In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' fiction I enjoyed reading in 2022. But in the very last of my roundup posts and in relatively less detail I'll be quickly sketching out the favourite movies that were new to me in 2022:

La Ronde (1950) An all-knowing narrator (Adolf Wohlbr ck) guides us through a series of vignettes in 1900s Vienna a soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening, and later he has an affair with a young lady who becomes a maid and who then does similarly with the young man of the house. On and on it goes, spinning on the carousel of life. A wonderfully beguiling movie, and a reminder that 'innocent' and 'charming' doesn't always imply 'childish'.

A Man Escaped (1956) A Man Escaped is the story of a WW2 resistance fighter who wishes to escape from a prison. Filmed in Robert Bresson's quasi-minimalistic style (and touching on his usual themes of Christian redemption), this deceptively simple-looking film rewards deeper analysis.

The Music Room (1958) In The Music Room, Satyajit Ray (best known for his Apu Trilogy) tells the story of a wealthy landlord who lives a decadent life with his wife and son. His passion is for music, however, and he spends a significant portion of his fortune on concerts held for the locals in his magnificent music room (or 'jalsaghar). However, his obsession for music (and its attendant quest for respect from his peers) is his eventual undoing, as he sacrifices both his family and wealth whilst trying to retain it. Indeed, The Music Room is less of an examination of a single rich man (or of the hypnotic sitar music by Vilayat Khan) than of the dying Bengali landowning class, which I read as symbolic of what was about to vanish from Indian culture in the post-Independence drive toward modernity. Still, this is a multi-layered and textured film, as this is also an intensely moving portrait of a highly-detached man as well.

The Hustler (1961) 'Fast Eddie' Felson is a small-time pool hustler with a lot of talent but a self-destructive attitude. His bravado causes him to challenge the legendary Minnesota Fats to a high-stakes match. The stakes are always much bigger than just money though, as Fast Eddie's ego is on the line. Despite not caring so much about the game, I was completely gripped by Paul Newman's superb performance. Almost certainly the best film about pool ever made, and probably the best sports film as well.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) One Valentine's Day in early-1900s Australia, an upper-class school takes its girls on a field trip to a scenic volcanic formation in the middle of the brush. Despite all the rules against it, however, several of the girls venture off onto the rock, and it's not until the end of the day that the group realises some of the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared without a trace. A mesmerising film about colonialism, sexual repression and Antonioni-esque alienation, Picnic at Hanging Rock's dreamlike aesthetic is haunting.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) Jeanne Dielman is a three-and-a-half-hour film that shows a widowed housewife doing her daily chores and taking care of her apartment. Yet in its uncompromising nature, it raises the tedium of her life to the level of profundity. I watched this radically political film a few months before it was recently voted as the 'greatest of all time'), but despite its relentless rigorous nature (and long running time), the conclusion when it comes is shattering.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991) Set in China during the 1920s, Raise the Red Lantern tells the story of a young woman who has become the new concubine of a wealthy man. However, as he has three wives already (each living in a separate house within his castle) she becomes are engaged in an extremely complicated competition attention and the privileges that come with it. Richly colourful, both in its visuals and symbolism, this is film both specifically about China at the time and human universals.

Moonlight (2016) A heartbreaking story of a young man's struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the pain and beauty of falling in love, whilst grappling with his own sexuality within the ambient weather of race and class in the United States. Absolutely spellbinding and visually stunning.

Drive My Car (2021) Yusuke Kafuku is a stage director who is unable to cope with the loss of his wife, and has therefore accepted an invitation to direct Anton Chekhov's [Uncle Vanya][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Vanya] at a festival in Hiroshima, Japan. Yet whilst many reviewers have focused on the compelling relationship between Yusuke and Misaki (the introverted young woman who has been appointed to drive his car), what I found devastating was the embedded meditation on language, communication, understanding and empathy, especially concerning what happens when these break down or are no longer possible. Drive My Car touches on the limits of each of these phenomena connecting to the next: being able to speak the same language as another doesn't mean you can communicate with them; and being able to communicate doesn't mean you can understand someone, let alone empathise with them. All of this through the near-ungraspable emotion of grief as well, and the portion of this film where the actress was silently employing Korean Sign Language was the most moving thing I saw this year.

In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I'll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut here include Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998) on the role of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) (a personal memoir on relating to how technology is increasingly fragmenting our attention), Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021) (a misleadingly named set of philosophic essays on feminism), Dana Heller et al.'s The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (2005), John Berger's mindbending Ways of Seeing (1972) and Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want (2006).

The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989) Paul Fussell Rather than describe the battles, weapons, geopolitics or big personalities of the two World Wars, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory & Wartime are focused instead on how the two wars have been remembered by their everyday participants. Drawing on the memoirs and memories of soldiers and civilians along with a brief comparison with the actual events that shaped them, Fussell's two books are a compassionate, insightful and moving piece of analysis. Fussell primarily sets himself against the admixture of nostalgia and trauma that obscures the origins and unimaginable experience of participating in these wars; two wars that were, in his view, a "perceptual and rhetorical scandal from which total recovery is unlikely." He takes particular aim at the dishonesty of hindsight:

For the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitised and romanticised almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. [And] in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war [seems] inaccessible.

The author does not engage in any of the customary rose-tinted view of war, yet he remains understanding and compassionate towards those who try to locate a reason within what was quite often senseless barbarism. If anything, his despondency and pessimism about the Second World War (the war that Fussell himself fought in) shines through quite acutely, and this is especially the case in what he chooses to quote from others:

"It was common [ ] throughout the [Okinawa] campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf."

It would take a rather heartless reader to fail to be sobered by this final simile, and an even colder one to view Fussell's citation of such an emotive anecdote to be manipulative. Still, stories and cruel ironies like this one infuse this often-angry book, but it is not without astute and shrewd analysis as well, especially on the many qualitative differences between the two conflicts that simply cannot be captured by facts and figures alone. For example:

A measure of the psychological distance of the Second [World] War from the First is the rarity, in 1914 1918, of drinking and drunkenness poems.

Indeed so. In fact, what makes Fussell's project so compelling and perhaps even unique is that he uses these non-quantitive measures to try and take stock of what happened. After all, this was a war conducted by humans, not the abstract school of statistics. And what is the value of a list of armaments destroyed by such-and-such a regiment when compared with truly consequential insights into both how the war affected, say, the psychology of postwar literature ("Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing."), the specific words adopted by combatants ("It is a truism of military propaganda that monosyllabic enemies are easier to despise than others") as well as the very grammar of interaction:

The Field Service Post Card [in WW1] has the honour of being the first widespread exemplary of that kind of document which uniquely characterises the modern world: the "Form". [And] as the first widely known example of dehumanised, automated communication, the post card popularised a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.

And this wouldn't be a book review without argument-ending observations that:

Indicative of the German wartime conception [of victory] would be Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans for the ultimate reconstruction of Berlin, which made no provision for a library.

Our myths about the two world wars possess an undisputed power, in part because they contain an essential truth the atrocities committed by Germany and its allies were not merely extreme or revolting, but their full dimensions (embodied in the Holocaust and the Holodomor) remain essentially inaccessible within our current ideological framework. Yet the two wars are better understood as an abyss in which we were all dragged into the depths of moral depravity, rather than a battle pitched by the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Fussell is one of the few observers that can truly accept and understand this truth and is still able to speak to us cogently on the topic from the vantage point of experience. The Second World War which looms so large in our contemporary understanding of the modern world (see below) may have been necessary and unavoidable, but Fussell convinces his reader that it was morally complicated "beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest," and that the only way to maintain a na ve belief in the myth that these wars were a Manichaean fight between good and evil is to overlook reality. There are many texts on the two World Wars that can either stir the intellect or move the emotions, but Fussell's two books do both. A uniquely perceptive and intelligent commentary; outstanding.

Longitude (1995) Dava Sobel Since Man first decided to sail the oceans, knowing one's location has always been critical. Yet doing so reliably used to be a serious problem if you didn't know where you were, you are far more likely to die and/or lose your valuable cargo. But whilst finding one's latitude (ie. your north south position) had effectively been solved by the beginning of the 17th century, finding one's (east west) longitude was far from trustworthy in comparison. This book first published in 1995 is therefore something of an anachronism. As in, we readily use the GPS facilities of our phones today without hesitation, so we find it difficult to imagine a reality in which knowing something fundamental like your own location is essentially unthinkable. It became clear in the 18th century, though, that in order to accurately determine one's longitude, what you actually needed was an accurate clock. In Longitude, therefore, we read of the remarkable story of John Harrison and his quest to create a timepiece that would not only keep time during a long sea voyage but would survive the rough ocean conditions as well. Self-educated and a carpenter by trade, Harrison made a number of important breakthroughs in keeping accurate time at sea, and Longitude describes his novel breakthroughs in a way that is both engaging and without talking down to the reader. Still, this book covers much more than that, including the development of accurate longitude going hand-in-hand with advancements in cartography as well as in scientific experiments to determine the speed of light: experiments that led to the formulation of quantum mechanics. It also outlines the work being done by Harrison's competitors. 'Competitors' is indeed the correct word here, as Parliament offered a huge prize to whoever could create such a device, and the ramifications of this tremendous financial incentive are an essential part of this story. For the most part, though, Longitude sticks to the story of Harrison and his evolving obsession with his creating the perfect timepiece. Indeed, one reason that Longitude is so resonant with readers is that many of the tropes of the archetypical 'English inventor' are embedded within Harrison himself. That is to say, here is a self-made man pushing against the establishment of the time, with his groundbreaking ideas being underappreciated in his life, or dishonestly purloined by his intellectual inferiors. At the level of allegory, then, I am minded to interpret this portrait of Harrison as a symbolic distillation of postwar Britain a nation acutely embarrassed by the loss of the Empire that is now repositioning itself as a resourceful but plucky underdog; a country that, with a combination of the brains of boffins and a healthy dose of charisma and PR, can still keep up with the big boys. (It is this same search for postimperial meaning I find in the fiction of John le Carr , and, far more famously, in the James Bond franchise.) All of this is left to the reader, of course, as what makes Longitute singularly compelling is its gentle manner and tone. Indeed, at times it was as if the doyenne of sci-fi Ursula K. LeGuin had a sideline in popular non-fiction. I realise it's a mark of critical distinction to downgrade the importance of popular science in favour of erudite academic texts, but Latitude is ample evidence that so-called 'pop' science need not be patronising or reductive at all.

Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court (1998) Edward Lazarus After the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that ended the Constitutional right to abortion conferred by Roe v Wade, I prioritised a few books in the queue about the judicial branch of the United States. One of these books was Closed Chambers, which attempts to assay, according to its subtitle, "The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court". This book is not merely simply a learned guide to the history and functioning of the Court (although it is completely creditable in this respect); it's actually an 'insider' view of the workings of the institution as Lazurus was a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun during the October term of 1988. Lazarus has therefore combined his experience as a clerk and his personal reflections (along with a substantial body of subsequent research) in order to communicate the collapse in comity between the Justices. Part of this book is therefore a pure history of the Court, detailing its important nineteenth-century judgements (such as Dred Scott which ruled that the Constitution did not consider Blacks to be citizens; and Plessy v. Ferguson which failed to find protection in the Constitution against racial segregation laws), as well as many twentieth-century cases that touch on the rather technical principle of substantive due process. Other layers of Lazurus' book are explicitly opinionated, however, and they capture the author's assessment of the Court's actions in the past and present [1998] day. Given the role in which he served at the Court, particular attention is given by Lazarus to the function of its clerks. These are revealed as being far more than the mere amanuenses they were hitherto believed to be. Indeed, the book is potentially unique in its the claim that the clerks have played a pivotal role in the deliberations, machinations and eventual rulings of the Court. By implication, then, the clerks have plaedy a crucial role in the internal controversies that surround many of the high-profile Supreme Court decisions decisions that, to the outsider at least, are presented as disinterested interpretations of Constitution of the United States. This is of especial importance given that, to Lazarus, "for all the attention we now pay to it, the Court remains shrouded in confusion and misunderstanding." Throughout his book, Lazarus complicates the commonplace view that the Court is divided into two simple right vs. left political factions, and instead documents an ever-evolving series of loosely held but strongly felt series of cabals, quid pro quo exchanges, outright equivocation and pure personal prejudices. (The age and concomitant illnesses of the Justices also appears to have a not insignificant effect on the Court's rulings as well.) In other words, Closed Chambers is not a book that will be read in a typical civics class in America, and the only time the book resorts to the customary breathless rhetoric about the US federal government is in its opening chapter:

The Court itself, a Greek-style temple commanding the crest of Capitol Hill, loomed above them in the dim light of the storm. Set atop a broad marble plaza and thirty-six steps, the Court stands in splendid isolation appropriate to its place at the pinnacle of the national judiciary, one of the three independent and "coequal" branches of American government. Once dubbed the Ivory Tower by architecture critics, the Court has a Corinthian colonnade and massive twenty-foot-high bronze doors that guard the single most powerful judicial institution in the Western world. Lights still shone in several offices to the right of the Court's entrance, and [ ]

Et cetera, et cetera. But, of course, this encomium to the inherent 'nobility' of the Supreme Court is quickly revealed to be a narrative foil, as Lazarus soon razes this dangerously na ve conception to the ground:

[The] institution is [now] broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange of their respective views or, for that matter, a meaningful explication or defense of their own views. It is of Justices who in many important cases resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions as they discard judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results. This is a Court so badly splintered, yet so intent on lawmaking, that shifting 5-4 majorities, or even mere pluralities, rewrite whole swaths of constitutional law on the authority of a single, often idiosyncratic vote. It is also a Court where Justices yield great and excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who in turn use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

Lazurus does not put forward a single, overarching thesis, but in the final chapters, he does suggest a potential future for the Court:

In the short run, the cure for what ails the Court lies solely with the Justices. It is their duty, under the shield of life tenure, to recognize the pathologies affecting their work and to restore the vitality of American constitutionalism. Ultimately, though, the long-term health of the Court depends on our own resolve on whom [we] select to join that institution.

