Review: Crashed, by Adam Tooze

Publisher:	Penguin Books
Copyright:	2018
Printing:	2019
ISBN:	0-525-55880-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	615

The histories of the 2008 financial crisis that I have read focus almost exclusively on the United States. They also stop after the bank rescue and TARP or, if they press on into the aftermath, focus on the resulting damage to the US economy and the widespread pain of falling housing prices and foreclosure. Crashed does neither, instead arguing that 2008 was a crisis of European banks as much as American banks. It extends its history to cover the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, treating it as a continuation of the same crisis in a different guise. In the process, Tooze makes a compelling argument that one can draw a clear, if wandering, line from the moral revulsion at the propping up of the international banking system to Brexit and Trump. Qualifications first, since they are important for this type of comprehensive and, in places, surprising and counterintuitive history. Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University and the director of its European Institute. His previous books have won multiple awards, and Crashed won the Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction on foreign policy. That it won a prize in that topic, rather than history or economics, is a hint at Tooze's chosen lens. The first half of the book is the lead-up and response to the crisis provoked by the collapse in value of securitized US mortgages and leading to the failure of Lehman Brothers, the failure in all but name of AIG, and a massive bank rescue. The financial instruments at the center of the crisis are complex and difficult to understand, and Tooze provides only brief explanation. This therefore may not be the best first book on the crisis; for that, I would still recommend Bethany McClean and Joe Nocera's All the Devils Are Here, although it's hard to beat Michael Lewis's storytelling in The Big Short. Tooze is not interested in dwelling on a blow-by-blow account of the crisis and initial response, and some of his account feels perfunctory. He is instead interested in describing its entangled global sweep. The new detail I took from the first half of Crashed is the depth of involvement of the European banks in what is often portrayed as a US crisis. Tooze goes into more specifics than other accounts on the eurodollar market, run primarily through the City of London, and the vast dollar-denominated liabilities of European banks. When the crisis struck, the breakdown of liquidity markets left those banks with no source of dollar funding to repay dollar-denominated short-term loans. The scale of dollar borrowing by European banks was vast, dwarfing the currency reserves or trade surpluses of their home countries. An estimate from the Bank of International Settlements put the total dollar funding needs for European banks at more than $2 trillion. The institution that saved the European banks was the United States Federal Reserve. This was an act of economic self-protection, not largesse; in the absence of dollar liquidity, the fire sale of dollar assets by European banks in a desperate attempt to cover their loans would have exacerbated the market crash. But it's remarkable in its extent, and in how deeply this contradicts the later public political position that 2008 was an American recession caused by American banks. 52% of the mortgage-backed securities purchased by the Federal Reserve in its quantitative easing policies (popularly known as QE1, QE2, and QE3) were sold by foreign banks. Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse unloaded more securities on the Fed than any American bank by a significant margin. And when that wasn't enough, the Fed went farther and extended swap lines to major national banks, providing them dollar liquidity that they could then pass along to their local institutions. In essence, in Tooze's telling, the US Federal Reserve became the reserve bank for the entire world, preventing a currency crisis by providing dollars to financial systems both foreign and domestic, and it did so with a remarkable lack of scrutiny. Its swap lines avoided public review until 2010, when Bloomberg won a court fight to extract the records. That allowed the European banks that benefited to hide the extent of their exposure.

In Europe, the bullish CEOs of Deutsche Bank and Barclays claimed exceptional status because they avoided taking aid from their national governments. What the Fed data reveal is the hollowness of those boasts. The banks might have avoided state-sponsored recapitalization, but every major bank in the entire world was taking liquidity assistance on a grand scale from its local central bank, and either directly or indirectly by way of the swap lines from the Fed.

The emergency steps taken by Timothy Geithner in the Treasury Department were nearly as dramatic as those of the Federal Reserve. Without regard for borders, and pushing the boundary of their legal authority, they intervened massively in the world (not just the US) economy to save the banking and international finance system. And it worked. One of the benefits of a good history is to turn stories about heroes and villains into more nuanced information about motives and philosophies. I came away from Sheila Bair's account of the crisis furious at Geithner's protection of banks from any meaningful consequences for their greed. Tooze's account, and analysis, agrees with Bair in many respects, but Bair was continuing a personal fight and Tooze has more space to put Geithner into context. That context tells an interesting story about the shape of political economics in the 21st century. Tooze identifies Geithner as an institutionalist. His goal was to keep the system running, and he was acutely aware of what would happen if it failed. He therefore focused on the pragmatic and the practical: the financial system was about to collapse, he did whatever was necessary to keep it working, and that effort was successful. Fairness, fault, and morals were treated as irrelevant. This becomes more obvious when contrasted with the eurozone crisis, which started with a Greek debt crisis in the wake of the recession triggered by the 2008 crisis. Greece is tiny by the standards of the European economy, so at first glance there is no obvious reason why its debt crisis should have perturbed the financial system. Under normal circumstances, its lenders should have been able to absorb such relatively modest losses. But the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis was not normal circumstances, particularly in Europe. The United States had moved aggressively to recapitalize its banks using the threat of compensation caps and government review of their decisions. The European Union had not; European countries had done very little, and their banks were still in a fragile state. Worse, the European Central Bank had sent signals that the market interpreted as guaranteeing the safety of all European sovereign debt equally, even though this was explicitly ruled out by the Lisbon Treaty. If Greece defaulted on its debt, not only would that be another shock to already-precarious banks, it would indicate to the market that all European debt was not equal and other countries may also be allowed to default. As the shape of the Greek crisis became clearer, the cost of borrowing for all of the economically weaker European countries began rising towards unsustainable levels. In contrast to the approach taken by the United States government, though, Europe took a moralistic approach to the crisis. Jean-Claude Trichet, then president of the European Central Bank, held the absolute position that defaulting on or renegotiating the Greek debt was unthinkable and would not be permitted, even though there was no realistic possibility that Greece would be able to repay. He also took a conservative hard line on the role of the ECB, arguing that it could not assist in this crisis. (Tooze is absolutely scathing towards Trichet, who comes off in this account as rigidly inflexible, volatile, and completely irrational.) Germany's position, represented by Angela Merkel, was far more realistic: Greece's debt should be renegotiated and the creditors would have to accept losses. This is, in Tooze's account, clearly correct, and indeed is what eventually happened. But the problem with Merkel's position was the potential fallout. The German government was still in denial about the health of its own banks, and political opinion, particularly in Merkel's coalition, was strongly opposed to making German taxpayers responsible for other people's debts. Stopping the progression of a Greek default to a loss of confidence in other European countries would require backstopping European sovereign debt, and Merkel was not willing to support this. Tooze is similarly scathing towards Merkel, but I'm not sure it's warranted by his own account. She seemed, even in his account, boxed in by domestic politics and the tight constraints of the European political structure. Regardless, even after Trichet's term ended and he was replaced by the far more pragmatic Mario Draghi, Germany and Merkel continued to block effective action to relieve Greece's debt burden. As a result, the crisis lurched from inadequate stopgap to inadequate stopgap, forcing crippling austerity, deep depressions, and continued market instability while pretending unsustainable debt would magically become payable through sufficient tax increases and spending cuts. US officials such as Geithner, who put morals and arguably legality aside to do whatever was needed to save the system, were aghast. One takeaway from this is that expansionary austerity is the single worst macroeconomic idea that anyone has ever had.

In the summer of 2012 [the IMF's] staff revisited the forecasts they had made in the spring of 2010 as the eurozone crisis began and discovered that they had systematically underestimated the negative impact of budget cuts. Whereas they had started the crisis believing that the multiplier was on average around 0.5, they now concluded that from 2010 forward it had been in excess of 1. This meant that cutting government spending by 1 euro, as the austerity programs demanded, would reduce economic activity by more than 1 euro. So the share of the state in economic activity actually increased rather than decreased, as the programs presupposed. It was a staggering admission. Bad economics and faulty empirical assumptions had led the IMF to advocate a policy that destroyed the economic prospects for a generation of young people in Southern Europe.

