This YouTube video about the Cashier Girl Meme is interesting in the context of AI systems that generate images of people and can communicate with people, hotter than any real human is an achievable goal [1]. Stand Up Maths has an interesting Youtube video about LLMs solving maths problems which I highly recommend watching (it does not require any real knowledge of maths), I think this opens the door to attacks on well established cryptologic systems [2]. Adam Conover made an insightful YouTube video about how and why Hollywood is now unable to make good sitcoms and why this is bad for society [3]. Sky Croeser wrote an interesting and insightful blog post about topics covered at the Digital and sexual citizenship in an age of social media bans: Interrogating the rights of children and young people conference [4]. Zane wrote a very informative blog post about reverse engineering a trojaned Android projector with Claude Code [5]. We need much better security on home networks to break the business model for this sort of thing. Renee Stonebraker s article Puritans Wouldn t Eat Pussy, So They Invented the Western has a lot of interesting information about early days of colonising the US, and not much about eating pussy [6]. IFLScience has an interesting article about brinicles, icicles of brine that form under sea ice [7]. Nautilus has an interesting article about the Silurian Hypothesis [8]. The Conversation has an intersting article about the pros and cons of no-till farming [9]. Cold War is a 365tomorrows story about bio-warfare which raises several disturbing possibilities we need to guard against [10]. Scott Santens wrote an insightful article describing how a land value tax would reduce rent and solve the housing shortages [11]. Positive News has an interesting article about using OnlyFans to teach people about climate change [12]. The Conversation has an interesting article about cultural safety in healthcare, sounds good, and while we are at it lets deal with sexism [13]. Doctoreww has an interesting web page about ways of displaying different strings to humans and machines, this could result in you running a different command to what you thought you copied from a web site or defeating tools designed to block hostile content [14]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article Commentary Hell is Other People about the way rich people want to use AI to replace all people [15]. Also psychologists who help rich people accept being greedy are worthy of a Luigi The research article Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work is interesting, yet another reason to get rid of narcissistic executives [16]. Renew Economy has an interesting article about clean up costs for mining (which is usually left for the government to pay) and how this could impact renewable energy production facilities [17]. Elvira Bary wrote an insightful article on the Russian financial collapse that is happening now [18]. The Guardian has an interesting article about Afro-American women who travel to South Korea for healthcare because of problems with racism and sexism in American hospitals [19]. The Conversation has an interesting article about the potential for disabled people to be more productive in space than non-disabled people [20]. Krebs has an interesting article about LG banning residential proxy code from apps after the LG store was found to have such code in 42% of it s apps [21]. Robert B Shpiner wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the death of democracy in the US [22].

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCn7bA1eg_0
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ8KThKAfbs
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpSghW4J3ws
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/28b6jclu
• [5] https://zanestjohn.com/blog/reing-with-claude-code
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2y2b6a58
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2awjppn5
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2y89gftt
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2b27vo8o
• [10] https://365tomorrows.com/2024/03/27/cold-war-2/
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2aqkn4z6
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2dy5vy8g
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/25rld7v3
• [14] https://doctoreww.github.io/EvilFontTool/
• [15] https://tinyurl.com/2c2guu89
• [16] https://tinyurl.com/27kq4qqu
• [17] https://tinyurl.com/2blp477w
• [18] https://tinyurl.com/27aybgge
• [19] https://tinyurl.com/29covbrp
• [20] https://tinyurl.com/27qdj6co
• [21] https://tinyurl.com/22pxub8v
• [22] https://tinyurl.com/25zf4hnp

On Friday May the 13th OpenSSL project has published advisory details for CVE-2026-2673. The CVE is treated as non-important by the project. The patches are only provided as commits on the stable branches. No git tag, no precise fixed version, and no source tarballs provided.The patches that were merged to openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches were not based on top of the last stable point release and did not split code changes & documentation updates. It means that cherry-picking the commits referenced in the advisory will always lead to conflicts requiring manual resolution. It is not clear if support is provided for snapshot builds off the openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches. As the builds from the stable branches declare themselves as dev builds of the next unreleased point release. For example, in contrast to projects such as vim and glibc, with every commit to stable branches explicitly recommended for distributors to ship and is supported.I have requested OpenSSL upstream in the past for the security fixes to branch off the last point release, commit code changes separate from the NEWS.md / CHANGES.md updates, and then merge that into the stable branches. This way the advisory that recommends cherry-picking individual commits, would actually apply conflict free - at no additional maintenance burden to the OpenSSL project and everyone who has to cherry-pick these updates. There is a wide support voiced for such strategy by the OpenSSL distributors and the OpenSSL Corporation. But this is not something that OpenSSL Project is yet choosing to provide.To avoid duplication of work, I am starting to provide stable OpenSSL re-releases of the last upstream tagged stable point release with security only patches split into code-change only; documentation update; version update to create security only source tarball releases that are easy to build; easy to identify by the security scanners; and which cherry-pick changes without conflicts. The first two releases are published on GitHub as immutable releases with attestations:

