FrameType	Description	Bytes
Raw	Bytes in the Payload field are opaque and not to be parsed.	[2]byte 0x00, 0x01
IPv4	Bytes in the Payload field are an IPv4 packet.	[2]byte 0x00, 0x02

And finally, I decided on a maximum length of the Payload, and decided on limiting it to 1500 bytes to align with the MTU of Ethernet.

var (
FrameTypeRaw = FrameType 0, 1 
FrameTypeIPv4 = FrameType 0, 2 
)

Given we know how we re going to marshal and unmarshal binary data to and from Frames, we can now move on to looking through the bit stream for our Frames.

Why is there no Length field? I was initially a bit surprised that Ethernet Frames didn t have a Length field in use, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a big ole' failure mode without a good implementation outcome. Either the Length is right (resulting in no action and used bits on every packet) or the Length is not the length of the Payload and the driver needs to determine what to do with the packet does it try and trim the overlong payload and ignore the rest? What if both the end of the read bytes and the end of the subset of the packet denoted by Length have a valid CRC? Which is used? Will everyone agree? What if Length is longer than the Payload but the CRC is good where we detected a lost carrer? I decided on simplicity. The end of a Frame is denoted by the loss of the BPSK carrier when the signal is no longer being transmitted (or more correctly, when the signal is no longer received), we know we ve hit the end of a packet. Missing a single symbol will result in the Frame being finalized. This can cause some degree of corruption, but it s also a lot easier than doing tricks like bit stuffing to create an end of symbol stream delimiter.

Finding the Frame start in a Symbol Stream First thing we need to do is find our sync bit pattern in the symbols we re receiving from our BPSK demodulator. There s some smart ways to do this, but given that I m not much of a smart man, I again decided to go for simple instead. Given our incoming vector of symbols (which are still float values) prepend one at a time to a vector of floats that is the same length as the sync phrase, and compare against the sync phrase, to determine if we re in sync with the byte boundary within the symbol stream. The only trick here is that because we re using BPSK to modulate and demodulate the data, post phaselock we can be 180 degrees out of alignment (such that a +1 is demodulated as -1, or vice versa). To deal with that, I check against both the sync phrase as well as the inverse of the sync phrase (both [1, -1, 1] as well as [-1, 1, -1]) where if the inverse sync is matched, all symbols to follow will be inverted as well. This effectively turns our symbols back into bits, even if we re flipped out of phase. Other techniques like NRZI will represent a 0 or 1 by a change in phase state which is great, but can often cascade into long runs of bit errors, and is generally more complex to implement. That representation isn t ambiguous, given you look for a phase change, not the absolute phase value, which is incredibly compelling. Here s a notional example of how I ve been thinking about the phrase sliding window and how I ve been thinking of the checks. Each row is a new symbol taken from the BPSK receiver, and pushed to the head of the sliding window, moving all symbols back in the vector by one.

 var (
sync = []float  ...  
buf = make([]float, len(sync))
incomingSymbols = []float  ...  
)
for _, el := range incomingSymbols  
copy(buf, buf[1:])
buf[len(buf)-1] = el
if compare(sync, buf)  
// we're synced!
 break
 
 

Given the pseudocode above, let s step through what the checks would be doing at each step:

Buffer	Sync	Inverse Sync
[ ]float 0, ,0	[ ]float -1, ,-1	[ ]float 1, ,1
[ ]float 0, ,1	[ ]float -1, ,-1	[ ]float 1, ,1
[more bits in]	[ ]float -1, ,-1	[ ]float 1, ,1
[ ]float 1, ,1	[ ]float -1, ,-1	[ ]float 1, ,1

After this notional set of comparisons, we know that at the last step, we are now aligned to the frame and byte boundary the next symbol / bit will be the MSB of the 0th Frame byte. Additionally, we know we re also 180 degrees out of phase, so we need to flip the symbol s sign to get the bit. From this point on we can consume 8 bits at a time, and re-assemble the byte stream. I don t know what this technique is called or even if this is used in real grown-up implementations, but it s been working for my toy implementation.

Next Steps Now that we can read/write Frames to and from PACKRAT, the next steps here are going to be implementing code to encode and decode Ethernet traffic into PACKRAT, coming next in Part 5!

She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was doing. It was a poem about daffodils. Apparently the poet had liked them very much. Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in Susan's very definite opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so. She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it. Around her, the poet's vision was being taken apart with inexpert tools.

Uniform representation The Motoko programming language, designed by Andreas Rossberg and implemented by a pretty cool team at DFINITY is a high-level language with strict semantics and a strong, structural, equi-recursive type system that compiles down to WebAssembly. Because the type system supports polymorphism, it represents all values uniformly. Simplified for the purpose of this blog post, they are always pointers into a heap object where the first word of the heap object, the heap tag, contains information about the value:

 
  tag    
 

The tag is something like array, int64, blob, variant, record, , and it has two purposes:

• The garbage collector uses it to understand what kind of object it is looking at, so that it can move it around and follow pointers therein. Variable size objects such as arrays include the object size in a subsequent word of the heap object.
• Some types have values that may have different shapes on the heap. For example, the ropes used in our text representation can either be a plain blob, or a concatenation node of two blobs. For these types, the tag of the heap object is inspected.

The optional type, naively The optional type (?t) is another example of such a type: Its values can either be null, or ?v for some value v of type t, and the primitive operations on this type are the two introduction forms, an analysis function, and a projection for non-null values:

null : () -> ?t
some : t -> ?t
is_some : ?t -> bool
project : ?t -> t     // must only be used if is_some holds

It is natural to use the heap tag to distinguish the two kind of values:

• The null value is a simple one-word heap object with just a tag that says that this is null:

   
    null  
   

• The other values are represented by a two-word object: The tag some, indicating that it is a ?v, and then the payload, which is the pointer that represents the value v:

   
    some   payload  
   

With this, the four operations can be implemented as follows:

def null():
  ptr <- alloc(1)
  ptr[0] = NULL_TAG
  return ptr
def some(v):
  ptr <- alloc(2)
  ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
  ptr[1] = v
  return ptr
def is_some(p):
  return p[0] == SOME_TAG
def project(p):
  return p[1]

The problem with this implementation is that null() and some(v) both allocate memory. This is bad if they are used very often, and very liberally, and this is the case in Motoko: For example the iterators used for the for (x in e) construct have type

type Iter<T> =   next : () -> ?T  

and would unavoidably allocate a few words on each iteration. Can we avoid this?

Static values It is quite simple to avoid this for for null: Just statically create a single null value and use it every time:

static_null = [NULL_TAG]
def null():
  return static_null

This way, at least null() doesn t allocate. But we gain more: Now every null value is represented by the same pointer, and since the pointer points to static memory, it does not change even with a moving garbage collector, so we can speed up is_some:

def is_some(p):
  return p != static_null

This is not a very surprising change so far, and most compilers out there can and will do at least the static allocation of such singleton constructors. For example, in Haskell, there is only a single empty list ([]) and a single Nothing value in your program, as you can see in my videos exploring the Haskell heap. But can we get rid of the allocation in some(v) too?

Unwrapped optional values If we don t want to allocate in some(v), what can we do? How about simply

def some(v):
  return v

That does not allocate! But it is also broken. At type ??Int, the values null, ?null and ??null are distinct values, but here this breaks. Or, more formally, the following laws should hold for our four primitive operations:

1. is_some(null()) = false
2. v. is_some(some(v)) = true
3. p. project(some(p)) = p

But with the new definition of some, we d get is_some(some(null())) = false. Not good! But note that we only have a problem if we are wrapping a value that is null or some(v). So maybe take the shortcut only then, and write the following:

def some(v):
  if v == static_null   v[0] == SOME_TAG:
    ptr <- alloc(2)
    ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
    ptr[1] = v
    return ptr
  else:
    return v

The definition of is_some can stay as it is: It is still the case that all null values are represented by static_null. But the some values are now no longer all of the same shape, so we have to change project():

def project(p):
  if p[0] == SOME_TAG:
    return p[1]
  else:
    return p

Now things fall into place: A value ?v can, in many cases, be represented the same way as v, and no allocation is needed. Only when v is null or ?null or ??null or ???null etc. we need to use the some heap object, and thus have to allocate. In fact, it doesn t cost much to avoid allocation even for ?null:

static_some_null = [SOME_TAG, static_null]
def some(v):
  if v == static_null:
    return static_some_null
  else if v[0] == SOME_TAG:
    ptr <- alloc(2)
    ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
    ptr[1] = v
    return ptr
  else:
    return v

So unless one nests the ? type two levels deep, there is no allocation whatsoever, and the only cost is a bit more branching in some and project. That wasn t hard, but quite rewarding, as one can now use idioms like the iterator shown above with greater ease.