Another takeaway, though, is central to Tooze's point in the final section of the book: the institutionalists in the United States won the war on financial collapse via massive state interventions to support banks and the financial system, a model that Europe grudgingly had to follow when attempting to reject it caused vast suffering while still failing to stabilize the financial system. But both did so via actions that were profoundly and obviously unfair, and only questionably legal. Bankers suffered few consequences for their greed and systematic mismanagement, taking home their normal round of bonuses while millions of people lost their homes and unemployment rates for young men in some European countries exceeded 50%. In Europe, the troika's political pressure against Greece and Italy was profoundly anti-democratic. The financial elite achieved their goal of saving the financial system. It could have failed, that failure would have been catastrophic, and their actions are defensible on pragmatic grounds. But they completely abandoned the moral high ground in the process. The political forces opposed to centrist neoliberalism attempted to step into that moral gap. On the Left, that came in the form of mass protest movements, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, and parties such as Syriza in Greece. The Left, broadly, took the moral side of debtors, holding that the primary pain of the crisis should instead be born by the wealthy creditors who were more able to absorb it. The Right by contrast, in the form of the Tea Party movement inside the Republican Party in the United States and the nationalist parties in Europe, broadly blamed debtors for taking on excessive debt and focused their opposition on use of taxpayer dollars to bail out investment banks and other institutions of the rich. Tooze correctly points out that the Right's embrace of racist nationalism and incoherent demagoguery obscures the fact that their criticism of the elite center has real merit and is partly shared by the Left. As Tooze sketches out, the elite centrist consensus held in most of Europe, beating back challenges from both the Left and the Right, although it faltered in the UK, Poland, and Hungary. In the United States, the Democratic Party similarly solidified around neoliberalism and saw off its challenges from the Left. The Republican Party, however, essentially abandoned the centrist position, embracing the Right. That left the Democratic Party as the sole remaining neoliberal institutionalist party, supplemented by a handful of embattled Republican centrists. Wall Street and its money swung to the Democratic Party, but it was deeply unpopular on both the Left and the Right and this shift may have hurt them more than helped. The Democrats, by not abandoning the center, bore the brunt of the residual anger over the bank bailout and subsequent deep recession. Tooze sees in that part of the explanation for Trump's electoral victory over Hilary Clinton. This review is already much too long, and I haven't even mentioned Tooze's clear explanation of the centrality of treasury bonds to world finances, or his discussions of Russian and Ukraine, China, or Brexit, all of which I thought were excellent. This is not only an comprehensive history of both of the crises and international politics of the time period. It is also a thought-provoking look at how drastic of interventions are required to keep the supposed free market working, who is left to suffer after those interventions, and the political consequences of the choice to prioritize the stability of a deeply inequitable and unsafe financial system. At least in the United States, there is now a major political party that is likely to oppose even mundane international financial institutions, let alone another major intervention. The neoliberal center is profoundly weakened. But nothing has been done to untangle the international financial system, and little has been done to reduce its risk. The world will go into the next financial challenge still suffering from a legitimacy crisis. Given the miserly, condescending, and dismissive treatment of the suffering general populace after moving heaven and earth to save the banking system, that legitimacy crisis is arguably justified, but an uncontrolled crash of the financial system is not likely to be any kinder to the average citizen than it is to the investment bankers. Crashed is not the best-written book at a sentence-by-sentence level. Tooze's prose is choppy and a bit awkward, and his paragraphs occasionally wander away from a clear point. But the content is excellent and thought-provoking, filling in large sections of the crisis picture that I had not previously been aware of and making a persuasive argument for its continuing effects on current politics. Recommended if you're not tired of reading about financial crises. Rating: 8 out of 10

As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'. I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible... All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).

Hidden Valley Road (2020) Robert Kolker A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) Cat Flyn In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial. Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.

The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) Robert O. Paxton Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today. Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake. In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps... Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.

What Good are the Arts? (2005) John Carey What Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art. But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up. Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art. Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.

How to disable internal keyboard/touchpad when a cat arrives

I m using an external keyboard (1) and mouse (2), but the laptop lid is usually still open for better cooling. That means the internal keyboard (3) and touchpad (4) made of comfortable materials are open to be used by a cat searching for warmth (7), in the obvious every time case that a normal non-heated nest (6) is not enough.

The problem is, everything goes chaotic at that point in the default configuration. The solution is to have quick shortcuts in my Dash to Dock (8) to both disable (10) and enable (9) keyboard and touchpad at a very rapid pace.It is to be noted that I m not disabling the touch screen (5) by default, because most of the time the cat is not leaning on it there is also the added benefit that if one forgets about the internal keyboard and touchpad disabling and detaches the laptop from the USB-C monitor (11), there s the possibility of using the touch screen and on-screen keyboard to type in the password and tap on the keyboard/touchpad enabling shortcut button again. If also touch screen was disabled, the only way would be to go back to an external keyboard or reboot.So here are the scripts. First, the disabling script (pardon my copy-paste use of certain string manipulation tools):

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/send-events "'disabled'"
sudo killall evtest
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "AT Translated Set 2 keyboard"   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "Dell WMI"   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "Power"   grep Kernel   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "Power"   grep Kernel   head -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "Sleep"   grep Kernel   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "HID"   grep Kernel   head -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "HID"   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') &
#sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices   grep -A 1 "ELAN"   tail -n 1   sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') # Touch screen

And the associated ~/.local/share/applications/disable-internal-input.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Disable internal input
GenericName=Disable internal input
Exec=/bin/bash -c /home/timo/Asiakirjat/helpers/disable-internal-input.sh
Icon=yast-keyboard
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;Development;

Here s the enabling script:

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/send-events "'enabled'"
sudo killall evtest

and the desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Enable internal input
GenericName=Enable internal input
Exec=/bin/bash -c /home/timo/Asiakirjat/helpers/enable-internal-input.sh
Icon=/home/timo/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/yast-keyboard-enable.png
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;Development;

With these, if I sense a cat or am just proactive enough, I press Super+9. If I m about to detach my laptop from the monitor, I press Super+8. If I forget the latter (usually this is the case) and haven t yet locked the screen, I just tap the enabling icon on the touch screen.

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

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Timo R hling (roehling)
• Patrick Franz (deltaone)
• Christian Ehrhardt (paelzer)
• Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich (ftobich)
• Taowa (taowa)
• F lix Sipma (felix)
• tienne Mollier (emollier)
• Daniel Swarbrick (dswarbrick)
• Hanno Wagner (wagner)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras
• Hugh McMaster

Congratulations!

Google Pixel phones support what they call Motion Photo which is essentially a photo with a short video clip attached to it. They are quite nice since they bring the moment alive, especially as the capturing of the video starts a small moment before the shutter button is pressed. For most viewing programs they simply show as static JPEG photos, but there is more to the files.

I d really love proper Shotwell support for these file formats, so I posted a longish explanation with many of the details in this blog post to a ticket there too. Examples of the newer format are linked there too.

There are actually two different formats, an old one that is already obsolete, and a newer current format. The older ones are those that your Pixel phone recorded as MVIMG_[datetime].jpg", and they have the following meta-data:

Xmp.GCamera.MicroVideo                       XmpText     1  1
Xmp.GCamera.MicroVideoVersion                XmpText     1  1
Xmp.GCamera.MicroVideoOffset                 XmpText     7  4022143
Xmp.GCamera.MicroVideoPresentationTimestampUs XmpText     7  1331607

The offset is actually from the end of the file, so one needs to calculate accordingly. But it is exact otherwise, so one simply extract a file with that meta-data information:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Extracts the microvideo from a MVIMG_*.jpg file

# The offset is from the ending of the file, so calculate accordingly
offset=$(exiv2 -p X "$1"   grep MicroVideoOffset   sed 's/.*\"\(.*\)"/\1/')
filesize=$(du --apparent-size --block=1 "$1"   sed 's/^\([0-9]*\).*/\1/')
extractposition=$(expr $filesize - $offset)
echo offset: $offset
echo filesize: $filesize
echo extractposition=$extractposition
dd if="$1" skip=1 bs=$extractposition of="$(basename -s .jpg $1).mp4"

The newer format is recorded in filenames called PXL_[datetime].MP.jpg , and they have a _lot_ of additional metadata:

Xmp.GCamera.MotionPhoto                      XmpText     1  1
Xmp.GCamera.MotionPhotoVersion               XmpText     1  1
Xmp.GCamera.MotionPhotoPresentationTimestampUs XmpText     6  233320
Xmp.xmpNote.HasExtendedXMP                   XmpText    32  E1F7505D2DD64EA6948D2047449F0FFA
Xmp.Container.Directory                      XmpText     0  type="Seq"
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]                   XmpText     0  type="Struct"
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]/Container:Item    XmpText     0  type="Struct"
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]/Container:Item/Item:Mime XmpText    10  image/jpeg
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]/Container:Item/Item:Semantic XmpText     7  Primary
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]/Container:Item/Item:Length XmpText     1  0
Xmp.Container.Directory[1]/Container:Item/Item:Padding XmpText     1  0
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]                   XmpText     0  type="Struct"
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]/Container:Item    XmpText     0  type="Struct"
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]/Container:Item/Item:Mime XmpText     9  video/mp4
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]/Container:Item/Item:Semantic XmpText    11  MotionPhoto
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]/Container:Item/Item:Length XmpText     7  1679555
Xmp.Container.Directory[2]/Container:Item/Item:Padding XmpText     1  0

Sounds like fun and lots of information. However I didn t see why the length in first item is 0 and I didn t see how to use the latter Length info. But I can use the mp4 headers to extract it:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Extracts the motion part of a MotionPhoto file PXL_*.MP.mp4

extractposition=$(grep --binary --byte-offset --only-matching --text \
-P "\x00\x00\x00\x18\x66\x74\x79\x70\x6d\x70\x34\x32" $1   sed 's/^\([0-9]*\).*/\1/')

dd if="$1" skip=1 bs=$extractposition of="$(basename -s .jpg $1).mp4"

UPDATE: I wrote most of this blog post earlier. When now actually getting to publishing it a week later, I see the obvious ie the Length is again simply the offset from the end of the file so one could do the same less brute force approach as for MVIMG. I ll leave the above as is however for the of binary grepping.(cross-posted to my other blog)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Timo R hling
• Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich
• Arun Kumar Pariyar
• Francis Murtagh
• William Desportes
• Robin Gustafsson
• Nicholas Guriev

Congratulations!