• OpenSSL 3.6.1+1 - OpenSSL 3.6.1 with fix for CVE-2026-2673
• OpenSSL 3.5.5+1 - OpenSSL 3.5.5 with fix for CVE-2026-2673

Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an informative blog post about self encrypting disks and UEFI with Linux [1]. This Coffeezilla video highlights an interesting scam, run a broker for day traders and don t execute trades, just be the counterparty for every trade and rely on day traders losing [2]. First Sight is a Dust SciFi short film that s worthy of Black Mirror [3]. Apple published an interesting article about the operation of the Secure Enclave in iPhone, Mac, and all other significant Apple hardware [4]. Reese Waters made an amusing video about a conservative catfight that s going on, nice to see horrible people attacking each other [5]. Chengyuan Ma wrote an informative summary of the history of the Great Firewall of China [6]. The V2Ray proxy has a nice feature set! Interesting article about the JP Morgan Workplace Activity Data Utility (WADU) AI spyware system [7]. Corporate work is going to become even more horrible. Veritasium has a great video about the history of vulcanised rubber and the potential for significant problems if rubber leaf blight spreads to other countries [8]. Jalopnik has an interesting article about how Reagan killed the safest car ever built [9]. David Brin wrote an interesting article Tolkien Enemy of Progress about fiction that justifies autocratic rule [10].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2a7jfbbu
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znl1WhLCnhE
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URDjsHupqUM
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/243vo432
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A_nq18uTR0
• [6] https://danglingpointer.fun/posts/GFWHistory
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/28htt7tg
• [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFXLZ7FEJc4
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/26p4gdhm
• [10] https://www.salon.com/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/

Achieving full disk encryption using FIPS, TCG OPAL and LUKS to encrypt UEFI ESP on bare-metal and in VMs

