Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting and insightful blog post about the license of software developed or co-developed by machine-learning systems [1]. One of his main points is that people in the FOSS community should aim for less copyright protection. The USENIX ATC 21/OSDI 21 Joint Keynote Address titled It s Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware has some inssightful points to make [2]. Timothy Roscoe makes some incendiaty points but backs them up with evidence. Is Linux really an OS? I recommend that everyone who s interested in OS design watch this lecture. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting set of 6 articles about Disneyland, ride pricing, and crowd control [3]. He proposes some interesting ideas for reforming Disneyland. Benjamin Bratton wrote an insightful article about how philosophy failed in the pandemic [4]. He focuses on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who has a history of writing stupid articles that match Qanon talking points but with better language skills. Arstechnica has an interesting article about penetration testers extracting an encryption key from the bus used by the TPM on a laptop [5]. It s not a likely attack in the real world as most networks can be broken more easily by other methods. But it s still interesting to learn about how the technology works. The Portalist has an article about David Brin s Startide Rising series of novels and his thought s on the concept of Uplift (which he denies inventing) [6]. Jacobin has an insightful article titled You re Not Lazy But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are [7]. Making people identify as lazy is bad for them and bad for getting them to do work. But this is the first time I ve seen it described as a facet of abusive capitalism. Jacobin has an insightful article about free public transport [8]. Apparently there are already many regions that have free public transport (Tallinn the Capital of Estonia being one example). Fare free public transport allows bus drivers to concentrate on driving not taking fares, removes the need for ticket inspectors, and generally provides a better service. It allows passengers to board buses and trams faster thus reducing traffic congestion and encourages more people to use public transport instead of driving and reduces road maintenance costs. Interesting research from Israel about bypassing facial ID [9]. Apparently they can make a set of 9 images that can pass for over 40% of the population. I didn t expect facial recognition to be an effective form of authentication, but I didn t expect it to be that bad. Edward Snowden wrote an insightful blog post about types of conspiracies [10]. Kevin Rudd wrote an informative article about Sky News in Australia [11]. We need to have a Royal Commission now before we have our own 6th Jan event. Steve from Big Mess O Wires wrote an informative blog post about USB-C and 4K 60Hz video [12]. Basically you can t have a single USB-C hub do 4K 60Hz video and be a USB 3.x hub unless you have compression software running on your PC (slow and only works on Windows), or have DisplayPort 1.4 or Thunderbolt (both not well supported). All of the options are not well documented on online store pages so lots of people will get unpleasant surprises when their deliveries arrive. Computers suck. Steinar H. Gunderson wrote an informative blog post about GaN technology for smaller power supplies [13]. A 65W USB-C PSU that fits the usual wall wart form factor is an interesting development.

• [1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/57615.html
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/yzo22rub
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/yf3q8p4y
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/ydr79yqf
• [6] https://theportalist.com/david-brin-startide-rising-introduction-uplift
• [7] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/laziness-work-capitalism-review-devon-price
• [8] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/public-transportation-brussels-free-tickets
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/yek4p8sv
• [10] https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/yh88rj5u
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/y6on8jcd
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/yegot6qv

I'm guessing the last glasses will be through the dishwasher (again) and Pepper the dog can settle down without having to cope with so many people.For those who don't know - Steve and his wife Jo (Sledge and Randombird) hold a barbeque in their garden every August Bank Holiday weekend [UK Bank Holiday on the last Monday in August]. The barbeque is not small - it's the dominating feature in the suburban garden, brick built, with a dedication stone, lights, electricity. The garden is small, generally made smaller by forty or so Debian friends and allies standing and sitting around. People are talking, arguing, hugging people they've not seen for (literal) years and putting the world to rights. This is Debian central point - with large quantities of meat and salads, an amount of beer/alcohol and "Cambridge gin" and general goodwill. This year was more than usually atmospheric because for some of us it was the first time with a large group of people in a while. Side conversations abound: for me it was learning something about the high energy particle physics community, how to precision build helicopters, fly quadcopters and precision 3D print anything, the maths of Isy counting crochet stitches to sew together randomly sized squares ... and, of course, obligatory things like how random is random and what's good enough entropy. And a few sessions of the game of our leader.
This is also a place for stuff to get done: I was unashamedly using this to upgrade the storage in my laptop while there were sensible engineers around. A corner of the table, a RattusRattus and it was quickly sorted - then a discussion around the internals of Thinkpads as he took his apart. Then getting a full install - Gb Ethernet to the Debian mirror in the cupboard six feet away is faster bandwidth than a jumbo jet full of tapes. Then getting mail to work again - it's handy when the mailserver owner is next to you, having come in from the garden to help, and finally IRC. And not just me: "You need a GPG key signed - there's three DPLs here, there's a release manager - but you've just missed one of the DAMs." plus an in-depth GPG how-to session on the other side of the table.I was the luckiest one with the most comfortable bed in the house overnight but I couldn't stay for last night. Thanks once again to all involved but especially Steve and Jo who do this for the love of it, and the fun, and the community and the family. Oh, and thanks to Lenovo - not just for being a platinum sponsor of Debconf but also for providing the official laptop of this and most Debian occasions

Late blogging on this one.Even as we wait for the final release of Bullseye [Debian 11], we're still producing updates for Debian 10 [Buster].Today has thrown up a few problems: working with Steve, RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge, Schweer and Linux-Fan somewhere else in the world.A couple of build problems have meant that we've started later than we otherwise might have been and a couple of image runs have had to be redone. We're there now and happily running tests.As ever, it's good to be doing this. With practice, I can now repeat mistakes with 100% reliability and in shorter time :)More updates later.

