Search Results: "Iain R. Learmonth"

7 February 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: After FOSDEM 2016

FOSDEM was fun. It was great to see all these open source projects coming together in one place and it was really good to talk to people that were just as enthusiastic about the FOSS activities they do as I am about mine. Thanks go to Sa l Corretg who looked after the real-time communications dev room and made sure everything ran smoothly. I was very pleased to find that I had to stand for a couple of talks as the room was full with people eager to learn more about the world of RTC. I was again pleased on the Sunday when I had such a great audience for my talk in the distributions dev room. Everyone was very welcoming and after the talk I had some corridor discussions with a few people that were really interesting and have given me a few new things to explore in the near future. A few highlights from FOSDEM: This is just some of the highlights, and I know I'm missing out a lot here. One of the main things that FOSDEM has done for me is open my eyes as to how wide and diverse our community is and it has served as a reminder that there is tons of cool stuff out there if you take a moment to look around. Also, thanks to my trip to FOSDEM, I now have four new t-shirts to add into the rotation: FOSDEM 2016, Debian, XMPP and twiki.org.

29 January 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: FOSDEM 2016

FOSDEM 2016 starts tomorrow and I will be attending. I've not got off to a brilliant start with my flight being cancelled, though SAS have now rebooked me onto a later flight and I'm going to arrive in time for the start tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I am going to miss the Friday beer event. On the Saturday, the real-time communications devroom will be happening, and I am one of the devroom admins that helped to organise this. There will be a full day of talks and demonstrations about real-time communications using open standards and free software. I'm rather excited about this. On the Sunday, I'll be giving a talk and quick demonstration in the distributions devroom about real-time communications in free software communities and why it is useful for your community. If you're considering setting up some real-time communications infrastructure for your community but you're not going to be along to FOSDEM, there is a great guide for getting started at rtcquickstart.org.

9 January 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: Trust

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I'm not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I'd like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It's likely we will never know what has brought us here. I live in Scotland, a country that is a part of the United Kingdom and a member of the European Union. We have a Scottish Government, although certain matters are still handled by the UK Government. The European Government also handles some matters and these can take effect across the entire European Union. I do not feel that I can hold trust in any of these bodies anymore. The European Convention on Human Rights was, for me at least, a beacon of hope. A series of fundamental rights guaranteed to be upheld for every person within the European Union. A series of fundamental rights that has been ignored by governments repeatedly: This is not an exhaustive list, just select cross-sections of our recent history. It is important to remember that in each of these cases, it took a citizen to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. These rights were violated by the UK government until the actions were challenged, the legislation that allowed them was currently enacted into UK law without regard for the ECHR. It should also be noted that the ban on prisoners voting is still in effect in the UK. We've learnt that the ECHR is not an effective safeguard against the abuse of powers by government. The UK government also sees the Human Rights Act as a problem, although at least scrapping it has been delayed for now. Much of these breaches of human rights are justified by the government as in the interest of the runaway train known as "national security". I have recently had direct contact with one aspect of this during my journey home from 32c3. You can read about my experiences with airport security here and here. My experiences at these airports angered me for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I was asked to expose my genitals as part of the routine screening, which I do not believe to be proportionate at all. At Luton, I was at the point where I was intending to leave the airport and take the train instead before I was allowed to excercise my right to opt-out of the nude body scanner. Since these incidents, I have conducted some research into these scanners and started an article on the Open Rights Group wiki. While the security officer at Luton had tried to tell me that the radio waves used could not penetrate clothing, they in fact can and this is the entire purpose of them. While the security officer at Luton told me that the machines did not generate an image, they are in fact doing exactly that, even if that image is processed by computer vision algorithms as opposed to being viewed by a human reviewer. A leaflet by the Department for Transport, made available on the Aberdeen Airport website, also states that no image is created, and yet this is exactly how the scanners work. I have never seen this leaflet printed and available in the airport itself, although I admit I do not fly regularly and may have missed it. That said, it does not provide a true representation of the scan process and I would go as far to say it contains an outright lie. In a document published by the UK Government titled "Response to the consultation on the use of security scanners in an aviation security environment", they state:
"nearly all passengers, if they fully understand the procedures, would be unlikely to opt for [the alternative of a private search]"
Even with this display of confidence that they believe the public are happy with the invasion of privacy brought by the security scanners, they have still chosen to not fully inform the public in the way in which the scanner operates. It is the lies that anger me the most. We claim to live in a democracy and you cannot have a democracy without transparency. It is not too late for the Government to earn back my trust, but for now, they haven't given me good reason to believe anything they produce. If you have read this article and you would like to support efforts for change in the United Kingdom, please consider joining the Open Rights Group and perhaps getting involved in their work.