Many security standards such as CIS and STIG require to protect information at rest. For example, NIST SP 800-53r5 SC-28 advocate to use cryptographic protection, offline storage and TPMs to enhance protection of information confidentiality and/or integrity.Traditionally to satisfy such controls on portable devices such as laptops one would utilize software based Full Disk Encryption - Mac OS X FileVault, Windows Bitlocker, Linux cryptsetup LUKS2. In cases when FIPS cryptography is required, additional burden would be placed onto these systems to operate their kernels in FIPS mode.Trusted Computing Group works on establishing many industry standards and specifications, which are widely adopted to improve safety and security of computing whilst keeping it easy to use. One of their most famous specifications them is TCG TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module). TPMs are now widely available on most devices and help to protect secret keys and attest systems. For example, most software full disk encryption solutions can utilise TCG TPM to store full disk encryption keys providing passwordless, biometric or pin-base ways to unlock the drives as well as attesting that system have not been modified or compromised whilst offline.TCG Storage Security Subsystem Class: Opal Specification is a set of specifications for features of data storage devices. The authors and contributors to OPAL are leading and well trusted storage manufacturers such as Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate Technologies, Dell, Google, Lenovo, IBM, Kioxia, among others. One of the features that Opal Specification enables is self-encrypting drives which becomes very powerful when combined with pre-boot authentication. Out of the box, such drives always and transparently encrypt all disk data using hardware acceleration. To protect data one can enter UEFI firmware setup (BIOS) to set NVMe single user password (or user + administrator/recovery passwords) to encrypt the disk encryption key. If one's firmware didn't come with such features, one can also use SEDutil to inspect and configure all of this. Latest release of major Linux distributions have SEDutil already packaged.Once password is set, on startup, pre-boot authentication will request one to enter password - prior to booting any operating systems. It means that full disk is actually encrypted, including the UEFI ESP and all operating systems that are installed in case of dual or multi-boot installations. This also prevents tampering with ESP, UEFI bootloaders and kernels which with traditional software-based encryption often remain unencrypted and accessible. It also means one doesn't have to do special OS level repartitioning, or installation steps to ensure all data is encrypted at rest.What about FIPS compliance? Well, the good news is that majority of the OPAL compliant hard drives and/or security sub-chips do have FIPS 140-3 certification. Meaning they have been tested by independent laboratories to ensure they do in-fact encrypt data. On the CMVP website one can search for module name terms "OPAL" or "NVMe" or name of hardware vendor to locate FIPS certificates.Are such drives widely available? Yes. For example, a common Thinkpad X1 gen 11 has OPAL NVMe drives as standard, and they have FIPS certification too. Thus, it is likely in your hardware fleet these are already widely available. Use sedutil to check if MediaEncrypt and LockingSupported features are available.Well, this is great for laptops and physical servers, but you may ask - what about public or private cloud? Actually, more or less the same is already in-place in both. On CVMP website all major clouds have their disk encryption hardware certified, and all of them always encrypt all Virtual Machines with FIPS certified cryptography without an ability to opt-out. One is however in full control of how the encryption keys are managed: cloud-provider or self-managed (either with a cloud HSM or KMS or bring your own / external). See these relevant encryption options and key management docs for GCP, Azure, AWS. But the key takeaway without doing anything, at rest, VMs in public cloud are always encrypted and satisfy NIST SP 800-53 controls.What about private cloud? Most Linux based private clouds ultimately use qemu typically with qcow2 virtual disk images. Qemu supports user-space encryption of qcow2 disk, see this manpage. Such encryption encrypts the full virtual machine disk, including the bootloader and ESP. And it is handled entirely outside of the VM on the host - meaning the VM never has access to the disk encryption keys. Qemu implements this encryption entirely in userspace using gnutls, nettle, libgcrypt depending on how it was compiled. This also means one can satisfy FIPS requirements entirely in userspace without a Linux kernel in FIPS mode. Higher level APIs built on top of qemu also support qcow2 disk encryption, as in projects such as libvirt and OpenStack Cinder.If you carefully read the docs, you may notice that agent support is explicitly sometimes called out as not supported or not mentioned. Quite often agents running inside the OS may not have enough observability to them to assess if there is external encryption. It does mean that monitoring above encryption options require different approaches - for example monitor your cloud configuration using tools such as Wiz and Orca, rather than using agents inside individual VMs. For laptop / endpoint security agents, I do wish they would start gaining capability to report OPAL SED availability and status if it is active or not.What about using software encryption none-the-less on top of the above solutions? It is commonly referred to double or multiple encryption. There will be an additional performance impact, but it can be worthwhile. It really depends on what you define as data at rest for yourself and which controls you need. If one has a dual-boot laptop, and wants to keep one OS encrypted whilst booted into the other, it can perfectly reasonable to encrypted the two using separate software encryption keys. In addition to the OPAL encryption of the ESP. For more targeted per-file / per-folder encryption, one can look into using gocryptfs which is the best successor to the once popular, but now deprecated eCryptfs (amazing tool, but has fallen behind in development and can lead to data loss).All of the above mostly talks about cryptographic encryption, which only provides confidentially but not data integrity. To protect integrity, one needs to choose how to maintain that. dm-verity is a good choice for read-only and rigid installations. For read-write workloads, it may be easier to deploy ZFS or Btrfs instead. If one is using filesystems without a built-in integrity support such as XFS or Ext4, one can retrofit integrity layer to them by using dm-integrity (either standalone, or via dm-luks/cryptsetup --integrity option).

If one has a lot of estate and a lot of encryption keys to keep track off a key management solution is likely needed. The most popular solution is likely the one from Thales Group marketed under ChiperTrust Data Security Platform (previously Vormetric), but there are many others including OEM / Vendor / Hardware / Cloud specific or agnostic solutions.

I hope this crash course guide piques your interest to learn and discover modern confidentially and integrity solutions, and to re-affirm or change your existing controls w.r.t. to data protection at rest.

Full disk encryption, including UEFI ESP /boot/efi is now widely achievable by default on both baremetal machines and in VMs including with FIPS certification. To discuss more let's connect on Linkedin.

Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers whether humans have evolved to want to control nature [1]. The OMG Elite hacker cable is an interesting device [2]. A Wifi device in a USB cable to allow remote control and monitoring of data transfer, including remote keyboard control and sniffing. Pity that USB-C cables have chips in them so you can t use a spark to remove unwanted chips from modern cables. David Brin s blog post The core goal of tyrants: The Red-Caesar Cult and a restored era of The Great Man has some insightful points about authoritarianism [3]. Ron Garret wrote an interesting argument against Christianity [4], and a follow-up titled Why I Don t Believe in Jesus [5]. He has a link to a well written article about the different theologies of Jesus and Paul [6]. Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an interesting blog post about how they reduced disk space for Ubuntu kernel packages and RAM for the initramfs phase of boot [7]. I hope this gets copied to Debian soon. Joey Hess wrote an interesting blog post about trying to make LLM systems produce bad code if trained on his code without permission [8]. Arstechnica has an interesting summary of research into the security of fingerprint sensors [9]. Not surprising that the products of the 3 vendors that supply almost all PC fingerprint readers are easy to compromise. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about how AI will allow mass spying (as opposed to mass surveillance) [10]. ZDnet has an informative article How to Write Better ChatGPT Prompts in 5 Steps [11]. I sent this to a bunch of my relatives. AbortRetryFail has an interesting article about the Itanic Saga [12]. Erberus sounds interesting, maybe VLIW designs could give a good ration of instructions to power unlike the Itanium which was notorious for being power hungry. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI and Trust [13]. We really need laws controlling these things! David Brin wrote an interesting blog post on the obsession with historical cycles [14].

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/2xf9wb9k
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/2m82ajju
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/yrjp5la6
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/ytdb24xm
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/2x6b7wbd
• [6] https://doctrine.org/jesus-vs-paul
• [7] http://tinyurl.com/yp3xqtr3
• [8] https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/attribution_armored_code/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/ywus4o47
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/ypzkjyfv
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/yp6ldxlr
• [12] https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-itanic-saga
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/yqh9wbfj
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/ylue4svh

Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI.

Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported.Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too.Recently livepatch support was expanded for FIPS compliant kernels, Public cloud FIPS compliant kernels, and as well IBM Z (mainframe) kernels. Bringing the total of kernel flavours support to over 60 distinct kernel flavours supported in parallel. The table of supported kernels in the documentation lists the supported kernel flavours ABIs, the duration of individual build's support window, supported architectures, and the Ubuntu release. This work was only possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud team, engineers at IBM for IBM Z (s390x) support, Ubuntu Pro team, Livepatch server & client teams.It is a great milestone, and I personally enjoy seeing the non-intrusive popup on my Ubuntu Desktop that a kernel livepatch was applied to my running system. I do enable Ubuntu Pro on my personal laptop thanks to the free Ubuntu Pro subscription for individuals.What's next? The next frontier is supporting ARM64 kernels. The Canonical kernel team has completed the gap analysis to start supporting Livepatch Service for ARM64. Upstream Linux requires development work on the consistency model to fully support livepatch on ARM64 processors. Livepatch code changes are applied on a per-task basis, when the task is deemed safe to switch over. This safety check depends mostly on kernel stacktraces. For these checks, CONFIG_HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE needs to be available in the upstream ARM64 kernel. (see The Linux Kernel Documentation). There are preliminary patches that enable reliable stacktraces on ARM64, however these turned out to be problematic as there are lots of fix revisions that came after the initial patchset that AWS ships with 5.10. This is a call for help from any interested parties. If you have engineering resources and are interested in bringing Livepatch Service to your ARM64 platforms, please reach out to the Canonical Kernel team on the public Ubuntu Matrix, Discourse, and mailing list. If you want to chat in person, see you at FOSDEM next weekend.

Photo by Pixabay

Ubuntu systems typically have up to 3 kernels installed, before they are auto-removed by apt on classic installs. Historically the installation was optimized for metered download size only. However, kernel size growth and usage no longer warrant such optimizations. During the 23.10 Mantic Minatour cycle, I led a coordinated effort across multiple teams to implement lots of optimizations that together achieved unprecedented install footprint improvements.