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

Review: Your Day, Your Way, by Timothy Caulfield

Publisher:	Running Press
Copyright:	December 2020
ISBN:	0-7624-7248-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	236

In case you're wondering why I would pick up a self-help book with such an uninspiring title, it's because this book was originally published in Canada with the title Relax, Damnit! Why Caulfield's US publishers would have changed that title is beyond me. Canada clearly got the better end of this deal. (I'm hoping it's not because they thought "damn" would scare someone off, but it probably is.) The topic of this book is a scientific take on all the little decisions that you may worry about throughout the day: whether to eat breakfast, how much water to drink, whether public toilet seats are risky, whether to weigh yourself, how important flossing is, and much more. Caulfield is a law professor at the University of Alberta specializing in health law and scientific ethics, but the hat he's wearing when writing this book is that of professional skeptic. I found out about this book through Dr. Jen Gunter, a connection that you won't find surprising when I mention that one of Caulfield's earlier books is titled Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?. (Spoiler: yes.) Caulfield chose to organize this collection of random essays around the timeline of a single day, starting with waking up (how long should you sleep?) and morning routines (what do scientific studies say about brushing your teeth?), going through a work day (there's a chapter on multitasking and why you really shouldn't do it), and concluding with dinner (no, you can't taste the difference between most wines even if you think you can), evening routines, and sleep. This worked for me. It's still a bit arbitrary, but it's hard to organize random bits of skepticism, and this layout let Caulfield make a point about how frequently most people check their phones. (Stop doomscrolling. It makes you feel bad. Yes, I'm talking to myself.) I've now read several books, and considerably more essays, on scientific skepticism of this type. They're all a bit the same, and unless you enjoy this general genre of writing, there aren't many compelling reasons to read this specific entry. (Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is still my favorite.) I think the only tidbit that I found surprising and hadn't heard elsewhere is that the science on flossing is meh at best. The rest is the standard mix of mainstream scientific advice (don't drink raw milk, you're not going to catch something from a public toilet seat, multivitamins just give you expensive urine), advice that's scientifically correct but that I'm still not going to follow (there's no scientific reason to wash your hair daily but I still prefer how it feels), and advice to not worry about things with no evidence on either side (it doesn't matter whether you eat breakfast, ten thousand steps is a marketing gimmick, drink water when you're thirsty and don't worry about how much). Caulfield does have a particularly good debunking of the myth that angry ranting helps you calm down and feel better (it does the exact opposite), but if you're reasonably well-read on scientific trivia, nothing here will be that novel. If you don't follow scientific trivia and want a good collection of debunking essays, this book is fine. I certainly won't discourage you from reading it. Caulfield is engaging and succinct, and there's a balanced mix of odd trivia, debunking of pseudoscience, and good public health advice, all comfortably in line with what I've read elsewhere. That said, I found it striking to read this book shortly after Can't Even. I was hoping that Caulfield would tackle the larger problem of anxiety and overload that is in part created by the proliferation of arbitrary standards and rules to which we hold ourselves. He does tackle some related topics, such as our bizarre belief in the US (and apparently Canada) that it is unsafe to let children walk to school without adult supervision, but Caulfield's solutions are nearly all individual. He wants to inform the reader, he wants to show you how to analyze scientific research and notice when news articles are scaring you unnecessarily, and he wants you to become more immune to fear-mongering. Petersen's salient point in Can't Even is that many of us are burned out already and this is even more work. In order to avoid being gratuitously frightened and deceived by con artists and sensational news stories, we have to run a mental checklist of evidence evaluation and go do independent research. Sure, this works, makes you better at risk analysis, and may thus make you feel calmer, but this takes a lot of time and energy. Wasn't a point of having the news media that other people would do some of that work for you? Once again, everything that's wrong with the world becomes another chore or energy expenditure that we all have to independently make. I know, it's asking too much of a harmless book on the scientific evidence behind daily life decisions to make a political point about individual versus collective effort. But it's hard to shake the feeling that asking individuals to try harder to ignore intentionally deceptive and well-funded propaganda campaigns doesn't scale. Not everyone enjoys skepticism as a hobby, and there's only so much individual energy to go around. Relax, Damnit! is good advice as far as it goes. But I'm more in the mood for the books that look at who is making us so anxious in the first place and how we can (collectively) get them to stop. I don't know what that looks like (there are obvious free speech concerns), but we need reliable sources of information that don't make us anxious. Rating: 6 out of 10

I had been thinking of doing a blog post on RCEP which China signed with 14 countries a week and a day back but this new story has broken and is being viraled a bit on the interwebs, especially twitter and is pretty much in our domain so thought would be better to do a blog post about it. Also, there is quite a lot packed so quite a bit of unpacking to do.

Whitehat, Greyhat and Blackhat For those of you who may not, there are actually three terms especially in computer science that one comes across. Those are white hats, grey hats and black hats. Now clinically white hats are like the fiery angels or the good guys who basically take permissions to try and find out weakness in an application, program, website, organization and so on and so forth. A somewhat dated reference to hacker could be Sandra Bullock (The Net 1995) , Sneakers (1992), Live Free or Die Hard (2007) . Of the three one could argue that Sandra was actually into viruses which are part of computer security but still she showed some bad-ass skills, but then that is what actors are paid to do Sneakers was much more interesting for me because in that you got the best key which can unlock any lock, something like quantum computing is supposed to do. One could equate both the first movies in either as a White hat or a Grey hat . A Grey hat is more flexible in his/her moral values, and they are plenty of such people. For e.g. Julius Assange could be described as a Grey hat, but as you can see and understand those are moral issues.

A black hat on the other hand is one who does things for profit even if it harms the others. The easiest fictitious examples are all Die Hard series, all of them except the 4th one, all had bad guys or black hats. The 4th also had but is the odd one out as it had Matthew Farell (Justin Long) as a Grey hat hacker. In real life Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, Robert Tappan Morris, George Hotz, Gary McKinnon are some examples of hackers, most of whom were black hats, most of them reformed into white hats and security specialists. There are many other groups and names but that perhaps is best for another day altogether. Now why am I sharing this. Because in all of the above, the people who are using and working with the systems have better than average understanding of systems and they arguably would be better than most people at securing their networks, systems etc. but as we shall see in this case there has been lots of issues in the company.

WhiteHat Jr. and 300 Million Dollars Before I start this, I would like to share that for me this suit in many ways seems to be similar to the suit filed against Krishnaraj Rao . Although the difference is that Krishnaraj Rao s case/suit is that it was in real estate while this one is in education although many things are similar to those cases but also differ in some obvious ways. For e.g. in the suit against Krishnaraj Rao, the plaintiff s first approached the High Court and then the Supreme Court. Of course Krishnaraj Rao won in the High Court and then in the SC plaintiff s agreed to Krishnaraj Rao s demands as they knew they could not win in SC. In that case, a compromise was reached by the plaintiff just before judgement was to be delivered. In this case, the plaintiff have directly approached the Delhi High Court. The charges against Mr. Poonia (the defendant in this case) are very much similar to those which were made in Krishnaraj Rao s suit hence won t be going into those details. They have claimed defamation and filed a 20 crore suit. The idea is basically to silence any whistle-blowers.

Fictional Character Wolf Gupta The first issue in this case or perhaps one of the most famous or infamous character is an unknown. While he has been reportedly hired by Google India, BJYU, Chandigarh. This has been reported by Yahoo News. I did a cursory search on LinkedIn to see if there indeed is a wolf gupta but wasn t able to find any person with such a name. I am not even talking the amount of money/salary the fictitious gentleman is supposed to have got and the various variations on the salary figures at different times and the different ads.

If I wanted to, I could have asked few of the kind souls whom I know are working in Google to see if they can find such a person using their own credentials but it probably would have been a waste of time. When you show a LinkedIn profile in your social media, it should come up in the results, in this case it doesn t. I also tried to find out if somehow BJYU was a partner to Google and came up empty there as well. There is another story done by Kan India but as I m not a subscriber, I don t know what they have written but the beginning of the story itself does not bode well. While I can understand marketing, there is a line between marketing something and being misleading. At least to me, all of the references shared seems misleading at least to me.

Taking down dissent One of the big no-nos at least from what I perceive, you cannot and should not take down dissent or critique. Indians, like most people elsewhere around the world, critique and criticize day and night. Social media like twitter, mastodon and many others would not exist in the place if criticisms are not there. In fact, one could argue that Twitter and most social media is used to drive engagements to a person, brand etc. It is even an official policy in Twitter. Now you can t drive engagements without also being open to critique and this is true of all the web, including of WordPress and me . What has been happening is that whitehatjr with help of bjyu have been taking out content of people citing copyright violation which seems laughable. When citizens critique anything, we are obviously going to take the name of the product otherwise people would have to start using new names similar to how Tom Riddle was known as Dark Lord , Voldemort and He who shall not be named . There have been quite a few takedowns, I just provide one for reference, the rest of the takedowns would probably come in the ongoing suit/case.

Whitehat Jr. ad showing investors fighting

Now a brief synopsis of what the ad. is about. The ad is about a kid named Chintu who makes an app. The app. Is so good that investors come to his house and right in the lawn and start fighting each other. The parents are enjoying looking at the fight and to add to the whole thing there is also a nosy neighbor who has his own observations. Simply speaking, it is a juvenile ad but it works as most parents in India, as elsewhere are insecure.

Jihan critiquing the whitehatjr ad

Before starting, let me assure that I asked Jihan s parents if it s ok to share his ad on my blog and they agreed. What he has done is broken down the ad and showed how juvenile the ad is and using logic and humor as a template for the same. He does make sure to state that he does not know how the product is as he hasn t used it. His critique was about the ad and not the product as he hasn t used that.

The Website If you look at the website, sadly, most of the site only talks about itself rather than giving examples that people can look in detail. For e.g. they say they have few apps. on Google play-store but no link to confirm the same. The same is true of quite a few other things. In another ad a Paralympic star says don t get into sports and get into coding. Which athlete in their right mind would say that? And it isn t that we (India) are brimming with athletes at the international level. In the last outing which was had in 2016, India sent a stunning 117 athletes but that was an exception as we had the women s hockey squad which was of 16 women, and even then they were overshadowed in numbers by the bureaucratic and support staff. There was criticism about the staff bit but that is probably a story for another date. Most of the site doesn t really give much value and the point seems to be driving sales to their courses. This is pressurizing small kids as well as teenagers and better who are in the second and third year science-engineering whose parents don t get that it is advertising and it is fake and think that their kids are incompetent. So this pressurizes both small kids as well as those who are learning, doing in whatever college or educational institution . The teenagers more often than not are unable to tell/share with them that this is advertising and fake. Also most of us have been on a a good diet of ads. Fair and lovely still sells even though we know it doesn t work. This does remind me of a similar fake academy which used very much similar symptoms and now nobody remembers them today. There used to be an academy called Wings Academy or some similar name. They used to advertise that you come to us and we will make you into a pilot or an airhostess and it was only much later that it was found out that most kids were doing laundry work in hotels and other such work. Many had taken loans, went bankrupt and even committed suicide because they were unable to pay off the loans due to the dreams given by the company and the harsh realities that awaited them. They were sued in court but dunno what happened but soon they were off the radar so we never came to know what happened to those million of kids whose life dreams were shattered.