2 January 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: Adventures at London Luton

Continuing on my journey home, once again I was asked to step into the full-body scanner. This time I was certain that I didn't want to use it, I was so angry last time that I had been forced into it that I actually threw up. It wasn't until I was in tears and asking them to take my bags off the plane, planning to take the train instead, that they gave me the manual pat-down. "Voluntary" apparently has a different meaning to the one I'm familiar with here.

Iain R. Learmonth: Fun in Hamburg Airport

Today I'm travelling home from 32c3, back to Aberdeen via London from Hamburg Airport. My experience passing through security to get to the gates this morning has angered me to the point that I had to vent. They have full-body scanners installed, which in my opinion are a massive invasion of my personal privacy. As I approached the security checkpoint, I noticed a sign where it stated that use of the scanner was not mandatory and that a manual screening process was available. Once I'd loaded my bags into the trays, I asked the security officer how to opt for the manual screening at which point I was told it was not available due to a lack of staff. I was forced to allow for an intimate scan to take place or miss my flight. I'm not really in a position to be making alternative arrangements for travel and so I had to submit but it has left me outraged. Privacy is about the ability to choose what I share and who I share it with. This was meant to be a right protected by the ECHR, but I guess human rights are outdated now we're entering 2016. Bring on the dystopian future!

20 December 2015

Iain R. Learmonth: A Week of Debian

For the last week I have been stuck in England. For the vast majority of that time, I've had nothing to do except work on Debian and this blog post documents some of the things I worked on. Obviously spending a whole week on Debian, there's going to be some packaging involved. The following packages got new versions in unstable this last week: Packaging updates were one of the simpler tasks tackled this week though. I spent a lot of time this week on Debian Live along with others in the #debian-live IRC channel. Over the last week we achieved a number of things, possibly the most important being that all the generic live support packages (i.e. live-boot, live-config and live-tools) have now been converted into native packages, have their VCS repositories hosted on Alioth and have seen a good number of patches merged from the BTS and from the old patch system. All future patches will be managed via the BTS for Debian Live, as with other Debian projects. We've also put effort into getting documentation online again now that the live.debian.net server has been turned off and we now have the live-build documentation and the live-wrapper documentation hosted on the project's Alioth webspace. The live-wrapper user documentation was mostly written this week so may not be amazing. On the smaller task list for Debian Live, the KGB bots are now present in the channel and reporting on git commits, a number of the more popular URLs from live.debian.net are now being redirected to their new locations (although we've had to recover these URLs from web.archive.org, the list of redirections is certainly not complete) and we've made updates to the wiki pages about how to contribute to the project. Unfortunately, no one has stepped forwards as a new lead for live-build and so this package has been orphaned. This does not necessarily mean that the package will be removed from Debian any time soon, just that it does not currently have a maintainer. If you're interested in taking over maintainence of live-build, see #808048. For testing the core live support packages, new live images for stretch have been built using live-wrapper and are available here. There are known issues with the syslinux configuration and these are not isohybrid images. My other major project this week has been my efforts to form a Debian Metadata team. The Debian Metadata team would produce the frameworks and run the services that make data about Debian available in a number of formats to make the data as accessible as possible and to encourage its use both within Debian and in external projects. Currently this includes two experimental services: rdf.debian.net and map.debian.net. We're don't plan to duplicate any of the work done by UDD, but make the data aggregated in UDD more accessible to users and developers. This means publishing that data in JSON/JSONP, KML, RDF, iCalendar and any other format that makes sense. There may be instances where it makes sense to augment the published data with live data, for example mirror availability should probably be live and not just a recent snapshot. If you're interested in participating in the Debian Metadata team, you can register your interested on bug #808049. This is not a complete summary of all my activities over the last week, but for those interested, it should give you an idea of what I've been up to. Finally, for those of you that have been waiting for my write-up on the airgapped GnuPG master key, I decided in the end that my blog was not the right place for this. You can find the guide in two parts: key generation and key export to the YubiKey. I've tried to keep these guides as generic as possible while still being as useful as possible. While writing these up on the wiki, I've also created pages for OpenPGP and GnuPG and I've almost entirely rewritten the DebianKeyring wiki page. I discovered this awesome guide to OpenPGP concepts which I would recommend to anyone that is new to OpenPGP.