Given a typical install of 3 generic kernel ABIs in the default configuration on a regular-sized VM (2 CPU cores 8GB of RAM) the following metrics are achieved in Ubuntu 23.10 versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS:

• 2x less disk space used (1,417MB vs 2,940MB, including initrd)

• 3x less peak RAM usage for the initrd boot (68MB vs 204MB)

• 0.5x increase in download size (949MB vs 600MB)

• 2.5x faster initrd generation (4.5s vs 11.3s)

• approximately the same total time (103s vs 98s, hardware dependent)

For minimal cloud images that do not install either linux-firmware or modules extra the numbers are:

• 1.3x less disk space used (548MB vs 742MB)

• 2.2x less peak RAM usage for initrd boot (27MB vs 62MB)

• 0.4x increase in download size (207MB vs 146MB)

Hopefully, the compromise of download size, relative to the disk space & initrd savings is a win for the majority of platforms and use cases. For users on extremely expensive and metered connections, the likely best saving is to receive air-gapped updates or skip updates.

This was achieved by precompressing kernel modules & firmware files with the maximum level of Zstd compression at package build time; making actual .deb files uncompressed; assembling the initrd using split cpio archives - uncompressed for the pre-compressed files, whilst compressing only the userspace portions of the initrd; enabling in-kernel module decompression support with matching kmod; fixing bugs in all of the above, and landing all of these things in time for the feature freeze. Whilst leveraging the experience and some of the design choices implementations we have already been shipping on Ubuntu Core. Some of these changes are backported to Jammy, but only enough to support smooth upgrades to Mantic and later. Complete gains are only possible to experience on Mantic and later.

The discovered bugs in kernel module loading code likely affect systems that use LoadPin LSM with kernel space module uncompression as used on ChromeOS systems. Hopefully, Kees Cook or other ChromeOS developers pick up the kernel fixes from the stable trees. Or you know, just use Ubuntu kernels as they do get fixes and features like these first.

The team that designed and delivered these changes is large: Benjamin Drung, Andrea Righi, Juerg Haefliger, Julian Andres Klode, Steve Langasek, Michael Hudson-Doyle, Robert Kratky, Adrien Nader, Tim Gardner, Roxana Nicolescu - and myself Dimitri John Ledkov ensuring the most optimal solution is implemented, everything lands on time, and even implementing portions of the final solution.

Hi, It's me, I am a Staff Engineer at Canonical and we are hiring https://canonical.com/careers.

Lots of additional technical details and benchmarks on a huge range of diverse hardware and architectures, and bikeshedding all the things below:

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2023-July/thread.html#42652
• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2023-July/thread.html#141412
• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2023-July/thread.html#42707
• https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/reduce-initramfs-size-and-speed-up-the-generation-in-ubuntu-23-10/38972
• https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830155820.138178-1-andrea.righi@canonical.com/
• https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230829123808.325202-1-andrea.righi@canonical.com/
• https://facebook.github.io/zstd/

For questions and comments please post to Kernel section on Ubuntu Discourse.

People I Met and will Remember

• Angela, my wife, I met daily on Jabber. Thanks for letting me go to this great DebConf17 conference and keeping our family up and running
• Andreas asking people to either impersonate his wife or adoptive daughter for a photo shooting. You gave such a touching talk on Friday, together with Minh from Vietnam.
• Holger for nagging us about stone age bugs in the Debian Blends package and the outdated software list in Debian Edu (Kernel 2.6.32 package are finally not mentioned anymore)
• Vagrant, Foetini and Alkis for there efforts on LTSP and their success in Greece with bringing Debian into Greek schools
• Tiago, Jerome and all the others from the local team, providing us with such great food and support. THANKS folks!!!
• Enrico who showed my his 20 liner version of nodm aka lightdm-autologin-greeter (and also made me curious on staticsite)
• Jonas Smedegaard for teaching me the solarized theme and loads of other things
• Siri for being around and really having a stand for making Debian look more like a product
• Dimitri John Ledkov for chiming in on Ayatana Indicators as next Indicators upstream for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Chrys for chiming on .desktop file proxying, meet you back in #arctica on Freenode
• Sean for asking me daily, if my luggage had arrived (see below), as he shared the same fate during DebCamp
• the owner of that nice shop where I bought loads of clothes while waiting for my luggage still stuck in Hamburg
• Steven for looking into gcc compiler macros with me for nx-libs autotools conversion, also probably - luggage wise - the lightest traveller among us
• Fabian for sharing is sadness and pain about the FLOSS non-situation in schools all over Quebec
• Mario from New Zealand and Jos from the Netherlands chiming in on FLOSS and education on IRC after having watch my talk about Debian Edu / Skolelinux. Mario, we will soon ask you for opensourcing your teacher screen over WiFi solution...
• Lior who thinks about bringing Debian Edu / Skolelinux to Israel. (That would be awesome!)
• Rhonda for having time for my Debian Backports woes and probably having been quite forgiving ;-)
• Bobby who is a font engineer during the week and (used to be) a cave explorer and mapper in his spare time
• Ximin for providing deep insight in the key signing workflow and the caff approach to it
• Daniel for sharing work experiences and nudging me to go with Remote Desktop stuff (out of pure personal interest *g*, of course, but still)
• Tzfarir and Gunnar for a nice chat on the last night of DebConf

Topics I have worked on

• Finding my luggage
  • After I had arrived at Montreal Airport, I found out that my luggage stayed in Hamburg
  • So the first 4.5 days, I was continuously busy with calling Lufthansa for package item tracking...
  • Go shopping twice, to update my plastic bag of fresh clothes...
• MATE 1.18 in Debian
  • Finalize package builds of MATE 1.18 in Debian unstable (because of some GLib2.0 regression, thanks to Iain Lane for the prompt fix and upload)
• Debian Edu
  • clear up src:package debian-edu regarding the task files related to Debian Pure Blends
  • this work is still in progress...
• Debian Blends (esp. the blends-dev part of the blends src:package)
  • You can now have empty Depends: / Recommends: / Suggests: fields with the list of packages then starting in the next line.
  • It is now possible to have real Depends: fields in task files that become Depends: fields in debian/control. Packages targetting Depends: that are not in unstable get de-promoted to the Suggests: field in debian/control.
  • Tested with most available Debian Pure Blends meta-packages
  • I also pointed Daniel Pocock with his new GnuPG clean-room project towards Debian Pure Blends
• Ring: A 'new' distributed video chat tool without mediating servers. Good concept, however, we could not get it to work on the DebConf campus.
• Debian Design Team (which I am now a member of, I guess)
  • Dive into and out of the vision of a Debian Uniform set of packages, turning the collection of software in Debian into one thing.
  • Run my terminal applications now with the Base16 profile 'solarized-universal'. However, Debian Design will be much more than 16 colors in a console terminal.
  • Let's turn Debian into something like a potential product!
• Debian Policy:
  • I even helped with a Debian Policy bug...
• Skolab Groupware: Forking Kolab (v2) as a new project, named the Skolab Groupware. Instead of migrating my own mail server away from Kolab (v2), I chose continuing maintenance for it, at least for the core compoents:
  • https://github.com/Skolab-Groupware
  • Targetting small to medium sized installations with little administration effort.
  • I mainly ported Kolab's kolab-webadmin PHP project to a recent status so that it can run under Debian testing/unstable: https://github.com/Skolab-Groupware/skolab-webadmin
  • Big thanks to Siri Reiter for consulting me on artwork and for helping me putting together a simple logo for the project.
• nx-libs: Work on several PRs:
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/496 (review + merge)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/498 (code)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/499 (code)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/501 (review + merge)
  • Play with KDE5 and nx-libs: IT WORKS!
• Weblate:
  • Become hosted by hosted Weblate for...
  • Ayatana Indicators
  • Arctica Project
  • Skolab Groupware
  Thanks to Michal iha for providing this fine translation service

Talks and BoFs

• Talk: Supporting Debian Edu / Skolelinux as a Product: Lessons Learned
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/169
  • Video: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/su...
  • Outcome: https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/59
• Talk: Ayatana Indicators
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/168
  • Video: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/ay...
  • Outcome: https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/60
• Ad-hoc BoF: Bits from the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/223
  • Outcome: still to be published...
• Ad-hoc BoF: Debian for Remote Desktop Computing
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/60
  • Outcome: still to be published...

Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable

• mate-settings-daemon
• mate-dock-applet
• brisk-menu
• mate-optimus
• caja-actions
• mate-common
• mate-tweak
• plank
• freerdp (2x)
• freerdp2
• gosa-plugin-mailaddress

Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW

• python-wither
• lightdm-autologin-greeter
• caja-rename

I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security

• freerdp (1.1) (actually twice, one of them a security upload)
• gosa-plugin-mailaddress
• mate-themes

Other Package related Stuff

• Prepare upload of caja-admin by asking for release tags upstream
• Talk Clint Byrums into a fresh upload of the long not touch undistract-me package
• Breed on different desktop layouts for Debian MATE (like in Ubuntu MATE)
• Do quite a bit of GnuPG key signing
• Update my consent with NM to pick up my work on collab-maint request processing again

Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

On last Tuesday, I gave a 20 min talk about Ayatana Indicators at DebConf 17 in Montreal. Ayatana Indicators Talk The talk had video coverage, so big thanks to the DebConf video team for making it possible to send the below video link around to people in the world: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/ay... The document of notes shown in the video is available on Debian's Infinote (Gobby) server:

$ sudo apt-get install gobby
$ sudo gobby infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf17/talk/ayatana-indicators 

The major outcome of this talk was getting to know Dimitri John Ledkov from the Foundation Team at Canonical Ltd. We agreed on investigating the following actions, targetting the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release and later on Debian 10 (aka buster): Upstream Todos

• We need to find out what indicator applets are still needed (already there: application, session, power; w-i-p: messages, not yet touch: sound, datetime, transfer). If you maintain a desktop environment and need indicator support, please contact us.
• Rip-out liburl-dispatcher and Mir related code from all ayatana-indicator-* code projects (upstream)
• Build-time disable phone and tablet related code (upstream). If you are from the UBPorts project and have concerns about this, please contact us.
• Fully deprecate all Ubuntu Indicators upstream projects on Launchpad and point to Ayatana Indicators as upstream source for indicators in the Ubuntu ecosystem

Debian/Ubuntu Todos

• Update https://wiki.debian.org/Ayatana, most important change for packagers: The team will use Git from now on, not Bazaar.
• Get in touch with people maintaining indicator related packages (packages that have libappindicator-dev as build-dependency) to prepare for the transition from Ubuntu Indicators (unmaintained upstream, unmaintained in Debian) to Ayatana Indicators (package list, see DDPO Ayatana Developers Overview)
• File bug reports against all packages still dependending on Ubuntu Indicators in Debian and ideally provide patches to make those packages build against Ayatana Indicators
• Do the Ayatana Indicator transition in Debian

Please get in Touch... As this is going to be quite an effort, esp. if we want to get this done until 18.04 LTS, let me say, that this blog post is a call for help. If you are attached to Ubuntu and have used desktops with indicator support until now, please get in touch with the Ayatana Indicators team upstream as well as downstream (Debian/Ubuntu). Contact:

• Ayatana Indicators upstream:
  • #arctica on Freenode IRC
• Ayatana Indicators in Debian:
  • #debian-ayatana on Debian/OFTC IRC
  • Mailing list: pkg-ayatana-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
• Ubuntu Desktop Developers:
  • #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode IRC

Looking forward to meeting you online or on person and possibly working together with you on this transition project.

There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. They are armed with automatic rifles and pistols. I am scared for my life having sneaked past them inside. Everyone else is acting as if everything is normal. Nobody is scared or running for cover. Nobody called the police. I've asked the reception to talk to the gunmen and ask them to leave. They looked at me as if I am mad. Maybe I am. Is this what shizophrenia feels like?! Can you see them on the picture?! Please help. There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. I am not in central Beirut, I am in central Brussels.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-6 with improved patches from Val Lorentz. Chris Lamb submitted a patch for ibus-table which makes the output of ibus-table-createdb deterministic. Niko Tyni wrote a patch to make libmodule-build-perl linking order deterministic. Santiago Vila has been leading discussions on the best way to fix timestamps coming from Gettext POT files. Packages fixed The following 35 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-log4j2, dctrl-tools, dms, gitit, gnubik, isrcsubmit, mailutils, normaliz, oaklisp, octave-fpl, octave-specfun, octave-vrml, opencolorio, openvdb, pescetti, php-guzzlehttp, proofgeneral, pyblosxom, pyopencl, pyqi, python-expyriment, python-flask-httpauth, python-mzml, python-simpy, python-tidylib, reactive-streams, scmxx, shared-mime-info, sikuli, siproxd, srtp, tachyon, tcltk-defaults, urjtag, velvet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-7 by Santiago Vila.
• boa-constructor/0.6.1-15 by Santiago Vila.
• brian/1.4.1-3 by Yaroslav Halchenko.
• criticalmass/1:1.0.0-3 by Santiago Vila.
• cvs-buildpackage/5.25 by Santiago Vila.
• fcrackzip/1.0-6 uploaded by Adam Borowski, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• filters/2.54 prepared by Joey Hess, fixed by Marius Gavrilescu.
• fsvs/1.2.6-2 by Santiago Vila.
• fte/0.50.2b6-6 by Santiago Vila.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.7 by Stephen Kitt.
• ircd-hybrid/1:8.2.8+dfsg.1-1 by Dominic Hargreaves.
• leveldb/1.18-3 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libavg/1.8.1-2 uploaded by Dimitri John Ledkov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• lynx-cur/2.8.9dev6-4 uploaded by Axel Beckert, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• maildir-utils/0.9.12-3 by Norbert Preining
• pd-iemnet/0.2-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• photopc/3.05-8 by Santiago Vila.
• postgresql-plproxy/2.6-1 uploaded by Christoph Berg, report by Dhole.
• prometheus-pushgateway/0.2.0+ds-2 uploaded by Mart n Ferrari, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shelxle/1.0.740-1 uploaded by Daniel Leidert, fixed upstream.
• sigil/0.8.7+dfsg-2 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• sks-ecc/0.93-5 by Santiago Vila.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• snd/11.7-4 by Santiago Vila.
• solarwolf/1.5-2.1 by Graham Inggs.
• sphinx/1.3.1-6 uploaded by Dmitry Shachnev, patches by Val Lorentz.
• tla/1.3.5+dfsg1-2 by Santiago Vila.
• zapping/0.10~cvs6-10 by Santiago Vila.

The package is not in yet in unstable, but linux/4.2-1~exp1 is now reproducible! Kudos to Ben Hutchings, and most fixes are already merged upstream. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bochs/2.6-3 by Santiago Vila.
• oolite/1.82-1 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• openjdk-7/7u85-2.6.1-1 uploaded by Matthias Klose, original patch by Emmanuel Bourg.
• python-dtcwt/0.10.1+dfsg1-2 uploaded by Ghislain Antony Vaillant, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #797432 on torus-trooper by Reiner Herrmann: set locale to C when sorting source file list.
• #797437 on flow-tools by Chris Lamb: use pre-defined hostname and date of the latest debian/changelog entry in build string.
• #797505 on cloudprint by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797506 on comix by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797508 on litl by Chris Lamb: remove date from documentation generated with LaTeX.
• #797518 on gyoto by Chris Lamb: set date in documentation generated with LaTeX to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #797539 on cadabra by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797543 on xotcl by Chris Lamb: sort source list in Makefile.
• #797579 on ferret-vis by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797711 on libkinosearch1-perl by Niko Tyni: sort source list in Build.PL.
• #797871 on xbae by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.

reproducible.debian.net Some bugs that prevented packages to build successfully in the remote builders have been fixed. (h01ger) Two more amd64 build jobs have been removed from the Jenkins host in favor of six more on the new remote nodes. (h01ger) The munin graphs currently looks fine, so more amd64 jobs will probably be added in the next week. diffoscope development Version 32 of diffoscope has been released on September 3rd with the following new features:

• A new --fuzzy-threshold option to specify the TLSH score used as cut-off for fuzzy matching. Specifying 0 will disable fuzzy-matching entirely. Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• A new --new-file option to treat absent files as empty. This make diffoscope a great tool to look at the content of an archive at once by comparing it with a non-existent file (example). Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• Comparisons of symlinks and devices given on the command line is now possible.
• Default values are displayed in --help.

It also fixes many bugs. Head over to the changelog for the full list. Version 33 was released the day after to fix a bug introduced in the packaging. Documentation update Chris Lamb blessed the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification with the version number 1.0 . Lunar documented how the .file assembler directive can help with random filenames in debug symbols. Package reviews 235 reviews have been removed, 84 added and 277 updated this week. 29 new FTBFS bugs were filled by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), Daniel Stender, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: random_order_in_ibus_table_createdb_output, random_order_in_antlr_output, nondetermistic_link_order_in_module_build, and timestamps_in_tex_documents. Misc. Thanks to Dhole and Thomas Vincent, the talk held at DebConf15 now has subtitles! Void Linux started to merge changes to make packages produced by xbps reproducible.