Security Now comes the security part. They have alleged that Mr. Poonia broke into their systems. While this may be true, what I find funny is that with the name Whitehat, how can they justify it? If you are saying you are white hat you are supposed to be much better than this. And while I have not tried to penetrate their systems, I did find it laughable that the site is using an expired https:// certificate. I could have tried further to figure out the systems but I chose not to. How they could not have an automated script to get the certificate fixed is beyond me, this is known as certificate outage and is very well understood in the industry. There are tools like Let s Encrypt and Certbot (both EFF) and many others. But that is their concern, not mine.

Comparison A similar offering would be unacademy but as can be seen they neither try to push you in any way and nor do they make any ridiculous claims. In fact how genuine unacademy is can be gauged from the fact that many of its learning resources are available to people to see on YT and if they have tools they can also download it. Now, does this mean that every educational website should have their content for free, of course not. But when a channel has 80% 90% of it YT content as ads and testimonials then they surely should give a reason to pause both for parents and students alike. But if parents had done that much research, then things would not be where they are now.

Allegations Just to complete, there are allegations by Mr. Poonia with some screenshots which show the company has been doing a lot of bad things. For e.g. they were harassing an employee at night 2 a.m. who was frustrated and working in the company at the time. Many of the company staff routinely made sexist and offensive, sexual abusive remarks privately between themselves for prospective women who came to interview via webcam (due to the pandemic). There also seems to be a bit of porn on the web/mobile server of the company as well. There also have been allegations that while the company says refund is done next day, many parents who have demanded those refunds have not got it. Now while Mr. Poonia has shared some quotations of the staff while hiding the identities of both the victims and the perpetrators, the language being used in itself tells a lot. I am in two minds whether to share those photos or not hence atm choosing not to. Poonia has also contended that all teachers do not know programming, and they are given scripts to share. There have been some people who did share that experience with him

Suruchi Sethi

From the company s side they are alleging he has hacked the company servers and would probably be using the Fruit of the poisonous tree argument which we have seen have been used in many arguments.

Conclusion Now that lies in the eyes of the Court whether the single bench chooses the literal meaning or use the spirit of the law or the genuine concerns of the people concerned. While in today s hearing while the company asked for a complete sweeping injunction they were unable to get it. Whatever may happen, we may hope to see some fireworks in the second hearing which is slated to be on 6.01.2021 where all of this plays out. Till later.

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

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

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

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• myrepos: prevent failure from mr status in bzr repos
• foxtrotgps: bzr option typo
• hexchat: hide focus channel menu item when already focussed
• Debian package uploads: foxtrotgps, smart-open, python-importlib-metadata, python-pyfakefs, python-zipp, python-threadpoolctl
• Debian wiki pages: ContributionCertificate, DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals/Audacity/Setup, DebianUnstable, Digital_Cameras/NikonCamera, Firmware/Open, FreedomboxIntroduction, Hardware, NickBlack, PaulWise/Standards, PrivacyIssues, Statistics
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: resources

Issues

• Crashes in gtk-vector-screenshot, gtranscribe (1 2)
• Start failure in rasdaemon
• CVS to git conversion needed for Mancala (sent privately)
• Obsolete conffile removal needed for speech-dispatcher
• Hosting location decision required for apt-repos
• Incorrect homepage in libforms
• Incorrect description for whipper
• Parallel builds needed in cython-blis
• Features in lintian, apt-file
• New versions of thinc, preshed, libforms
• Incorrect paths in theano
• Typo in dpkg (sent on IRC)
• Missing APT_CONFIG usage in apt-repos

Review

• Spam: reported 231 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored iotop-c gtranscribe
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved abcde antimony cava cd-discid celluloid crazydiskinfo drawing dwww elektroid epiphany-browser evolution firefox-esr gaphor gl-117 gnome-2048 gnome-maps gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel gnome-usage gparted iotop-c ipv6toolkit kdenlive kernelshark lazarus libreoffice-writer lollypop lxqt mpv nemo phosh quodlibet superkb supertux telegram-desktop tootle topplot unity-control-center vim-athena zim
  • approved deletion of opencc (screenshot of the github repo), telegram-desktop (low quality)
  • rejected deletion of mumble (screenshots are versioned), audacious (keyboard mash), apache2/hashcat/onboard/jack-keyboard/kcharselect/inxi (spam reason)

Administration

• Debian: restarted RAM eating service
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Sponsors The cython-blis/preshed/thinc/theano bugs and smart-open/python-importlib-metadata/python-pyfakefs/python-zipp/python-threadpoolctl backports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Welcome to the July 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these monthly reports, we round-up the things that we have been up to over the past month. As a brief refresher, the motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. (If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.)

General news At the upcoming DebConf20 conference (now being held online), Holger Levsen will present a talk on Thursday 27th August about Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org were made from their claimed sources. Tavis Ormandy published a blog post making the provocative claim that You don t need reproducible builds , asserting elsewhere that the many attacks that have been extensively reported in our previous reports are fantasy threat models . A number of rebuttals have been made, including one from long-time contributor Reproducible Builds contributor Bernhard Wiedemann. On our mailing list this month, Debian Developer Graham Inggs posted to our list asking for ideas why the openorienteering-mapper Debian package was failing to build on the Reproducible Builds testing framework. Chris Lamb remarked from the build logs that the package may be missing a build dependency, although Graham then used our own diffoscope tool to show that the resulting package remains unchanged with or without it. Later, Nico Tyni noticed that the build failure may be due to the relationship between the FILE C preprocessor macro and the -ffile-prefix-map GCC flag. An issue in Zephyr, a small-footprint kernel designed for use on resource-constrained systems, around .a library files not being reproducible was closed after it was noticed that a key part of their toolchain was updated that now calls --enable-deterministic-archives by default. Reproducible Builds developer kpcyrd commented on a pull request against the libsodium cryptographic library wrapper for Rust, arguing against the testing of CPU features at compile-time. He noted that:

I ve accidentally shipped broken updates to users in the past because the build system was feature-tested and the final binary assumed the instructions would be present without further runtime checks

David Kleuker also asked a question on our mailing list about using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with the install(1) tool from GNU coreutils. When comparing two installed packages he noticed that the filesystem birth times differed between them. Chris Lamb replied, realising that this was actually a consequence of using an outdated version of diffoscope and that a fix was in diffoscope version 146 released in May 2020. Later in July, John Scott posted asking for clarification regarding on the Javascript files on our website to add metadata for LibreJS, the browser extension that blocks non-free Javascript scripts from executing. Chris Lamb investigated the issue and realised that we could drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ].

Development work

Website On our website this month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ]. He also fixed a number of broken URLs [ ][ ]. Gonzalo Bulnes Guilpain made a large number of grammatical improvements [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as some misspellings, case and whitespace changes too [ ][ ][ ]. Lastly, Holger Levsen updated the README file [ ], marked the Alpine Linux continuous integration tests as currently disabled [ ] and linked the Arch Linux Reproducible Status page from our projects page [ ].

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In July, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including releasing versions 150, 151, 152, 153 & 154:

• New features:
  • Add support for flash-optimised F2FS filesystems. (#207)
  • Don t require zipnote(1) to determine differences in a .zip file as we can use libarchive. [ ]
  • Allow --profile as a synonym for --profile=-, ie. write profiling data to standard output. [ ]
  • Increase the minimum length of the output of strings(1) to eight characters to avoid unnecessary diff noise. [ ]
  • Drop some legacy argument styles: --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata have been replaced with --exclude-directory-metadata= yes,no . [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Pass the absolute path when extracting members from SquashFS images as we run the command with working directory in a temporary directory. (#189)
  • Correct adding a comment when we cannot extract a filesystem due to missing libguestfs module. [ ]
  • Don t crash when listing entries in archives if they don t have a listed size such as hardlinks in ISO images. (#188)
• Output improvements:
  • Strip off the file offset prefix from xxd(1) and show bytes in groups of 4. [ ]
  • Don t emit javap not found in path if it is available in the path but it did not result in an actual difference. [ ]
  • Fix ... not available in path messages when looking for Java decompilers that used the Python class name instead of the command. [ ]
• Logging improvements:
  • Add a bit more debugging info when launching libguestfs. [ ]
  • Reduce the --debug log noise by truncating the has_some_content messages. [ ]
  • Fix the compare_files log message when the file does not have a literal name. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Rewrite and rename exit_if_paths_do_not_exist to not check files multiple times. [ ][ ]
  • Add an add_comment helper method; don t mess with our internal list directly. [ ]
  • Replace some simple usages of str.format with Python f-strings [ ] and make it easier to navigate to the main.py entry point [ ].
  • In the RData comparator, always explicitly return None in the failure case as we return a non-None value in the success one. [ ]
  • Tidy some imports [ ][ ][ ] and don t alias a variable when we do not use it. [ ]
  • Clarify the use of a separate NullChanges quasi-file to represent missing data in the Debian package comparator [ ] and clarify use of a null diff in order to remember an exit code. [ ]
• Other changes:
  • Profile the launch of libguestfs filesystems. [ ]
  • Clarify and correct our contributing info. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Jean-Romain Garnier also made the following changes:

• Allow passing a file with a list of arguments via diffoscope @args.txt. (!62)
• Improve the output of side-by-side diffs by detecting added lines better. (!64)
• Remove offsets before instructions in objdump [ ][ ] and remove raw instructions from ELF tests [ ].