Examples The following tables shows the representation of various values before and after. Here [ ] is a pointed-to dynamically allocated heap object, a statically allocated heap object, N = NULL_TAG and S = SOME_TAG.

type	value	before	after
Null	null	N	N
?Int	null	N	N
?Int	?23	[S,23]	23
??Int	null	N	N
??Int	?null	[S, N ]	S, N
??Int	??23	[S,[S,23]]	23
???Int	null	N	N
???Int	?null	[S, N ]	S, N
???Int	??null	[S,[S, N ]]	[S, S, N ]
???Int	???23	[S,[S,[S,23]]]	23

Concluding remarks

• If you know what parametric polymorphism is, and wonder how this encoding can work in a language that has that, note that this representation is on the low-level of the untyped run-time value representation: We don t need to know the type of v in some(v), merely its heap representation.
• The uniform representation in Motoko is a bit more involved: The pointers are tagged (by subtracting 1) and some scalar values are represented directly in place (shifted left by 1 bit). But this is luckily orthogonal to what I showed here.
• Could Haskell do this for its Maybe type? Not so easily:
  • The Maybe type is not built-in, but rather a standard library-defined algebraic data type. But the compiler could feasible detect that this is option-like?
  • Haskell is lazy, so at runtime, the type Maybe could be Nothing, or Just v, or, and this is crucial, a yet to be evaluated expression, also called a thunk. And one definitely needs to distinguish between a thunk t :: Maybe a that may evaluate to Nothing, and a value Just t :: Maybe a that definitely is Just, but contains a value, which may be a thunk.
  Something like this may work for a strict Maybe type or unlifted sums like (# (# #) a #), but may clash with other ticks in GHC, such as pointer tagging.
• As I said above, I don t expect this to be novel, and I am happy to add references to prior art here.
• Given that a heap object with tag SOME_TAG now always encodes a tower ? null for n>0, one could try to optimize that even more by just storing the n:

   
    some    n   
   

  But that seems unadvisable: It is only a win if you have deep towers, which is probably rare. Worse, now the project function would have to return such a heap object with n decremented, so now projection might have to allocate, which goes against the cost model expected by the programmer.
• If you rather want to see code than blog posts, feel free to check out Motoko PR #2115.
• Does this kind of stuff excite you? Motoko is open source, so your contributions may be welcome!

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

xrandr --newmode 2560x1440_54.97  221.00  2560 2608 2640 2720  1440 1443 1447 1478  +HSync -VSync
xrandr --addmode DP-3 2560x1440_54.97
xrandr --output DP-3 --mode 2560x1440_54.97 --right-of eDP-1 --primary

$ lspci grep -E "VGA 3D"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation CometLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics] (rev 05)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GLM [Quadro P620] (rev ff)

• Dense: I assume a lot of starting knowledge. Or to look at it another way: I expect my reader to be able to look up and digest non-Rust-specific words or concepts.
• Broad: I cover not just the language and tools, but also the library ecosystem, development approach, community ideology, and so on.
• Frank: much material about Rust has a tendency to gloss over or minimise the bad parts. I don't do that. That also frees me to talk about strategies for dealing with the bad parts.
• Non-neutral: I'm not afraid to recommend particular libraries, for example. I'm not afraid to extol Rust's virtues in the areas where it does well.
• Terse, and sometimes shallow: I often gloss over what I see as unimportant or fiddly details; instead I provide links to appropriate reference materials.

Dual screen desktop running i3, Emacs, some terminals, including a Quake console, Firefox, Polybar as the status bar, and Dunst as the notification daemon.

i3: the window manager i3 aims to be a minimal tiling window manager. Its documentation can be read from top to bottom in less than an hour. i3 organize windows in a tree. Each non-leaf node contains one or several windows and has an orientation and a layout. This information arbitrates the window positions. i3 features three layouts: split, stacking, and tabbed. They are demonstrated in the below screenshot:

Demonstration of the layouts available in i3. The main container is split horizontally. The first child is split vertically. The second one is tabbed. The last one is stacking.

Tree representation of the previous screenshot.

Most of the other tiling window managers, including the awesome window manager, use predefined layouts. They usually feature a large area for the main window and another area divided among the remaining windows. These layouts can be tuned a bit, but you mostly stick to a couple of them. When a new window is added, the behavior is quite predictable. Moreover, you can cycle through the various windows without thinking too much as they are ordered. i3 is more flexible with its ability to build any layout on the fly, it can feel quite overwhelming as you need to visualize the tree in your head. At first, it is not unusual to find yourself with a complex tree with many useless nested containers. Moreover, you have to navigate windows using directions. It takes some time to get used to. I set up a split layout for Emacs and a few terminals, but most of the other workspaces are using a tabbed layout. I don t use the stacking layout. You can find many scripts trying to emulate other tiling window managers but I did try to get my setup pristine of these tentatives and get a chance to familiarize myself. i3 can also save and restore layouts, which is quite a powerful feature. My configuration is quite similar to the default one and has less than 200 lines.

i3 companion: the missing bits i3 philosophy is to keep a minimal core and let the user implements missing features using the IPC protocol:

Do not add further complexity when it can be avoided. We are generally happy with the feature set of i3 and instead focus on fixing bugs and maintaining it for stability. New features will therefore only be considered if the benefit outweighs the additional complexity, and we encourage users to implement features using the IPC whenever possible. Introduction to the i3 window manager

While this is not as powerful as an embedded language, it is enough for many cases. Moreover, as high-level features may be opinionated, delegating them to small, loosely coupled pieces of code keeps them more maintainable. Libraries exist for this purpose in several languages. Users have published many scripts to extend i3: automatic layout and window promotion to mimic the behavior of other tiling window managers, window swallowing to put a new app on top of the terminal launching it, and cycling between windows with Alt+Tab. Instead of maintaining a script for each feature, I have centralized everything into a single Python process, i3-companion using asyncio and the i3ipc-python library. Each feature is self-contained into a function. It implements the following components:

make a workspace exclusive to an application

When a workspace contains Emacs or Firefox, I would like other applications to move to another workspace, except for the terminal which is allowed to intrude into any workspace. The workspace_exclusive() function monitors new windows and moves them if needed to an empty workspace or to one with the same application already running.

implement a Quake console

The quake_console() function implements a drop-down console available from any workspace. It can be toggled with Mod+ . This is implemented as a scratchpad window.

back and forth workspace switching on the same output

With the workspace back_and_forth command, we can ask i3 to switch to the previous workspace. However, this feature is not restricted to the current output. I prefer to have one keybinding to switch to the workspace on the next output and one keybinding to switch to the previous workspace on the same output. This behavior is implemented in the previous_workspace() function by keeping a per-output history of the focused workspaces.

create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty workspace

To create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty workspace, you have to locate a free slot and use workspace number 4 or move container to workspace number 4. The new_workspace() function finds a free number and use it as the target workspace.

restart some services on output change

When adding or removing an output, some actions need to be executed: refresh the wallpaper, restart some components unable to adapt their configuration on their own, etc. i3 triggers an event for this purpose. The output_update() function also takes an extra step to coalesce multiple consecutive events and to check if there is a real change with the low-level library xcffib.

I will detail the other features as this post goes on. On the technical side, each function is decorated with the events it should react to:

@on(CommandEvent("previous-workspace"), I3Event.WORKSPACE_FOCUS)
async def previous_workspace(i3, event):
    """Go to previous workspace on the same output."""

The CommandEvent() event class is my way to send a command to the companion, using either i3-msg -t send_tick or binding a key to a nop command. The latter is used to avoid spawning a shell and a i3-msg process just to send a message. The companion listens to binding events and checks if this is a nop command.

bindsym $mod+Tab nop "previous-workspace"

There are other decorators to avoid code duplication: @debounce() to coalesce multiple consecutive calls, @static() to define a static variable, and @retry() to retry a function on failure. The whole script is a bit more than 1000 lines. I think this is worth a read as I am quite happy with the result.

dunst: the notification daemon Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not come with a built-in notification system. Dunst is a lightweight notification daemon. I am running a modified version with HiDPI support for X11 and recursive icon lookup. The i3 companion has a helper function, notify(), to send notifications using DBus. container_info() and workspace_info() uses it to display information about the container or the tree for a workspace.

Notification showing i3 s tree for a workspace

polybar: the status bar i3 bundles i3bar, a versatile status bar, but I have opted for Polybar. A wrapper script runs one instance for each monitor. The first module is the built-in support for i3 workspaces. To not have to remember which application is running in a workspace, the i3 companion renames workspaces to include an icon for each application. This is done in the workspace_rename() function. The icons are from the Font Awesome project. I maintain a mapping between applications and icons. This is a bit cumbersome but it looks great.

i3 workspaces in Polybar

For CPU, memory, brightness, battery, disk, and audio volume, I am relying on the built-in modules. Polybar s wrapper script generates the list of filesystems to monitor and they get only displayed when available space is low. The battery widget turns red and blinks slowly when running out of power. Check my Polybar configuration for more details.

Polybar displaying various information: CPU usage, memory usage, screen brightness, battery status, Bluetooth status (with a connected headset), network status (connected to a wireless network and to a VPN), notification status, and speaker volume.