Iain R. Learmonth: YubiKey + udev follow-ups

In my previous post, I talked about the udev hack I had used with the YubiKey and how it was not the correct way to do things. I recieved a lot of feedback on this post, and here I'm hoping to summarise what the correct way to do it is. The rule I was originally using was: 
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="1050",ATTRS idProduct =="0111", OWNER="irl"
The problem with this rule was that it always made my own username the owner of the YubiKey. For my use on my laptop, this was fine, as I'm the only user ever logged into my laptop, but this is not the right way to do this. On a multi-user system you would want the user logged into the console, and so the one that has plugged in the USB device by implication, to be the owner of the device. Sam Morris followed up to my last post by e-mail to suggest the following rule: 
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="1050", ATTRS idProduct =="0111", TAG+="uaccess"
The difference here is that instead of explicitly setting an owner, the uaccess tag is added to the device. This tag has meaning to systemd-logind and will add the necessary ACLs to the device to allow the console user to access it. The ACL should also be removed by systemd-logind when you log out. He also suggested using getfacl (from the acl package) to check the ACLs that have been assigned to devices. 
irl@orbiter$ getfacl /dev/hidraw0  
# file: hidraw0
# owner: irl
# group: root
user::rw-  
user:irl:rw-  
group::---  
mask::rw-  
other::---
Here we can see that the device has been set to being owned by my username. (Note that on your system, the YubiKey may have a different path, check your dmesg output to see what device name it is assigned.) If you don't have systemd-logind available, fear not as there is an alternative approach you can take that was suggested by Simon Josefsson, who actually wrote a blog post in 2014 about using an offline GnuPG master key with subkeys on a YubiKey. If you install the pcscd package this will provide you with a daemon that runs as root and provides access to the smartcard for ordinary users. I haven't looked at how pcscd handles limiting access to the device for other users as this isn't an approach I've taken. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback, I feel like I've learnt something and taken another step closer to doing things The Right Way .

17 December 2015

Iain R. Learmonth: YubiKey NEO as an OpenPGP token

I was first interested in the idea of using a smartcard to store OpenPGP subkeys when I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe as a Fellow and recieved my FSFE Fellowship Card. By performing all cryptographic operations on the smartcard it would remove almost all the routes by which the secret key material could be compromised as the host operating system never has access to that secret material. I decided that this was something I wanted to try out and I purchased two Cherry G83-6644 keyboards. One of the nice things I noticed about this product was that it was both FIPS 201 approved and GOST R approved. If both the Americans and the Russians could agree it was a good keyboard, it had a good chance of being a good keyboard. A little udev magic to handle permissions and the card worked great, but there was a problem. This was not the most friendly form-factor and a USB keyboard was a bit big to be carrying around to use the smartcard with my laptop. I intended to get a smaller reader for my laptop but never did and the Fellowship card fell into disuse. Later, I came across the YubiKey NEO. The YubiKey NEO is capable of emulating an OpenPGP smartcard, just like the Fellowship card, but in the form-factor of a USB stick. This improved form factor was enough to make me give it a go. Since August 2015 I've been using a YubiKey NEO to store my OpenPGP subkeys and, excluding some occasional udev mishaps, it's been working great. When you first get the YubiKey NEO, it does not have the OpenPGP applet enabled. You'll need to enable it yourself using the ykpersonalize tool: 
sudo apt install yubikey-personalization  
sudo ykpersonalize -m 82
Once you've enabled the OpenPGP module, the USB product ID will change, and you can now add a udev rule that will allow you to interact with the device when it's plugged in as your normal user. 
/etc/udev/rules.d/99-yubikeys.rules:
------------------------------------
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="1050",ATTRS idProduct =="0111", OWNER="irl"
This is not the correct way to do this. I've set it so that any YubiKey with the OpenPGP module inserted is set to be owned by my username (irl) when the correct way to do this would be to have it set to the current console user. I do not know enough udev magic to know how to do that. UPDATE: I recieved a lot of good feedback on this, which you can find here. Of course, for my key 0xE9846C49, this key started life as an ordinary key just stored on my laptop, so seperating subkeys onto the YubiKey has not massively increased security as an attacker that has stolen the secret key material can generate new subkeys. I would hopefully notice these new rogue subkeys (I do monitor keyservers for changes to my key regularly), but I would prefer to make the possibility of the key being compromised as low as possible. For this reason I am performing a key transition to a new key, F540ABCD, where the master key is stored offline. In my next post, hopefully within a day or so, I'll explain how I used Tails to generate a key offline and load the subkeys into the YubiKey.