Back in 1998, Lazurus might have had room for this qualified optimism. But from the vantage point of 2022, it appears that the "resolve" of the United States citizenry was not muscular enough to meet his challenge. After all, Lazurus was writing before Bush v. Gore in 2000, which arrogated to the judicial branch the ability to decide a presidential election; the disillusionment of Barack Obama's failure to nominate a replacement for Scalia; and many other missteps in the Court as well. All of which have now been compounded by the Trump administration's appointment of three Republican-friendly justices to the Court, including hypocritically appointing Justice Barrett a mere 38 days before the 2020 election. And, of course, the leaking and ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, the true extent of which has not been yet. Not of a bit of this is Lazarus' fault, of course, but the Court's recent decisions (as well as the liberal hagiographies of 'RBG') most perforce affect one's reading of the concluding chapters. The other slight defect of Closed Chambers is that, whilst it often implies the importance of the federal and state courts within the judiciary, it only briefly positions the Supreme Court's decisions in relation to what was happening in the House, Senate and White House at the time. This seems to be increasingly relevant as time goes on: after all, it seems fairly clear even to this Brit that relying on an activist Supreme Court to enact progressive laws must be interpreted as a failure of the legislative branch to overcome the perennial problems of the filibuster, culture wars and partisan bickering. Nevertheless, Lazarus' book is in equal parts ambitious, opinionated, scholarly and dare I admit it? wonderfully gossipy. By juxtaposing history, memoir, and analysis, Closed Chambers combines an exacting evaluation of the Court's decisions with a lively portrait of the intellectual and emotional intensity that has grown within the Supreme Court's pseudo-monastic environment all while it struggles with the most impactful legal issues of the day. This book is an excellent and well-written achievement that will likely never be repeated, and a must-read for anyone interested in this ever-increasingly important branch of the US government.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021) Adam Tooze The economic historian Adam Tooze has often been labelled as an unlikely celebrity, but in the fourteen years since the global financial crisis of 2008, a growing audience has been looking for answers about the various failures of the modern economy. Tooze, a professor of history at New York's Columbia University, has written much that is penetrative and thought-provoking on this topic, and as a result, he has generated something of a cult following amongst economists, historians and the online left. I actually read two Tooze books this year. The first, Crashed (2018), catalogues the scale of government intervention required to prop up global finance after the 2008 financial crisis, and it characterises the different ways that countries around the world failed to live up to the situation, such as doing far too little, or taking action far too late. The connections between the high-risk subprime loans, credit default swaps and the resulting liquidity crisis in the US in late 2008 is fairly well known today in part thanks to films such as Adam McKay's 2015 The Big Short and much improved economic literacy in media reportage. But Crashed makes the implicit claim that, whilst the specific and structural origins of the 2008 crisis are worth scrutinising in exacting detail, it is the reaction of states in the months and years after the crash that has been overlooked as a result. After all, this is a reaction that has not only shaped a new economic order, it has created one that does not fit any conventional idea about the way the world 'ought' to be run. Tooze connects the original American banking crisis to the (multiple) European debt crises with a larger crisis of liberalism. Indeed, Tooze somehow manages to cover all these topics and more, weaving in Trump, Brexit and Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the evolving role of China in the post-2008 economic order. Where Crashed focused on the constellation of consequences that followed the events of 2008, Shutdown is a clear and comprehensive account of the way the world responded to the economic impact of Covid-19. The figures are often jaw-dropping: soon after the disease spread around the world, 95% of the world's economies contracted simultaneously, and at one point, the global economy shrunk by approximately 20%. Tooze's keen and sobering analysis of what happened is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came out whilst the pandemic was still unfolding. In fact, this leads quickly to one of the book's few flaws: by being published so quickly, Shutdown prematurely over-praises China's 'zero Covid' policy, and these remarks will make a reader today squirm in their chair. Still, despite the regularity of these references (after all, mentioning China is very useful when one is directly comparing economic figures in early 2021, for examples), these are actually minor blemishes on the book's overall thesis. That is to say, Crashed is not merely a retelling of what happened in such-and-such a country during the pandemic; it offers in effect a prediction about what might be coming next. Whilst the economic responses to Covid averted what could easily have been another Great Depression (and thus showed it had learned some lessons from 2008), it had only done so by truly discarding the economic rule book. The by-product of inverting this set of written and unwritten conventions that have governed the world for the past 50 years, this 'Washington consensus' if you well, has yet to be fully felt. Of course, there are many parallels between these two books by Tooze. Both the liquidity crisis outlined in Crashed and the economic response to Covid in Shutdown exposed the fact that one of the central tenets of the modern economy ie. that financial markets can be trusted to regulate themselves was entirely untrue, and likely was false from the very beginning. And whilst Adam Tooze does not offer a singular piercing insight (conveying a sense of rigorous mastery instead), he may as well be asking whether we're simply going to lurch along from one crisis to the next, relying on the technocrats in power to fix problems when everything blows up again. The answer may very well be yes.

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021) Elizabeth D. Samet Elizabeth D. Samet's Looking for the Good War answers the following question what would be the result if you asked a professor of English to disentangle the complex mythology we have about WW2 in the context of the recent US exit of Afghanistan? Samet's book acts as a twenty-first-century update of a kind to Paul Fussell's two books (reviewed above), as well as a deeper meditation on the idea that each new war is seen through the lens of the previous one. Indeed, like The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Wartime (1989), Samet's book is a perceptive work of demystification, but whilst Fussell seems to have been inspired by his own traumatic war experience, Samet is not only informed by her teaching West Point military cadets but by the physical and ontological wars that have occurred during her own life as well. A more scholarly and dispassionate text is the result of Samet's relative distance from armed combat, but it doesn't mean Looking for the Good War lacks energy or inspiration. Samet shares John Adams' belief that no political project can entirely shed the innate corruptions of power and ambition and so it is crucial to analyse and re-analyse the role of WW2 in contemporary American life. She is surely correct that the Second World War has been universally elevated as a special, 'good' war. Even those with exceptionally giddy minds seem to treat WW2 as hallowed:

It is nevertheless telling that one of the few occasions to which Trump responded with any kind of restraint while he was in office was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

What is the source of this restraint, and what has nurtured its growth in the eight decades since WW2 began? Samet posits several reasons for this, including the fact that almost all of the media about the Second World War is not only suffused with symbolism and nostalgia but, less obviously, it has been made by people who have no experience of the events that they depict. Take Stephen Ambrose, author of Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers miniseries: "I was 10 years old when the war ended," Samet quotes of Ambrose. "I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper." If Looking for the Good War has a primary thesis, then, it is that childhood hero worship is no basis for a system of government, let alone a crusading foreign policy. There is a straight line (to quote this book's subtitle) from the "American Amnesia" that obscures the reality of war to the "Violent Pursuit of Happiness." Samet's book doesn't merely just provide a modern appendix to Fussell's two works, however, as it adds further layers and dimensions he overlooked. For example, Samet provides some excellent insight on the role of Western, gangster and superhero movies, and she is especially good when looking at noir films as a kind of kaleidoscopic response to the Second World War:

Noir is a world ruled by bad decisions but also by bad timing. Chance, which plays such a pivotal role in war, bleeds into this world, too.

Samet rightfully weaves the role of women into the narrative as well. Women in film noir are often celebrated as 'independent' and sassy, correctly reflecting their newly-found independence gained during WW2. But these 'liberated' roles are not exactly a ringing endorsement of this independence: the 'femme fatale' and the 'tart', etc., reflect a kind of conditional freedom permitted to women by a post-War culture which is still wedded to an outmoded honour culture. In effect, far from being novel and subversive, these roles for women actually underwrote the ambient cultural disapproval of women's presence in the workforce. Samet later connects this highly-conditional independence with the liberation of Afghan women, which:

is inarguably one of the more palatable outcomes of our invasion, and the protection of women's rights has been invoked on the right and the left as an argument for staying the course in Afghanistan. How easily consequence is becoming justification. How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as original objective.

Samet has ensured her book has a predominantly US angle as well, for she ends her book with a chapter on the pseudohistorical Lost Cause of the Civil War. The legacy of the Civil War is still visible in the physical phenomena of Confederate statues, but it also exists in deep-rooted racial injustice that has been shrouded in euphemism and other psychological devices for over 150 years. Samet believes that a key part of what drives the American mythology about the Second World War is the way in which it subconsciously cleanses the horrors of brother-on-brother murder that were seen in the Civil War. This is a book that is not only of interest to historians of the Second World War; it is a work for anyone who wishes to understand almost any American historical event, social issue, politician or movie that has appeared since the end of WW2. That is for better or worse everyone on earth.

Review: Contact, by Carl Sagan

Publisher:	Pocket Books
Copyright:	1985
Printing:	October 1986
ISBN:	0-671-43422-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	434

Contact is a standalone first-contact science fiction novel. Carl Sagan (1934 1996) was best known as a non-fiction writer, astronomer, and narrator of the PBS non-fiction program Cosmos. This is his first and only novel. Ellie Arroway is the director of Project Argus, a radio telescope array in the New Mexico desert whose primary mission is SETI: the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by scanning the skies for unexpected radio signals. Its assignment to SETI is controversial; there are radio astronomy projects waiting, and although 25% of the telescope time is assigned to non-SETI projects, some astronomers think the SETI mission should be scrapped and Argus fully diverted to more useful research. That changes overnight when Argus picks up a signal from Vega, binary pulses representing the sequence of prime numbers. The signal of course doesn't stop when the Earth rotates, so Ellie and her team quickly notify every radio observatory they can get hold of to follow the signal as it passes out of their line of sight. Before long, nearly every country with a radio telescope is involved, and Russian help is particularly vital since they have ship-mounted equipment. The US military and intelligence establishment isn't happy about this and make a few attempts to shove the genie back into the bottle and keep any further discoveries secret, without a lot of success. (Sagan did not anticipate the end of the Cold War, and yet ironically relations with the Russians in his version of the 1990s are warmer by far than they are today. Not that this makes the military types any happier.) For better or worse, making sense of the alien signal becomes a global project. You may be familiar with this book through its 1997 movie adaptation starring Jodie Foster. What I didn't know before reading this book is that it started life as a movie treatment, co-written with Ann Druyan, in 1979. When the movie stalled, Sagan expanded it into a novel. (Given the thanks to Druyan in the author's note, it may not be far wrong to name her as a co-author.) If you've seen the movie, you will have a good idea of what will happen, but the book gives the project a more realistic international scope. Ellie has colleagues carefully selected from all over the world, including for the climactic moment of the story. The biggest problem with Contact as a novel is that Sagan is a non-fiction writer who didn't really know how to write a novel. The long, detailed descriptions of the science and the astronomical equipment fit a certain type of SF story, but the descriptions of the characters, even Ellie, are equally detailed and yet use the same style. The book starts with an account of Ellie's childhood and path into science written like a biography or a magazine profile, not like a novel in which she's the protagonist. The same is true of the other characters: we get characterization of a sort, but the tone ranges from Wikipedia article to long-form essay and never quite feels like a story. Ellie is the most interesting character in the book, partly because the way Sagan writes her is both distant but oddly compelling. Sagan (or perhaps Druyan?) tries hard to show what life is like for a woman born in the middle of the 20th century who is interested in science and I think mostly succeeds, although Ellie's reactions to sexism felt weirdly emotionless. The descriptions of her relationships are even odder and the parts where this book felt the least like a novel, but Sagan does sell some of that tone as reflective of Ellie's personality. She's a scientist, the work is the center of her life, and everything else, even when important, is secondary. It doesn't entirely make the writing style work, but it helps. Sagan does attempt to give Ellie a personal development arc related to her childhood and her relationships with her father and step-father. I thought the conclusion to that was neither believable nor anywhere near as important as Sagan thought it was, which was off-putting. Better were her ongoing arguments with evangelical Christians, one of whom is a close-minded ass and the other of which is a far more interesting character. They felt wedged into this book, and I'm dubious a realistic version of Ellie would have been the person to have those debates, but it's a subject Sagan clearly has deep personal interest in and that shows in how they're written. The other problem with Contact as a novel is that Sagan does not take science fiction seriously as a genre, instead treating it as a way to explore a thought experiment. To a science fiction reader, or at least to this science fiction reader, the interesting bits of this story involve the aliens. Those are not the bits Sagan is interested in. His attention is on how this sort of contact, and project, would affect humanity and human politics. We do get some more traditional science fiction near the end of the book, but Sagan then immediately backs away from it, minimizes that part of the story, and focuses exclusively on the emotional and philosophical implications for humans of his thought experiment. Since I found his philosophical musings about agnosticism and wonder and discovery less interesting than the actual science fiction bits, I found this somewhat annoying. The ending felt a bit more like a cheap trick than a satisfying conclusion. Interestingly, this entire novel is set in an alternate universe, for reasons entirely unexplained (at least that I noticed) in the book. It's set in the late 1990s but was written in 1985, so of course this is an alternate future, but the 1985 of this world still isn't ours. Yuri Gagarin was the first man to set foot on the moon, and the space program and the Cold War developed in subtly different ways. I'm not sure why Sagan made that choice, but it felt to me like he was separating his thought experiment farther from our world to give the ending more plausible deniability. There are, at the time of the novel, permanent orbital colonies for (mostly) rich people, because living in space turns out to greatly extend human lifespans. That gives Sagan an opportunity to wax poetic about the life-altering effects of seeing Earth from space, which in his alternate timeline rapidly sped up nuclear disarmament and made the rich more protective of the planet. This is an old bit of space boosterism that isn't as common these days, mostly because it's become abundantly clear that human psychology doesn't work this way. Sadly, rich sociopaths remain sociopaths even when you send them into space. I was a bit torn between finding Sagan's predictions charmingly hopeful and annoyingly daft. I don't think this novel is very successful as a novel. It's much longer than it needs to be and long parts of it drag. But it's still oddly readable; even knowing the rough shape of the ending in advance, I found it hard to put down once the plot properly kicks into gear about two-thirds of the way through. There's a lot in here that I'd argue with Sagan about, but he's thoughtful and makes a serious attempt to work out the political and scientific ramifications of such a discovery in detail. Despite the dry tone, he does a surprisingly good job capturing the anticipation and excitement of a very expensive and risky scientific experiment. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to anyone, but I'm also the person who found Gregory Benford's Timescape to be boring and tedious, despite its rave reviews as a science fiction novel about the practice of science. If that sort of book is more your jam, you may like Contact better than I did. Rating: 6 out of 10

Pune Rains Lemme start with a slightly funny picture that tells as much about Pune, my city as anything else does.

Pune- Leave your attitude behind, we have our own

This and similar tags, puns and whatnot you will find if you are entering Pune from the road highway. You can also find similar similar symbols and Puns all over the city and they are partly sarcasm and ironic and partly the truth. Puneities work from the attitude that they know everything rather than nothing, including yours truly . What is the basis of that or why is there such kind of confidence I have no clue or idea, it is what it is. Approximately 24 hrs. ago, apparently we had a cloudburst. What I came to know later is that we got 100 mm of rain. Sharing from local news site. Much more interesting was a thread made on Reddit where many people half-seriously asked where they can buy a boat. One of the reasons being even if it s October, in fact, we passed middle of October and it s still raining. Even today in the evening, it rained for quite a while. As I had shared in a few blog posts before, June where rains should have started, it didn t, it actually started late July or even August, so something has shifted. The current leadership does not believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change or human activity induced climate change even though that is a reality. I could share many links and even using the term above should give links to various studies. Most of the people who are opposed to it are either misinformed or influenced from the fossil fuel industry. Again, could share many links, but will share just one atm. I have talked to quite a few people about it but nobody has ever been able to give a convincing answer as to why GM had to crush the cars. Let s even take the argument that it was the worst manufactured car in history and there have been quite a few, have the others been crushed? If not, then the reason shared or given by most people sounds hollow. And if you look into it, they had an opportunity that they let go, and now most of them are scrambling and yet most of the legacy auto manufacturers will be out of existence if they don t get back into the game in the next 2-3 years. There have been a bunch of announcements but we are yet to see. The Chinese though have moved far ahead, although one has to remark that they have been doing that for the last decade, so they have a 10-year head start, hardly surprising then. But I need to get back to the subject, another gentleman on Reddit remarked that if you start to use boat, and others start to use boat, then the Govt. will tax it. In fact, somebody had shared the below the other day

Different types of taxes collected by GOI

Many of the taxes that I have shared above are by the Modi Govt. who came on the platform, manifesto that once they come to power they will reduce taxes for the common man, they have reduced taxes but only for the Corporates. For the common man, the taxes have only gone up, both direct tax and indirect tax. Any reference to the Tory party who have also done similar things and have also shared that it is labor who had done large expenditures even though they have been 8 years in power, I am sure for most is purely coincidental. Incidentally, that is the same tack that was taken even by the Republican party. They all like to give tax benefits to the 1% while for the rest is austerity claiming some reason, even if it has been proven to be false.

Corporate Tax Rate, Revenue Loss to Govt.

The figures mentioned above are findings of parliamentary panel so nobody can accuse of anybody having a bias. Also, I probably had shared this but still feel the need to re-share it as people still believe that 2G scam happened even though there are plenty of arguments I can share to prove how it was all a fabricated lie.

Vinod Rai Mafinama in Uttarakhand High Court.

Part 2 of the same Mafinama.