For Bluetooh, network, and notification statuses, I am using Polybar s ipc module: the next version of Polybar can receive an arbitrary text on an IPC socket. The module is defined with a single hook to be executed at the start to restore the latest status.

[module/network]
type = custom/ipc
hook-0 = cat $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/i3/network.txt 2> /dev/null
initial = 1

It can be updated with polybar-msg action "#network.send.XXXX". In the i3 companion, the @polybar() decorator takes the string returned by a function and pushes the update through the IPC socket. The i3 companion reacts to DBus signals to update the Bluetooth and network icons. The @on() decorator accepts a DBusSignal() object:

@on(
    StartEvent,
    DBusSignal(
        path="/org/bluez",
        interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
        member="PropertiesChanged",
        signature="sa sv as",
        onlyif=lambda args: (
            args[0] == "org.bluez.Device1"
            and "Connected" in args[1]
            or args[0] == "org.bluez.Adapter1"
            and "Powered" in args[1]
        ),
    ),
)
@retry(2)
@debounce(0.2)
@polybar("bluetooth")
async def bluetooth_status(i3, event, *args):
    """Update bluetooth status for Polybar."""

The middle of the bar is occupied by the date and a weather forecast. The latest also uses the IPC mechanism, but the source is a Python script triggered by a timer.

Current date and weather forecast for the day in Polybar. The data is retrieved with the OpenWeather API.

I don t use the system tray integrated with Polybar. The embedded icons usually look horrible and they all behave differently. A few years back, Gnome has removed the system tray. Most of the problems are fixed by the DBus-based Status Notifier Item protocol also known as Application Indicators or Ayatana Indicators for GNOME. However, Polybar does not support this protocol. In the i3 companion, The implementation of Bluetooth and network icons, including displaying notifications on change, takes about 200 lines. I got to learn a bit about how DBus works and I get exactly the info I want.

picom: the compositor I like having slightly transparent backgrounds for terminals and to reduce the opacity of unfocused windows. This requires a compositor.¹ picom is a lightweight compositor. It works well for me, but it may need some tweaking depending on your graphic card.² Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not handle transparency, so the compositor needs to decide by itself the opacity of each window. Check my configuration for details.

systemd: the service manager I use systemd to start i3 and the various services around it. My xsession script only sets some environment variables and lets systemd handles everything else. Have a look at this article from Micha G ral for the rationale. Notably, each component can be easily restarted and their logs are not mangled inside the ~/.xsession-errors file.³ I am using a two-stage setup: i3.service depends on xsession.target to start services before i3:

[Unit]
Description=X session
BindsTo=graphical-session.target
Wants=autorandr.service
Wants=dunst.socket
Wants=inputplug.service
Wants=picom.service
Wants=pulseaudio.socket
Wants=policykit-agent.service
Wants=redshift.service
Wants=spotify-clean.timer
Wants=ssh-agent.service
Wants=xiccd.service
Wants=xsettingsd.service
Wants=xss-lock.service

Then, i3 executes the second stage by invoking the i3-session.target:

[Unit]
Description=i3 session
BindsTo=graphical-session.target
Wants=wallpaper.service
Wants=wallpaper.timer
Wants=polybar-weather.service
Wants=polybar-weather.timer
Wants=polybar.service
Wants=i3-companion.service
Wants=misc-x.service

Have a look on my configuration files for more details.

rofi: the application launcher Rofi is an application launcher. Its appearance can be customized through a CSS-like language and it comes with several themes. Have a look at my configuration for mine.

Rofi as an application launcher

It can also act as a generic menu application. I have a script to control a media player and another one to select the wifi network. It is quite a flexible application.

Rofi to select a wireless network

xss-lock and i3lock: the screen locker i3lock is a simple screen locker. xss-lock invokes it reliably on inactivity or before a system suspend. For inactivity, it uses the XScreenSaver events. The delay is configured using the xset s command. The locker can be invoked immediately with xset s activate. X11 applications know how to prevent the screen saver from running. I have also developed a small dimmer application that is executed 20 seconds before the locker to give me a chance to move the mouse if I am not away.⁴ Have a look at my configuration script.

Demonstration of xss-lock, xss-dimmer and i3lock with a 4 speedup.

The remaining components

• autorandr is a tool to detect the connected display, match them against a set of profiles, and configure them with xrandr.
• inputplug executes a script for each new mouse and keyboard plugged. This is quite useful to load the appropriate the keyboard map. See my configuration.
• xsettingsd provides settings to X11 applications, not unlike xrdb but it notifies applications for changes. The main use is to configure the Gtk and DPI settings. See my article on HiDPI support on Linux with X11.
• Redshift adjusts the color temperature of the screen according to the time of day.
• maim is a utility to take screenshots. I use Prt Scn to trigger a screenshot of a window or a specific area and Mod+Prt Scn to capture the whole desktop to a file. Check the helper script for details.
• I have a collection of wallpapers I rotate every hour. A script selects them using advanced machine learning algorithms and stitches them together on multi-screen setups. The selected wallpaper is reused by i3lock.

---

1. Apart from the eye candy, a compositor also helps to get tear-free video playbacks.
2. My configuration works with both Haswell (2014) and Whiskey Lake (2018) Intel GPUs. It also works with AMD GPU based on the Polaris chipset (2017).
3. You cannot manage two different displays this way e.g. :0 and :1. In the first implementation, I did try to parametrize each service with the associated display, but this is useless: there is only one DBus user session and many services rely on it. For example, you cannot run two notification daemons.
4. I have only discovered later that XSecureLock ships such a dimmer with a similar implementation. But mine has a cool countdown!

BBI Kenya and live Supreme Court streaming on YT The last few weeks have been unrelenting as all sorts of news have been coming in, mostly about the downturn in the Economy, Islamophobia in India on the rise, Covid, and electioneering. However, in the last few days, Kenya surpassed India in live-streaming proceeds in a Court of Appeals about BBI or Building Bridges Initiative. A background filler article on the topic can be found in BBC. The live-streaming was done via YT and if wants to they can start from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQzpmVKvro One can also subscribe to K24TV which took the initiative of sharing the proceedings with people worldwide. If K24TV continues to share SC proceedings of Kenya, that would add to the soft power of Kenya. I will not go into the details of the case as Gautam Bhatia who has been following the goings-on in Kenya is a far better authority on the subject. In fact, just recently he shared about another Kenyan judgment from a trial which can be seen here. He has shared the proceedings and some hot takes on the Twitter thread started by him. Probably after a couple of weeks or more when he has processed what all has happened there, he may also share some nuances although many of his thoughts would probably go to his book on Comparative Constitutional Law which he hopes to publish maybe in 2021/2022 or whenever he can. Such televised proceedings are sure to alleviate the standing of Kenya internationally. There has been a proposal to do similar broadcasts by India but with surveillance built-in, so they know who is watching. The problems with the architecture and the surveillance built-in have been shared by Srinivas Kodali or DigitalDutta quite a few times, but that probably is a story for another day.

Uttar Pradesh Population Control Bill

Hindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children

The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area. Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO s (Long-time Observers) and STO s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) . Going back to the original topic, though, I had shared Hans Rosling s famous Ted talk on population growth which shows that even countries which we would not normally associate with family planning for e.g. the middle-east and Africa have also been falling quite rapidly. Of course, when people have deeply held prejudices, then it is difficult. Even when sharing China as to how they had to let go of their old policy in 2016 as they had the thing for leftover men . I also shared the powerful movie So Long my Son. I even shared how in Haryana women were and are trafficked and have been an issue for centuries but as neither suits the RW propaganda, they simply refuse to engage. They are more repulsed by people who publish this news rather than those who are actually practicing it, as that is culture . There is also teenage pregnancy, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, etc., etc. It is just all too horrible to contemplate. Personal anecdote I know a couple, or they used to be a couple, where the gentleman wanted to have a male child. It was only after they got an autistic child, they got their DNA tested and came to know that the gentleman had a genetic problem. He again forced and had another child, and that too turned out to be autistic. Finally, he left the wife and the children, divorced them and lived with another woman. Almost a decade of the wife s life was ruined. The wife before marriage was a gifted programmer employed at IBM. This was an arranged marriage. After this, if you are thinking of marrying, apart from doing astrology charts, also look up DNA compatibility charts. Far better than ruining yours or the women s life. Both the children whom I loved are now in heaven, god bless them If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill here. The sad part is that the systems which need fixing, nobody wants to fix. The reason being simple. If you get good health service by public sector, who will go to the private sector. In Europe, AFAIK they have the best medical bang for the money. Even the U.S. looks at Europe and hopes it had the systems that Europe has but that again is probably for another day.

South Africa and India long-lost brothers. As had shared before, after the 2016 South African Debconf convention, I had been following South Africa. I was happy when FeesMustFall worked and in 2017 the then ANC president Zuma declared it in late 2017. I am sure that people who have been regular visitors to this blog know how my position is on student loans. They also must be knowing that even in U.S. till the 1970s it had free education all the way to be a lawyer and getting a lawyer license. It is only when people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and others from the civil rights movement came out as a major force that the capitalists started imposing fees. They wanted people who could be sold to corporate slavery, and they won. Just last week, Biden took some steps and canceled student loans and is working on steps towards broad debt forgiveness. Interestingly, NASA has an affirmative diversity program for people from diverse backgrounds, where a couple of UC (Upper Caste) women got the job. While they got the job, the RW (Right-Wing) was overjoyed as they got jobs on merit . Later, it was found that both the women were the third or fourth generation of immigrants in U.S.

NASA Federal Equal Opportunity Policy Directive NPD 3713 2H

Going back to the original question and topic, while there has been a concerning spate of violence, some calling it the worst sort of violence not witnessed since 1994. The problem, as ascertained in that article, is the same as here in India or elsewhere. Those, again, who have been on my blog know that merit 90% of the time is a function of privilege and there is a vast amount of academic literature which supports that. If, for a moment, you look at the data that is shared in the graph above which shows that 83% of Hindus and 13% of Muslims have more than 2 children, what does it show, it shows that 83+13 = 96% of the population is living in insecurity. The 5% are the ones who have actually consolidated more power during this regime rule in India. Similarly, from what I understood living in Cape Town for about a month, it is the Dutch Afrikaans as they like to call themselves and the immigrants who come from abroad who have enjoyed the fruits of tourism and money and power while the rest of the country is dying due to poverty. It is the same there, it is the same here. Corruption is also rampant in both countries, and the judiciary is virtually absent from both communities in India and SA. Interestingly, South Africa and India have been at loggerheads, but I suspect that is more due to the money and lobbying power by the Dutch. Usually, those who have money power, do get laws and even press on their side, and it is usually the ruling party in power. I cannot help but share about the Gupta brothers and their corruption as I came to know about it in 2016. And as have shared that I m related to Gupta s on my mother s side, not those specific ones but Gupta as a clan. The history of the Gupta dynasty does go back to the 3rd-4th century. Equally interesting have been Sonali Ranade s series of articles which she wrote in National Herald, the latest on exports which is actually the key to taking India out of poverty rather than anything else. While in other countries Exporters are given all sort of subsidies, here it is being worked as how to give them less. This was in Economic times hardly a week back

Export incentive schemes being reduced

I can t imagine the incredible stupidity done by the Finance Minister. And then in an attempt to prove that, they will attempt to present a rosy picture with numbers that have nothing to do with reality. Interestingly enough, India at one time was a major exporter of apples, especially from Kashmir. Now instead of exporting, we are importing them from Afghanistan as well as Belgium and now even from the UK. Those who might not want to use the Twitter link could use this article. Of course, what India got out of this trade deal is not known. One can see that the UK got the better deal from this. Instead of investing in our own capacity expansion, we are investing in increasing the capacity of others. This is at the time when due to fuel price hike (Central taxes 66%) demand is completely flat. And this is when our own CEA (Chief Economic Adviser) tells us that growth will be at the most 6-7% and that too in 2023-2024 while currently, the inflation rate is around 12%. Is it then any wonder that almost 70% are living on Govt. ration and people in the streets of Kolkata, Assam, and other places have to sell kidneys to make sure they have some money for their kids for tomorrow. Now I have nothing against the UK but trade negotiation is an art. Sadly, this has been going on for the last few years. The politicians in India fool the public by always telling of future trade deals. Sadly, as any businessman knows, once you have compromised, you always have to compromise. And the more you compromise, the more you weaken the hand for any future trade deals.

IIT pupil tries to sell kidney to repay loan, but no takers for Dalit organ.

The above was from yesterday s Times of India. Just goes to show how much people are suffering. There have been reports in vernacular papers of quite a few people from across regions and communities are doing this so they can live without pain a bit. Almost all the time, the politicians are saved as only few understand international trade, the diplomacy and the surrounding geopolitics around it. And this sadly, is as much to do with basic education as much as it is to any other factor

Suli Deals About a month back on the holy day of Ramzan or Ramadan as it is known in the west, which is beloved by Muslims, a couple of Muslim women were targeted and virtually auctioned. Soon, there was a flood and a GitHub repository was created where hundreds of Muslim women, especially those who have a voice and fearlessly talk about their understanding about issues and things, were being virtually auctioned. One week after the FIR was put up, to date none of the people mentioned in the FIR have been arrested. In fact, just yesterday, there was an open letter which was published by livelaw. I have saved a copy on WordPress just in case something does go wrong. Other than the disgust we feel, can t say much as no action being taken by GOI and police.

IT Rules 2021 and Big Media After almost a year of sleeping when most activists were screaming hoarsely about how the new IT rules are dangerous for one and all, big media finally woke up a few weeks back and listed a writ petition in Madras High Court of the same. Although to be frank, the real writ petition was filed In February 2021, classical singer, performer T.M. Krishna in Madras High Court. Again, a copy of the writ petition, I have hosted on WordPress. On 23rd June 2021, a group of 13 media outlets and a journalist have challenged the IT Rules, 2021. The Contention came from Digital News Publishers Association which is made up of the following news companies: ABP Network Private Limited, Amar Ujala Limited, DB Corp Limited, Express Network Pvt Ltd, HT Digital Streams Limited, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd, Jagran Prakashan Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, TV Today Network Limited, The Malayala Manorama Co (P) Ltd, Times Internet Limited, and Ushodaya Enterprises Private Limited. All the above are heavyweights in the markets where they operate. The reason being simple, when these media organizations came into being, the idea was to have self-regulation, which by and large has worked. Now, the present Govt. wants each news item to be okayed by them before publication. This is nothing but blatant misuse of power and an attempt at censorship. In fact, the Tamil Nadu BJP president himself made a promise of the same. And of course, what is true and what is a lie, only GOI knows and will decide for the rest of the country. If somebody remembers Joseph Goebbels at this stage, it is merely a coincidence. Anyways, 3 days ago Supreme Court on 14th July the Honorable Supreme Court asked the Madras High Court to transfer all the petitions to SC. This, the Madras High Court denied as cited/shared by Meera Emmanuel, a reporter who works with barandbench. The Court says nothing doing, let this happen and then the SC can entertain the motion of doing it that level. At the same time, they would have the benefit of Madras High Court opinion as well. It gave the center two weeks to file a reply. So, either of end-week of July or latest by August first week, we might be able to read the Center s reply on the same. The SC could do a forceful intervention, but it would lead to similar outrage as has been witnessed in the past when a judge commented that if the SC has to do it all, then why do we need the High Courts, district courts etc. let all the solutions come from SC itself. This was, admittedly, frustration on the part of the judge, but due in part to the needless intervention of SC time and time again. But the concerns had been felt around all the different courts in the country.

Sedition Law A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Honorable CJI NV Ramanna, entertained the PIL filed by Maj Gen S G Vombatkere (Retd.) which asked simply that the sedition law which was used in the colonial times by the British to quell dissent by Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Indian freedom struggle. A good background filler article can be found on MSN which tells about some recent cases but more importantly how historically the sedition law was used to quell dissent during India s Independence. Another article on MSN actually elaborates on the PIL filed by Maj Gen S. G. Vombatkere. Another article on MSN tells how sedition law has been challenged and changed in 10 odd countries. I find it equally sad and equally hilarious that the Indian media whose job is to share news and opinion on this topic is being instead of being shared more by MSN. Although, I would be bereft of my duty if I did not share the editorial on the same topic by the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. Also, an interesting question to ask is, are there only 10 countries in the world that have sedition laws? AFAIK, there are roughly 200 odd countries as recognized by WTO. If 190 odd countries do not have sedition laws, it also tells a lot about them and a lot about the remaining 10. Also, it came to light that police are still filing laws under sec66A which was declared null and void a few years ago. It was replaced with section 124A if memory serves right and it has more checks and balances.