2 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: FOSDEM 2016 Real-Time Communications dev-room and lounge

FOSDEM is one of the world's premier meetings of free software developers, with over five thousand people attending each year. FOSDEM 2016 takes place 30-31 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. This call-for-participation contains information about:
  • Real-Time communications dev-room and lounge,
  • speaking opportunities,
  • volunteering in the dev-room and lounge,
  • related events around FOSDEM, including the XMPP summit,
  • social events (including the Saturday night dinner),
  • the Planet aggregation sites for RTC blogs
Call for participation - Real Time Communications (RTC) The Real-Time dev-room and Real-Time lounge is about all things involving real-time communication, including: XMPP, SIP, WebRTC, telephony, mobile VoIP, codecs, privacy and encryption. The dev-room is a successor to the previous XMPP and telephony dev-rooms. We are looking for speakers for the dev-room and volunteers and participants for the tables in the Real-Time lounge. The dev-room is only on Saturday, 30 January 2016 in room K.3.401. The lounge will be present for both days in building K. To discuss the dev-room and lounge, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Speaking opportunities Note: if you used Pentabarf before, please use the same account/username Main track: the deadline for main track presentations was midnight on 30 October. Leading developers in the Real-Time Communications field are encouraged to consider submitting a presentation to the main track. Real-Time Communications dev-room: deadline 27 November. Please also use the Pentabarf system to submit a talk proposal for the dev-room. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Real-Time devroom". Other dev-rooms: some speakers may find their topic is in the scope of more than one dev-room. It is permitted to apply to more than one dev-room but please be kind enough to tell us if you do this. See the full list of dev-rooms. Lightning talks: deadline 27 November. The lightning talks are an excellent opportunity to introduce a wider audience to your project. Given that dev-rooms are becoming increasingly busy, all speakers are encouraged to consider applying for a lightning talk as well as a slot in the dev-room. Pentabarf system to submit a lightning talk proposal. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Lightning Talks". First-time speaking? FOSDEM dev-rooms are a welcoming environment for people who have never given a talk before. Please feel free to contact the dev-room administrators personally if you would like to ask any questions about it. Submission guidelines The Pentabarf system will ask for many of the essential details. Please remember to re-use your account from previous years if you have one. In the "Submission notes", please tell us about:
  • the purpose of your talk
  • any other talk applications (dev-rooms, lightning talks, main track)
  • availability constraints and special needs
You can use HTML in your bio, abstract and description. If you maintain a blog, please consider providing us with the URL of a feed with posts tagged for your RTC-related work. We will be looking for relevance to the conference and dev-room themes, presentations aimed at developers of free and open source software about RTC-related topics. Please feel free to suggest a duration between 20 minutes and 55 minutes but note that the final decision on talk durations will be made by the dev-room administrators. As the two previous dev-rooms have been combined into one, we may decide to give shorter slots than in previous years so that more speakers can participate. Please note FOSDEM aims to record and live-stream all talks. The CC-BY license is used. For any questions, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Volunteers needed To make the dev-room and lounge run successfully, we are looking for volunteers:
  • FOSDEM provides video recording equipment and live streaming, volunteers are needed to assist in this
  • organizing one or more restaurant bookings (dependending upon number of participants) for the evening of Saturday, 30 January
  • participation in the Real-Time lounge
  • helping attract sponsorship funds for the dev-room to pay for the Saturday night dinner and any other expenses
  • circulating this Call for Participation to other mailing lists
FOSDEM is made possible by volunteers and if you have time to contribute, please feel free to get involved. Related events - XMPP and RTC summits The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has traditionally held a summit in the days before FOSDEM. There is discussion about a similar summit taking place on 28 and 29 January 2016. Please see the XSF Summit 19 wiki and join the mailing list to discuss. We are also considering a more general RTC or telephony summit, potentially on 29 January. Please join the Free-RTC mailing list and send an email if you would be interested in participating, sponsoring or hosting such an event. Social events and dinners The traditional FOSDEM beer night occurs on Friday, 29 January On Saturday night, there are usually dinners associated with each of the dev-rooms. Most restaurants in Brussels are not so large so these dinners have space constraints. Please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list for further details about the Saturday night dinner options and how you can register for a seat. Spread the word and discuss If you know of any mailing lists where this CfP would be relevant, please forward this email. If this dev-room excites you, please blog or microblog about it, especially if you are submitting a talk. If you regularly blog about RTC topics, please send details about your blog to the planet site administrators:
http://planet.jabber.org ralphm@ik.nu
http://planet.sip5060.net daniel@pocock.pro
http://planet.opentelecoms.org daniel@pocock.pro
Please also link to the Planet sites from your own blog or web site. Contact For discussion and queries, please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list. The dev-room administration team:

1 September 2015

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2015)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

25 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the reproducible builds talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the reproducible builds roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

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