Other tools strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. It is used automatically in most Debian package builds. In July, Chris Lamb ensured that we did not install the internal handler documentation generated from Perl POD documents [ ] and fixed a trivial typo [ ]. Marc Herbert added a --verbose-level warning when the Archive::Cpio Perl module is missing. (!6) reprotest is our end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments and then checks the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes to support diffoscope version 153 which had removed the (deprecated) --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata command-line arguments, and updated the testing configuration to also test under Python version 3.8 [ ].

Distributions

Debian In June 2020, Timo R hling filed a wishlist bug against the debhelper build tool impacting the reproducibility status of hundreds of packages that use the CMake build system. This month however, Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper version 13.2 that passes the -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON and -DBUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON arguments to CMake when using the (currently-experimental) Debhelper compatibility level 14. According to Niels, this change:

should fix some reproducibility issues, but may cause breakage if packages run binaries directly from the build directory.

34 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 20 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_order_of_debhelper_snippets_added_by_dh_fortran_mod [ ] and gem2deb_install_mkmf_log [ ] toolchain issues. Lastly, Holger Levsen filed two more wishlist bugs against the debrebuild Debian package rebuilder tool [ ][ ].

openSUSE In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Bernhard also published the results of performing 12,235 verification builds of packages from openSUSE Leap version 15.2 and, as a result, created three pull requests against the openSUSE Build Result Compare Script [ ][ ][ ].

Other distributions In Arch Linux, there was a mass rebuild of old packages in an attempt to make them reproducible. This was performed because building with a previous release of the pacman package manager caused file ordering and size calculation issues when using the btrfs filesystem. A system was also implemented for Arch Linux packagers to receive notifications if/when their package becomes unreproducible, and packagers now have access to a dashboard where they can all see all their unreproducible packages (more info). Paul Spooren sent two versions of a patch for the OpenWrt embedded distribution for adding a build system revision to the packages manifest so that all external feeds can be rebuilt and verified. [ ][ ]

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 these patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • afl (fix an incorrectly built manual page varied from kernel boot options)
  • brp-check-suse (sorting issue)
  • dnscrypt-proxy (sort the output of find(1))
  • graphviz (timezone issue, forwarded from Debian)
  • guile-gcrypt (parallelism)
  • insighttoolkit (prevent CPU detection, forwarded upstream
  • ipopt (parallelism issue and use https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/strip-nondeterminism)
  • jboss-logging-tools (date, forwarded upstream)
  • kismet (date)
  • lcov (date issue, already upstream)
  • multus (date issue, already upstream)
  • multus (date)
  • paperjam (date issue, forwarded upstream)
  • pspp (scrub testsuite.log)
  • python-PyNaCl (sort Python glob/readdir)
  • python-enaml (workaround an open upstream Python issue)
  • sac (omit creation time from .zip files)
  • sql-parser (sort, already upstream)
  • ugrep (CPU-related issue, already upstream)
  • ugrep (CPU-related issue)
  • unknown-horizons (filesystem ordering issue, already upstream)
  • unknown-horizons (filesystem ordering issue)
  • xfce4-panel-profiles (POSIX.1-2001/pax headers)
  • yast2-sound (uses uname -r)
• Chris Lamb:
  • dh-fortran-mod
  • flit
  • gem2deb
  • gmap
  • jskeus
  • libtpms
  • logilab-common
  • mrbayes
  • nmap
  • numpydoc
  • pyerfa
  • python-cooler
  • python-peachpy (forwarded upstream)
  • python-pyxs
  • sratom
  • weather-util
• Guillaume Nodet:
  • apache-sshd (date)

Vagrant Cascadian also reported two issues, the first regarding a regression in u-boot boot loader reproducibility for a particular target [ ] and a non-deterministic segmentation fault in the guile-ssh test suite [ ]. Lastly, Jelle van der Waa filed a bug against the MeiliSearch search API to report that it embeds the current build date.

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Tweak the rescheduling of various architecture and suite combinations. [ ][ ]
  • Fix links for 404 and not for us icons. (#959363)
  • Further work on a rebuilder prototype, for example correctly processing the sbuild exit code. [ ][ ]
  • Update the sudo configuration file to allow the node health job to work correctly. [ ]
  • Add php-horde packages back to the pkg-php-pear package set for the bullseye distribution. [ ]
  • Update the version of debrebuild. [ ]
• System health check development:
  • Add checks for broken SSH [ ], logrotate [ ], pbuilder [ ], NetBSD [ ], unkillable processes [ ], unresponsive nodes [ ][ ][ ][ ], proxy connection failures [ ], too many installed kernels [ ], etc.
  • Automatically fix some failed systemd units. [ ]
  • Add notes explaining all the issues that hosts are experiencing [ ] and handle zipped job log files correctly [ ].
  • Separate nodes which have been automatically marked as down [ ] and show status icons for jobs with issues [ ].
• Misc:
  • Disable all Alpine Linux jobs until they are or Alpine is fixed. [ ]
  • Perform some general upkeep of build nodes hosted by OSUOSL. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the init_node script to suggest using sudo instead of explicit logout and logins [ ][ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

---

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
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

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As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing ...

La morte di Stefano Cucchi avvenne a Roma il 22 ottobre 2009 mentre il giovane era sottoposto a custodia cautelare. Le cause della morte e le responsabilit sono oggetto di procedimenti giudiziari che hanno coinvolto da un lato i medici dell'ospedale Pertini,[1][2][3][4] dall'altro continuano a coinvolgere, a vario titolo, pi militari dell Arma dei Carabinieri[5][6]. Il caso ha attirato l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica a seguito della pubblicazione delle foto dell'autopsia, poi riprese da agenzie di stampa, giornali e telegiornali italiani[7]. La vicenda ha ispirato, altres , documentari e lungometraggi cinematografici.[8][9][10]

La morte di Giuseppe Uva avvenne il 14 giugno 2008 dopo che, nella notte tra il 13 e il 14 giugno, era stato fermato ubriaco da due carabinieri che lo portarono in caserma, dalla quale venne poi trasferito, per un trattamento sanitario obbligatorio, nell'ospedale di Varese, dove mor la mattina successiva per arresto cardiaco. Secondo la tesi dell'accusa, la morte fu causata dalla costrizione fisica subita durante l'arresto e dalle successive violenze e torture che ha subito in caserma. Il processo contro i due carabinieri che eseguirono l'arresto e contro altri sei agenti di polizia ha assolto gli imputati dalle accuse di omicidio preterintenzionale e sequestro di persona[1][2][3][4]. Alla vicenda dedicato il documentario Viva la sposa di Ascanio Celestini[1][5].

Il caso Aldrovandi la vicenda giudiziaria causata dall'uccisione di Federico Aldrovandi, uno studente ferrarese, avvenuta il 25 settembre 2005 a seguito di un controllo di polizia.[1][2][3] I procedimenti giudiziari hanno condannato, il 6 luglio 2009, quattro poliziotti a 3 anni e 6 mesi di reclusione, per "eccesso colposo nell'uso legittimo delle armi";[1][4] il 21 giugno 2012 la Corte di cassazione ha confermato la condanna.[1] All'inchiesta per stabilire la cause della morte ne sono seguite altre per presunti depistaggi e per le querele fra le parti interessate.[1] Il caso stato oggetto di grande attenzione mediatica e ha ispirato un documentario, stato morto un ragazzo.[1][5]

Federico Aldrovandi (17 July 1987 in Ferrara 25 September 2005 in Ferrara) was an Italian student, who was killed by four policemen.[1]

24 Giugno 2020

Welcome to the June 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month.

What are reproducible builds? One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. But whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into seemingly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

News The GitHub Security Lab published a long article on the discovery of a piece of malware designed to backdoor open source projects that used the build process and its resulting artifacts to spread itself. In the course of their analysis and investigation, the GitHub team uncovered 26 open source projects that were backdoored by this malware and were actively serving malicious code. (Full article) Carl Dong from Chaincode Labs uploaded a presentation on Bitcoin Build System Security and reproducible builds to YouTube: The app intended to trace infection chains of Covid-19 in Switzerland published information on how to perform a reproducible build. The Reproducible Builds project has received funding in the past from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to reach specific technical goals, as well as to enable the project to meet in-person at our summits. The OTF has actually also assisted countless other organisations that promote transparent, civil society as well as those that provide tools to circumvent censorship and repressive surveillance. However, the OTF has now been threatened with closure. (More info) It was noticed that Reproducible Builds was mentioned in the book End-user Computer Security by Mark Fernandes (published by WikiBooks) in the section titled Detection of malware in software. Lastly, reproducible builds and other ideas around software supply chain were mentioned in a recent episode of the Ubuntu Podcast in a wider discussion about the Snap and application stores (at approx 16:00).