I have just disconnected from irc.freenode.net for the last time. You should do the same. The awful new de facto operators are using user numbers as a public justification for their behaviour. Specifically, I recommend that you:

• Move your own channels to to Libera or OFTC
• If you have previously been known to be generally around on Freenode, connect to Libera (the continuity network set up by the Freenode staff), and register your usual nick(s) there.
• Disconnect from freenode so that you don't count as one of their users.

Note that mentioning libera in the channel topic of your old channels on freenode is likely to get your channel forcibly taken over by the new de facto operators of freenode. They won't tolerate you officially directing people to the competition. I did an investigation and writeup of this situation for the Xen Project. It's a little out of date - it doesn't have the latest horrible behaviours from the new regime - but I think it is worth pasting it here:

Message-ID: <24741.12566.639691.461134@mariner.uk.xensource.com>
From: Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>
To: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org
CC: community.manager@xenproject.org
Subject: IRC networks
Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 16:39:02 +0100
Summary:
We have for many years used the Freenode IRC network for real-time
chat about Xen.  Unfortunately, Freenode is undergoing a crisis.
There is a dispute between, on the one hand, Andrew Lee, and on the
other hand, all (or almost all) Freenode volunteer staff.  We must
make a decision.
I have read all the publicly available materials and asked around with
my contacts.  My conclusions:
 * We do not want to continue to use irc.freenode.*.
 * We might want to use libera.chat, but:
 * Our best option is probably to move to OFTC https://www.oftc.net/
Discussion:
Firstly, my starting point.
I have been on IRC since at least 1993.  Currently my main public
networks are OFTC and Freenode.
I do not have any personal involvement with public IRC networks.  Of
the principals in the current Freenode dispute, I have only heard of
one, who is a person I have experience of in a Debian context but have
not worked closely with.
George asked me informally to use my knowledge and contacts to shed
light on the situation.  I decided that, having done my research, I
would report more formally and publicly here rather than just
informally to George.
Historical background:
 * Freenode has had drama before.  In about 2001 OFTC split off from
   Freenode after an argument over governance.  IIRC there was drama
   again in 2006.  Significant proportion of the Free Software world,
   including Debian, now use OFTC.  Debian switched in 2006.
Facts that I'm (now) pretty sure of:
 * Freenode's actual servers run on donated services; that is,
   the hardware is owned by those donating the services, and the
   systems are managed by Freenode volunteers, known as "staff".
 * The freenode domain names are currently registered to a limited
   liability company owned by Andrew Lee (rasengan).
 * At least 10 Freenode staff have quit in protest, writing similar
   resignation letters protesting about Andrew Lee's actions [1].  It
   does not appear that any Andrew Lee has the public support of any
   Freenode staff.
 * Andrew Lee claims that he "owns" Freenode.[2]
 * A large number of channel owners for particular Free Software
   projects who previously used Freenode have said they will switch
   away from Freenode.
Discussion and findings on Freenode:
There is, as might be expected, some murk about who said what to whom
when, what promises were made and/or broken, and so on.  The matter
was also complicated by the leaking earlier this week of draft(s) of
(at least one of) the Freenode staffers' resignation letters.
Andrew Lee has put forward a position statement [2].  A large part of
the thrust of that statement is allegations that the current head of
Freenode staff, tomaw, "forced out" the previous head, christel.  This
allegation is strongly disputed by by all those current (resigning)
Freenode staff I have seen comment.  In any case it does not seem to
be particularly germane; in none of my reading did tomaw seem to be
playing any kind of leading role.  tomaw is not mentioned in the
resignation letters.
Some of the links led to me to logs of discussions on #freenode.  I
read some of these in particular[3].  MB I haven't been able to verify
that these logs have not been tampered with.  Having said that and
taking the logs at face value, I found the rasengan writing there to
be disingenuous and obtuse.
Andrew Lee has been heavily involved in Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a hive of
scum and villainy, a pyramid scheme, and an environmental disaster,
all rolled into one.  This does not make me think well of Lee.
Additionally, it seems that Andrew Lee has been involved in previous
governance drama involving a different IRC network, Snoonet.
I have come to the very firm conclusion that we should have nothing to
do with Andrew Lee, and avoid using services that he has some
effective control over.
Alternatives:
The departing Freenode staff are setting up a replacement,
"libera.chat".  This is operational but still suffering from teething
problems and of course has a significant load as it deals with an
influx of users on a new setup.
On the staff and trust question: As I say, I haven't heard of any of
the Freenode staff, with one exception.  Unfortunately the one
exception does not inspire confidence in me[4] - although NB that is
only one data point.
On the other hand, Debian has had many many years of drama-free
involvement with OFTC.  OFTC has a formal governance arrangement and
it is associated with Software in the Public Interest.  I notice that
the last few OFTC'[s annual officer elections have been run partly by
Steve McIntyre.  Steve is a friend of mine (and he is a former Debian
Project Leader) and I take his involvement as a good sign.
I recommend that we switch to using OFTC as soon as possible.
Ian.
References:
Starting point for the resigning Freenode staff's side [1]:
  https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409
Andrew Lee's side [2]:
  https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/88549ec34ee32d01629354e4075d2d48
[3]
https://paste.sr.ht/~ircwright/7e751d2162e4eb27cba25f6f8893c1f38930f7c4
[4] I won't give the name since I don't want to be shitposting.