Danish Siddiqui, Pulitzer award-winning and death in Afghanistan Before I start with Danish Siddiqui, let me share an anecdote that I think I have shared on the blog years ago about how photojournalists are. Again, those who know me and those who follow me know how much I am mad both about trains and planes (civil aviation). A few months back, I had shared a blog post about some of the biggest railway systems in the world which shows that privatization of Railways doesn t necessarily lead to up-gradation of services but definitely leads to an increase in tariff/fares. Just had a conversation couple of days ago on Twitter and realized that need to also put a blog post about civil aviation in India and the problems it faces, but I digress. This was about a gentleman who wanted to take a photo of a particular train coming out of a valley at a certain tunnel at two different heights, one from below and one from above the train. This was several years ago, and while I did share that award-winning photograph then, it probably would take me quite a bit of time and effort to again look it up on my blog and share. The logistics though were far more interesting and intricate than I had first even thought of. We came around a couple of days before the train was supposed to pass that tunnel and the valley. More than half a dozen or maybe more shots were taken throughout the day by the cameras. The idea was to see how much light was being captured by the cameras and how much exposure was to be given so that the picture isn t whitened out or is too black. Weather is the strangest of foes for a photojournalist or even photographers, and the more you are in nature, the more unpredictable it is and can be. We were also at a certain height, so care had to be taken in case light rainfall happens or dew falls, both not good for digital cameras. And dew is something which will happen regardless of what you want. So while the two days our gentleman cameraman fiddled with the settings to figure out correct exposure settings, we had one other gentleman who was supposed to take the train from an earlier station and apprise us if the train was late or not. The most ideal time would be at 0600 hrs. When the train would enter the tunnel and come out and the mixture of early morning sun rays, dew, the flowers in the valley, and the train would give a beautiful effect. We could stretch it to maybe 0700 hrs. Anything after that would just be useless, as it wouldn t have the same effect. And of all this depended on nature. If the skies were to remain too dark, nothing we could do about it, if the dewdrops didn t fall it would all be over. On the day of the shoot, we were told by our compatriot that the train was late by half an hour. We sank a little on hearing that news. Although Photoshop and others can do touch-ups, most professionals like to take as authentic a snap as possible. Everything had been set up to perfection. The wide-angle lenses on both the cameras with protections were set up. The tension you could cut with a knife. While we had a light breakfast, I took a bit more and went in the woods to shit and basically not be there. This was too tensed up for me. Returned an hour to find everybody in a good mood. Apparently, the shoot went well. One of the two captured it for good enough. Now, this is and was in a benign environment where the only foe was the environment. A bad shot would have meant another week in the valley, something which I was not looking forward to. Those who have lived with photographers and photojournalists know how self-involved they can be in their craft, while how grumpy they can be if they had a bad shoot. For those, who don t know, it is challenging to be friends with such people for a long time. I wish they would scream more at nature and let out the frustrations they have after a bad shoot. But again, this is in a very safe environment. Now let s cut to Danish Siddiqui and the kind of photojournalism he followed. He followed a much more riskier sort of photojournalism than the one described above. Krittivas Mukherjee in his Twitter thread shared how reporters in most advanced countries are trained in multiple areas, from risk assessment to how to behave in case you are kidnapped, are in riots, hostage situations, etc. They are also trained in all sorts of medical training from treating gunshot wounds, CPR, and other survival methods. They are supposed to carry medical equipment along with their photography equipment. Sadly, these concepts are unknown in India. And even then they get killed. Sadly, he attributes his death to the thrill of taking an exclusive photograph. And the gentleman s bio reads that he is a diplomat. Talk about tone-deafness On another completely different level was Karen Hao who was full of empathy as she shared the humility, grace, warmth and kinship she describes in her interaction with the photojournalist. His body of work can be seen via his ted talk in 2020 where he shared a brief collage of his works. Latest, though in a turnaround, the Taliban have claimed no involvement in the death of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui. This could be in part to show the Taliban in a more favorable light as they do and would want to be showcased as progressive, even though they are forcing that all women within a certain age become concubines or marry the fighters and killing the minority Hazaras or doing vile deeds with them. Meanwhile, statements made by Hillary Clinton almost a decade, 12 years ago have come back into circulation which stated how the U.S. itself created the Taliban to thwart the Soviet Union and once that job was finished, forgot all about it. And then in 2001, it landed back in Afghanistan while the real terrorists were Saudi. To date, not all documents of 9/11 are in the public domain. One can find more information of the same here. This is gonna take probably another few years before Saudi Arabia s whole role in the September 11 attacks will be known. Last but not the least, came to know about the Pegasus spyware and how many prominent people in some nations were targeted, including in mine India. Will not talk more as it s already a big blog post and Pegasus revelations need an article on its own.

Our system has detected that this message is 421-4.7.0 suspicious due to the nature of the content and/or the links within.

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.

The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.

For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.

The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.

For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.

  simplex:~
 % schroot --preserve-environment -r -c polymake
(unstable-amd64-sbuild)bremner@simplex:~$ echo $SLURM_CPU_BIND_LIST
0x55555555555555555555
(unstable-amd64-sbuild)bremner@simplex:~$ grep Cpus /proc/self/status
Cpus_allowed:   ffff,ffffffff,ffffffff
Cpus_allowed_list:      0-79
(unstable-amd64-sbuild)bremner@simplex:~$ taskset $SLURM_CPU_BIND_LIST bash
(unstable-amd64-sbuild)bremner@simplex:~$ grep Cpus /proc/self/status
Cpus_allowed:   5555,55555555,55555555
Cpus_allowed_list:      0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44,46,48,50,52,54,56,58,60,62,64,66,68,70,72,74,76,78

Next steps In principle the schroot configuration parameter can be used to run taskset before every command. In practice it's a bit fiddly because you need a shell script shim (because the environment variable) and you need to e.g. goof around with bind mounts to make sure that your script is available in the chroot. And then there's combining with ccache and eatmydata...

UK Railways

How Privatization Fails : Railways

The Above video is by a gentleman called Shaun who basically shared that privatization as far as UK is concerned is nothing but monopolies and while there are complex reasons for the same, the design of the Railways is such that it will always be a monopoly structure. At the most what you can do is have several monopolies but that is all that can happen. The idea of competition just cannot happen. Even the idea that subsidies will be less or/and trains will run on time is far from fact. Both of these facts have been checked and found to be truthful by fullfact.org. It is and argued that UK is small and perhaps it doesn t have the right conditions. It is probably true but still we do deserve to have a glance at the UK railway map.

UK railway map with operators

The above map is copyrighted to Map Marketing where you could see it today . As can be seen above most companies had their own specified areas. Now if you had looked at the facts then you would have seen that UK fares have been higher. In fact, an oldish article from Metro (a UK publication) shares the same. In fact, UK nationalized its railways effectively as many large rail operators were running in red. Even Scotland is set to nationalised back in March 2022. Remember this is a country which hasn t seen inflation go upwards of 5% in nearly a decade. The only outlier was 2011 where they indeed breached the 5% mark. So from this, what we see is Private Gains and Private Gains Public Losses perhaps seem fit. But then maybe we didn t use the right example. Perhaps Japan would be better. They have bullet trains while UK is still thinking about it. (HS2).

Japanese Railway Below is the map of Japanese Railway

Railway map of Japan with private ownership courtesy Wikimedia commons

Japan started privatizing its railway in 1987 and to date it has not been fully privatized. And on top of it, amount as much as 24 trillion of the long-term JNR debt was shouldered by the government at the expense of taxpayers of Japan while also reducing almost 1/4th of it employees. To add to it, while some parts of Japanese Railways did make profits, many of them made profits by doing large-scale non-railway business mostly real estate of land adjacent to railway stations. In many cases, it seems this went all the way up to 60% of the revenue. The most profitable has been the Shinkansen though. And while it has been profitable, it has not been without safety scandals over the years, the biggest in recent years was the 2005 Amagasaki derailment. What was interesting to me was the Aftermath, while the Wikipedia page doesn t share much, I had read at the time and probably could be found how a lot of ordinary people stood up to the companies in a country where it is a known fact that most companies are owned by the Yakuza. And this is a country where people are loyal to their corporation or company no matter what. It is a strange culture to west and also here in India where people change jobs on drop of hat, although nowadays we have record unemployment. So perhaps Japan too does not meet our standard as it doesn t do competition with each other but each is a set monopoly in those regions. Also how much subsidy is there or not is not really transparent.

U.S. Railways Last, but not the least I share the U.S. Railway map. This is provided by A Mr. Tom Alison on reddit on channel maporn. As the thread itself is archived and I do not know the gentleman concerned, nor have taken permission for the map, hence sharing the compressed version

U.S. Railway lines with the different owners

Now the U.S. Railways is and has always been peculiar as unlike the above two the U.S. has always been more of a freight network. Probably, much of it has to do that in the 1960 s when oil was cheap, the U.S. made zillions of roadways and romanticized the road trip and has been doing it ever since. Also the creation of low-cost airlines definitely didn t help the railways to have more passenger services, in fact the opposite. There are and have been smaller services and attempts of privatization in both New Zealand and Australia and both have been failures. Please see papers in that regard. My simple point is this, as can be seen above, there have been various attempts at privatization of railways and most of them have been a mixed bag. The only one which comes close to what we think as good is Japanese but that also used a lot of public debt which we don t know what will happen on next. Also for higher-speed train services like a bullet train or whatever, you need to direct, no hair pen bends. In fact, a good talk on the topic is the TBD podcast which while it talks about hyperloop, the same questions is and would be asked if were to do in India. Another thing to be kept in mind is that the Japanese have been exceptional builders and this is because they have been forced to. They live in a seismically active zone which made Fukushima disaster a reality but at the same time, their buildings are earthquake-resistant. Standard Disclaimer The above is a simplified version of things. I could have added in financial accounts but that again has no set pattern. For e.g. some Railways use accrual, some use cash and some use hybrid. I could have also shared in either the guage or electrification but all have slightly different standards, although uniguage is something that all Railways aspire for and electrification is again something that all Railways want although in many cases it just isn t economically feasible.

Indian Railways Indian Railways itself recently made the move from Cash to Accrual couple of years back. In-between for a couple of years, it was hybrid. The sad part is and was you can now never measure against past performance in the old way because it is so different. Hence, whether the Railways will be making a loss or a profit, we would come to know only much later. Also, most accountants don t know the new system well, so it is gonna take more time, how much unknown. Sadly, what GOI did a few years back is merge the Railway budget into the Union Budget. Of course, the excuse they gave is too many pressures of new trains, while the truth is, by doing this, they decreased transparency about the whole thing. For e.g. for the last few years, the only state which had significant work being done is in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) and a bit in Goa, although that is has been protested time and again. I being from the neighborly state of Maharashtra , and have been there several times. Now it does feels all like a dream, going to Goa :(.

Covid news Now before I jump on the news, I should share the movie Virus (2019) which was made by the talented Aashiq Abu. Even though, am not a Malayalee, I still have enjoyed many of his movies simply because he is a terrific director and Malayalam movies, at least most of them have English subtitles and lot of original content.. Interestingly, unlike the first couple of times when I saw it a couple of years back. The first time I saw it, I couldn t sleep a wink for a week. Even the next time, it was heavy. I had shared the movie with mum, and even she couldn t see it in one go. It is and was that powerful Now maybe because we are headlong in the pandemic, and the madness is all around us. There are two terms that helped me though understand a great deal of what is happening in the movie, the first term was altered sensorium which has been defined here. The other is saturation or to be more precise oxygen saturation . This term has also entered the Indian twitter lexicon quite a bit as India has started running out of oxygen. Just today Delhi High Court did an emergency hearing on the subject late at night. Although there is much to share about the mismanagement of the center, the best piece on the subject has been by Miss Priya Ramani. Yup, the same lady who has won against M.J. Akbar and this is when Mr. Akbar had 100 lawyers for this specific case. It would be interesting to see what happens ahead. There are however few things even she forgot in her piece, For e.g. reverse migration i.e. from urban to rural migration started again. Two articles from different entities sharing a similar outlook.Sadly, the right have no empathy or feeling for either the poor or the sick. Even the labor minister Santosh Gangwar s statement that around 1.04 crores were the only people who walked back home. While there is not much data, however some work/research has been done on migration to cites that the number could be easily 10 times as much. And this was in the lockdown of last year. This year, again the same issue has re-surfaced and migrants learning lessons started leaving cities. And I m ashamed to say I think they are doing the right thing. Most State Governments have not learned lessons nor have they done any work to earn the trust of migrants. This is true of almost all state Governments. Last year, just before the lockdown was announced, me and my friend spent almost 30k getting a cab all the way from Chennai to Pune, how much we paid for the cab, how much we bribed the various people just so we could cross the state borders to return home to our anxious families. Thankfully, unlike the migrants, we were better off although we did make a loss. I probably wouldn t be alive if I were in their situation as many didn t. That number is still in the air undocumented deaths Vaccine issues Currently, though the issue has been the Vaccine and the pricing of the same. A good article to get a summation of the issues outlined has been shared on Economist. Another article that goes to the heart of the issue is at scroll. To buttress the argument, the SII chairman had shared this few weeks back

Adar Poonawala talking to Vishnu Som on Left, right center, 7th April 2021.

So, a licensee manufacturer wants to make super-profits during the pandemic. And now, as shared above they can very easily do it. Even the quotes given to nearby countries is smaller than the quotes given to Indian states

Prices of AstraZeneca among various states and countries.

The situation around beds, vaccines, oxygen, anything is so dire that people could go to any lengths to save their loved ones. Even if they know if a certain medicine doesn t work. For e.g. Remdesivir, 5 WHO trials have concluded that it doesn t increase mortality. Heck, even AIIMS chief said the same. But both doctors and relatives desperation to cling on hope has made Remdesivir as a black market drug with unoffical prices hovering anywhere between INR 14k/- to INR30k/- per vial. One of the executives of a top firm was also arrested in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, the opposition M.P. came to the rescue of the officials of Bruick pharms in Mumbai. Sadly, this strange affliction to the party in the center is also there in my extended family. At one end, they will heap praise on Mr. Modi, at the same time they can t get wait to get fast out of India. Many of them have settled in horrors of horror Dubai, as it is the best place to do business, get international schools for the young ones at decent prices, cheaper or maybe a tad more than what they paid in Delhi or elsewhere. Being an Agarwal or a Gupta makes it easier to compartmentalize both things. Ease of doing business, 5 days flat to get a business registered, up and running. And the paranoia is still there. They won t talk on the phone about him because they are afraid they may say something which comes back to bite them. As far as their decision to migrate, can t really blame them. If I were 20-25 yeas younger and my mum were in a better shape than she is, we probably would have migrated as well, although would have preferred Europe than anywhere else.

Internet Freedom and Aarogya Setu App.

Internet Freedom had shared the chilling effects of the Aarogya Setu App. This had also been shared by FSCI in the past, and recently had their handle being banned on Twitter. This was also apparent in a legal bail order which the high court judge gave. While I won t go into the merits and demerits of the bail order, it is astounding for the judge to say that the accused, even though he would be on bail install an app. so he can be surveilled. And this is a high court judge, such a sad state of affairs. We seem to be putting up new lows every day when it comes to judicial jurisprudence. One interesting aspect of the whole case was shared by Aishwarya Iyer. She shared a story that she and her team worked on quint which raises questions on the quality of the work done by Delhi Police. This is of course, up to Delhi Police to ascertain the truth of the matter because unless and until they are able to tie in the PMO s office in for a leak or POTUS s office it hardly seems possible. For e.g. the dates when two heads of state can meet each other would be decided by the secretaries of the two. Once the date is known, it would be shared with the press while at the same time some sort of security apparatus would kick in place. It is incumbent, especially on the host to take as much care as he can of the guest. We all remember that World War 1 (the war to end all wars) started due to the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.

As nobody wants that, the best way is to make sure that a political murder doesn t happen on your watch. Now while I won t comment on what it would be, it would be safe to assume that it would be z+ security along with higher readiness. Especially if it as somebody as important as POTUS. Now, it would be quite a reach for Delhi Police to connect the two dates. They either will have to get creative with the dates or some other way. Otherwise, with practically no knowledge in the public domain, they can t work in limbo. In either case, I do hope the case comes up for hearing soon and we see what the Delhi Police says and contends in the High Court about the same. At the very least, it would be irritating for them to talk of the dates unless they can contend some mass conspiracy which involves the PMO (and would bring into question the constant vetting done by the Intelligence dept. of all those who work in PMO). And this whole case is to kind of shelter to the Delhi riots which happened in which majorly the Muslims died but their deaths lay unaccounted till date

Conclusion In Conclusion, I would like to share a bit of humor because right now the atmosphere is humorless, both with authoritarian tendencies of the Central Govt. and the mass mismanagement of public health which they now have left to the state to do as they fit. The peice I am sharing is from arre, one of my goto sites whenever I feel low.

Brief History

• 17th century: The Kingdom of Sikkim is founded by the Namgyal dynasty and ruled by Buddhist priest-kings known as the Chogyal.
• 1890: Sikkim becomes a princely state of British India.
• 1947: Sikkim continues its protectorate status with the Union of India, post-Indian-independence.
• 1973: Anti-royalist riots take place in front of the Chogyal's palace, by Nepalis seeking greater representation.
• 1975: Referendum leads to the deposition of the monarchy and Sikkim joins India as its 22nd state.

Languages

• Official: English, Nepali, Sikkimese/Bhotia and Lepcha
• Though Hindi and Nepali share the same script (Devanagari), they are not mutually intelligible. Yet, most people in Sikkim can understand and speak Hindi.

Ethnicity

• Nepalis: Migrated in large numbers (from Nepal) and soon became the dominant community
• Bhutias: People of Tibetan origin. Major inhabitants in Northern Sikkim.
• Lepchas: Original inhabitants of Sikkim

Food

• Tibetan/Nepali dishes (mostly consumed during winter)
  • Thukpa: Noodle soup, rich in spices and vegetables. Usually contains some form of meat. Common variations: Thenthuk and Gyathuk
  • Momos: Steamed or fried dumplings, usually with a meat filling.
  • Saadheko: Spicy marinated chicken salad.
  • Gundruk Soup: A soup made from Gundruk, a fermented leafy green vegetable.
  • Sinki : A fermented radish tap-root product, traditionally consumed as a base for soup and as a pickle. Eerily similar to Kimchi.
• While pork and beef are pretty common, finding vegetarian dishes is equally easy.
• Staple: Dal-Bhat with Subzi. Rice is a lot more common than wheat (rice) possibly due to greater carb content and proximity to West Bengal, India s largest producer of Rice.
• Good places to eat in Gangtok
  • Hamro Bhansa Ghar, Nimtho (Nepali)
  • Taste of Tibet
  • Dragon Wok (Chinese & Japanese)

Buddhism in Sikkim

• Bayul Demojong (Sikkim), is the most sacred Land in the Himalayas as per the belief of the Northern Buddhists and various religious texts.
• Sikkim was blessed by Guru Padmasambhava, the great Buddhist saint who visited Sikkim in the 8th century and consecrated the land.
• However, Buddhism is said to have reached Sikkim only in the 17th century with the arrival of three Tibetan monks viz. Rigdzin Goedki Demthruchen, Mon Kathok Sonam Gyaltshen & Rigdzin Legden Je at Yuksom. Together, they established a Buddhist monastery.
• In 1642 they crowned Phuntsog Namgyal as the first monarch of Sikkim and gave him the title of Chogyal, or Dharma Raja.
• The faith became popular through its royal patronage and soon many villages had their own monastery.
• Today Sikkim has over 200 monasteries.

Major monasteries

• Rumtek Monastery, 20Km from Gangtok
• Lingdum/Ranka Monastery, 17Km from Gangtok
• Phodong Monastery, 28Km from Gangtok
• Ralang Monastery, 10Km from Ravangla
• Tsuklakhang Monastery, Royal Palace, Gangtok
• Enchey Monastery, Gangtok
• Tashiding Monastery, 35Km from Ravangla

Reaching Sikkim

• Gangtok, being the capital, is easiest to reach amongst other regions, by public transport and shared cabs.
• By Air:
  • Pakyong (PYG) :
    • Nearest airport from Gangtok (about 1 hour away)
    • Tabletop airport
    • Reserved cabs cost around INR 1200.
    • As of Apr 2021, the only flights to PYG are from IGI (Delhi) and CCU (Kolkata).
  • Bagdogra (IXB) :
    • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
    • Larger airport with flights to most major Indian cities.
    • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs cost about INR 350.
• By Train:
  • New Jalpaiguri (NJP) :
    • About 20 minutes from Siliguri and 4 hours from Gangtok.
    • Reserved cabs cost about INR 3000. Shared cabs from INR 350.
• By Road:
  • NH10 connects Siliguri to Gangtok
  • If you can t find buses plying to Gangtok directly, reach Siliguri and then take a cab to Gangtok.
• Sikkim Nationalised Transport Div. also runs hourly buses between Siliguri and Gangtok and daily buses on other common routes. They re cheaper than shared cabs.
• Wizzride also operates shared cabs between Siliguri/Bagdogra/NJP, Gangtok and Darjeeling. They cost about the same as shared cabs but pack in half as many people in luxury cars (Innova, Xylo, etc.) and are hence more comfortable.

---

Gangtok

• Time needed: 1D/1N
• Places to visit:
  • Hanuman Tok
  • Ganesh Tok
  • Tashi View Point [6,800ft]
  • MG Marg
  • Sikkim Zoo
  • Gangtok Ropeway
  • Enchey Monastery
  • Tsuklakhang Palace & Monastery
• Hostels: Tagalong Backpackers (would strongly recommend), Zostel Gangtok
• Places to chill: Travel Cafe, Caf Live & Loud and Gangtok Groove
• Places to shop: Lal Market and MG Marg

Getting Around

• Taxis operate on a reserved or shared basis. In case of the latter, you can pool with other commuters your taxis will pick up and drop en-route.
• Naturally shared taxis only operate on popular routes. The easiest way to get around Gangtok is to catch a shared cab from MG Marg.
• Reserved taxis for Gangtok sightseeing cost around INR 1000-1500, depending upon the spots you d like to see
• Key taxi/bus stands :
  • Deorali stand: For Darjeeling, Siliguri, Kalimpong
  • Vajra stand: For North & East Sikkim (Tsomgo Lake & Nathula)
  • Rumtek taxi: For Ravangla, Pelling, Namchi, Geyzing, Jorethang and Singtam.

Exploring Gangtok on an MTB

• If you'd like to explore Gangtok at your own pace, you could rent a cycle from Hub Outdoor or HillBike. I paid INR 600 for a day at HillBike.
• These are well-maintained geared mountain bikes, so adapting to inclines and declines should be a breeze, even for beginners.
• Cycling down from Ganesh Tok to Tashi View Point is an absolute delight and in my opinion, the best thing you can do in Gangtok.
• While it is a little unconventional and exhausting (uphill stretches), but a 100% recommended unless you ve been skipping leg day
• Pro tip : Make sure you use the right/back brake while decelerating downhill and not the left/front brake.
• Recommended route [3-5hrs, 20.3Km, 1770-2081ft] : Chandmari (HillBike) -> Sera Jhe Dro-Phen-Ling Monastery > Ganesh Tok > Tashi View Point > Bakthung Falls > Vajra Stand > Tsuklakhang Palace & Monastery > Enchey Monastery > Chandmari

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North Sikkim

• The easiest & most economical way to explore North Sikkim is the 3D/2N package offered by shared-cab drivers.
• This includes food, permits, cab rides and accommodation (1N in Lachen and 1N in Lachung)
• The accommodation on both nights are at homestays with bare necessities, so keep your hopes low.
• In the spirit of sustainable tourism, you ll be asked to discard single-use plastic bottles, so please carry a bottle that you can refill along the way.
• Zero Point and Gurdongmer Lake are snow-capped throughout the year

3D/2N Shared-cab Package Itinerary

• Day 1
  • Gangtok (10am) - Chungthang - Lachung (stay)
• Day 2
  • Pre-lunch : Lachung (6am) - Yumthang Valley [12,139ft] - Zero Point - Lachung [15,300ft]
  • Post-lunch : Lachung - Chungthang - Lachen (stay)
• Day 3
  • Pre-lunch : Lachen (5am) - Kala Patthar - Gurdongmer Lake [16,910ft] - Lachen
  • Post-lunch : Lachen - Chungthang - Gangtok (7pm)
• This itinerary is idealistic and depends on the level of snowfall.
• Some drivers might switch up Day 2 and 3 itineraries by visiting Lachen and then Lachung, depending upon the weather.
• Areas beyond Lachen & Lachung are heavily militarized since the Indo-China border is only a few miles away.

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East Sikkim

Zuluk and Silk Route

• Time needed: 2D/1N
• Zuluk [9,400ft] is a small hamlet with an excellent view of the eastern Himalayan range including the Kanchenjunga.
• Was once a transit point to the historic Silk Route from Tibet (Lhasa) to India (West Bengal).
• The drive from Gangtok to Zuluk takes at least four hours. Hence, it makes sense to spend the night at a homestay and space out your trip to Zuluk

Tsomgo Lake and Nathula

• Time Needed : 1D
• A Protected Area Permit is required to visit these places, due to their proximity to the Chinese border
• Tsomgo/Chhangu Lake [12,313ft]
  • Glacial lake, 40 km from Gangtok.
  • Remains frozen during the winter season.
  • You can also ride on the back of a Yak for INR 300
• Baba Mandir
  • An old temple dedicated to Baba Harbhajan Singh, a Sepoy in the 23rd Regiment, who died in 1962 near the Nathu La during Indo China war.
• Nathula Pass [14,450ft]
  • Located on the Indo-Tibetan border crossing of the Old Silk Route, it is one of the three open trading posts between India and China.
  • Plays a key role in the Sino-Indian Trade and also serves as an official Border Personnel Meeting(BPM) Point.
  • May get cordoned off by the Indian Army in event of heavy snowfall or for other security reasons.

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West Sikkim

• Time needed: 3N/1N
• Hostels at Pelling : Mochilerro Ostillo

Itinerary

Day 1: Gangtok - Ravangla - Pelling

• Leave Gangtok early, for Ravangla through the Temi Tea Estate route.
• Spend some time at the tea garden and then visit Buddha Park at Ravangla
• Head to Pelling from Ravangla

Day 2: Pelling sightseeing

• Hire a cab and visit Skywalk, Pemayangtse Monastery, Rabdentse Ruins, Kecheopalri Lake, Kanchenjunga Falls.

Day 3: Pelling - Gangtok/Siliguri

• Wake up early to catch a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at the Pelling Helipad around sunrise
• Head back to Gangtok on a shared-cab
• You could take a bus/taxi back to Siliguri if Pelling is your last stop.

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Darjeeling

• In my opinion, Darjeeling is lovely for a two-day detour on your way back to Bagdogra/Siliguri and not any longer (unless you re a Bengali couple on a honeymoon)
• Once a part of Sikkim, Darjeeling was ceded to the East India Company after a series of wars, with Sikkim briefly receiving a grant from EIC for gifting Darjeeling to the latter
• Post-independence, Darjeeling was merged with the state of West Bengal.

Itinerary

Day 1 :

• Take a cab from Gangtok to Darjeeling (shared-cabs cost INR 300 per seat)
• Reach Darjeeling by noon and check in to your Hostel. I stayed at Hideout.
• Spend the evening visiting either a monastery (or the Batasia Loop), Nehru Road and Mall Road.
• Grab dinner at Glenary whilst listening to live music.

Day 2:

• Wake up early to catch the sunrise and a glimpse of Kanchenjunga at Tiger Hill. Since Tiger Hill is 10km from Darjeeling and requires a permit, book your taxi in advance.
• Alternatively, if you don t want to get up at 4am or shell out INR1500 on the cab to Tiger Hill, walk to the Kanchenjunga View Point down Mall Road
• Next, queue up outside Keventers for breakfast with a view in a century-old cafe
• Get a cab at Gandhi Road and visit a tea garden (Happy Valley is the closest) and the Ropeway. I was lucky to meet 6 other backpackers at my hostel and we ended up pooling the cab at INR 200 per person, with INR 1400 being on the expensive side, but you could bargain.
• Get lunch, buy some tea at Golden Tips, pack your bags and hop on a shared-cab back to Siliguri. It took us about 4hrs to reach Siliguri, with an hour to spare before my train.
• If you ve still got time on your hands, then check out the Peace Pagoda and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (Toy Train). At INR 1500, I found the latter to be too expensive and skipped it.

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Tips and hacks

• Download offline maps, especially when you re exploring Northern Sikkim.
• Food and booze are the cheapest in Gangtok. Stash up before heading to other regions.
• Keep your Aadhar/Passport handy since you need permits to travel to North & East Sikkim.
• In rural areas and some cafes, you may get to try Rhododendron Wine, made from Rhododendron arboreum a.k.a Gurans. Its production is a little hush-hush since the flower is considered holy and is also the National Flower of Nepal.
• If you don t want to invest in a new jacket, boots or a pair of gloves, you can always rent them at nominal rates from your hotel or little stores around tourist sites.
• Check the weather of a region before heading there. Low visibility and precipitation can quite literally dampen your experience.
• Keep your itinerary flexible to accommodate for rest and impromptu plans.
• Shops and restaurants close by 8pm in Sikkim and Darjeeling. Plan for the same.

Carry

• a couple of extra pairs of socks (woollen, if possible)
• a pair of slippers to wear indoors
• a reusable water bottle
• an umbrella
• a power bank
• a couple of tablets of Diamox. Helps deal with altitude sickness
• extra clothes and wet bags since you may not get a chance to wash/dry your clothes
• a few passport size photographs

Shared-cab hacks

• Intercity rides can be exhausting. If you can afford it, pay for an additional seat.
• Call shotgun on the drives beyond Lachen and Lachung. The views are breathtaking.
• Return cabs tend to be cheaper (WB cabs travelling from SK and vice-versa)

Cost

• My median daily expenditure (back when I went to Sikkim in early March 2021) was INR 1350.
• This includes stay (bunk bed), food, wine and transit (shared cabs)
• In my defence, I splurged on food, wine and extra seats in shared cabs, but if you re on a budget, you could easily get by on INR 1 - 1.2k per day.
• For a 9-day trip, I ended up shelling out nearly INR 15k, including 2AC trains to & from Kolkata
• Note : Summer (March to May) and Autumn (October to December) are peak seasons, and thereby more expensive to travel around.

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Souvenirs and things you should buy

Buddhist souvenirs :

• Colourful Prayer Flags (great for tying on bikes or behind car windshields)
• Miniature Prayer/Mani Wheels
• Lucky Charms, Pendants and Key Chains
• Cham Dance masks and robes
• Singing Bowls
• Common symbols: Om mani padme hum, Ashtamangala, Zodiac signs

Handicrafts & Handlooms

• Tibetan Yak Wool shawls, scarfs and carpets
• Sikkimese Ceramic cups
• Thangka Paintings

Edibles

• Darjeeling Tea (usually brewed and not boiled)
• Wine (Arucha Peach & Rhododendron)
• Dalle Khursani (Chilli) Paste and Pickle

Header Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY

Debian

This was my 27th month of active contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ This month was a bit exhausting; lots of moving parts. With the financial year ending, it was even more crazy, with me running around to banks, CA, et al.
Anyway, with now working on Ubuntu full-time, I did little of Debian this month. Here are the following things I worked on:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• polybar (3.5.5-1) - New upstream version, v3.5.5.
• ruby-http-parser (1.2.1-5) - Disable tests causing FTBFS on s390x architecture.
• debian-security-support (1:11+2021.03.19) - Fix for bug #984539: dpkg hook should never fail.
• Filed bug #985314 against asterisk (systemd misconfiguration) and added a patch as well.
• Filed bug #985421 against at (add DEP8 tests) and added a patch as well.

Other $things:

• Attended the Debian LTS team meeting.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.

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Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my eighteenth month as a Debian LTS and ninth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 60.00 hours for LTS and 39.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2580-1, fixing CVE-2021-21311, for adminer.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.2.5-3+deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2581-1, fixing CVE-2021-27803, for wpa.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2:2.4-1+deb9u9.
• Issued DLA 2585-1, fixing CVE-2020-13848, for libupnp.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1:1.6.19+git20160116-1.2+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2589-1, fixing CVE-2020-26519 and CVE-2021-3407, for mupdf.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.9a+ds1-4+deb9u6.
• Issued DLA 2593-1, fixing bug #962596, for ca-certificates.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 20200601~deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2589-2, fixing regression caused by DLA 2589-1, for mupdf.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.9a+ds1-4+deb9u7.
• Issued DLA 2598-1, fixing CVE-2020-25097, for squid3.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 3.5.23-5+deb9u6.
• Issued DLA 2599-1, fixing CVE-2021-28963, for shibboleth-sp2.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.6.0+dfsg1-4+deb9u2.
• Issued DLA 2601-1, fixing CVE-2021-3429, for cloud-init.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.7.9-2+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2558-2, fixing regression caused by DLA 2558-1, for xterm.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 327-2+deb9u2.
• Released debian-security-support to unstable via Holger to fix bug #984539.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 374-1, fixing CVE-2021-27803, for wpa.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.3-1+deb8u13.
• Issued ELA 375-1, fixing CVE-2021-3410, for libcaca.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 0.99.beta19-2+deb8u2.
• Issued ELA 376-1, fixing CVE-2020-25638, for libhibernate3-java.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 3.6.10.Final-3+deb8u1.
• Issued ELA 382-1, fixing CVE-2020-25097, for squid3.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 3.5.23-5+deb8u3.
• Issued ELA 385-1, fixing CVE-2021-28963, for shibboleth-sp2.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.5.3+dfsg-2+deb8u2.
• Issued ELA 363-2, fixing regression caused by ELA 363-1, for xterm.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 312-2+deb8u2.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 01-03 until 07-03 for ELTS and then from 29-03 until 04-04 for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged wpa, python-aiohttp, spip, wpa, qemu, tomcat7, tomcat8, grub2, mupdf, openssh, tiff, spice, pillow, xmlgraphics-commons, batik, libupnp, ca-certificates, salt, squid3, shibboleth-sp2, courier-authlib, cloud-init, spamassassin, openssl, libcaca, and openjpeg2.
• Marked CVE-2021-21330/python-aiohttp as not-affected for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-20233, CVE-2021-20225, CVE-2020-27779, CVE-2020-27778, CVE-2020-27749, CVE-2020-27748, CVE-2020-25647, CVE-2020-25632, CVE-2020-25631, and CVE-2020-14372, affecting grub2, as ignored for stretch and jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-27842/openjpeg2 as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-27843/openjpeg2 as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-28041/openssh as not-affect for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-3552 3,4 /tiff as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-20201/spice as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-11988/xmlgraphics-commons as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-11987/batik as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-12695/libupnp as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-25122/tomcat7 as not-affected for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-25329/tomcat7 as ignored for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-28116/squid3 as postponed for stretch and jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-3449/openssl as not-affected for stretch.
• Document extra notes for grub2 for LTS and co-ordinate with the sec-team.
• Document extra notes for pillow about piled-up issues in jessie.
• Issued DLA-2593-1 for ca-certificates on Microsoft s request; co-ordinating w/ them.
• Co-ordinating w/ maintainer of courier-authlib for stretch and jessie update.
• Fixing build failures of ELTS security tracker and re-ordering entries in data/CVE-EXTENDED-LTS/list file.
• Answer queries of dupondje and mikap about openssl on IRC; and it being not-affected for stretch.
• Help review the status of CVE-2021-3121/golang-github-gogo-protobuf-dev for Ola.
• Co-ordinating w/ Noah for cloud-init and setuptools.
• Auto EOL ed mongodb, linux, guacamole-client, node-xmlhttprequest, newlib, neutron, privoxy, glpi, and zabbix for jessie.
• Attended monthly meeting for Debian LTS.
• Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts).
• General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.

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Until next time.
:wq for today.