Distribution work In the ArchLinux distribution, a goal to remove .doctrees from installed files was created via Arch s TODO list mechanism. These .doctree files are caches generated by the Sphinx documentation generator when developing documentation so that Sphinx does not have to reparse all input files across runs. They should not be packaged, especially as they lead to the package being unreproducible as their pickled format contains unreproducible data. Jelle van der Waa and Eli Schwartz submitted various upstream patches to fix projects that install these by default. Dimitry Andric was able to determine why the reproducibility status of FreeBSD s base.txz depended on the number of CPU cores, attributing it to an optimisation made to the Clang C compiler [ ]. After further detailed discussion on the FreeBSD bug it was possible to get the binaries reproducible again [ ]. For the GNU Guix operating system, Vagrant Cascadian started a thread about collecting reproducibility metrics and Jan janneke Nieuwenhuizen posted that they had further reduced their bootstrap seed to 25% which is intended to reduce the amount of code to be audited to avoid potential compiler backdoors. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update as well as made the following changes within the distribution itself:

• autogen (Date issue)
• carla (Timestamp in Windows Portable Executable executables)
• fonttosfnt/xorg-x11-fonts (Address space layout randomization issue)
• fossil (Date issue)
• gcc10 C++ (Link-time optimisation issue)
• grep (Profile-guided optimisation issue)
• kubernetes1.18 (Remove Go build identifier)
• libjcat (Remove certificate)
• lifelines (Date issue)
• miredo (Drop hostname)
• stressapptest (Override date, user & host)

Debian Holger Levsen filed three bugs (#961857, #961858 & #961859) against the reproducible-check tool that reports on the reproducible status of installed packages on a running Debian system. They were subsequently all fixed by Chris Lamb [ ][ ][ ]. Timo R hling filed a wishlist bug against the debhelper build tool impacting the reproducibility status of 100s of packages that use the CMake build system which led to a number of tests and next steps. [ ] Chris Lamb contributed to a conversation regarding the nondeterministic execution of order of Debian maintainer scripts that results in the arbitrary allocation of UNIX group IDs, referencing the Tails operating system s approach this [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian also added to a discussion regarding verification formats for reproducible builds. 47 reviews of Debian packages were added, 37 were updated and 69 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb identified and classified a new uids_gids_in_tarballs_generated_by_cmake_kde_package_app_templates issue [ ] and updated the paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge as deterministic issue, and Vagrant Cascadian updated the cmake_rpath_contains_build_path and gcc_captures_build_path issues. [ ][ ][ ]. Lastly, Debian Developer Bill Allombert started a mailing list thread regarding setting the -fdebug-prefix-map command-line argument via an environment variable and Holger Levsen also filed three bugs against the debrebuild Debian package rebuilder tool (#961861, #961862 & #961864).

Development On our website this month, Arnout Engelen added a link to our Mastodon account [ ] and moved the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH git log example to another section [ ]. Chris Lamb also limited the number of news posts to avoid showing items from (for example) 2017 [ ]. strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. It is used automatically in most Debian package builds. This month, Mattia Rizzolo bumped the debhelper compatibility level to 13 [ ] and adjusted a related dependency to avoid potential circular dependency [ ].

Upstream work The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix unreproducible packages and we try to to send all of our patches upstream. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches including:

• Andreas Schleifer:
  • conky
  • kismet
  • nitrokey-app
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • autogen (race condition)
  • cockpit (date)
  • fossil (date)
  • libnvidia-container (date)
  • libv3270 ( date)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #962401 filed against netcdf-fortran.
  • #962589 filed against seqtools.
  • #962702 filed against python-pauvre.
  • #963119 filed against petitboot.
  • #963120 filed against fonts-anonymous-pro.
  • #963124 filed against python-pyqtgraph (forwarded upstream)
  • #963485 filed against libqmi.
  • #963486 filed against tkabber-plugins.
  • #963533 filed against python-stem.
  • #963537 filed against golang-v2ray-core.
  • #963600 filed against critcl.
  • #963602 filed against gftl.
  • #963603 filed against libmbim.
  • #963688 filed against neovim-qt.
  • #963740 filed against golang-github-viant-toolbox.
• Hendrik Meyer:
  • gitality
  • lsof
• Nick Wellnhofer:
  • libxml2 (random data corruption)
• Jelle van der Waa:
  • gnome-builder
  • PHP
• Eli Schwartz:
  • ghc
  • vigra
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #961954 filed against lirc.
  • #962021 filed against graphviz.
  • #962305 filed against libtommath.
  • #963466, #963467, #963470 and #963472 filed against qemu.
  • #963518 filed against source-highlight.

Bernhard M. Wiedemann also filed reports for frr (build fails on single-processor machines), ghc-yesod-static/git-annex (a filesystem ordering issue) and ooRexx (ASLR-related issue).

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth diff-on-steroids utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. It does not define reproducibility, but rather provides a helpful and human-readable guidance for packages that are not reproducible, rather than relying essentially-useless binary diffs. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded versions 147, 148 and 149 to Debian and made the following changes:

• New features:
  • Add output from strings(1) to ELF binaries. (#148)
  • Dump PE32+ executables (such as EFI applications) using objdump(1). (#181)
  • Add support for Zsh shell completion. (#158)
• Bug fixes:
  • Prevent a traceback when comparing PDF documents that did not contain metadata (ie. a PDF /Info stanza). (#150)
  • Fix compatibility with jsondiff version 1.2.0. (#159)
  • Fix an issue in GnuPG keybox file handling that left filenames in the diff. [ ]
  • Correct detection of JSON files due to missing call to File.recognizes that checks candidates against file(1). [ ]
• Output improvements:
  • Use the CSS word-break property over manually adding U+200B zero-width spaces as these were making copy-pasting cumbersome. (!53)
  • Downgrade the tlsh warning message to an info level warning. (#29)
• Logging improvements:
  • Log calls to subprocess.check_output by using a wrapper. (#151)
  • Clarify that we are generating presenter formats in a debug-level message. [ ]
  • Log the version of jsondiff used. [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Update tests for file(1) version 5.39. (#179)
  • Drop accidentally-duplicated copy of the --diff-mask tests. [ ]
  • Don t mask an existing test. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Replace obscure references to WF with Wagner-Fischer for clarity. [ ]
  • Use a semantic AbstractMissingType type instead of remembering to check for both types of missing files. [ ]
  • Add a comment regarding potential security issue in the .changes, .dsc and .buildinfo comparators. [ ]
  • Drop a large number of unused imports. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Make many code sections more Pythonic. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Prevent some variable aliasing issues. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Use some tactical f-strings to tidy up code [ ][ ] and remove explicit u"unicode" strings [ ].
  • Refactor a large number of routines for clarity. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

trydiffoscope is the web-based version of diffoscope. This month, Chris Lamb also corrected the location for the celerybeat scheduler to ensure that the clean/tidy tasks are actually called which had caused an accidental resource exhaustion. (#12) In addition Jean-Romain Garnier made the following changes:

• Fix the --new-file option when comparing directories by merging DirectoryContainer.compare and Container.compare. (#180)
• Allow user to mask/filter diff output via --diff-mask=REGEX. (!51)
• Make child pages open in new window in the --html-dir presenter format. [ ]
• Improve the diffs in the --html-dir format. [ ][ ]

Lastly, Daniel Fullmer fixed the Coreboot filesystem comparator [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo prevented warnings from the tlsh fuzzy-matching library during tests [ ] and tweaked the build system to remove an unwanted .build directory [ ]. For the GNU Guix distribution Vagrant Cascadian updated the version of diffoscope to version 147 [ ] and later 148 [ ].

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. Amongst many other tasks, this tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts across many distributions as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Prevent bogus failure emails from rsync2buildinfos.debian.net every night. [ ]
  • Merge a fix from David Bremner s database of .buildinfo files to include a fix regarding comparing source vs. binary package versions. [ ]
  • Only run the Debian package rebuilder job twice per day. [ ]
  • Increase bullseye scheduling. [ ]
• System health status page:
  • Add a note displaying whether a node needs to be rebooted for a kernel upgrade. [ ]
  • Fix sorting order of failed jobs. [ ]
  • Expand footer to link to the related Jenkins job. [ ]
  • Add archlinux_html_pages, openwrt_rebuilder_today and openwrt_rebuilder_future to known broken jobs. [ ]
  • Add HTML <meta> header to refresh the page every 5 minutes. [ ]
  • Count the number of ignored jobs [ ], ignore permanently known broken jobs [ ] and jobs on known offline nodes [ ].
  • Only consider the known offline status from Git. [ ]
  • Various output improvements. [ ][ ]
• Tools:
  • Switch URLs for the Grml Live Linux and PureOS package sets. [ ][ ]
  • Don t try to build a disorderfs Debian source package. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Stop building diffoscope as we are moving this to Salsa. [ ][ ]
  • Merge several is diffoscope up-to-date on every platform? test jobs into one [ ] and fail less noisily if the version in Debian cannot be determined [ ].

In addition: Marcus Hoffmann was added as a maintainer of the F-Droid reproducible checking components [ ], Jelle van der Waa updated the is diffoscope up-to-date in every platform check for Arch Linux and diffoscope [ ], Mattia Rizzolo backed up a copy of a remove script run on the Codethink-hosted jump server [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian temporarily disabled the fixfilepath on bullseye, to get better data about the ftbfs_due_to_f-file-prefix-map categorised issue. Lastly, the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ].

---

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
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

---

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Eli Schwartz, Holger Levsen, Jelle van der Waa and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

Paul-F lix Armand-Delille (3 July 1874 in Fourchambault, Ni vre 4 September 1963) was a physician, bacteriologist, professor, and member of the French Academy of Medicine who accidentally brought about the collapse of rabbit populations throughout much of Europe and beyond in the 1950s by infecting them with myxomatosis.

Charles Franklin Kettering (August 29, 1876 November 25, 1958) sometimes known as Charles "Boss" Kettering[1] was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents.[2] He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starting motor[3] and leaded gasoline.[4][5] In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems. At DuPont he also was responsible for the development of Duco lacquers and enamels, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced automobiles. While working with the Dayton-Wright Company he developed the "Bug" aerial torpedo, considered the world's first aerial missile.[6] He led the advancement of practical, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, revolutionizing the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. In 1927, he founded the Kettering Foundation, a non-partisan research foundation. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine on January 9, 1933.