comments

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

Like many I use pass for storing usernames and passwords. This gives me easy access to credentials in a secure manner. I don't like the way that the metadata (i.e. filenames) are public, but that aside it is a robust tool I've been using for several years. The last time I talked about pass was when I talked about showing the age of my credentials, via the integrated git support. That then became a pass-plugin:

  frodo ~ $ pass age
  6 years ago GPG/root@localhost.gpg
  6 years ago GPG/steve@steve.org.uk.OLD.gpg
  ..
  4 years, 8 months ago Domains/Domain.fi.gpg
  4 years, 7 months ago Mobile/dna.fi.gpg
  ..
  1 year, 3 months ago Websites/netlify.com.gpg
  1 year ago Financial/ukko.fi.gpg
  1 year ago Mobile/KiK.gpg
  4 days ago Enfuce/sre.tst.gpg
  ..

Anyway today's work involved writing another plugin, named env. I store my data in pass in a consistent form, each entry looks like this:

   username: steve
   password: secrit
   site: http://example.com/login/blah/
   # Extra data

The keys vary, sometimes I use "login", sometimes "username", other times "email", but I always label the fields in some way. Recently I was working with some CLI tooling that wants to have a username/password specified and I patched it to read from the environment instead. Now I can run this:

     $ pass env internal/cli/tool-name
     export username="steve"
     export password="secrit"

That's ideal, because now I can source that from within a shell:

   $ source <(pass env internal/cli/tool-name)
   $ echo username
   steve

Or I could directly execute the tool I want:

   $ pass env --exec=$HOME/ldap/ldap.py internal/cli/tool-name
   you are steve
   ..

TLDR: If you store your password entries in "key: value" form you can process them to export $KEY=$value, and that allows them to be used without copying and pasting into command-line arguments (e.g. "~/ldap/ldap.py --username=steve --password=secrit")

Like many I use pass for storing usernames and passwords. This gives me easy access to credentials in a secure manner. I don't like the way that the metadata (i.e. filenames) are public, but that aside it is a robust tool I've been using for several years. The last time I talked about pass was when I talked about showing the age of my credentials, via the integrated git support. That then became a pass-plugin:

  frodo ~ $ pass age
  6 years ago GPG/root@localhost.gpg
  6 years ago GPG/steve@steve.org.uk.OLD.gpg
  ..
  4 years, 8 months ago Domains/Domain.fi.gpg
  4 years, 7 months ago Mobile/dna.fi.gpg
  ..
  1 year, 3 months ago Websites/netlify.com.gpg
  1 year ago Financial/ukko.fi.gpg
  1 year ago Mobile/KiK.gpg
  4 days ago Enfuce/sre.tst.gpg
  ..

Anyway today's work involved writing another plugin, named env. I store my data in pass in a consistent form, each entry looks like this:

   username: steve
   password: secrit
   site: http://example.com/login/blah/
   # Extra data

The keys vary, sometimes I use "login", sometimes "username", other times "email", but I always label the fields in some way. Recently I was working with some CLI tooling that wants to have a username/password specified and I patched it to read from the environment instead. Now I can run this:

     $ pass env internal/cli/tool-name
     export username="steve"
     export password="secrit"

That's ideal, because now I can source that from within a shell:

   $ source <(pass env internal/cli/tool-name)
   $ echo username
   steve

Or I could directly execute the tool I want:

   $ pass env --exec=$HOME/ldap/ldap.py internal/cli/tool-name
   you are steve
   ..

TLDR: If you store your password entries in "key: value" form you can process them to export $KEY=$value, and that allows them to be used without copying and pasting into command-line arguments (e.g. "~/ldap/ldap.py --username=steve --password=secrit")

In my previous post I wrote about how I'd been running CP/M on a Z80-based single-board computer. I've been slowly working my way through a bunch of text-based adventure games:

• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
• Zork 1
• Zork 2
• Zork 3

Along the way I remembered how much fun I used to have doing this in my early teens, and decided to write my own text-based adventure. Since I'm not a masochist I figured I'd write something with only three or four locations, and solicited facebook for ideas. Shortly afterwards a "plot" was created and I started work. I figured that the very last thing I wanted to be doing was to be parsing text-input with Z80 assembly language, so I hacked up a simple adventure game in C. I figured if I could get the design right that would ease the eventual port to assembly. I had the realization pretty early that using a table-driven approach would be the best way - using structures to contain the name, description, and function-pointers appropriate to each object for example. In my C implementation I have things that look like this:

 name: "generator",
 desc: "A small generator.",
 use: use_generator,
 use_carried: use_generator_carried,
 get_fn: get_generator,
 drop_fn: drop_generator ,

A bit noisy, but simple enough. If an object cannot be picked up, or dropped, the corresponding entries are blank:

 name: "desk",
 desc: "",
 edesc: "The desk looks solid, but old." ,

Here we see something that is special, there's no description so the item isn't displayed when you enter a room, or LOOK. Instead the edesc (extended description) is available when you type EXAMINE DESK. Anyway over a couple of days I hacked up the C-game, then I started work porting it to Z80 assembly. The implementation changed, the easter-eggs were different, but on the whole the two things are the same. Certainly 99% of the text was recycled across the two implementations. Anyway in the unlikely event you've got a craving for a text-based adventure game I present to you:

• The Lighthouse Of Doom
  • https://github.com/skx/lighthouse-of-doom/

In the past, I've talked about building a Z80-based computer. I made some progress towards that goal, in the sense that I took the initial (trivial steps) towards making something:

• I built a clock-circuit.
• I wired up a Z80 processor to the clock.
• I got the thing running an endless stream of NOP instructions.
  • No RAM/ROM connected, tying all the bus-lines low, meaning every attempted memory-read returned 0x00 which is the Z80 NOP instruction.

But then I stalled, repeatedly, at designing an interface to RAM and ROM, so that it could actually do something useful. Over the lockdown I've been in two minds about getting sucked back down the rabbit-hole, so I compromised. I did a bit of searching on tindie, and similar places, and figured I'd buy a Z80-based single board computer. My requirements were minimal:

• It must run CP/M.
• The source-code to "everything" must be available.
• I want it to run standalone, and connect to a host via a serial-port.

With those goals there were a bunch of boards to choose from, rc2014 is the standard choice - a well engineered system which uses a common backplane and lets you build mini-boards to add functionality. So first you build the CPU-card, then the RAM card, then the flash-disk card, etc. Over-engineered in one sense, extensible in another. (There are some single-board variants to cut down on soldering overhead, at a cost of less flexibility.) After a while I came across https://8bitstack.co.uk/, which describes a simple board called the the Z80 playground. The advantage of this design is that it loads code from a USB stick, making it easy to transfer files to/from it, without the need for a compact flash card, or similar. The downside is that the system has only 64K RAM, meaning it cannot run CP/M 3, only 2.2. (CP/M 3.x requires more RAM, and a banking/paging system setup to swap between pages.) When the system boots it loads code from an EEPROM, which then fetches the CP/M files from the USB-stick, copies them into RAM and executes them. The memory map can be split so you either have ROM & RAM, or you have just RAM (after the boot the ROM will be switched off). To change the initial stuff you need to reprogram the EEPROM, after that it's just a matter of adding binaries to the stick or transferring them over the serial port. In only a couple of hours I got the basic stuff working as well as I needed:

• A z80-assembler on my Linux desktop to build simple binaries.
• An installation of Turbo Pascal 3.00A on the system itself.
  • I used this to build some simple utilities.
  • There's a good overview of using turbopascal here which covers how to use/quit the editor, compile binaries, etc.
• An installation of FORTH on the system itself.
  • Which is nice.
• A couple of simple games compiled from Pascal
  • Snake, Tetris, etc.
• The Zork trilogy installed, along with Hitchhikers guide.

I had some fun with a CP/M emulator to get my hand back in things before the board arrived, and using that I tested my first "real" assembly language program (cls to clear the screen), as well as got the hang of using the wordstar keyboard shortcuts as used within the turbo pascal environment. I have some plans for development:

• Add command-line history (page-up/page-down) for the CP/M command-processor.
• Add paging to TYPE, and allow terminating with Q.

Nothing major, but fun changes that won't be too difficult to implement. Since CP/M 2.x has no concept of sub-directories you end up using drives for everything, I implemented a "search-path" so that when you type "FOO" it will attempt to run "A:FOO.COM" if there is no file matching on the current-drive. That's a nicer user-experience at all. I also wrote some Z80-assembly code to search all drives for an executable, if not found in current drive and not already qualified. Remember CP/M doesn't have a concept of sub-directories) that's actually pretty useful:

  B>LOCATE H*.COM
  P:HELLO   COM
  P:HELLO2  COM
  G:HITCH   COM
  E:HYPHEN  COM

I've also written some other trivial assembly language tools, which was surprisingly relaxing. Especially once I got back into the zen mode of optimizing for size. I forked the upstream repository, mostly to tidy up the contents, rather than because I want to go into my own direction. I'll keep the contents in sync, because there's no point splitting a community even further - I guess there are fewer than 100 of these boards in the wild, probably far far fewer!

• My fork
• The original

We're almost there: last lots of AMD64 testing on the debian-live images - a couple of willing helpers are also testing some i386 images though these can be more problematic on low memory. Steve has just started the final stage to start the final scripts. If all goes well, they should be done within 3/4 of an hour - which should put the images in the final locations on the main mirror by about 2230 UTC. It's been something of the order of twelve hours from start to finish which is still slightly quicker than most of the releases we've done - as ever, thanks to all. And that's it for another however long until we get to sort out 10.10 in a while.

Steve is about to sign the release and to begin the push across to the mirrors.Although it sometimes seems like an age, this will be approximately 8 hours rather than 15 hours - a 50% improvement in release timetable means that the behind the scenes work has been well worth while.We always find tweaks, improvements, things we forgot and genuine bugs. Once again: We've found that live images can be significantly memory intensive on older hardware or machines with limited memory. The boot process for any live CD image expands a squashfs so that the image runs entirely in memory. This is particularly noticeable on the 32 bit i386 images. These really require a minimum of 2GB of memory if you are using the heavier weight desktop images like KDE or Gnome: much less and they will either be unreasonably slow or just fail to work.There is also now a note on the download pages warning on this.Thanks once again to maswan early on and Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, Schweer, linux-fan and sqr not for helping out in testing images. I'm listening in to an impromptu chat explaining the behind the scenes steps to run to actually sign and push the final images so we're a short while away from publishing to the principal CD image machine. At the same time, the torrent seeders will be started and the scripts will push to update the mirrors. And so to the next time :)Handy tip For people running mirrors of debian-cd: If you're low on disk space, perhaps you could remove the 10.7 images by hand before running your next sync scripts to allow space for 10.8 to move in: any ftpsync or rsync process might only remove the old images after copying in the new ones. It's only about 220GB - but you don't want that to be an instantaneous 440GB.

Nothing too much has happened recently, largely as a result of the pandemic killing a lot of daily interests and habits. However as a result of Brexit I'm having to do some paperwork, apparently I now need to register for permanent residency under the terms of the withdrawal agreement, and that will supersede the permanent residency I previously obtained. Of course as a UK citizen I've now lost the previously-available freedom of movement. I can continue to reside here in Helsinki, Finland, indefinitely, but I cannot now move to any other random EU country. It has crossed my mind, more than a few times, that I should attempt to achieve Finnish citizenship. As a legal resident of Finland the process is pretty simple, I just need two things:

• Prove I've lived here for the requisite number of years.
• Pass a language test.

Of course the latter requirement is hard, I can understand a lot of spoken and written Finnish, but writing myself, and speaking a lot is currently beyond me. I need to sit down and make the required effort to increase my fluency. There is the alternative option of learning Swedish, which is a hack a lot of immigrants use:

• Learning Swedish is significantly easier for a native English-speaker.
• But the downside is that it would be learning a language solely to "cheat" the test, it wouldn't actually be useful in my daily life.

Finland has two official languages, and so the banks, the medical world, the tax-office, etc, are obliged to provide service in both. However daily life, ordering food at restaurants, talking to parents in the local neighborhood? Finnish, or English are the only real options. So if I went this route I'd end up in a weird situation where I had to learn a language to pass a test, but then would continue to need to learn more Finnish to live my life. That seems crazy, unless I were desperate for a second citizenship which I don't think I am. Learning Finnish has not yet been a priority, largely because I work in English in the IT-world, and of course when I first moved here I was working (remotely) for a UK company, and didn't have the time to attend lessons (because they were scheduled during daytime, on the basis that many immigrants are unemployed). Later we had a child, which meant that early-evening classes weren't a realistic option either. (Of course I learned a lot of the obvious things immediately upon moving, things like numbers, names for food, days of the week were essential. Without those I couldn't have bought stuff in shops and would have starved!) On the topic of languages a lot of people talk about how easy it is for children to pick up new languages, and while that is broadly true it is also worth remembering just how many years of correction and repetition they have to endure as part of the process. For example we have a child, as noted already, he is spoken to by everybody in Finnish. I speak to him in English, and he hears his mother and myself speaking English. But basically he's 100% Finnish with the exception of:

• Me, speaking English to him.
• His mother and I speaking English in his hearing.
• Watching Paw Patrol.

If he speaks Finnish to me I pretend to not understand him, even when I do, just for consistency. As a result of that I've heard him tell strangers "Daddy doesn't speak Finnish" (in Finnish) when we've been stopped and asked for directions. He also translates what some other children have said into English for my benefit which is adorable Anyway he's four, and he's pretty amazing at speaking to everybody in the correct language - he's outgrown the phase where he'd mix different languages in the same sentence ("more leip ", "saisinko milk") - when I took him to the UK he surprised and impressed me by being able to understand a lot of the heavy/thick accents he'd never heard before. (I'll still need to train him on Rab C. Nesbitt when he's a wee bit older, but so far no worries.) So children learn languages, easily and happily? Yes and no. I've spent nearly two years correcting his English and he still makes the same mistake with gender. It's not a big deal, at all, but it's a reminder that while children learn this stuff, they still don't do it as easily as people imagine. I'm trying to learn and if I'd been corrected for two years over the same basic point you'd rightly think I was "slow", but actually that's just how it works. Learning languages requires a hell of a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a lot of feedback/corrections. Specifically Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, the same word is used for "he" and "she". This leads to a lot of Finnish people, adults and children, getting the pronouns wrong in English. In the case of our child he'll say "Mommy is sleeping, when he wake up?" In the case of adults I've heard people say "My girlfriend is a doctor, he works in a hospital", or "My dad is an accountant, she works for a big firm". As I say I've spent around two years making this correction to the child, and he's still nowhere near getting it right. Kinda adorable actually:

• "Mommy is a woman we say "when she wakes up"..."
• "Adriana is a girl we say "her bike".."

All of the testing of the normal Debian images has gone through the steps we lay out. We're now working on the Debian live CDs which take significantly longer per image.Looks like a long night until Steve is ready to sign the release and begin the final transfer - however much we try to minimise it, it's a 12-15 hour process and my thanks go to RattusRattus and Steve for the final stages of a very long day.

Back in 2017 I announced that the https://Debian-Administration.org website was being made read-only, and archived. At the time I wrote a quick update to save each requested page as a flat-file, hashed beneath /tmp, with the expectation that after a few months I'd have a complete HTML-only archive of the site which I could serve as a static-website, instead of keeping the database and pile of CGI scripts running. Unfortunately I never got round to archiving the pages in a git-repository, or some other store, and I usually only remembered this local tree of content was available a few minutes after I'd rebooted the server and lost the stuff - as the reboot would reap the contents of /tmp! Thinking about it today I figured I probably didn't even need to do that, instead I just need to redirect to the wayback machine. Working on the assumption that the site has been around for "a while" it should have all the pages mirrored by now I've made a "final update" to Apache:

 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteRule   ^/(.*)  "http://web.archive.org/web/https://debian-administration.org/$1"  [R,L]

Assuming nobody reports a problem in the next month I'll retire the server and make a simple docker container to handle the appropriate TLS certificate renewal, and hardwire the redirection(s) for the sites involved.

For the past few years I've had a bunch of virtual machines hosting websites, services, and servers. Of course I want them to be available - especially since I charge people money to access at some of them (for example my dns-hosting service) - and that means I want to know when they're not. The way I've gone about this is to have a bunch of machines running stuff, and then dedicate an entirely separate machine solely for monitoring and alerting. Sure you can run local monitoring, testing that services are available, the root-disk isn't full, and that kind of thing. But only by testing externally can you see if the machine is actually available to end-users, customers, or friends.

A local-agent might decide "I'm fine", but if the hosting-company goes dark due to a fibre cut you're screwed.

I've been hosting my services with Hetzner (cloud) recently, and their service is generally pretty good. Unfortunately I've started to see an increasing number of false-alarms. I'd have a server in Germany, with the monitoring machine in Helsinki (coincidentally where I live!). For the past month I've started to get pinged with a failure every three/four days on average, "service down - dns failed", or "service down - timeout". When the notice would wake me up I'd go check and it would be fine, it was a very transient failure. To be honest the reason for this is my monitoring is just too damn aggressive, I like to be alerted immediately in case something is wrong. That means if a single test fails I get an alert, as rather than only if a test failed for something more reasonable like three+ consecutive failures. I'm experimenting with monitoring in a less aggressive fashion, from my home desktop. Since my monitoring tool is a single self-contained golang binary, and it is already packaged as a docker-based container deployment was trivial. I did a little work writing an agent to receive failure-notices, and ping me via telegram - instead of the previous approach where I had an online status-page which I could view via my mobile, and alerts via pushover. So far it looks good. I've tweaked the monitoring to setup a timeout of 15 seconds, instead of 5, and I've configured it to only alert me if there is an outage which lasts for >= 2 consecutive failures. I guess the TLDR is I now do offsite monitoring .. from my house, rather than from a different region. The only real reason to write this post was mostly to say that the process of writing a trivial "notify me" gateway to interface with telegram was nice and straightforward, and to remind myself that transient failures are way more common than we expect. I'll leave things alone for a moment, but it was a fun experiment. I'll keep the two systems in parallel for a while, but I guess I can already predict the outcome:

• The desktop monitoring will report transient outages now and again, because home broadband isn't 100% available.
• The heztner-based monitoring, in a different region, will report transient problems, because even hosting companies are not 100% available.
  • Especially at the cheap prices I'm paying.
• The way to avoid being woken up by transient outages/errors is to be less agressive.
  • I think my paying users will be OK if I find out a services is offline after 5 minutes, rather than after 30 seconds.
  • If they're not we'll have to talk about budgets ..

Recently I've been writing a couple of simple compilers, which take input in a particular format and generate assembly language output. This output can then be piped through gcc to generate a native executable. Public examples include this trivial math compiler and my brainfuck compiler. Of course there's always the nagging thought that relying upon gcc (or nasm) is a bit of a cheat. So I wondered how hard is it to write an assembler? Something that would take assembly-language program and generate a native (ELF) binary? And the answer is "It isn't hard, it is just tedious". I found some code to generate an ELF binary, and after that assembling simple instructions was pretty simple. I remember from my assembly-language days that the encoding of instructions can be pretty much handled by tables, but I've not yet gone into that. (Specifically there are instructions like "add rax, rcx", and the encoding specifies the source/destination registers - with different forms for various sized immediates.) Anyway I hacked up a simple assembler, it can compile a.out from this input:

.hello   DB "Hello, world\n"
.goodbye DB "Goodbye, world\n"
        mov rdx, 13        ;; write this many characters
        mov rcx, hello     ;; starting at the string
        mov rbx, 1         ;; output is STDOUT
        mov rax, 4         ;; sys_write
        int 0x80           ;; syscall
        mov rdx, 15        ;; write this many characters
        mov rcx, goodbye   ;; starting at the string
        mov rax, 4         ;; sys_write
        mov rbx, 1         ;; output is STDOUT
        int 0x80           ;; syscall
        xor rbx, rbx       ;; exit-code is 0
        xor rax, rax       ;; syscall will be 1 - so set to xero, then increase
        inc rax            ;;
        int 0x80           ;; syscall

The obvious omission is support for "JMP", "JMP_NZ", etc. That's painful because jumps are encoded with relative offsets. For the moment if you want to jump:

        push foo     ; "jmp foo" - indirectly.
        ret
:bar
        nop          ; Nothing happens
        mov rbx,33   ; first syscall argument: exit code
        mov rax,1    ; system call number (sys_exit)
        int 0x80     ; call kernel
:foo
        push bar     ; "jmp bar" - indirectly.
        ret

I'll update to add some more instructions, and see if I can use it to handle the output I generate from a couple of other tools. If so that's a win, if not then it was a fun learning experience:

• https://github.com/skx/assembler/

So my previous post was all about implementing a simple FORTH-like language. Of course the obvious question is then "What do you do with it"? So I present one possible use - turtle-graphics:

\ Draw a square of the given length/width
: square
  dup dup dup dup
  4 0 do
    forward
    90 turn
  loop
;
\ pen down
1 pen
\ move to the given pixel
100 100 move
\ draw a square of width 50 pixels
50 square
\ save the result (png + gif)
save

Exciting times!

• https://github.com/skx/turtle

Four years ago somebody posted a comment-thread describing how you could start writing a little reverse-polish calculator, in C, and slowly improve it until you had written a minimal FORTH-like system:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082825

At the time I read that comment I'd just hacked up a simple FORTH REPL of my own, in Perl, and I said "thanks for posting". I was recently reminded of this discussion, and decided to work through the process. Using only minimal outside resources the recipe worked as expected! The end-result is I have a working FORTH-lite, or FORTH-like, interpreter written in around 2000 lines of golang! Features include:

• Reverse-Polish mathematical operations.
• Comments between ( and ) are ignored, as expected.
  • Single-line comments \ to the end of the line are also supported.
• Support for floating-point numbers (anything that will fit inside a float64).
• Support for printing the top-most stack element (., or print).
• Support for outputting ASCII characters (emit).
• Support for outputting strings (." Hello, World ").
• Support for basic stack operations (drop, dup, over, swap)
• Support for loops, via do/loop.
• Support for conditional-execution, via if, else, and then.
• Load any files specified on the command-line
  • If no arguments are included run the REPL
• A standard library is loaded, from the present directory, if it is present.

To give a flavour here we define a word called star which just outputs a single start-character:

: star 42 emit ;

Now we can call that (NOTE: We didn't add a newline here, so the REPL prompt follows it, that's expected):

> star
*>

To make it more useful we define the word "stars" which shows N stars:

> : stars dup 0 > if 0 do star loop else drop then ;
> 0 stars
> 1 stars
*> 2 stars
**> 10 stars
**********>

This example uses both if to test that the parameter on the stack was greater than zero, as well as do/loop to handle the repetition. Finally we use that to draw a box:

> : squares 0 do over stars cr loop ;
> 4 squares
****
****
****
****
> 10 squares
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********
**********

For fun we allow decompiling the words too:

> #words 0 do dup dump loop
..
Word 'square'
 0: dup
 1: *
Word 'cube'
 0: dup
 1: square
 2: *
Word '1+'
 0: store 1.000000
 2: +
Word 'test_hot'
  0: store 0.000000
  2: >
  3: if
  4: [cond-jmp 7.000000]
  6: hot
  7: then
..

Anyway if that is at all interesting feel free to take a peak. There's a bit of hackery there to avoid the use of return-stacks, etc. Compared to gforth this is actually more featureful in some areas:

• I allow you to use conditionals in the REPL - outside a word-definition.
• I allow you to use loops in the REPL - outside a word-definition.