How pathetic Mr. Rai s understanding of economics is can be gauged from the fact that he was made Chairman of IDFC and subsequently had to be thrown out. That whole lie was engineered to throw UPA out and it worked. There are and have been many such coincidences happening over the last 8 years, parallel stories happening in India and UK. This was just yesterday, about a year back Air India was given back to the Tatas, There was controversy about the supposed auctions as only Indigo was the only other party allowed to be at auction but not allowed to buy but more as a spectator as they already have 60% of the Indian civil aviation market. And there was lot of cheering from the Govt. side that finally Air India has been bought home to its true owners, the Tatas. The Tatas too started cheering and sharing how they will take down all the workers, worker unions and everything will be happy glory within a year. In fact, just couple of days back they shared new plans. Btw for the takeover of Air India, they had bought loans from the Banks and they are in the category of too big to fail. As I have shared couple of times before, RBI has not shared any inspection reports of nationalized or private banks after 2013/14. While by law, RBI is supposed to do inspection reports every 3 months and share them in the Public domain. And if you ask any of their supporter, for everything they will say UPA did x or y, which only goes to show morally bankrupt the present Govt. is. Coming back to the topic, before I forget, the idea of sharing their plans is so that they can again borrow money from the banks. But that is not the only story. Just one day back, Smita Prakash, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the present Govt. (she is the boss at Asia News International (ANI)) posted how Air India had treated her sister and other 21 passengers. Basically, they had bought business tickets but the whole cabin was dirty, they complained and they were forced to sit in economy class, not just her cousin sister but the other 21 odd passengers too. Of course Ms Smita became calm as her sister was given free air tickets on Vistara and other goodies. Of course, after that she didn t post anything about the other 21 odd passengers after that. And yes, I understand she is supposed to be a reporter but as can be seen from the twitter thread, there is or was no follow up. Incidentally, she is one of many who has calling others about Revdi culture (freebies to the masses.) but guess that only applies to other people not her or her sister. Again, if there are any coincidences of similar nature in the UK or when Trump was P.M. of the U.S. they are just coincidental .

The Uncosted budget India and the UK have many parallels, it s mind boggling. Before we get into the nitty-gritties, saw something that would be of some interest to the people here.

For those who might not be able to see above, apparently there is place in UK called Tufton Street where there are quite a few organizations that are shadowy and whose finances are not known as to how they are financed. Ms. Truss and quite a few of the people in the cabinet are from the same shadowy organizations. Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, the just-departed chancellor is and was part of the same group. Now even for me it was a new term to learn and understand what is an uncosted budget is. To make it much more easier I share the example using a common person who goes to the bank for a loan

Now M/S X wants a loan of say Rs. 1000/- for whatever reason. He/she/they go to the bank and asks give me a loan of say INR 1000/- The banks asks them to produce a statement of accounts to show what their financial position is. They produce a somewhat half-filled statement of accounts In which all liabilities are shown, but incomes are not. The bank says you already have so much liabilities, how are you gonna pay those, accounts have to be matched otherwise you are not solvent. M/s X adamantly refuses to do any changes citing that they don t need to. At this point, M/s X credit rating goes down and nobody in the market will give them a loan. At the same time, the assets they had held, their value also depreciates because it became known that they can t act responsibly. So whose to say whether or not M/s X has those number of assets and priced them accurately. But the drama doesn t end there, M/s X says this is the responsibility of actually Mr. Z ( cue The Bank of England) as they are my accountant/lawyer etc. M/s Z says as any lawyer/accountant should. This is not under my remit. If the clients either gives incomplete information or false information or whatever then it is their responsibility not mine. And in fact, the Chancellor is supposed to be the one who is given the responsibility of making the budget. The Chancellor is very similar to our Finance Minister. Because the UK has constitutional monarchy, I am guessing the terms are slightly different, otherwise the functionality seems to be the same. For two weeks, there was lot of chaos, lot of pension funds lost quite a bit in the market and in the end Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng was ousted out of the job. Incredibly, the same media and newspapers who had praised Mr. Kwarteng just few weeks back as the best Tory budget, they couldn t wait to bury him. And while I have attempted to simplify what happened, the best explanation of what has happened can be found in an article from the guardian. Speculation is rife in the UK as to who s ruling atm as the new Chancellor has reversed almost all the policies that Ms. Truss had bought and she is now more or less a figurehead. Mr. Hunt, the new chancellor doesn t have anybody behind him. Apparently, the gentleman wanted to throw his hat the ring in the Tory leadership contest that was held about a month back and he couldn t get 20 MP s to support him. Another thing that is different between UK and India is that in UK by law the PM has to answer questions put up to him or her by the opposition leaders. That is the way accountability is measured there. This is known as PMQ s or Prime Minister Questions and Answers. One can just go to YouTube or any streaming service and give Liz Truss and PMQ s and if they are interested of a certain date, give a date and they can see how she answered the questions thrown at her. Unfortunately, all she could do in both times were non-answers. In fact, the Tories seem to be using some of Labor s policies after they had bad-mouthed the same policies. Politics of right-wing both in the UK and the US seems so out of touch with the people whom they are supposed to protect and administer. An article about cyclists which is sort of half-truth, half irony shows how screwed up the policies are of the RW (right-wing). Now they are questions about the pensions triple-lock. Sadly, it is the working class who would suffer the most, most of the rich have already moved their money abroad several years ago. The Financial Times, did share a video about how things have been unfolding

Seems Ms. Truss forgot to add Financial Times in the list of anti-growth coalition she is so fond of. Also, the Tory party seems to want to create more tax havens in the UK and calling them investment zones. Of course, most of the top tax havens are situated around the UK itself. I wouldn t go more into as that would probably require its own article, although most of that information is all in public domain. Fracking I don t really want to take much time as the blog post has become long. There have been many articles written why Fracking is bad and that is why even the Tories had put in their Manifesto that they won t allow Fracking but apparently, today they are trying to reopen Fracking. And again how bad it is and can be found out by the article in Guardian.

This summer, I signed up to participate in the Northcape 4000 <https://www.northcape4000.com/>, an annual 4000km bike ride between Rovereto (in northern Italy) and the northernmost point of Europe, the North cape. The Northcape event has been held for several years, and while it always ends on the North Cape, the route there varies. Last years route went through the Baltics, but this years was perhaps as direct as possible - taking us through Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech republic, Germany again, Sweden, Finland and finally Norway. The ride is unsupported, meaning you have to find your own food and accomodation and can only avail yourself of resupply and sleeping options on the route that are available to everybody else as well. The event is not meant to be a race (unlike the Transcontinental, which starts at the same day), so there is a minimum time to finish it in (10 days) and a maximum (21 days). Unfortunately, this meant skipping some other events I d wanted attend (DebConf, MCH).

Rama II This would be more of a short post about the current book I am reading. Now people who have seen Arrival would probably be more at home. People who have also seen Avatar would also be familiar to the theme or concept I am sharing about. Now before I go into detail, it seems that Arthur C. Clarke wanted to use a powerful god or mythological character for the name and that is somehow the RAMA series started. Now the first book in the series explores an extraterrestrial spaceship that earth people see/connect with. The spaceship is going somewhere and is doing an Earth flyby so humans don t have much time to explore the spaceship and it is difficult to figure out how the spaceship worked. The spaceship is around 40 km. long. They don t meet any living Ramans but mostly automated systems and something called biots. As I m still reading it, I can t really say what happens next. Although in Rama or Rama I, the powers that be want to destroy it while in the end last they don t. Whether they could have destroyed it or not would be whole another argument. What people need to realize is that the book is a giant What IF scenario.

Aliens If there were any intelligent life in the Universe, I don t think they will take the pain of visiting Earth. And the reasons are far more mundane than anything else. Look at how we treat each other. One of the largest democracies on Earth, The U.S. has been so divided. While the progressives have made some good policies, the Republicans are into political stunts, consider the political stunt of sending Refugees to Martha s Vineyard. The ex-president also made a statement that he can declassify anything just by thinking about it. Now understand this, a refugee is a legal migrant whose papers would be looked into by the American Govt. and till the time he/she/their application is approved or declined they can work, have a house, or do whatever to support themselves. There is a huge difference between having refugee status and being an undocumented migrant. And it isn t as if the Republicans don t know this, they did it because they thought they will be able to get away with it. Both the above episodes don t throw us in a good light. If we treat others like the above, how can we expect to be treated? And refugees always have a hard time, not just in the U.S, , the UK you name it. The UK just some months ago announced a controversial deal where they will send Refugees to Rwanda while their refugee application is accepted or denied, most of them would be denied. The Indian Government is more of the same. A friend, a casual acquaintance Nishant Shah shared the same issues as I had shared a few weeks back even though he s an NRI. So, it seems we are incapable of helping ourselves as well as helping others. On top of it, we have the temerity of using the word alien for them. Now, just for a moment, imagine you are an intelligent life form. An intelligent life-form that could coax energy from the stars, why would you come to Earth, where the people at large have already destroyed more than half of the atmosphere and still arguing about it with the other half. On top of it, we see a list of authoritarian figures like Putin, Xi Jinping whose whole idea is to hold on to power for as long as they can, damn the consequences. Mr. Modi is no different, he is the dumbest of the lot and that s saying something. Most of the projects made by him are in disarray, Pune Metro, my city giving an example. And this is when Pune was the first applicant to apply for a Metro. Just like the UK, India too has tanked the economy under his guidance. Every time they come closer to target dates, the targets are put far into the future, for e.g. now they have said 2040 for a good economy. And just like in other countries, he has some following even though he has a record of failure in every sector of the economy, education, and defense, the list is endless. There isn t a single accomplishment by him other than screwing with other religions. Most of my countrymen also don t really care or have a bother to see how the economy grows and how exports play a crucial part otherwise they would be more alert. Also, just like the UK, India too gave tax cuts to the wealthy, most people don t understand how economies function and the PM doesn t care. The media too is subservient and because nobody asks the questions, nobody seems to be accountable :(.

Religion There is another aspect that also has been to the fore, just like in medieval times, I see a great fervor for religion happening here, especially since the pandemic and people are much more insecure than ever before. Before, I used to think that insecurity and religious appeal only happen in the uneducated, and I was wrong. I have friends who are highly educated and yet still are blinded by religion. In many such cases or situations, I find their faith to be a sham. If you have faith, then there shouldn t be any room for doubt or insecurity. And if you are not in doubt or insecure, you won t need to talk about your religion. The difference between the two is that a person is satiated himself/herself/themselves with thirst and hunger. That person would be in a relaxed mode while the other person would continue to create drama as there is no peace in their heart. Another fact is none of the major religions, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or even Hinduism has allowed for the existence of extraterrestrials. We have already labeled them as aliens even before meeting them & just our imagination. And more often than not, we end up killing them. There are and have been scores of movies that have explored the idea. Independence day, Aliens, Arrival, the list goes on and on. And because our religions have never thought about the idea of ET s and how they will affect us, if ET s do come, all the religions and religious practices would panic and die. That is the possibility why even the 1947 Roswell Incident has been covered up . If the above was not enough, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans would always be a black mark against humanity. From the alien perspective, if you look at the technology that they have vis-a-vis what we have, they will probably think of us as spoilt babies and they wouldn t be wrong. Spoilt babies with nuclear weapons are not exactly a healthy mix

Earth To add to our fragile ego, we didn t even leave earth even though we have made sure we exploit it as much as we can. We even made the anthropocentric or homocentric view that makes man the apex animal and to top it we have this weird idea that extraterrestrials come here or will invade for water. A species that knows how to get energy out of stars but cannot make a little of H2O. The idea belies logic and again has been done to death. Why we as humans are so insecure even though we have been given so much I fail to understand. I have shared on numerous times the Kardeshev Scale on this blog itself. The above are some of the reasons why Arthur C. Clarke s works are so controversial and this is when I haven t even read the whole book. It forces us to ask questions that we normally would never think about. And I have to repeat that when these books were published for the first time, they were new ideas. All the movies, from Stanley Kubrick s 2001: Space Odyssey, Aliens, Arrival, and Avatar, somewhere or the other reference some aspect of this work. It is highly possible that I may read and re-read the book couple of times before beginning the next one. There is also quite a bit of human drama, but then that is to be expected. I have to admit I did have some nice dreams after reading just the first few pages, imagining being given the opportunity to experience an Extraterrestrial spaceship that is beyond our wildest dreams. While the Governments may try to cover up or something, the ones who get to experience that spacecraft would be unimaginable. And if they were able to share the pictures or a Livestream, it would be nothing short of amazing. For those who want to, there is a lot going on with the New James Webb Telescope. I am sure it would give rise to more questions than answers.

History Before I start, the game I was talking about is called Cell To Singularity. Now I haven t gone much in the game as I have shared but think that the Singularity it refers to is the Technological Singularity that people think will happen. Whether that will happen or not is open to debate to one and all. This is going to be a bit long one. Confession Time :- When I was sharing in the blog post, I had no clue that we actually had sessions on it in this year s Debconf. I just saw the schedule yesterday and then came to know. Then I saw Guido s two talks, one at Debconf as well as one as Froscon. In fact, saw the Froscon talk first, and then the one at Debconf. Both the talks are nearly the same except for a thing here or a thing there. Now because I was not there so my understanding and knowledge would be disadvantageously asymmetrical to Guido and others who were there and could talk and share more. Having a Debian mobile or Debian on the mobile could also make Debian more popular and connectable to the masses, one of the things that were not pointed out in the Debian India BOF sadly. At the same time, there are some facts that are not on the table and hence not thought about. Being a B.Com person, I have been following not just the technical but also how the economics work and smartphone penetration in India is pretty low or historically been very low, say around 3-4% while the majority that people use, almost 90-95% of the market uses what are called non-smartphones or dumbphones. Especially during the pandemic and even after that the dumbphones market actually went up while smartphones stagnated and even came down. There is a lot of inventory at most of the dealers that they can t get rid of. From a dealer perspective, it probably makes more sense to buy and sell dumbphones more in number as the turnaround of capital is much faster and easier than for smartphones. I have seen people spend a number of hours and rightly so in order to make their minds up on a smartphone while for a dumbphone, it is a 10-minute thing. Ask around, figure out who is selling at the cheapest, and just buy. Most of these low-end phones are coming from China. In fact, even in the middle and getting even into smartphones, the Chinese are the masters from whom we buy, even as they have occupied Indian territory. In the top five, Samsung comes at number three of four (sharing about Samsung as a fan and having used them.) even though battery times are atrocious, especially with Android 12L. The only hope that most of the smartphone manufacturers have is lowering the sticker prices and hoping that 5G Adoption picks up and that is what they are betting on but that comes with its own share of drawbacks as can be seen.

GNOME, MATE, memory leaks, Payments FWIW, while I do have GNOME and do use a couple of tools from the GNOME stack, I hate GNOME with a passion. I have been a mate user for almost a decade now and really love the simplicity that mate has vis-a-vis GNOME. And with each release, MATE has only become better. So, it would be nice if we can have MATE on the mobile phone. How adaptive the apps might be on the smaller area, I dunno. It would be interesting to find out if and how people are looking at debugging memory leaks on mobile phones. Although finding memory leaks on any platform is good, finding them and fixing them on a mobile phone is pretty much critical as most phones have fixed & relatively small amounts of memory and it is and can get quickly exhausted. One of the things that were asked in the Q&A was about payments. The interesting thing is both UK and India are the same or markedly similar in regard as far as contactless payments being concerned. What most Indians have or use is basically UPI which is basically backed by your bank. Unlike in some other countries where you have a selection of wallets and even temporary/permanent virtual accounts whereby you can minimize your risks in case your mobile gets stolen or something, here we don t have that. There are three digital wallets that I know Paytm Not used (have heard it s creepy, but don t really know), Google pay (Unfortunately, this is the one I use, they bought multiple features, and in the last couple of years have really taken the game away from Paytm but also creepy.). The last one is Samsung Pay (haven t really used it as their find my phone app. always crashes, dunno how it is supposed to work.) But I do find that the apps. are vulnerable. Every day there is some or other news of fraud happening. Previously, only States like Bihar and Jharkhand used to be infamous for cybercrime as a hub, but now even States like Andhra Pradesh have joined and surpassed them :(. People have lost lakhs and crores, this is just a few days back. Some more info. on UPI can be found here and GitHub has a few implementation examples that anybody could look at and run away with it.

Balancing on three things For any new mobile phone to crack the market, it has to balance three things. One, achieve economies of scale. Unless, that is not taken care of or done, however good or bad the product might be, it remains a niche and dies after some time. While Guido shared about Openmoko and N900, one of the more interesting bits from a user perspective at least was the OLPC project. There are many nuances that the short article didn t go through. While I can t say for other countries, at least in India, no education initiative happens without corruption. And perhaps Nicholas s hands were tied while other manufacturers would and could do to achieve their sales targets. In India, it flopped because there was no way for volunteers to buy or get OLPC unless they were part of a school or college. There was some traction in FOSS communities, but that died down once OLPC did the partnership with MS-Windows, and proverbially broke the camel s back. FWIW, I think the idea, the concept, and even the machine were far ahead of their time. The other two legs are support and Warranty Without going into any details, I can share and tell there were quite a few OLPC type attempts using conventional laptops or using Android and FOSS or others or even using one of the mainstream distributions but the problems have always been polishing, training and support. Guido talked about privacy as a winning feature but fails to take into account that people want to know that their privacy isn t being violated. If a mobile phone answers to Hey Google does it mean it was passively gathering, storing, and sending info to third parties, we just don t know. The mobile phone could be part of the right to repair profile while at the same time it can force us to ask many questions about the way things currently are and going to be. Six months down the line all the flagships of all companies are working on being able to take and share through satellites (Satellite Internet) and perhaps maybe a few non-flagships. Of course, if you are going to use a satellite, then you are going to drain that much more quickly. In all and every event there are always gonna be tradeoffs. The Debian-mobile mailing list doesn t seem to have many takers. The latest I could find there is written by Paul Wise. I am in a similar boat (Samsung; SM-M526B; Lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12. It is difficult to know which release would work on your machine, make sure that the building from the source is not tainted and pristine and needs a way to backup and restore if you need to. I even tried installing GNURoot Debian and the Xserver alternative they had shared but was unable to use the touch interface on the fakeroot instance . The system talks about a back key but what back key I have no clue.

Precursor Events Debconf 2023 As far as precursor events are concerned before Debconf 23 in India, all the festivals that we have could be used to showcase Debian. In fact, the ongoing Ganesh Chaturthi would have been the perfect way to showcase Debian and apps. according to the audience. Even the festival of Durga Puja, Diwali etc. can be used. When commercial organizations use the same festivals, why can t we? What perhaps we would need to figure out is the funding part as well as getting permissions from Municipal authorities. One of the things for e.g. that we could do is buy either a permanent 24 monitor or a 34 TV and use that to display Debian and apps. The bigger, the better. Something that we could use day to day and also is used for events. This would require significant amounts of energy so we could approach companies, small businesses and individuals both for volunteering as well as helping out with funding. Somebody asked how we could do online stuff and why it is somewhat boring. What could be done for e.g. instead of 4-5 hrs. of things, break it into manageable 45 minute pieces. 4-5 hrs. is long and is gonna fatigue the best of people. Make it into 45-minute negotiable chunks, and intersphere it with jokes, hacks, anecdotes, and war stories. People do not like or want to be talked down to but rather converse. One of the things that I saw many of the artists do is have shows and limit the audience to 20-24 people on zoom call or whatever videoconferencing system you have and play with them. The passive audience enjoys the play between the standup guy and the crowd he works on, some of them may be known to him personally so he can push that envelope a bit more. The same thing can be applied here. Share the passion, and share why we are doing something. For e.g. you could do smem -t -k less and give a whole talk about how memory is used and freed during a session, how are things different on desktop and ARM as far as memory architecture is concerned (if there is). What is being done on the hardware side, what is on the software side and go on and on. Then share about troubleshooting applications. Valgrind is super slow and makes life hell, is there some better app ? Doesn t matter if you are a front-end or a back-end developer you need to know this and figure out the best way to deal with in your app/program. That would have lot of value. And this is just an e.g. to help trigger more ideas from the community. I am sure others probably have more fun ideas as to what can be done. I am stopping here now otherwise would just go on, till later. Feel free to comment, feedback. Hope it generates some more thinking and excitement on the grey cells.

When I first moved from being a technical consultant to a manager of other consultants, I took a 5-day course Managing Technical Teams a bootstrap for managing people within organisations, but with a particular focus on technical people. We do have some particular quirks, after all Two elements of that course keep coming to mind when doing Debian work, and they both relate to how teams fit together and get stuff done. Tuckman s four stages model In the mid-1960s Bruce W. Tuckman developed a four-stage descriptive model of the stages a project team goes through in its lifetime. They are:

• Forming: the team comes together and its members are typically motivated and excited, but they often also feel anxiety or uncertainty about how the team will operate and their place within it.
• Storming: initial enthusiasm can give way to frustration or disagreement about goals, roles, expectations and responsibilities. Team members are establishing trust, power and status. This is the most critical stage.
• Norming: team members take responsibility and share a common goal. They tolerate the whims and fancies of others, sometimes at the expense of conflict and sharing controversial ideas.
• Performing: team members are confident, motivated and knowledgeable. They work towards the team s common goal. The team is high-achieving.

Resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of co-operation emerges.

Teams need to understand these stages because a team can regress to earlier stages when its composition or goals change. A new member, the departure of an existing member, changes in supervisor or leadership style can all lead a team to regress to the storming stage and fail to perform for a time. When you see a team member say this, as I observed in an IRC channel recently, you know the team is performing:

nice teamwork these busy days Seen on IRC in the channel of a performing team

Tuckman s model describes a team s performance overall, but how can team members establish what they can contribute and how can they go doing so confidently and effectively? Belbin s Team Roles

The types of behaviour in which people engage are infinite. But the range of useful behaviours, which make an effective contribution to team performance, is finite. These behaviours are grouped into a set number of related clusters, to which the term Team Role is applied. Belbin, R M. Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010

Dr Meredith Belbin s thesis, based on nearly ten years research during the 1970s and 1980s, is that each team has a number of roles which need to be filled at various times, but they re not innate characteristics of the people filling them. People may have attributes which make them more or less suited to each role, and they can consciously take up a role if they recognise its need in the team at a particular time. Belbin s nine team roles are:

• Plant (thinking): the ideas generator; solves difficult problems. Associated weaknesses: ignores incidentals; preoccupation
• Resource investigator (people): outgoing; enthusiastic; has lots of contacts knows someone who might know someone who knows how to solve a problem. Associated weaknessses: over-optimism, enthusiasm wanes quickly
• Co-ordinator (people): mature; confident; identifies talent; clarifies goals and delegates effectively. Associated weaknesses: may be seen as manipulative; offloads own share of work.
• Shaper (action): challenging; dynamic; has drive. Describes what they want and when they want it. Associated weaknesses: prone to provocation; offends others feelings.
• Monitor/evaluator (thinking): sees all options, judges accurately. Best given data and options and asked which the team should choose. Associated weaknesses: lacks drive; can be overly critical.
• Teamworker (people): takes care of things behind the scenes; spots a problem and deals with it quietly without fuss. Averts friction. Associated weaknesses: indecisive; avoids confrontation.
• Implementer (action): turns ideas into actions and organises work. Allowable weaknesses: somewhat inflexible; slow to respond to new possibilities.
• Completer finisher (action): searches out errors; polishes and perfects. Despite the name, may never actually consider something finished . Associated weaknesses: inclined to worry; reluctant to delegate.
• Specialist (thinking): knows or can acquire a wealth of things on a subject. Associated weaknesses: narrow focus; overwhelmes others with depth of knowledge.

(adapted from https://www.belbin.com/media/3471/belbin-team-role-descriptions-2022.pdf) A well-balanced team, Belbin asserts, isn t comprised of multiples of nine individuals who fit into one of these roles permanently. Rather, it has a number of people who are comfortable to wear some of these hats as the need arises. It s even useful to use the team roles as language: for example, someone playing a shaper might say the way we ve always done this is holding us back , to which a co-ordinator s could respond Steve, Joanna put on your Plant hats and find some new ideas. Talk to Susan and see if she knows someone who s tackled this before. Present the options to Nigel and he ll help evaluate which ones might work for us. Teams in Debian There are all sort of teams in Debian those which are formally brought into operation by the DPL or the constitution; package maintenance teams; public relations teams; non-technical content teams; special interest teams; and a whole heap of others. Teams can be formal and informal, fleeting or long-lived, two people working together or dozens. But they all have in common the Tuckman stages of their development and the Belbin team roles they need to fill to flourish. At some stage in their existence, they will all experience new or departing team members and a period of re-forming, norming and storming perhaps fleetingly, perhaps not. And at some stage they will all need someone to step into a team role, play the part and get the team one step further towards their goals. Footnote Belbin Associates, the company Meredith Belbin established to promote and continue his work, offers a personalised report with guidance about which roles team members show the strongest preferences for, and how to make best use of them in various settings. They re quick to complete and can also take into account observers , i.e. how others see a team member. All my technical staff go through this process blind shortly after they start, so as not to bias their input, and then we discuss the roles and their report in detail as a one-to-one. There are some teams in Debian for which this process and discussion as a group activity could be invaluable. I have no particular affiliation with Belbin Associates other than having used the reports and the language of team roles for a number of years. If there s sufficient interest for a BoF session at the next DebConf, I could probably be persuaded to lead it.

---

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

• Slides
• Talk page
• Video of the talk

Further reading

• Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
• You cannot create or curate a community where everyone is welcome

Talk notes Intro

• I'm not speaking for the whole of DAM
• Motivation in part is personal frustration, and need to set boundaries and negotiate expectations

Debian Account Managers

• history

Responsibility for official membership

• approve account creation
• manage the New Member Process and nm.debian.org
• close MIA accounts
• occasional emergency termination of accounts
• handle Emeritus
• with lots of help from FrontDesk and MIA teams (big shoutout)

What DAM is not

• we are not mediators
• we are not a community management team
• a list or IRC moderation team
• we are not responsible for vision or strategic choices about how people are expected to interact in Debian
• We shouldn't try and solve things because they need solving

Unexpected responsibilities

• Over time, the community has grown larger and more complex, in a larger and more complex online environment
• Enforcing the Diversity Statement and the Code of Conduct
• Emergency list moderation
  • we have ended up using DAM warnings to compensate for the lack of list moderation, at least twice
• contributors.debian.org (mostly only because of me, but it would be good to have its own team)

DAM warnings

• except for rare glaring cases, patterns of behaviour / intentions / taking feedback in, are more relevant than individual incidents
• we do not set out to fix people. It is enough for us to get people to acknowledge a problem
  • if they can't acknowledge a problem they're probably out
  • once a problem is acknowledged, fixing it could be their implementation detail
  • then again it's not that easy to get a number of troublesome people to acknowledge problems, so we go back to the problem of deciding when enough is enough

DAM warnings?

• I got to a point where I look at DAM warnings as potential signals that DAM has ended up with the ball that everyone else in Debian dropped.
• DAM warning means we haven't gotten to a last resort situation yet, meaning that it probably shouldn't be DAM dealing with this at this point
• Everyone in the project can write a person "do you realise there's an issue here? Can you do something to stop?", and give them a chance to reflect on issues or ignore them, and build their reputation accordingly.
• People in Debian should not have to endure, completey powerless, as trolls drag painful list discussions indefinitely until all the trolled people run out of energy and leave. At the same time, people who abuse a list should expect to be suspended or banned from the list, not have their Debian membership put into question (unless it is a recurring pattern of behaviour).
• The push to grow DAM warnings as a tool, is a sign of the rest of Debian passing on their responsibilities, and DAM picking them up.
• Then in DAM we end up passing on things, too, because we also don't have the energy to face another intensive megametathread, and as we take actions for things that shouldn't quite be our responsibility, we face a higher level of controversy, and therefore demotivation.
• Also, as we take actions for things that shouldn't be our responsibility, and work on a higher level of controversy, our legitimacy is undermined (and understandably so)
  • there's a pothole on my street that never gets filled, so at some point I go out and fill it. Then people thank me, people complain I shouldn't have, people complain I didn't fill it right, people appreciate the gesture and invite me to learn how to fix potholes better, people point me out to more potholes, and then complain that potholes don't get fixed properly on the whole street. I end up being the problem, instead of whoever had responsibility of the potholes but wasn't fixing them
• The Community Team, the Diversity Team, and individual developers, have no energy or entitlement for explaining what a healthy community looks like, and DAM is left with that responsibility in the form of accountability for their actions: to issue, say, a DAM warning for bullying, we are expected to explain what is bullying, and how that kind of behaviour constitutes bullying, in a way that is understandable by the whole project.
• Since there isn't consensus in the project about what bullying loos like, we end up having to define it in a warning, which again is a responsibility we shouldn't have, and we need to do it because we have an escalated situation at hand, but we can't do it right

House rules

• We have the Diversity Statement
• We have the Code of Conduct
• We have the DebConf Code of Conduct
• We have the Debian Mailinglist Code of Conduct

Interpreting house rules

• you can't encode common sense about people behaviour in written rules: no matter how hard you try, people will find ways to cheat that
• so one can use rules as a guideline, and someone responsible for the bits that can't go into rules.
  • context matters, privilege/oppression matters, patterns matter, histor matters
• example:
  • call a person out for breaking a rule
  • get DARVO in response
  • state that DARVO is not acceptable
  • get concern trolling against margninalised people and accuse them of DARVO if they complain
• example: assume good intentions vs enabling
• example: rule lawyering and Figure skating
• this cannot be solved by GRs: I/we (DAM)/possibly also we (Debian) don't want to do GRs about evaluating people

Governance by bullying

• How to DoS discussions in Debian
  • example: gender, minority groups, affirmative action, inclusion, anything about the community team itself, anything about the CoC, systemd, usrmerge, dam warnings, expulsions
    • think of a topic. Think about sending a mail to debian-project about it. If you instinctively shiver at the thought, this is probably happening
    • would you send a mail about that to -project / -devel?
    • can you think of other topics?
  • it is an effective way of governance as it excludes topics from public discussion
• A small number of people abuse all this, intentionally or not, to effectively manipulate decision making in the project.
• Instead of using the rules of the community to bring forth the issues one cares about, it costs less energy to make it unthinkable or unbearable to have a discussion on issues one doesn't want to progress. What one can't stop constructively, one can oppose destructively.
• even regularly diverting the discussion away from the original point or concern is enough to derail it without people realising you're doing it
• This is an effective strategy for a few reckless people to unilaterally direct change, in the current state of Debian, at the cost of the health and the future of the community as a whole.
• There are now a number of important issues nobody has the energy to discuss, because experience says that energy requirements to bring them to the foreground and deal with the consequences are anticipated to be disproportionate.
• This is grave, as we're talking about trolling and bullying as malicious power moves to work around the accepted decision making structures of our community.
• Solving this is out of scope for this talk, but it is urgent nevertheless, and can't be solved by expecting DAM to fix it

How about the Community Team?

• It is also a small group of people who cannot pick up the responsibility of doing what the community isn't doing for itself
• I believe we need to recover the Community Team: it's been years that every time they write something in public, they get bullied by the same recurring small group of people (see governance by bullying above)

How about DAM?

• I was just saying that we are not the emergency catch all
• When the only enforcement you have is "nuclear escalation", there's nothing you can do until it's too late, and meanwhile lots of people suffer (this was written before Russia invaded Ukraine)
• Also, when issues happen on public lists, the BTS, or on IRC, some of the perpetrators are also outside of the jurisdiction of DAM, which shows how DAM is not the tool for this

How about the DPL?

• Talking about emergency catch alls, don't they have enough to do already?

Concentrating responsibility

• Concentrating all responsibility on social issues on a single point creates a scapegoat: we're blamed for any conduct issue, and we're blamed for any action we take on conduct issues
  • also, when you are a small group you are personally identified with it. Taking action on a person may mean making a new enemy, and becoming a target for harassment, retaliation, or even just the general unwarranted hostility of someone who is left with an axe to grind
• As long as responsibility is centralised, any action one takes as a response of one micro-aggression (or one micro-aggression too many) is an overreaction. Distributing that responsibility allows a finer granularity of actions to be taken
  • you don't call the police to tell someone they're being annoying at the pub: the people at the pub will tell you you're being annoying, and the police is called if you want to beat them up in response
• We are also a community where we have no tool to give feedback to posts, so it still looks good to nitpick stupid details with smart-looking tranchant one-liners, or elaborate confrontational put-downs, and one doesn't get the feedback of "that did not help". Compare with discussing https://salsa.debian.org/debian/grow-your-ideas/ which does have this kind of feedback
  • the lack of moderation and enforcement makes the Debian community ideal for easy baiting, concern trolling, dog whistling, and related fun, and people not empowered can be so manipulated to troll those responsible
  • if you're fragile in Debian, people will play cat and mouse with you. It might be social awkwardness, or people taking themselves too serious, but it can easily become bullying, and with no feedback it's hard to tell and course correct
• Since DAM and DPL are where the ball stops, everyone else in Debian can afford to let the ball drop.
• More generally, if only one group is responsible, nobody else is

Empowering developers

• Police alone does not make a community safe: a community makes a community safe.
• DDs currently have no power to act besides complaining to DAM, or complaining to Community Team that then can only pass complaints on to DAM.
  • you could act directly, but currently nobody has your back if the (micro-)aggression then starts extending to you, too
• From no power comes no responsibility. And yet, the safety of a community is sustainable only if it is the responsibility of every member of the community.
• don't wait for DAM as the only group who can do something
• people should be able to address issues in smaller groups, without escalation at project level
• but people don't have the tools for that
• I/we've shouldered this responsibility for far too long because nobody else was doing it, and it's time the whole Debian community gets its act together and picks up this responsibility as they should be. You don't get to not care just because there's a small number of people who is caring for you.

What needs to happen

• distinguish DAM decisions from decisions that are more about vision and direction, and would require more representation
• DAM warnings shouldn't belong in DAM
• who is responsible for interpretation of the CoC?
• deciding what to do about controversial people shouldn't belong in DAM
• curation of the community shouldn't belong in DAM
• can't do this via GRs, it's a mess to do a GR to decide how acceptable is a specific person's behaviour, and a lot of this requires more and more frequent micro-decisions than one'd do via GRs

I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43 4K Monitor [1] and gone back to my Samsung 28 4K monitor model LU28E590DS/XY AKA UE590. The main listed differences are the size and the fact that the Samsung is TN but the Philips is IPS. Here s a comparison of TN and IPS technologies [2]. Generally I think that TN is probably best for a monitor but in theory IPS shouldn t be far behind. The Philips monitor has a screen with a shiny surface which may be good for a TV but isn t good for a monitor. Also it seemed to blur the pixels a bit which again is probably OK for a TV that is trying to emulate curved images but not good for a monitor where it s all artificial straight lines. The most important thing for me in a monitor is how well it displays text in small fonts, for that I don t really want the round parts of the letters to look genuinely round as a clear octagon or rectangle is better than a fuzzy circle. There is some controversy about the ideal size for monitors. Some people think that nothing larger than 28 is needed and some people think that a 43 is totally usable. After testing I determined that 43 is really too big, I had to move to see it all. Also for my use it s convenient to be able to turn a monitor slightly to allow someone else to get a good view and a 43 monitor is too large to move much (maybe future technology for lighter monitors will change this). Previously I had been unable to get my Samsung monitor to work at 4K resolution with 60Hz and had believed it was due to cheap video cards. I got the Philips monitor to work with HDMI so it s apparent that the Samsung monitor doesn t do 4K@60Hz on HDMI. This isn t a real problem as the Samsung monitor doesn t have built in speakers. The Philips monitor has built in speakers for HDMI sound which means one less cable to my PC and no desk space taken by speakers. I bought the Philips monitor on eBay in opened unused condition. Inside the box was a sheet with a printout stating that the monitor blanks the screen periodically, so the seller knew that it wasn t in unused condition, it was tested and failed the test. If the Philips monitor had been as minimally broken as described then I might have kept it. However it seems that certain patterns of input caused it to reboot. For example I could be watching Netflix and have it drop out, I would press the left arrow to watch that bit again and have it drop out again. On one occasion I did a test and found that a 5 second section of Netflix content caused the monitor to reboot on 6/8 times I viewed it. The workaround I discovered was to switch between maximised window and full-screen mode when it had a dropout. So I just press left-arrow and then F and I can keep watching. That s not what I expect from a $700 monitor! I considered checking for Philips firmware updates but decided against it because I didn t want to risk voiding the warranty if it didn t work correctly and I decided I just didn t like the monitor that much. Ideally for my next monitor I ll get a 4K screen of about 35 , TN, and a screen that s not shiny. At the moment there doesn t seem to be many monitors between 32 and 43 in size, so 32 may do. I am quite happy with the Samsung monitor so getting the same but slightly larger is fine. It s a pity they stopped making 5K displays.

• [1] https://www.philips.com.au/c-p/438P1_75/brilliance-4k-ultra-hd-lcd-display-with-multiview
• [2] https://history-computer.com/tn-vs-ips/

Welcome to the May 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Repfix paper Zhilei Ren, Shiwei Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Xiaochen Li, Zhide Zhou and He Jiang have published an academic paper titled Automated Patching for Unreproducible Builds:

[..] fixing unreproducible build issues poses a set of challenges [..], among which we consider the localization granularity and the historical knowledge utilization as the most significant ones. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel approach [called] RepFix that combines tracing-based fine-grained localization with history-based patch generation mechanisms.

The paper (PDF, 3.5MB) uses the Debian mylvmbackup package as an example to show how RepFix can automatically generate patches to make software build reproducibly. As it happens, Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch for the mylvmbackup package which has remained unapplied by the Debian package maintainer for over seven years, thus this paper inadvertently underscores that achieving reproducible builds will require both technical and social solutions.

Python variables Johannes Schauer discovered a fascinating bug where simply naming your Python variable _m led to unreproducible .pyc files. In particular, the types module in Python 3.10 requires the following patch to make it reproducible:

--- a/Lib/types.py
+++ b/Lib/types.py
@@ -37,8 +37,8 @@ _ag = _ag()
 AsyncGeneratorType = type(_ag)
 
 class _C:
-    def _m(self): pass
-MethodType = type(_C()._m)
+    def _b(self): pass
+MethodType = type(_C()._b)

Simply renaming the dummy method from _m to _b was enough to workaround the problem. Johannes bug report first led to a number of improvements in diffoscope to aid in dissecting .pyc files, but upstream identified this as caused by an issue surrounding interned strings and is being tracked in CPython bug #78274.

New SPDX team to incorporate build metadata in Software Bill of Materials SPDX, the open standard for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), is continuously developed by a number of teams and committees. However, SPDX has welcomed a new addition; a team dedicated to enhancing metadata about software builds, complementing reproducible builds in creating a more secure software supply chain. The SPDX Builds Team has been working throughout May to define the universal primitives shared by all build systems, including the who, what, where and how of builds:

• Who: the identity of the person or organisation that controls the build infrastructure.
• What: the inputs and outputs of a given build, combining metadata about the build s configuration with an SBOM describing source code and dependencies.
• Where: the software packages making up the build system, from build orchestration tools such as Woodpecker CI and Tekton to language-specific tools.
• How: the invocation of a build, linking metadata of a build to the identity of the person or automation tool that initiated it.

The SPDX Builds Team expects to have a usable data model by September, ready for inclusion in the SPDX 3.0 standard. The team welcomes new contributors, inviting those interested in joining to introduce themselves on the SPDX-Tech mailing list.

Talks at Debian Reunion Hamburg Some of the Reproducible Builds team (Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo, Roland Clobus, Philip Rinn, etc.) met in real life at the Debian Reunion Hamburg (official homepage). There were several informal discussions amongst them, as well as two talks related to reproducible builds. First, Holger Levsen gave a talk on the status of Reproducible Builds for bullseye and bookworm and beyond (WebM, 210MB): Secondly, Roland Clobus gave a talk called Reproducible builds as applied to non-compiler output (WebM, 115MB):

Supply-chain security attacks This was another bumper month for supply-chain attacks in package repositories. Early in the month, Lance R. Vick noticed that the maintainer of the NPM foreach package let their personal email domain expire, so they bought it and now controls foreach on NPM and the 36,826 projects that depend on it . Shortly afterwards, Drew DeVault published a related blog post titled When will we learn? that offers a brief timeline of major incidents in this area and, not uncontroversially, suggests that the correct way to ship packages is with your distribution s package manager .

Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a process for building software tools progressively from a primitive compiler tool and source language up to a full Linux development environment with GCC, etc. This is important given the amount of trust we put in existing compiler binaries. This month, a bootstrappable mini-kernel was announced. Called boot2now, it comprises a series of compilers in the form of bootable machine images.

Google s new Assured Open Source Software service Google Cloud (the division responsible for the Google Compute Engine) announced a new Assured Open Source Software service. Noting the considerable 650% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source suppliers, the new service claims to enable enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows . The announcement goes on to enumerate that packages curated by the new service would be:

• Regularly scanned, analyzed, and fuzz-tested for vulnerabilities.
• Have corresponding enriched metadata incorporating Container/Artifact Analysis data.
• Are built with Cloud Build including evidence of verifiable SLSA-compliance
• Are verifiably signed by Google.
• Are distributed from an Artifact Registry secured and protected by Google.

(Full announcement)

A retrospective on the Rust programming language Andrew bunnie Huang published a long blog post this month promising a critical retrospective on the Rust programming language. Amongst many acute observations about the evolution of the language s syntax (etc.), the post beings to critique the languages approach to supply chain security ( Rust Has A Limited View of Supply Chain Security ) and reproducibility ( You Can t Reproduce Someone Else s Rust Build ):

There s some bugs open with the Rust maintainers to address reproducible builds, but with the number of issues they have to deal with in the language, I am not optimistic that this problem will be resolved anytime soon. Assuming the only driver of the unreproducibility is the inclusion of OS paths in the binary, one fix to this would be to re-configure our build system to run in some sort of a chroot environment or a virtual machine that fixes the paths in a way that almost anyone else could reproduce. I say almost anyone else because this fix would be OS-dependent, so we d be able to get reproducible builds under, for example, Linux, but it would not help Windows users where chroot environments are not a thing.

(Full post)

Reproducible Builds IRC meeting The minutes and logs from our May 2022 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 28th June at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.

A new tool to improve supply-chain security in Arch Linux kpcyrd published yet another interesting tool related to reproducibility. Writing about the tool in a recent blog post, kpcyrd mentions that although many PKGBUILDs provide authentication in the context of signed Git tags (i.e. the ability to verify the Git tag was signed by one of the two trusted keys ), they do not support pinning, ie. that upstream could create a new signed Git tag with an identical name, and arbitrarily change the source code without the [maintainer] noticing . Conversely, other PKGBUILDs support pinning but not authentication. The new tool, auth-tarball-from-git, fixes both problems, as nearly outlined in kpcyrd s original blog post.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 212, 213 and 214 to Debian unstable. Chris also made the following changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for extracting vmlinuz Linux kernel images. [ ]
  • Support both python-argcomplete 1.x and 2.x. [ ]
  • Strip sticky etc. from x.deb: sticky Debian binary package [ ]. [ ]
  • Integrate test coverage with GitLab s concept of artifacts. [ ][ ][ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don t mask differences in .zip or .jar central directory extra fields. [ ]
  • Don t show a binary comparison of .zip or .jar files if we have observed at least one nested difference. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Substantially update comment for our calls to zipinfo and zipinfo -v. [ ]
  • Use assert_diff in test_zip over calling get_data with a separate assert. [ ]
  • Don t call re.compile and then call .sub on the result; just call re.sub directly. [ ]
  • Clarify the comment around the difference between --usage and --help. [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Test --help and --usage. [ ]
  • Test that --help includes the file formats. [ ]

Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool reference xb-tool for GNU Guix [ ] as well as updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix itself [ ][ ][ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 85 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated, including adding a new nondeterministic_ordering_in_deprecated_items_collected_by_doxygen toolchain issue [ ] as well as ones for mono_mastersummary_xml_files_inherit_filesystem_ordering [ ], extended_attributes_in_jar_file_created_without_manifest [ ] and apxs_captures_build_path [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian performed a rough check of the reproducibility of core package sets in GNU Guix, and in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly reproducible builds status report.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • gtkmm-documentation (merged; sorting issue)
  • librespot (merged; random BuildID issue)
  • lirc (merged)
  • lsof (uname/hostname problem)
  • solanum (merged, possibly a race condition)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1010845 filed against logapp.
  • #1010854 filed against mono.
  • #1010855 filed against longrun.
  • #1011452 filed against rust-simplelog.
  • #1011752 filed against freesas.
  • PeachPy (merged, sort entries)
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • #1010957 filed against man-db.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1010462 filed against mtink.
  • #1010463 filed against fceux.
  • #1010466 filed against glob2.
  • #1010483 filed against coinor-cgl.
  • #1010486 filed against metapixel.
  • #1010781 filed against ragel.
  • #1010785 filed against gdome2.
  • #1010787 filed against sgml-base-doc.
  • #1010789 filed against xarclock.
  • #1010790 filed against xgammon.
  • #1010825 filed against lwatch.
  • #1010828 filed against bbrun.
  • #1010830 filed against gscanbus.
  • #1010859 filed against libnss-gw-name.
  • #1010870 filed against pidgin-blinklight.
  • #1010871 filed against dvbtune.
  • #1010872 filed against efax.
  • #1010944 filed against quelcom.
  • #1010948 filed against xine-lib-1.2.
  • #1011034 filed against fusesmb.
  • #1011036 filed against mailfront.
  • #1011104 filed against convlit.
  • #1011109 filed against bitstormlite.
  • #1011257 filed against coinor-osi.
  • #1011402 filed against razor.
  • #1011405 filed against autoclass.
  • #1011428 filed against cdbackup.
  • #1011429 filed against dds2tar.
  • #1011469 filed against transcalc.
  • #1011470 filed against libapache2-mod-authz-unixgroup.
  • #1011471 filed against mgdiff.
  • #1011478 filed against scsitools.
  • #1011479 filed against fstrcmp.
  • #1011480 filed against libxsettings-client.
  • #1011481 filed against tamil-gtk2im.
  • #1011486 filed against tdfsb.
  • #1011488 filed against stymulator.
  • #1011489 filed against wiipdf.
  • #1011490 filed against gdigi.
  • #1011491 filed against getstream.
  • #1011493 filed against freecdb.
  • #1011495 filed against modglue.
  • #1011496 filed against nwall.
  • #1011498 filed against parprouted.
  • #1011499 filed against imagination.
  • #1011500 filed against tuxcmd-modules.
  • #1011501 filed against libapache2-mod-authn-yubikey.
  • #1011503 filed against libapache2-mod-auth-plain.
  • lcsync (remove build paths)

Reproducible builds website Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation in a number of small ways, but also prepared and published an interview with Jan Nieuwenhuizen about Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Tim Jones added a link to the Talos Linux project [ ] and billchenchina fixed a dead link [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Add support for detecting running kernels that require attention. [ ]
  • Temporarily configure a host to support performing Debian builds for packages that lack .buildinfo files. [ ]
  • Update generated webpages to clarify wishes for feedback. [ ]
  • Update copyright years on various scripts. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Provide a facility so that Debian Live image generation can copy a file remotely. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Add initial support for testing generated images with OpenQA. [ ]

And finally, as usual, node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ].

Misc news On our mailing list this month:

• John Neffenger posted that the early-access release of OpenJDK version 19 build 21 is reproducible.
• Mattia Rizzolo added a request around tentatively planning a Reproducible Builds summit in 2022.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted about a Reproducible Builds meetup at the openSUSE conference in Nuremberg.
• Luca Boccassi asked for help getting arm64 binaries to build reproducibly for the Debian systemd package.
• Yaobin Wen asked a number of questions in an attempt to discover the best practices for manage Debian .dsc files using reprepro.

Contact If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

TL;DR: procmail is a security liability and has been abandoned upstream for the last two decades. If you are still using it, you should probably drop everything and at least remove its SUID flag. There are plenty of alternatives to chose from, and conversion is a one-time, acceptable trade-off.

Procmail is unmaintained procmail is unmaintained. The "Final release", according to Wikipedia, dates back to September 10, 2001 (3.22). That release was shipped in Debian since then, all the way back from Debian 3.0 "woody", twenty years ago. Debian also ships 25 uploads on top of this, with 3.22-21 shipping the "3.23pre" release that has been rumored since at least the November 2001, according to debian/changelog at least:

procmail (3.22-1) unstable; urgency=low
  * New upstream release, which uses the  standard' format for Maildir
    filenames and retries on name collision. It also contains some
    bug fixes from the 3.23pre snapshot dated 2001-09-13.
  * Removed  sendmail' from the Recommends field, since we already
    have  exim' (the default Debian MTA) and  mail-transport-agent'.
  * Removed suidmanager support. Conflicts: suidmanager (<< 0.50).
  * Added support for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS in the source package.
  * README.Maildir: Do not use locking on the example recipe,
    since it's wrong to do so in this case.
 -- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:40:20 +0100

All Debian suites from buster onwards ship the 3.22-26 release, although the maintainer just pushed a 3.22-27 release to fix a seven year old null pointer dereference, after this article was drafted. Procmail is also shipped in all major distributions: Fedora and its derivatives, Debian derivatives, Gentoo, Arch, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. We all seem to be ignoring this problem. The upstream website (http://procmail.org/) has been down since about 2015, according to Debian bug #805864, with no change since. In effect, every distribution is currently maintaining its fork of this dead program. Note that, after filing a bug to keep Debian from shipping procmail in a stable release again, I was told that the Debian maintainer is apparently in contact with the upstream. And, surprise! they still plan to release that fabled 3.23 release, which has been now in "pre-release" for all those twenty years. In fact, it turns out that 3.23 is considered released already, and that the procmail author actually pushed a 3.24 release, codenamed "Two decades of fixes". That amounts to 25 commits since 3.23pre some of which address serious security issues, but none of which address fundamental issues with the code base.

Procmail is insecure By default, procmail is installed SUID root:mail in Debian. There's no debconf or pre-seed setting that can change this. There has been two bug reports against the Debian to make this configurable (298058, 264011), but both were closed to say that, basically, you should use dpkg-statoverride to change the permissions on the binary. So if anything, you should immediately run this command on any host that you have procmail installed on:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/procmail

Note that this might break email delivery. It might also not work at all, thanks to usrmerge. Not sure. Yes, everything is on fire. This is fine. In my opinion, even assuming we keep procmail in Debian, that default should be reversed. It should be up to people installing procmail to assign it those dangerous permissions, after careful consideration of the risk involved. The last maintainer of procmail explicitly advised us (in that null pointer dereference bug) and other projects (e.g. OpenBSD, in [2]) to stop shipping it, back in 2014. Quote:

Executive summary: delete the procmail port; the code is not safe and should not be used as a basis for any further work.

I just read some of the code again this morning, after the original author claimed that procmail was active again. It's still littered with bizarre macros like:

#define bit_set(name,which,value) \
  (value?(name[bit_index(which)] =bit_mask(which)):\
  (name[bit_index(which)]&=~bit_mask(which)))

... from regexp.c, line 66 (yes, that's a custom regex engine). Or this one:

#define jj  (aleps.au.sopc)

It uses insecure functions like strcpy extensively. malloc() is thrown around gotos like it's 1984 all over again. (To be fair, it has been feeling like 1984 a lot lately, but that's another matter entirely.) That null pointer deref bug? It's fixed upstream now, in this commit merged a few hours ago, which I presume might be in response to my request to remove procmail from Debian. So while that's nice, this is the just tip of the iceberg. I speculate that one could easily find an exploitable crash in procmail if only by running it through a fuzzer. But I don't need to speculate: procmail had, for years, serious security issues that could possibly lead to root privilege escalation, remotely exploitable if procmail is (as it's designed to do) exposed to the network. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe the procmail author will go through the code base and do a proper rewrite. But I don't think that's what is in the cards right now. What I expect will happen next is that people will start fuzzing procmail, throw an uncountable number of bug reports at it which will get fixed in a trickle while never fixing the underlying, serious design flaws behind procmail.

Procmail has better alternatives The reason this is so frustrating is that there are plenty of modern alternatives to procmail which do not suffer from those problems. Alternatives to procmail(1) itself are typically part of mail servers. For example, Dovecot has its own LDA which implements the standard Sieve language (RFC 5228). (Interestingly, Sieve was published as RFC 3028 in 2001, before procmail was formally abandoned.) Courier also has "maildrop" which has its own filtering mechanism, and there is fdm (2007) which is a fetchmail and procmail replacement. Update: there's also mailprocessing, which is not an LDA, but processing an existing folder. It was, however, specifically designed to replace complex Procmail rules. But procmail, of course, doesn't just ship procmail; that would just be too easy. It ships mailstat(1) which we could probably ignore because it only parses procmail log files. But more importantly, it also ships:

• lockfile(1) - conditional semaphore-file creator
• formail(1) - mail (re)formatter

lockfile(1) already has a somewhat acceptable replacement in the form of flock(1), part of util-linux (which is Essential, so installed on any normal Debian system). It might not be a direct drop-in replacement, but it should be close enough. formail(1) is similar: the courier maildrop package ships reformail(1) which is, presumably, a rewrite of formail. It's unclear if it's a drop-in replacement, but it should probably possible to port uses of formail to it easily.

Update: the maildrop package ships a SUID root binary (two, even). So if you want only reformail(1), you might want to disable that with:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/lockmail.maildrop 
dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/maildrop

It would be perhaps better to have reformail(1) as a separate package, see bug 1006903 for that discussion.

The real challenge is, of course, migrating those old .procmailrc recipes to Sieve (basically). I added a few examples in the appendix below. You might notice the Sieve examples are easier to read, which is a nice added bonus.

Conclusion There is really, absolutely, no reason to keep procmail in Debian, nor should it be used anywhere at this point. It's a great part of our computing history. May it be kept forever in our museums and historical archives, but not in Debian, and certainly not in actual release. It's just a bomb waiting to go off. It is irresponsible for distributions to keep shipping obsolete and insecure software like this for unsuspecting users. Note that I am grateful to the author, I really am: I used procmail for decades and it served me well. But now, it's time to move, not bring it back from the dead.

Appendix

Previous work It's really weird to have to write this blog post. Back in 2016, I rebuilt my mail setup at home and, to my horror, discovered that procmail had been abandoned for 15 years at that point, thanks to that LWN article from 2010. I would have thought that I was the only weirdo still running procmail after all those years and felt kind of embarrassed to only "now" switch to the more modern (and, honestly, awesome) Sieve language. But no. Since then, Debian shipped three major releases (stretch, buster, and bullseye), all with the same vulnerable procmail release. Then, in early 2022, I found that, at work, we actually had procmail installed everywhere, possibly because userdir-ldap was using it for lockfile until 2019. I sent a patch to fix that and scrambled to remove get rid of procmail everywhere. That took about a day. But many other sites are now in that situation, possibly not imagining they have this glaring security hole in their infrastructure.

Procmail to Sieve recipes I'll collect a few Sieve equivalents to procmail recipes here. If you have any additions, do contact me. All Sieve examples below assume you drop the file in ~/.dovecot.sieve.

deliver mail to "plus" extension folder Say you want to deliver user+foo@example.com to the folder foo. You might write something like this in procmail:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail.log
VERBOSE=off
EXTENSION=$1            # Need to rename it - ?? does not like $1 nor 1
:0
* EXTENSION ?? [a-zA-Z0-9]+
        .$EXTENSION/

That, in sieve language, would be:

require ["variables", "envelope", "fileinto", "subaddress"];
########################################################################
# wildcard +extension
# https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/examples/#plus-addressed-mail-filtering
if envelope :matches :detail "to" "*"  
  # Save name in $ name  in all lowercase
  set :lower "name" "$ 1 ";
  fileinto "$ name ";
  stop;
 

Subject into folder This would file all mails with a Subject: line having FreshPorts in it into the freshports folder, and mails from alternc.org mailing lists into the alternc folder:

:0
## mailing list freshports
* ^Subject.*FreshPorts.*
.freshports/
:0
## mailing list alternc
* ^List-Post.*mailto:.*@alternc.org.*
.alternc/

Equivalent Sieve:

if header :contains "subject" "FreshPorts"  
    fileinto "freshports";
  elsif header :contains "List-Id" "alternc.org"  
    fileinto "alternc";
 

Mail sent to root to a reports folder This double rule:

:0
* ^Subject: Cron
* ^From: .*root@
.rapports/

Would look something like this in Sieve:

if header :comparator "i;octet" :contains "Subject" "Cron"  
  if header :regex :comparator "i;octet"  "From" ".*root@"  
        fileinto "rapports";
   
 

Note that this is what the automated converted does (below). It's not very readable, but it works.

Bulk email I didn't have an equivalent of this in procmail, but that's something I did in Sieve:

if header :contains "Precedence" "bulk"  
    fileinto "bulk";
 

Any mailing list This is another rule I didn't have in procmail but I found handy and easy to do in Sieve:

if exists "List-Id"  
    fileinto "lists";
 

This or that I wouldn't remember how to do this in procmail either, but that's an easy one in Sieve:

if anyof (header :contains "from" "example.com",
           header :contains ["to", "cc"] "anarcat@example.com")  
    fileinto "example";
 

You can even pile up a bunch of options together to have one big rule with multiple patterns:

if anyof (exists "X-Cron-Env",
          header :contains ["subject"] ["security run output",
                                        "monthly run output",
                                        "daily run output",
                                        "weekly run output",
                                        "Debian Package Updates",
                                        "Debian package update",
                                        "daily mail stats",
                                        "Anacron job",
                                        "nagios",
                                        "changes report",
                                        "run output",
                                        "[Systraq]",
                                        "Undelivered mail",
                                        "Postfix SMTP server: errors from",
                                        "backupninja",
                                        "DenyHosts report",
                                        "Debian security status",
                                        "apt-listchanges"
                                        ],
           header :contains "Auto-Submitted" "auto-generated",
           envelope :contains "from" ["nagios@",
                                      "logcheck@",
                                      "root@"])
     
    fileinto "rapports";
 

Automated script There is a procmail2sieve.pl script floating around, and mentioned in the dovecot documentation. It didn't work very well for me: I could use it for small things, but I mostly wrote the sieve file from scratch.

Progressive migration Enrico Zini has progressively migrated his procmail setup to Sieve using a clever way: he hooked procmail inside sieve so that he could deliver to the Dovecot LDA and progressively migrate rules one by one, without having a "flag day". See this explanatory blog post for the details, which also shows how to configure Dovecot as an LMTP server with Postfix.

Other examples The Dovecot sieve examples are numerous and also quite useful. At the time of writing, they include virus scanning and spam filtering, vacation auto-replies, includes, archival, and flags.

Harmful considered harmful I am aware that the "considered harmful" title has a long and controversial history, being considered harmful in itself (by some people who are obviously not afraid of contradictions). I have nevertheless deliberately chosen that title, partly to make sure this article gets maximum visibility, but more specifically because I do not have doubts at this moment that procmail is, clearly, a bad idea at this moment in history.

Developing story I must also add that, incredibly, this story has changed while writing it. This article is derived from this bug I filed in Debian to, quite frankly, kick procmail out of Debian. But filing the bug had the interesting effect of pushing the upstream into action: as mentioned above, they have apparently made a new release and merged a bunch of patches in a new git repository. This doesn't change much of the above, at this moment. If anything significant comes out of this effort, I will try to update this article to reflect the situation. I am actually happy to retract the claims in this article if it turns out that procmail is a stellar example of defensive programming and survives fuzzing attacks. But at this moment, I'm pretty confident that will not happen, at least not in scope of the next Debian release cycle.

Z3 is a theorem prover developed at Microsoft research and available as a dynamically linked C++ library in Debian-based distributions. While the library is a whopping 16 MB, and the solver is a tad slow, it s permissive licensing, and number of tactics offered give it a huge potential for use in solving dependencies in a wide variety of applications. Z3 does not need normalized formulas, but offers higher level abstractions like atmost and atleast and implies, that we will make use of together with boolean variables to translate the dependency problem to a form Z3 understands. In this post, we ll see how we can apply Z3 to the dependency resolution in APT. We ll only discuss the basics here, a future post will explore optimization criteria and recommends.

Translating the universe APT s package universe consists of 3 relevant things: packages (the tuple of name and architecture), versions (basically a .deb), and dependencies between versions. While we could translate our entire universe to Z3 problems, we instead will construct a root set from packages that were manually installed and versions marked for installation, and then build the transitive root set from it by translating all versions reachable from the root set. For each package P in the transitive root set, we create a boolean literal P. We then translate each version P1, P2, and so on. Translating a version means building a boolean literal for it, e.g. P1, and then translating the dependencies as shown below. We now need to create two more clauses to satisfy the basic requirements for debs:

1. If a version is installed, the package is installed; and vice versa. We can encode this requirement for P above as P == atleast( P1,P2 , 1).
2. There can only be one version installed. We add an additional constraint of the form atmost( P1,P2 , 1).

We also encode the requirements of the operation.

1. For each package P that is manually installed, add a constraint P.
2. For each version V that is marked for install, add a constraint V.
3. For each package P that is marked for removal, add a constraint !P.

Dependencies Packages in APT have dependencies of two basic forms: Depends and Conflicts, as well as variations like Breaks (identical to Conflicts in solving terms), and Recommends (soft Depends) - we ll ignore those for now. We ll discuss Conflicts in the next section. Let s take a basic dependency list: A Depends: X Y, Z. To represent that dependency, we expand each name to a list of versions that can satisfy the dependency, for example X1 X2 Y1, Z1. Translating this dependency list to our Z3 solver, we create boolean variables X1,X2,Y1,Z1 and define two rules:

1. A implies atleast( X1,X2,Y1 , 1)
2. A implies atleast( Z1 , 1)

If there actually was nothing that satisfied the Z requirement, we d have added a rule not A. It would be possible to simply not tell Z3 about the version at all as an optimization, but that adds more complexity, and the not A constraint should not cause too many problems.

Conflicts Conflicts cannot have or in them. A dependency B Conflicts: X, Y means that only one of B, X, and Y can be installed. We can directly encode this in Z3 by using the constraint atmost( B,X,Y , 1). This is an optimized encoding of the constraint: We could have encoded each conflict in the form !B or !X, !B or !X, and so on. Usually this leads to worse performance as it introduces additional clauses.

Complete example Let s assume we start with an empty install and want to install the package a below.

Package: a
Version: 1
Depends: c   b
Package: b
Version: 1
Package: b
Version: 2
Conflicts: x
Package: d
Version: 1
Package: x
Version: 1

The translation in Z3 rules looks like this:

1. Package rules for a:
   1. a == atleast( a1 , 1) - package is installed iff one version is
   2. atmost( a1 , 1) - only one version may be installed
   3. a a must be installed
2. Dependency rules for a
   1. implies(a1, atleast( b2, b1 , 1)) the translated dependency above. note that c is gone, it s not reachable.
3. Package rules for b:
   1. b == atleast( b1,b2 , 1) - package is installed iff one version is
   2. atmost( b1, b2 , 1) - only one version may be installed
4. Dependencies for b (= 2):
   1. atmost( b2, x1 , 1) - the conflicts between x and b = 2 above
5. Package rules for x:
   1. x == atleast( x1 , 1) - package is installed iff one version is
   2. atmost( x1 , 1) - only one version may be installed

The package d is not translated, as it is not reachable from the root set a1 , the transitive root set is a1,b1,b2,x1 .

Next iteration: Optimization We have now constructed the basic set of rules that allows us to solve solve our dependency problems (equivalent to SAT), however it might lead to suboptimal solutions where it removes automatically installed packages, or installs more packages than necessary, to name a few examples. In our next iteration, we have to look at introducing optimization; for example, have the minimum number of removals, the minimal number of changed packages, or satisfy as many recommends as possible. We will also look at the upgrade problem (upgrade as many packages as possible), the autoremove problem (remove as many automatically installed packages as possible).

Update: Facebook has reversed itself over this censorship, but I maintain that whether the censorship was algorithmic or human, it was intentional either way. Details in my new post. Last November, I made a brief post to Facebook about Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source and open social network, which is decentralized and all about user control instead of corporate control. I ve blogged about Mastodon and the dangers of Facebook before, but rarely mentioned Mastodon on Facebook itself. Today, I received this notice that Facebook had censored my post about Mastodon: Wonder with me for a second what this one-off post I composed myself might have done to trip Facebook s filter . and it is probably obvious that what tripped the filter was the mention of an open source competitor, even though Facebook is much more enormous than Mastodon. I have been a member of Facebook for many years, and this is the one and only time anything like that has happened. Why they decided today to take down that post I have no idea. In case you wondered about their sincerity towards stamping out misinformation which, on the rare occasions they do something about, they deprioritize rather than remove as they did here this probably answers your question. Or, are they sincere about thinking they re such a force for good by connecting the world s people? Well, only so long as the world s people don t say nice things about alternatives to Facebook, I guess. Well, you might be wondering, Why not appeal, since they obviously made a mistake? Because, of course, you can t: Indeed I did tick a box that said I disagreed, but there was no place to ask why or to question their action. So what would cause a non-controversial post from a long-time Facebook member that has never had anything like this happen, to disappear? Greed. Also fear. Maybe I d feel sorry for them if they weren t acting like a bully. Edit: There are reports from several others on Mastodon of the same happening this week. I am trying to gather more information. It sounds like it may be happening on Twitter as well. Edit 2: And here are some other reports from both Facebook and Twitter. Definitely not just me. Edit 3: While trying to reply to someone on Facebook, that was trying to defend Facebook, I mentioned joinmastodon.org and got this: Anyone else seeing it? Edit 4: It is far more than just me, clearly. More reports are out there; for instance, this one and that one.

This is the second post in a series about the interface description language Candid.

Safe upgrades A central idea behind Candid is that services evolve over time, and so also their interfaces evolve. As they do, it is desirable to keep the interface usable by clients who have not been updated. In particular on a blockchainy platform like the Internet Computer, where some programs are immutable and cannot be changed to accommodate changes in the interface of the services they use, this is of importance. Therefore, Candid defines which changes to an interface are guaranteed to be backward compatible. Of course it s compatible to add new methods to a service, but some changes to a method signature can also be ok. For example, changing

service A1 :  
  get_value : (variant   current; previous : nat  )
    -> (record   value : int; last_change : nat  )
 

to

service A2 :  
  get_value : (variant   current; previous : nat; default  )
    -> (record   value : int; last_change : nat; committed : bool  )
 

is fine: It doesn t matter that clients that still use the old interface don t know about the new constructor of the argument variant. And the extra field in the result record will silently be ignored by old clients. In the Candid spec, this relation is written as A2 <: A1 (note the order!), and the formal footing this builds on is subtyping. We thus say that it is safe to upgrade a service to a subtype , and that A2 s interface is a subtype of A1 s. In small examples, I often use nat and int, because every nat is also a int, but some int values are not not nat values, namely the negative ones. We say nat is a subtype of int, nat <: int. So a function that in the first returns a int can in the new version return a nat without breaking old clients. But the other direction doesn t work: If the old version s method had a return type of nat, then changing that to int would be a breaking change, as old clients would not be prepared to handle negative numbers. Note that arguments of function types follow different rules. In fact, the rules are simply turned around, and in argument position (also called negative position ), we can evolve the interface to accept supertypes. Concretely, a function that originally expected an nat can be changed to expect an int, but the other direction doesn t work, because there might still be old clients around that send negative numbers. This reversing-of-the-rules is called contravariance. The vision is that the developer s tooling will warn the developer before they upgrade the code of a running service to a type that is not a subtype of the old interface. Let me stress, though, that all this is about not breaking existing clients that use the old interface. It does not mean that a client developer who fetches the new interface for your service won t have to change their code to make his programs compile again.

Higher order composition So far, we considered the simple case of one service with a bunch of clients, i.e. the first order situation. Things get much more interesting if we have multiple services that are composed, and that pass around references to each other, and we still want everything to be nicely typed and never fail even as we upgrade services. Therefore, Candid s type system can express that a service s method expects or a returns a reference to another service or method, and the type that this service or method should have. For example

service B :   add_listener : (text, func (int) -> ()) -> ()  

says that the service with interface B has a method called add_listener which takes two arguments, a plain value of type text and a reference to a function that itself expects a int-typed argument. The contravariance of the subtyping rules explained above also applies to the types of these function reference. And because the int in the above type is on the left of two function arrows, the subtyping rule direction flips twice, and it is therefore safe to upgrade the service to accept the following interface:

service B :   add_listener : (text, func (nat) -> ()) -> ()  

Soundness theorem and Coq proof The combination of these higher order features and the safe upgrade mechanism is maybe the unique selling point of Candid, but also what made its design quite tricky sometimes. And although the conventional subtyping rules work well, we wanted to do some less conventional things (more on that below), and more than once thought we had a good solution, only to notice that it did not hold water in complicated higher-order cases. But what does it mean to hold water? I felt the need to precisely define a soundness criteria for higher order interface description languages, which you can find in the document An IDL Soundness Proposition. This is a general framework which you can instantiate with your concrete IDL language and rules, and then it tells you what you have to prove to consider your language to be sound. Intuitively, it simulates all possible ways in which services can be defined and upgraded, and in which they can pass around references to each other, and the soundness property is that then that for all messages sent between services, they can always be understood. The document also shows, in general, that any system that builds on canonical subtyping in sound, as expected. That is still a generic theorem that you can instantiate with a concrete system, but now there is less to do. Because these proofs can get tricky in corner cases, it is valuable to mechanize them in an interactive theorem prover and have the computer check the proofs. So I have created a Coq formalization that defines the soundness criteria, including the reduction to canonical subtyping. It also defines MiniCandid, a greatly simplified variant of Candid, proves various properties about it (transitivity etc.) and finally instantiates the soundness theorem. I am particularly fond of the use of coinduction to model the equirecursive types, and the use of named cases, as we know them from Isabelle, to make the proofs a bit more readable and maintainable. I am less fond of how much work it seems to be to extend MiniCandid with more of Candid s types. Already adding vec was more work than it s worth it, and I defensively blame Coq s not-so-great support for nested recursion. The soundness relies on subtyping, and that is all fine and well as long as we stick to canonical rules. Unfortunately, practical considerations force us to deviate from these a bit, as we see in the next post of this series.

The freenode IRC network has been hijacked. TL;DR: move to libera.chat or OFTC.net, as did countless free software projects including Gentoo, CentOS, KDE, Wikipedia, FOSDEM, and more. Debian and the Tor project were already on OFTC and are not affected by this.

What is freenode and why should I care? freenode is the largest remaining IRC network. Before this incident, it had close to 80,000 users, which is small in terms of modern internet history -- even small social networks are larger by multiple orders of magnitude -- but is large in IRC history. The IRC network is also extensively used by the free software community, being the default IRC network on many programs, and used by hundreds if not thousands of free software projects. I have been using freenode since at least 2006. This matters if you care about IRC, the internet, open protocols, decentralisation, and, to a certain extent, federation as well. It also touches on who has the right on network resources: the people who "own" it (through money) or the people who make it work (through their labor). I am biased towards open protocols, the internet, federation, and worker power, and this might taint this analysis.

What happened? It's a long story, but basically:

1. back in 2017, the former head of staff sold the freenode.net domain (and its related company) to Andrew Lee, "American entrepreneur, software developer and writer", and, rather weirdly, supposedly "crown prince of Korea" although that part is kind of complex (see House of Yi, Yi Won, and Yi Seok). It should be noted the Korean Empire hasn't existed for over a century at this point (even though its flag, also weirdly, remains)
2. back then, this was only known to the public as this strange PIA and freenode joining forces gimmick. it was suspicious at first, but since the network kept running, no one paid much attention to it. opers of the network were similarly reassured that Lee would have no say in the management of the network
3. this all changed recently when Lee asserted ownership of the freenode.net domain and started meddling in the operations of the network, according to this summary. this part is disputed, but it is corroborated by almost a dozen former staff which collectively resigned from the network in protest, after legal threats, when it was obvious freenode was lost.
4. the departing freenode staff founded a new network, irc.libera.chat, based on the new ircd they were working on with OFTC, solanum
5. meanwhile, bot armies started attacking all IRC networks: both libera and freenode, but also OFTC and unrelated networks like a small one I help operate. those attacks have mostly stopped as of this writing (2021-05-24 17:30UTC)
6. on freenode, however, things are going for the worse: Lee has been accused of taking over a channel, in a grotesque abuse of power; then changing freenode policy to not only justify the abuse, but also remove rules against hateful speech, effectively allowing nazis on the network (update: the change was reverted, but not by Lee)

Update: even though the policy change was reverted, the actual conversations allowed on freenode have already degenerated into toxic garbage. There are also massive channel takeovers (presumably over 700), mostly on channels that were redirecting to libera, but also channels that were still live. Channels that were taken over include #fosdem, #wikipedia, #haskell... Instead of working on the network, the new "so-called freenode" staff is spending effort writing bots and patches to basically automate taking over channels. I run an IRC network and this bot is obviously not standard "services" stuff... This is just grotesque. At this point I agree with this HN comment:

We should stop implicitly legitimizing Andrew Lee's power grab by referring to his dominion as "Freenode". Freenode is a quarter-century-old community that has changed its name to libera.chat; the thing being referred to here as "Freenode" is something else that has illegitimately acquired control of Freenode's old servers and user database, causing enormous inconvenience to the real Freenode.

I don't agree with the suggested name there, let's instead call it "so called freenode" as suggested later in the thread.

What now? I recommend people and organisations move away from freenode as soon as possible. This is a major change: documentation needs to be fixed, and the migration needs to be coordinated. But I do not believe we can trust the new freenode "owners" to operate the network reliably and in good faith. It's also important to use the current momentum to build a critical mass elsewhere so that people don't end up on freenode again by default and find an even more toxic community than your typical run-of-the-mill free software project (which is already not a high bar to meet). Update: people are moving to libera in droves. It's now reaching 18,000 users, which is bigger than OFTC and getting close to the largest, traditionnal, IRC networks (EFnet, Undernet, IRCnet are in the 10-20k users range). so-called freenode is still larger, currently clocking 68,000 users, but that's a huge drop from the previous count which was 78,000 before the exodus began. We're even starting to see the effects of the migration on netsplit.de. Update 2: the isfreenodedeadyet.com site is updated more frequently than netsplit and shows tons more information. It shows 25k online users for libera and 61k for so-called freenode (down from ~78k), and the trend doesn't seem to be stopping for so-called freenode. There's also a list of 400+ channels that have moved out. Keep in mind that such migrations take effect over long periods of time.

Where do I move to? The first thing you should do is to figure out which tool to use for interactive user support. There are multiple alternatives, of course -- this is the internet after all -- but here is a short list of suggestions, in preferred priority order:

1. irc.libera.chat
2. irc.OFTC.net
3. Matrix.org, which bridges with OFTC and (hopefully soon) with libera as well, modern IRC alternative
4. XMPP/Jabber also still exists, if you're into that kind of stuff, but I don't think the "chat room" story is great there, at least not as good as Matrix

Basically, the decision tree is this:

• if you want to stay on IRC:
  • if you are already on many OFTC channels and few freenode channels: move to OFTC
  • if you are more inclined to support the previous freenode staff: move to libera
  • if you care about matrix users (in the short term): move to OFTC
• if you are ready to leave IRC:
  • if you want the latest and greatest: move to Matrix
  • if you like XML and already use XMPP: move to XMPP

Frankly, at this point, everyone should seriously consider moving to Matrix. The user story is great, the web is a first class user, it supports E2EE (although XMPP as well), and has a lot of momentum behind it. It even bridges with IRC well (which is not the case for XMPP) so if you're worried about problems like this happening again. (Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if similar drama happens on OFTC or libera in the future. The history of IRC is full of such epic controversies, takeovers, sabotage, attacks, technical flamewars, and other silly things. I am not sure, but I suspect a federated model like Matrix might be more resilient to conflicts like this one.) Changing protocols might mean losing a bunch of users however: not everyone is ready to move to Matrix, for example. Graybeards like me have been using irssi for years, if not decades, and would take quite a bit of convincing to move elsewhere. I have mostly kept my channels on IRC, and moved either to OFTC or libera. In retrospect, I think I might have moved everything to OFTC if I would have thought about it more, because almost all of my channels are there. But I kind of expect a lot of the freenode community to move to libera, so I am keeping a socket open there anyways.

How do I move? The first thing you should do is to update documentation, websites, and source code to stop pointing at freenode altogether. This is what I did for feed2exec, for example. You need to let people know in the current channel as well, and possibly shutdown the channel on freenode. Since my channels are either small or empty, I took the radical approach of:

• redirecting the channel to ##unavailable which is historically the way we show channels have moved to another network
• make the channel invite-only (which effectively enforces the redirection)
• kicking everyone out of the channel
• kickban people who rejoin
• set the topic to announce the change

In IRC speak, the following commands should do all this:

/msg ChanServ set #anarcat mlock +if ##unavailable
/msg ChanServ clear #anarcat users moving to irc.libera.chat
/msg ChanServ set #anarcat restricted on
/topic #anarcat this channel has moved to irc.libera.chat

If the channel is not registered, the following might work

/mode #anarcat +if ##unavailable

Then you can leave freenode altogether:

/disconnect Freenode unacceptable hijack, policy changes and takeovers. so long and thanks for all the fish.

Keep in mind that some people have been unable to setup such redirections, because the new freenode staff have taken over their channel, in which case you're out of luck... Some people have expressed concern about their private data hosted at freenode as well. If you care about this, you can always talk to NickServ and DROP your nick. Be warned, however, that this assumes good faith of the network operators, which, at this point, is kind of futile. I would assume any data you have registered on there (typically: your NickServ password and email address) to be compromised and leaked. If your password is used elsewhere (tsk, tsk), change it everywhere. Update: there's also another procedure, similar to the above, but with a different approach. Keep in mind that so-called freenode staff are actively hijacking channels for the mere act of mentioning libera in the channel topic, so thread carefully there.

Last words This is a sad time for IRC in general, and freenode in particular. It's a real shame that the previous freenode staff have been kicked out, and it's especially horrible that if the new policies of the network are basically making the network open to nazis. I wish things would have gone out differently: now we have yet another fork in the IRC history. While it's not the first time freenode changes name (it was called OPN before), now the old freenode is still around and this will bring much confusion to the world, especially since the new freenode staff is still claiming to support FOSS. I understand there are many sides to this story, and some people were deeply hurt by all this. But for me, it's completely unacceptable to keep pushing your staff so hard that they basically all (except one?) resign in protest. For me, that's leadership failure at the utmost, and a complete disgrace. And of course, I can't in good conscience support or join a network that allows hate speech. Regardless of the fate of whatever we'll call what's left of freenode, maybe it's time for this old IRC thing to die already. It's still a sad day in internet history, but then again, maybe IRC will never die...

The Population Issue and its many facets Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.

Girl child What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice. What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows . On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.

Climate Change Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.

Health Budget Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage. Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.

Vaccine issues One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.) What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.

A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital

Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward

Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)

ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.

Twitter In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.

Censorship Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.

Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens

Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that Oxygen:12%
Remedisivir:12%
Sanitiser:12%
Ventilator:12%
PPE:18%
Ambulances 28% Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.

Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021

What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.

Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021

One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.

Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021

The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day

Fake websites Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .

Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.

And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act

Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar

The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel. Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are

Times of New York
Manchester Times
Times of Los Angeles
Manhattan Post
Washington Herald
and many more. The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again

Caste Issues I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is. And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition. Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.

Situation going forward I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die

The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading

Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.

For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.

Conclusion Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later. Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big

Too much has been written, a war of support letters is going on, Debian is heading head first like Lemmings into the same war. And then, there is this by the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): Civil Rights Activist Nadine Strossen s Response To #CancelStallman:

I find it so odd that the strong zeal for revenge and punishment if someone says anything that is perceived to be sexist or racist or discriminatory comes from liberals and progressives. There are so many violations [in cases like Stallman s] of such fundamental principles to which progressives and liberals cling in general as to what is justice, what is fairness, what is due process.
One is proportionality: that the punishment should be proportional to the offense. Another one is restorative justice: that rather than retribution and punishment, we should seek to have the person constructively come to understand, repent, and make amends for an infraction. Liberals generally believe society to be too punitive, too harsh, not forgiving enough. They are certainly against the death penalty and other harsh punishments even for the most violent, the mass murderers. Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don t understand the double standard!
Another cardinal principle is we shouldn t have any guilt by association. [To hold culpable] these board members who were affiliated with him and ostensibly didn t do enough to punish him for things that he said which by the way were completely separate from the Free Software Foundation is multiplying the problems of unwarranted punishment. It extends the punishment where the argument for responsibility and culpability becomes thinner and thinner to the vanishing point. That is also going to have an enormous adverse impact on the freedom of association, which is an important right protected in the U.S. by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court has upheld freedom of association in cases involving organizations that were at the time highly controversial. It started with NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, but we have a case that s going to the Supreme Court right now regarding Black Lives Matter. The Supreme Court says even if one member of the group does commit a crime in both of those cases physical violence and assault that is not a justification for punishing other members of the group unless they specifically intended to participate in the particular punishable conduct.
Now, let s assume for the sake of argument, Stallman had an attitude that was objectively described as discriminatory on the basis on race and gender (and by the way I have seen nothing to indicate that), that he s an unrepentant misogynist, who really believes women are inferior. We are not going to correct those ideas, to enlighten him towards rejecting them and deciding to treat women as equals through a punitive approach! The only approach that could possibly work is an educational one! Engaging in speech, dialogue, discussion and leading him to re-examine his own ideas.
Even if I strongly disagree with a position or an idea, an expression of an idea, advocacy of an idea, and even if the vast majority of the public disagrees with the idea and finds it offensive, that is not a justification for suppressing the idea. And it s not a justification for taking away the equal rights of the person who espouses that idea including the right to continue holding a tenured position or other prominent position for which that person is qualified.
But a number of the ideas for which Richard Stallman has been attacked and punished are ideas that I as a feminist advocate of human rights find completely correct and positive from the perspective of women s equality and dignity! So for example, when he talks about the misuse and over use and flawed use of the term sexual assault, I completely agree with that critique! People are indiscriminantly using that term or synonyms to describe everything from the most appaulling violent abuse of helpless vulnerable victims (such as a rape of a minor) to any conduct or expression in the realm of gender or sexuality that they find unpleasant or disagreeable.
So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn t find that an appealing invitation. Maybe he used poor judgement in asking her out, maybe he didn t, but in any case that is NOT sexual assault or harassment. To call it that is to really demean the huge horror and violence and predation that does exist when you are talking about violent sexual assault. People use the term sexual assault/ sexual harassment to refer to any comment about gender or sexuality issues that they disagree with or a joke that might not be in the best taste, again is that to be commended? No! But to condemn it and equate it with a violent sexual assault again is really denying and demeaning the actual suffering that people who are victims of sexual assault endure. It trivializes the serious infractions that are committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. So that is one point that he made that I think is very important that I strongly agree with.
Secondly and relatedly, [Richard Stallman] never said that he endorse child pornography, which by definition the United States Supreme Court has defined it multiple times is the sexual exploitation of an actual minor. Coerced, forced, sexual activity by that minor, with that minor that happens to be filmed or photographed. That is the definition of child pornography. He never defends that! What the point he makes, a very important one, which the U.S. Supreme Court has also made, is mainly that we overuse and distort the term child pornography to refer to any depiction of any minor in any context that is even vaguely sexual.
So some people have not only denounced as child pornography but prosecuted and jailed loving devoted parents who committed the crime of taking a nude or semi-nude picture of their own child in a bathtub or their own child in a bathing suit. Again it is the hysteria that has totally refused to draw an absolutely critical distinction between actual violence and abuse, which is criminal and should be criminal, to any potentially sexual depiction of a minor. And I say potentially because I think if you look at a picture a parent has taken of a child in a bathtub and you see that as sexual, then I d say there s something in your perspective that might be questioned or challenged! But don t foist that upon the parent who is lovingly documenting their beloved child s life and activities without seeing anything sexual in that image.
This is a decision that involves line drawing. We tend to have this hysteria where once we hear terms like pedophilia of course you are going to condemn anything that could possibly have that label. Of course you would. But societies around the world throughout history various cultures and various religions and moral positions have disagreed about at what age do you respect the autonomy and individuality and freedom of choice of a young person around sexuality. And the U.S. Supreme Court held that in a case involving minors right to choose to have an abortion.
By the way, [contraception and abortion] is a realm of sexuality where liberals and progressives and feminists have been saying, Yes! If you re old enough to have sex. You should have the right to contraception and access to it. You should have the right to have an abortion. You shouldn t have to consult with your parents and have their permission or a judge s permission because you re sufficiently mature. And the Supreme Court sided in accord of that position. The U.S. Supreme Court said constitutional rights do not magically mature and spring into being only when someone happens to attain the state defined age of majority.
In other words the constitution doesn t prevent anyone from exercising rights, including Rights and sexual freedoms, freedom of choice and autonomy at a certain age! And so you can t have it both ways. You can t say well we re strongly in favor of minors having the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, to have an abortion what is in some people s minds murder but we re not going to trust them to decide to have sex with somewhat older than they are.
And I say somewhat older than they are because that s something where the law has also been subject to change. On all issues of when you obtain the age of majority, states differ on that widely and they choose different ages for different activities. When you re old enough to drive, to have sex with someone around your age, to have sex with someone much older than you. There is no magic objective answer to these questions. I think people need to take seriously the importance of sexual freedom and autonomy and that certainly includes women, feminists. They have to take seriously the question of respecting a young person s autonomy in that area.
There have been famous cases of 18 year olds who have gone to prison because they had consensual sex with their girlfriends who were a couple of years younger. A lot of people would not consider that pedophilia and yet under some strict laws and some absolute definitions it is. Romeo and Juliet laws make an exception to pedophilia laws when there is only a relatively small age difference. But what is relatively small? So to me, especially when he says he is re-examining his position, Stallman is just thinking through the very serious debate of how to be protective and respectful of young people. He is not being disrespectful, much less wishing harm upon young people, which seems to be what his detractors think he s doing.

Unfortunately, I don t think the Anti-Harassment Team of Debian and others of the usual group of warriors will ever read less understand what is written there. So sad.

I was shocked to learn today that Richard Stallman has been reinstated as a member of the board of the Free Software Foundation. I think this is plain inappropriate, but I cannot see how anyone who doesn t think that could fail to see the reinstatement as counterproductive. As Bradley M. Kuhn put it,

The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. It really doesn t matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction from the radical activism you re actively trying to advance. The message of universal software freedom is a radical cause; it s basically impossible for one individual to effectively push forward two unrelated controversial agendas at once. In short, the radical message of software freedom became overshadowed by RMS radical views about sexual morality.

There is an open letter calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation in response. I haven t signed the letter because the Free Software Foundation Board s vote to reinstate Stallman was not unanimous, so the call to remove all of them does not make sense to me. I agree with the open letter s call to remove Stallman from other positions of leadership. I hope that this whole situation can be resolved quickly.

Freedom house puts India in partly free Just couple of days ago, freedom house published its 2020 rankings for all countries including India. While freedom house shared how democracy in the world has weakened, India chose to take offense about it being called partly free .

India, leader in Internet shutdowns Access Now (copyright)

The above illustration is shared by accessnow . The next big ones who have Internet shutdowns are Yemen 6 and Ethiopia 4. Such internet shutdowns have and will have sad repercussions as would share in another story as well.

Color-coding journalists A story was broken by caravan magazine yesterday and which was followed by newslaundry which shows how the Govt. is looking to just drive some narrative, does not matter whether it s true or false, it should just show that the Govt. is right and others are all wrong. As can be seen, almost all reporters barring a few have kept silent rather than refuting statements attributed to them or happenings which didn t happen. And this goes to a much larger narrative and disinformation route taken by the Govt. which doesn t have any semblance to the truth or reality as people know it. I would illustrate couple of examples below which shares that. In all my young and even adult-life I hadn t seen a Govt. this much against its own people.

Omega Seiki puts a manufacturing plant in Bangladesh Now Omega Seiki is an Indian vendor who chose or had to go to manufacture their electric vehicles in Bangladesh. Now while this is a slightly old story this was broken on social media recently. Everybody starting blaming both the vendor and saying we should break FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with Bangladesh, not knowing that despite the FTA, India has put tariff barriers between India and Bangladesh. I had to share research from Brookings to show where India has been losing. Of course, those who don t want to see, wouldn t see anything wrong in the picture.

Teen raped, asked to marry the accused when she turns 18 Now you may see the above headlines and feel it is ridiculous, but the fact is that these orders were put or given by Madras High Court couple of months back. This was then reported by both Livelaw and BarandBench respectively. Now to be truthful, this news didn t make much noise as it should have, probably as I had shared previously that the Govt. wants to lower the marriageable age to 15 or even less. And this is despite all the medical evidence on the contrary, because it assuages this Govt s masculinity. There is also the very recent case where the SC CJI asked the rapist if he is willing to marry a girl who was underage when she reaches maturity. Another one in which it seems martial rape is not a crime according to the CJI. So it seems these are the state of things in which India finds itself today. There are judges like Vrinda Grover who do question CJI but they are few and there are costs to them who ask questions. Although, as shared this news was overtaken by other news and would have remained so, if not one of the leaders of the present Govt. , a Ramesh Jarkiholi, who hails from Belagavi region of north Karnataka was caught in a sex CD scandal basically asking sexual favors for a permanent Govt. job. He had made statements after the Madras High Court case applauding the judgement given by the judge. While, due to public pressure he had to resign, but not before stating that he had everybody blue films including the Chief Minister of the State. And sad to report that six Karnataka Ministers rushed today or rather yesterday to put a petition in the civil court to restrain media from airing/printing/publishing any defamatory content against them. The court has granted a media gag against 68 media houses for the same. Sadly, the recent happening only reinforce what has been happening in Karnataka since a decade. Update 07/03/2021 Seems yesterday another 10 odd ministers rushed to get the same order. Seems different laws apply to politicians vis-a-vis others. A recent example of Rhea Chakravarthy, an actress and girlfriend of Sushant Singh who was hounded in his suicide case and many accusations made on TV but no evidence till date. From what we know as facts, Sushant committed suicide as he was not getting work due to cronyism in Bollywood. In fact, those who were behind it have white-washed themselves, deleted their tweets etc. and while the public knows, no accountability on them. In fact, there is and was so much that I wanted to share as to what has been happening to women, sadly and thankfully arre did the needful for me. They wrote an entire article which tells what the situation for women in India today is. And if you are wondering why I said, that is because when a site which was made exclusively for people to laugh and have a good time and get relief, when they start writing serious articles, you can be sure that things have gone horribly wrong

Asking Tesla to come to India and at the same time ambivalent on battery Recently, Mr. Nitin Gadkari, a prominent minister of the present Govt. invited Tesla and gave all sorts of incentives to start a manufacturing plant here in India. And while it seems that Tesla has accepted, looking at the Vodafone case, hopefully Tesla does make such contracts where if something goes wrong and they need to sue the Govt. they can do it in States or elsewhere. The way the Govt. acted in the Vodafone case had been a dampener to any MNC investments so far. Although to be fair to both Tesla and GOI, the basic models even if they are manufactured in India will go to less than 1% of the population. The cheapest Tesla Model Y which retails in the U.S. for USD 40k would be around INR 30 lakh. And this is their cheapest car to date. I do know there are rumors of the 25k but that is probably 2-3 years away as shared by Tesla China President Tom Zhu in an interview shared on YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH5leMWFBxI There are couple of interesting comments being made. The fact that China is going to fully open its automobile market to western companies shows how confident China feels about their own vendors. And I m not much impressed about Tesla as I am about the tiny car revolution happening in China. India, if it wanted to, could learn many lessons from China. Even the electric buses they had started in 2010 itself where people in our auto industry thought it was all a fad. Sadly, we are missing most of the technology and if and by the time Tesla starts a production line, dunno where we could get our lithium. India hasn t been as aggressive as other countries when it comes to securing raw natural resources in other countries, as some other countries have. Even besides that, it has been tough when you have so many people who still believe that ICE vehicles (Internal Combustion Engines) are better than EV s and even if they know they choose to believe the propaganda. Couple of months ago a young UK girl who had died due to asthma, an inquest found that air pollution was a factor. The girl s name was Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. This is the first case where the doctor ruled air pollution as a chief factor in a person s death. Probably first of its kind of ruling anywhere in the world. I also shared TCO studies between BEV and ICE vehicles done by people who are considering an electric vehicle but those studies seem to fall on deaf ears.

Starlink This is another of Elon Musk s ventures and would be a money spinner for sure in around the globe. While Starlink has asked TRAI for permission, I don t think they will get it. There is also Bharti Global s Oneweb which probably has a better chance of getting permissions. The reason is censorship. As shared above, India is now a leader in Internet shutdowns and do see this trend only accelerate rather than go the other way around. For people who don t remember, remember how satellite phones were made illegal even though only businessmen could afford it. And this was just 5 years ago. As shared Oneweb would have better shot as they would accept all Government directives without a second thought. Unless Starlink gives a binding to the Govt. to be a willing partner when it wants to have internet shutdowns, it will not work. Now how Elon approaches that is to be seen and known. FWIW, you can t access Starlink webpage on BSNL broadband. My broadband provider gives at the most 300 kbps and sometimes, at late nights or early mornings, around 500 kbps.

Farmer Protests
Lastly, farmer protests have entered 100 days. In the interim, Vivek Kaul, an economist took stock of the Bihar APMC to see if things have really worked as the Govt. supporters were telling. The investigation and the results didn t inspire the confidence as the Govt. said. The sad part is though, that nowadays nobody, at least those in power as well as those who are supporters are keen to read, understand and even argue otherwise. They are all happy with whatsapp knowledge. Till date 200+ people have died in the farmer protests. All mainstream media houses have stopped talking about farmers in the hope that they will disappear. At the end of the day the Govt. wants that the corporates should win at whatever the cost.