John Charles Cutler (June 29, 1915 February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service. After his death, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical studies of syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 November 9, 1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations. Lee is best known for his public relations work with the Rockefeller family. His first major client was the Pennsylvania Railroad, followed by numerous major railroads such as the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Harriman lines such as the Union Pacific. He established the Association of Railroad Executives, which included providing public relations services to the industry. Lee advised major industrial corporations, including steel, automobile, tobacco, meat packing, and rubber, as well as public utilities, banks, and even foreign governments. Lee pioneered the use of internal magazines to maintain employee morale, as well as management newsletters, stockholder reports, and news releases to the media. He did a great deal of pro bono work, which he knew was important to his own public image, and during World War I, he became the publicity director for the American Red Cross.[1]

No spoilers, for those who have yet to watch it... Channel 4 have been broadcasting a new 10-part series called Electric Dreams, based on some of the short fiction of Philip K Dick. The series was commissioned after Channel 4 lost Black Mirror to Netflix, perhaps to try and find something tonally similar. Electric Dreams is executive-produced by Brian Cranston, who also stars in one of the episodes yet to broadcast. I've read all of PKD's short fiction1 but it was a long time ago so I have mostly forgotten the stories upon which the series is based. I've quite enjoyed going back and re-reading them after watching the corresponding episodes to see what changes they've made. In some cases the changes are subtle or complementary, in other cases they've whittled the original story right out and installed a new one inside the shell. A companion compilation has been published with just the relevant short stories in it, and from what I've seen browsing it in a book shop it also contains short introductions which might be worth a read. Things started strong with The Hood Maker, which my wife also enjoyed, although she was disappointed to realise we wouldn't be revisiting those characters in the future. The world-building was strong enough that it seemed like a waste for a single episode. My favourite episode of those broadcast so far was The Commuter, starring Timothy Spall. The changes made were complementary and immensely expanded the emotional range of the story. In some ways, a key aspect of the original story was completely inverted, which I found quite funny: my original take on Dick's story was Dick implying a particular outcome was horrific, whereas it becomes desirable in the TV episode. One of the stories most hollowed-out was Sales Pitch which was the basis for Tony Grisoni s episode Crazy Diamond, starring Steve Buscemi and Sidse Babett Knudsen. Buscemi was good but Knudsen totally stole every frame she was in. Fans of the cancelled Channel 4 show Utopia should enjoy this one: both were directed by Marc Munden and the directing, photography and colour balance really recall it. The last episode broadcast was Real Life directed by Ronald D Moore of Battlestar Galactica reboot fame and starring Anna Paquin. Like Sales Pitch it bears very little resemblance to the original story. It played around with similar ideas explored in a lot of Sci-Fi movies and TV shows but left me a little flat; I didn't think it contributed much that I hadn't seen before. I was disappointed that there was a relatively conclusive ending. There was a subversive humour in the Dick short that was completely lost in the retelling. The world design seemed pretty generic. I'm looking forward to Autofac, which is one of the shorts I can remember particularly enjoying.

Confession time: I started making these posts (eons ago) because a close friend did as well, and I enjoyed reading them. But the main reason why I continue is because the primary way I have to keep track of the books I've bought and avoid duplicates is, well, grep on these posts. I should come up with a non-bullshit way of doing this, but time to do more elegant things is in short supply, and, well, it's my blog. So I'm boring all of you who read this in various places with my internal bookkeeping. I do try to at least add a bit of commentary. This one will be more tedious than most since it includes five separate Humble Bundles, which increases the volume a lot. (I just realized I'd forgotten to record those purchases from the past several months.) First, the individual books I bought directly: Ilona Andrews Sweep in Peace (sff)
Ilona Andrews One Fell Sweep (sff)
Steven Brust Vallista (sff)
Nicky Drayden The Prey of Gods (sff)
Meg Elison The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (sff)
Pat Green Night Moves (nonfiction)
Ann Leckie Provenance (sff)
Seanan McGuire Once Broken Faith (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Brightest Fell (sff)
K. Arsenault Rivera The Tiger's Daughter (sff)
Matthew Walker Why We Sleep (nonfiction)
Some new books by favorite authors, a few new releases I heard good things about, and two (Night Moves and Why We Sleep) from references in on-line articles that impressed me. The books from security bundles (this is mostly work reading, assuming I'll get to any of it), including a blockchain bundle: Wil Allsop Unauthorised Access (nonfiction)
Ross Anderson Security Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Anley, et al. The Shellcoder's Handbook (nonfiction)
Conrad Barsky & Chris Wilmer Bitcoin for the Befuddled (nonfiction)
Imran Bashir Mastering Blockchain (nonfiction)
Richard Bejtlich The Practice of Network Security (nonfiction)
Kariappa Bheemaiah The Blockchain Alternative (nonfiction)
Violet Blue Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy (nonfiction)
Richard Caetano Learning Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Nick Cano Game Hacking (nonfiction)
Bruce Dang, et al. Practical Reverse Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Dannen Introducing Ethereum and Solidity (nonfiction)
Daniel Drescher Blockchain Basics (nonfiction)
Chris Eagle The IDA Pro Book, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Nikolay Elenkov Android Security Internals (nonfiction)
Jon Erickson Hacking, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Pedro Franco Understanding Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Christopher Hadnagy Social Engineering (nonfiction)
Peter N.M. Hansteen The Book of PF (nonfiction)
Brian Kelly The Bitcoin Big Bang (nonfiction)
David Kennedy, et al. Metasploit (nonfiction)
Manul Laphroaig (ed.) PoC GTFO (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. The Art of Memory Forensics (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. Malware Analyst's Cookbook (nonfiction)
Michael W. Lucas Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Nikkel Practical Forensic Imaging (nonfiction)
Sean-Philip Oriyano CEHv9 (nonfiction)
Kevin D. Mitnick The Art of Deception (nonfiction)
Narayan Prusty Building Blockchain Projects (nonfiction)
Prypto Bitcoin for Dummies (nonfiction)
Chris Sanders Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Schneier Applied Cryptography (nonfiction)
Adam Shostack Threat Modeling (nonfiction)
Craig Smith The Car Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Dafydd Stuttard & Marcus Pinto The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Albert Szmigielski Bitcoin Essentials (nonfiction)
David Thiel iOS Application Security (nonfiction)
Georgia Weidman Penetration Testing (nonfiction)
Finally, the two SF bundles: Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes Encounter with Tiber (sff)
Poul Anderson Orion Shall Rise (sff)
Greg Bear The Forge of God (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Dawn (sff)
William C. Dietz Steelheart (sff)
J.L. Doty A Choice of Treasons (sff)
Harlan Ellison The City on the Edge of Forever (sff)
Toh Enjoe Self-Reference ENGINE (sff)
David Feintuch Midshipman's Hope (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Icerigger (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Mission to Moulokin (sff)
Alan Dean Foster The Deluge Drivers (sff)
Taiyo Fujii Orbital Cloud (sff)
Hideo Furukawa Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (sff)
Haikasoru (ed.) Saiensu Fikushon 2016 (sff anthology)
Joe Haldeman All My Sins Remembered (sff)
Jyouji Hayashi The Ouroboros Wave (sff)
Sergei Lukyanenko The Genome (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Good Luck, Yukikaze (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Yukikaze (sff)
Sakyo Komatsu Virus (sff)
Miyuki Miyabe The Book of Heroes (sff)
Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls (sff)
Robert Silverberg Across a Billion Years (sff)
Allen Steele Orbital Decay (sff)
Bruce Sterling Schismatrix Plus (sff)
Michael Swanwick Vacuum Flowers (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: Dawn (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 2: Ambition (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 3: Endurance (sff)
Tow Ubukata Mardock Scramble (sff)
Sayuri Ueda The Cage of Zeus (sff)
Sean Williams & Shane Dix Echoes of Earth (sff)
Hiroshi Yamamoto MM9 (sff)
Timothy Zahn Blackcollar (sff)
Phew. Okay, all caught up, and hopefully won't have to dump something like this again in the near future. Also, more books than I have any actual time to read, but what else is new.