Find the code here:

• https://github.com/skx/foth

So many good books, so little reading time. Jairus Banaji A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (nonfiction)
Steven Brust The Baron of Magister Valley (sff)
Micaiah Johnson The Space Between Worlds (sff)
Ian McDonald Luna: New Moon (sff)
Elizabeth Moon Trading in Danger (sff)
Tamsyn Muir Harrow the Ninth (sff)
Suzanne Palmer Finder (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Shame (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Control (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Pain (sff)
Arundhati Roy Azadi (nonfiction)
Jeff VanderMeer Authority (sff)
Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance (sff)
K.B. Wagers Behind the Throne (sff)
Jarrett Walker Human Transit (nonfiction) I took advantage of a few sales to get books I know I'm going to want to read eventually for a buck or two.

Previously: v5.5. Linux v5.6 was released back in March. Here s my quick summary of various features that caught my attention: WireGuard
The widely used WireGuard VPN has been out-of-tree for a very long time. After 3 1/2 years since its initial upstream RFC, Ard Biesheuvel and Jason Donenfeld finished the work getting all the crypto prerequisites sorted out for the v5.5 kernel. For this release, Jason has gotten WireGuard itself landed. It was a twisty road, and I m grateful to everyone involved for sticking it out and navigating the compromises and alternative solutions. openat2() syscall and RESOLVE_* flags
Aleksa Sarai has added a number of important path resolution scoping options to the kernel s open() handling, covering things like not walking above a specific point in a path hierarchy (RESOLVE_BENEATH), disabling the resolution of various magic links (RESOLVE_NO_MAGICLINKS) in procfs (e.g. /proc/$pid/exe) and other pseudo-filesystems, and treating a given lookup as happening relative to a different root directory (as if it were in a chroot, RESOLVE_IN_ROOT). As part of this, it became clear that there wasn t a way to correctly extend the existing openat() syscall, so he added openat2() (which is a good example of the efforts being made to codify Extensible Syscall arguments). The RESOLVE_* set of flags also cover prior behaviors like RESOLVE_NO_XDEV and RESOLVE_NO_SYMLINKS. pidfd_getfd() syscall
In the continuing growth of the much-needed pidfd APIs, Sargun Dhillon has added the pidfd_getfd() syscall which is a way to gain access to file descriptors of a process in a race-less way (or when /proc is not mounted). Before, it wasn t always possible make sure that opening file descriptors via /proc/$pid/fd/$N was actually going to be associated with the correct PID. Much more detail about this has been written up at LWN. openat() via io_uring
With my attack surface reduction hat on, I remain personally suspicious of the io_uring() family of APIs, but I can t deny their utility for certain kinds of workloads. Being able to pipeline reads and writes without the overhead of actually making syscalls is pretty great for performance. Jens Axboe has added the IORING_OP_OPENAT command so that existing io_urings can open files to be added on the fly to the mapping of available read/write targets of a given io_uring. While LSMs are still happily able to intercept these actions, I remain wary of the growing syscall multiplexer that io_uring is becoming. I am, of course, glad to see that it has a comprehensive (if out of tree ) test suite as part of liburing. removal of blocking random pool
After making algorithmic changes to obviate separate entropy pools for random numbers, Andy Lutomirski removed the blocking random pool. This simplifies the kernel pRNG code significantly without compromising the userspace interfaces designed to fetch cryptographically secure random numbers. To quote Andy, This series should not break any existing programs. /dev/urandom is unchanged. /dev/random will still block just after booting, but it will block less than it used to. See LWN for more details on the history and discussion of the series. arm64 support for on-chip RNG
Mark Brown added support for the future ARMv8.5 s RNG (SYS_RNDR_EL0), which is, from the kernel s perspective, similar to x86 s RDRAND instruction. This will provide a bootloader-independent way to add entropy to the kernel s pRNG for early boot randomness (e.g. stack canary values, memory ASLR offsets, etc). Until folks are running on ARMv8.5 systems, they can continue to depend on the bootloader for randomness (via the UEFI RNG interface) on arm64. arm64 E0PD
Mark Brown added support for the future ARMv8.5 s E0PD feature (TCR_E0PD1), which causes all memory accesses from userspace into kernel space to fault in constant time. This is an attempt to remove any possible timing side-channel signals when probing kernel memory layout from userspace, as an alternative way to protect against Meltdown-style attacks. The expectation is that E0PD would be used instead of the more expensive Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) features on arm64. powerpc32 VMAP_STACK
Christophe Leroy added VMAP_STACK support to powerpc32, joining x86, arm64, and s390. This helps protect against the various classes of attacks that depend on exhausting the kernel stack in order to collide with neighboring kernel stacks. (Another common target, the sensitive thread_info, had already been moved away from the bottom of the stack by Christophe Leroy in Linux v5.1.) generic Page Table dumping
Related to RISCV s work to add page table dumping (via /sys/fs/debug/kernel_page_tables), Steven Price extracted the existing implementations from multiple architectures and created a common page table dumping framework (and then refactored all the other architectures to use it). I m delighted to have this because I still remember when not having a working page table dumper for ARM delayed me for a while when trying to implement upstream kernel memory protections there. Anything that makes it easier for architectures to get their kernel memory protection working correctly makes me happy. That s in for now; let me know if there s anything you think I missed. Next up: Linux v5.7.

2020, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.