Dear all, This would be a longish blog post (as most of mine are) compiled over days but as there is so short a time and so much to share. I had previously thought to share beautiful photographs of Ganesh mandals taking out the procession at time of immersion of the idol or the last day of Durga Puja recent events around do not make my mood to share photos at this point in time. I may share some of them in a future blog post or two . Before going further, I would like to offer my sympathies and condolences to people hurt and dislocated in Hurricane Irma , the 2017 Central Mexico Earthquake and lastly the most recent Las Vegas shooting as well as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico . I am somewhat nonplussed as to why Americans always want to name, especially hurricanes which destroy people s lives and livelihood built over generations and why most of the hurricanes are named after women. A look at weather.com site unveiled the answer to the mystery. Ironically (or not) I saw some of the best science coverage about Earthquakes or anything scientific reporting and analysis after a long time in mainstream newspapers in India. On another note, I don t understand or even expect to understand why the gunman did what he did 2 days back. Country music AFAIK is one of the most chilled-out kind of music, in some ways very similar to classical Indian singing although they are worlds apart in style of singing, renditions, artists, the way they emote etc. I seriously wish that the gunman had not been shot but caught and reasons were sought about what he did, he did. While this is certainly armchair thinking as was not at the scene of crime, but if a Mumbai Police constable could do it around a decade ago armed only with a lathi could do it, why couldn t the American cops who probably are trained in innumerable ways to subdue people without killing them, did. While investigations are on, I suspect if he were caught just like Ajmal Kasab was caught then lot of revelations might have come up. From what is known, the gentleman was upwardly mobile i.e. he was white, rich and apparently had no reason to have beef with anybody especially a crowd swaying to some nice music, all of which makes absolutely no sense. Indian Economy Slowdown Anyways, back to one of the main reasons of writing this blog post. Few days back, an ex-finance Minister of India Yashwant Sinha wrote what was felt by probably millions of Indians, an Indian Express article called I need to speak up now While there have been many, many arguments made since then by various people. A simple search of I need to speak up would lead to lead to many a result besides the one I have shared above. The only exception I have with the article is the line Forty leading companies of the country are already facing bankruptcy proceedings. Many more are likely to follow suit. I would not bore you but you ask any entrepreneur trying to set up shop in India i.e. ones who actually go through the processes of getting all the licenses for setting up even a small businesses as to the numerous hurdles they have to overcome and laid-back corrupt bureaucracy which they have to overcome. I could have interviewed some of my friends who had the conviction and the courage to set up shop and spent more than half a decade getting all the necessary licenses and approval to set up but it probably would be too specific for one industry or the other and would lead to the same result. Co-incidentally, a new restaurant, leaf opened in my vicinity few weeks before. From the looks it looked like a high-brow, high-priced restaurant hence like many others I did not venture in. After a few days, they introduced south-Indian delicacies like Masala Dosa, Uttapam at prices similar to other restaurants around. So I ventured in and bought some south Indian food to consume between mum and me. Few days later, I became friends with the owner/franchisee and I suggested (in a friendly tone) that why he doesn t make it like a CCD play where many people including yours truly use the service to share, strategize and meet with clients. The CCD joints usually serve coffee and snacks (which are over-priced but still run out pretty fast) but people come as they have chilled-out atmosphere and Wi-Fi access which people need for their smartphones, although the Wi-Fi part may soon become redundant With Reliance Jio making a big play. I also shared why he doesn t add more variety and time (the south Indian items are time-limited) as I see/saw many empty chairs there. Anyways, the shop-owner/franchisee shared his gross costs including salary, stocking, electricity, rent and it doesn t pan out to be serving Rs.80/- dish (roughly a 1US dollar and 25 cents) then serving INR Rs. 400/- a dish (around 6 $USD). One round of INR 400/- + dishes make his costs for the day, around 12 tables were there. It s when they have two full rounds of dishes costing INR 400/- or more that he actually has profits and he is predicting loss for at least 6 months to a year before he makes a rebound. He needs steady customers rather than just walk-ins that will make his business work/click. Currently his family is bearing the costs. He didn t mention the taxes although I know apart from GST there are still some local body taxes that they will have to pay and comply with. There are a multitude of problems for shutting a shop legally as well as they have to again renavigate the bureaucracy for the same. I have seen more than a few retailers downing their shutters for 6-8 months and then either sell it to new management, let go of the lease or simply sell the property to a competitor. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is probably the first proper exit policy for large companies. So the 40 odd companies that Mr. Sinha were talking about were probably sick for a long time. In India, there is also an additional shame of being a failed entrepreneur unlike in the west where Entrepreneurs start on their next venture. As seen from Retailing In India only 3.3% of the population or at the most 4% of the population is directly or indirectly linked with the retail trade. Most of the economy still derives its wealth from the agrarian sector which is still reeling under the pressure from demonetization which happened last year. Al jazeera surprisingly portrayed a truer picture of the effects demonetization had on common citizen than many Indian newspapers did at the time. Because of the South African Debconf, I had to resort to debit cards and hence was able to escape standing in long lines in which many an old and women perished. It is only yesterday that the Government has acknowledged which many prominent Indians have been saying for months now, that we are in a slowdown . Be aware of the terms being used for effect by the Prime Minister. There are two articles which outlines the troubles India is in atm. The only bright spot has been e-commerce which so far has eluded GST although the Govt. has claimed regulations to put it in check. Indian Education System Interestingly, Ravish Kumar has started a series on NDTV where he is showcasing how Indian education sector, especially public colleges have been left to teachers on contract basis, see the first four episodes on NDTV channel starting with the first one I have shared as a hyperlink. I apologize as the series is in Hindi as the channel is meant for Indians and is mostly limited to Northern areas of the Country (mostly) although he has been honest that it is because they lack resources to tackle the amount of information flowing to them. Ravish started the series with sharing information about the U.S. where the things are similar with some teachers needing to sleep in cars because of high-cost of living to some needing to turn to sex-work . I was shocked when I read the guardian article, that is no way to treat our teachers.I went on to read How the American University was Killed following the breadcrumbs along the way. Reading that it seems Indians have been following the American system playbook from the 1980 s itself. The article talks about HMO as well and that seems to have followed here as well with my own experience of hospital fees and drugs which I had to entail a few weeks/month ago. Few years ago, when me and some of my friends had the teaching bug and we started teaching in a nearby municipal school, couple of teachers had shared that they were doing 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. I don t know about others in my group, at least I was cynical because I thought all the teachers were permanent and they make good money only to realize now that the person was probably speaking the truth. When you have to do three jobs to make ends meet from where do you bring the passion to teach young people and that too outside the syllabus ? Also, with this new knowledge in hindsight, I take back all my comments I made last year and the year before for the pathetic education being put up by the State. With teachers being paid pathetically/underpaid and almost 60% teachers being ad-hoc/adjunct teachers they have to find ways to have some sense of security. Most teachers are bachelors as they are poor and cannot offer any security (either male or female) and for women, after marriage it actually makes no sense for them to continue in this profession. I salute all the professors who are ad-hoc in nature and probably will never get a permanent position in their life. I think in some way, thanx to him, that the government has chosen to give 7th pay commisson salary to teachers. While the numbers may appear be large, there are a lot of questions as to how many people will actually get paid. There needs to be lot of vacancies which need to be filled quickly but don t see any solution in the next 2-3 years as well. The Government has taken a position to use/re-hire retired teachers rather than have new young teachers as an unwritten policy. In this Digital India context how are retired teachers supposed to understand and then pass on digital concepts is beyond me when at few teacher trainings I have seen they lack even the most basic knowledge that I learnt at least a decade or two ago, the difference is that vast. I just don t know what to say to that. My own experience with my own mother who had pretty good education in her time and probably would have made a fine business-woman if she knew that she will have a child that she would have to raise by herself alone (along with maternal grand-parents) is testimonial to the fact how hard it is for older people to grasp technology and here I m talking just using the interface as a consumer rather than a producer or someone in-between who has the idea of how companies and governments profit from whatever data is shared one way or the other. After watching the series/episodes and discussing the issue with my mother it was revealed that both her and my late maternal grandfather were on casual/ad-hoc basis till 20-25 years in their service in the defense sector. If Ravish were to do a series on the defense sector he probably would find the same thing there. To add to that, the defense sector is a vital component to a country s security. If 60% of the defense staff in all defense establishments have temporary staff how do you ensure the loyalty of the people working therein. That brings to my mind Ignorance is bliss . Software development and deployment There is another worry that all are skirting around, the present dispensation/government s mantra is minimum government-maximum governance with digital technologies having all solutions which is leading to massive unemployment. Also from most of the stories/incidents I read in the newspapers, mainstream media and elsewhere it seems most software deployments done in India are done without having any system of internal checks and balances. There is no lintian for software to be implemented. Contracts seem to be given to big companies and there is no mention of what prerequisites or conditions were laid down by the Government for software development and deployment and if any checks were done to ensure that the software being developed was in according to government specifications or not. Ideally this should all be in public domain so that questions can be asked and responsibility fixed if things go haywire, as currently they do not. Software issues As my health been not that great, I have been taking a bit more time and depth while filing bugs. #877638 is a good example. I suspect though that part of the problem might be that mate has moved to gtk3 while guake still has gtk-2 bindings. I also reported the issue upstream both in mate-panel as well as guake . I haven t received any response from either or/and upstreams . I also have been fiddling around with gdb to better understand the tool so I can exploit/use this tool in a better way. There are some commands within the gdb interface which seem to be interesting and hopefully I ll try how the commands perform over days, weeks to a month. I hope we see more action on the mate-panel/guake bug as well as move of guake to gtk+3 but that what seemingly seemed like wait for eternity seems to have done by somebody in last couple of days. As shared in the ticket there are lots of things still to do but it seems the heavy lifting has been done but seems merging will be tricky as two developers have been trying to update to gtk+3 although aichingm seems to have a leg up with his 3! branch. Another interesting thing I saw is the below picture. The firefox version I was using to test the site/wordpress-wp-admin was Mozilla Firefox 52.4.0 which AFAIK is a pretty recentish one and people using Debian stretch would probably be using the same version (firefox stable/LTS) rather than the more recent versions. I went to the link it linked to and it gave no indication as to why it thought my browser is out-of-date and what functionality was/is missing. I have found that wordpress support has declined quite a bit and people don t seem to use the forums as much as they used to before. I also filed a few bugs for qalculate. #877716 where a supposedly transitional package removes the actual application, #877717 as the software has moved its repo. to github.com as well as tickets and other things in process and lastly #877733. I had been searching for a calculator which can do currency calculations on the fly (say for e.g. doing personal budgeting for Taiwan debconf) without needing to manually enter the conversion rates and losing something in the middle. While the current version has support for some limited currencies, the new versions promise more as other people probably have more diverse needs for currency conversions (people who do long or short on oil, stocks overseas is just one example, I am sure there are many others) than simplistic mine.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #American Education System, #bug-filing, #Climate change, #Dignity, #e-commerce, #gtk+3, #gtk2, #Indian Economy 'Slowdown', #Indian Education System, #Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, #Las Vegas shooting, #Modern Retail in India, #planet-debian, #qalculate, Ad-hoc and Adjunct Professors, wordpress.com

A Safe and Happy New Year to all. While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India

Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still

Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).

And port of call

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .

The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism