DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occasion when one happens. This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me. I wasn t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less, his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks, Nilesh, for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Korea s s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many things easy. Most stuff were documented on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels. We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrapers I have ever seen. The city has a good mix of modern and ancient culture. We explored various places in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing. Next, we headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is Busan is Good .) South Korea has a good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because, despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the time. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels. The venue for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from the front desk, we got our dormitory rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different, ie:

• Rooms had heated floors. It seems to snow in Busan.
• Each area was had card based access. There was a separate card for laundry too.
• Rooms had announcement systems right inside the room, though we couldn t decipher any announcement as all of them were in Korean.
• Each room was provided with a dedicated access point and own SSID inside the room.

Settling in was easy. We started meeting familiar folks after almost a year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf. Like everytime, the first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, volunteers check in, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls. After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions, which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out. DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetarianism folks well, of which I m one. I got to try different food items, which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian restaurant to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn t particularly craving desi food but wasn t able to get something according to my taste so went there. For day trip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful).
Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors, folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was a massive update to last year when we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn t what is required, but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage, but it s always fun to have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;)
Now let s talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general:

• Convenience stores were everywhere, one could see same brand stores less than a kilometer apart. We had even had two of them (GS25(s)), a road cross away too. These places were well stocked with almost everything, even alcohol.
• There were wide footpaths and pedestrian friendly policies.
• Public transport and intra modal transfer is convenient and easy to figure. Each metro station connects to multiple nearby buildings through underground walkways, and one never had to go out in the sun (in hot and humid weather). Also, Seoul and Busan metro networks were massive. The Same T money card worked for buses (almost hop on, tap and hop off at your destination), metros and even cabs.
• South Korea pays special attention to maintaining their historical and cultural buildings. These venues had informational brochures in Korea, English, Japanese and Chinese.
• We got a constant stream of Public safety alerts on our phones. Some phones even read them aloud for heatwaves and rains warnings, all in Korean.
• Trash was segregated at source everywhere.
• Public, high speed Wi-Fi was omnipresent in malls, public transport, airport etc. In metro, each coach had access points from all three telecom providers (SK Telecom, KT and LG U+) which also had almost similar voice and data plans.
• Police personals were quite helpful despite the language issue.
• Not many folks here are comfortable in English, but one can always make use of various mobile translation apps.
• Cards are accepted everywhere and there are too many of these cards ;)
• Food situation was a bit difficult for me as a vegetarian. We always have vegan/veg food in DebConf but outside, this whole concept doesn t seem to exist here.
• I couldn t find any public speedtest servers inside Korea. All my fast.com/speedtest.net servers were located either Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and even in the United States. On the very last day, I got a speedtest servers in Seoul, inside SK Telecom.

If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it s better to attend DebCamp as well because that s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organizational work/stress so was better, and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost all Debian teams needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to the team, and would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull off this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality. This whole experience expanded my world view. There s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France. PS - Shoutout to abbyck (aka hamCK)!

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In July, 13 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 5.0h (out of 4.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 8.75h (out of 4.5h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.25h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 51.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 43.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
• Lucas Kanashiro did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 4.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 20.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 5.0h (out of 5.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 6.0h (out of 16.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Sean Whitton did 2.25h (out of 6.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.75h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 39.5h (out of 2.5h assigned and 51.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 1 DLA. August will be the month that Debian 11 makes the transition to LTS. Our contributors have already been hard at work with preparatorty tasks and also with making contributions to packages in Debian 11 in close collaboration with the Debian security team and package maintainers. As a result, users and sponsors should not observe any especially notable differences as the transition occurs. While only one DLA was released in July (as a result of the transitional state of Debian 11 bullseye ), there were some notable highlights. LTS contributor Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt for Debian 11 (in collaboration with the Old-Stable Release Managers and the Debian Security Team) to fix a number of outstanding CVEs which did not rise to the level of a DSA by the Debian Security Team. The update prepared by Guilhem will be included in Debian 11 as part of the final point release at the end of August, one of the final transition steps by the Release Managers as Debian 11 moves entirely to the LTS Team s responsibility. Notable work was also undertaken by contributors Lee Garrett (fixes on the ansible test suite and a bullseye update), Lucas Kanashiro (Rust toolchain, utilized by the clamav, firefox-esr, and thunderbird packages), and Sylvain Beucler (fixes on the ruby2.5/2.7 test suites and CI infrastructure), which will help improve the quality of updates produced during the next LTS cycle. June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for customers of the Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right away if you still have Debian 10 systems which must be kept secure (and which cannot yet be upgraded).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 106 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 74 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 38 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 116 months)
  • Linode (for 110 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 100 months)
  • Plat Home (for 99 months)
  • CINECA (for 74 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 56 months)
  • Deveryware (for 43 months)
  • EDF SA (for 28 months)
  • Dataport A R (for 3 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 121 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 115 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 107 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 107 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 101 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 91 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 85 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 69 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 58 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 56 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 50 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 50 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 44 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 42 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 40 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 40 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 31 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 28 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 4 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 121 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 121 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 118 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 118 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 117 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 116 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 116 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 115 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 115 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 114 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 105 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 103 months)
  • Tesorion (for 98 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 97 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 97 months)
  • Bearstech (for 89 months)
  • LiHAS (for 89 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 84 months)
  • Supagro (for 79 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 78 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 64 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 56 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 53 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 49 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 44 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 40 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 35 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 34 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 33 months)
  • Alter Way (for 26 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 16 months)
  • SOBIS Software GmbH

Debian Contributions: 2024-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

autopkgtest/Incus build streamlining, by Colin Watson Colin contributed a change to allow maintaining Incus container and VM images in parallel. Both of these are useful (containers are faster, but some tests need full machine isolation), and the build tools previously didn t handle that very well. This isn t yet in unstable, but once it is, keeping both flavours of unstable images up to date will be a simple matter of running this regularly:

RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus images:debian/trixie
RELEASE=sid autopkgtest-build-incus --vm images:debian/trixie

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago continued the work on the support for applying security fixes to the Linux kernel in Debian, without the need to reboot the machine. As mentioned in the previous month report, kpatch 0.9.9-1 (and 0.9.9-2 afterwards) was uploaded to unstable in July, closing the Intent to Salvage (ITS) bug. With this upload, the remaining RC bugs were solved, and kpatch was able to transition to Debian testing recently. Kpatch is expected to be an important component in the live-patching support, since it makes it easy to build a patch as a kernel module. Emmanuel and Santiago continued to work on the design for Linux live-patching and presented the current status in the DebConf24 presentation.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n To be able to add RISC-V support and to avoid using tools not packaged in Debian (See #331), the Salsa CI pipeline first needed to move away from kaniko to build the images used by the pipeline. Santiago created a merge request to use buildah instead, and it was merged last month. Santiago also prepared a couple of more MRs related to how the images are built: initial RISC-V support, that should be merged after improving how built images are tested. The switch to buildah introduced a regression in the work-in-progress MR that adds new build image so the build job can run sbuild. Santiago hopes to address this regression and continue with the sbuild-related MRs in August. Additionally, Santiago also contributed to the install docker-cli instead of docker.io in the piuparts image MR, and reviewed others such as reprotest: Add append-build-command option, fix failure at manual pipeline run when leaving RELEASE variable empty and Fix image not found error on image building stage.

Python 3.13 Betas, by Stefano Rivera As Python 3.13 is approaching the first release, Stefano has been uploading the beta releases to Debian unstable. Most of these have uncovered small bugs that needed to be investigated and fixed. Stefano also took the time to review the current patch set against cPython in Debian. Python 3.13 isn t marked as a supported Python release in Debian s Python tooling, yet, so nothing has been built against it, yet. Now that the Python 3.12 transition has completed, the next task will be to start trying to build Debian s Python module packages against Python 3.13, to estimate the work required to transition to 3.13 in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles Pina updated the packages python-asyncclick, python-pyaarlo and prepared updates for python-ring-doorbell and simplemonitor.
• Carles Pina updated (reviewing or translating) Catalan translations for adduser, apt-listchanges, debconf and shadow.
• Colin merged OpenSSH 9.8, and prepared a corresponding release note for DSA support now being disabled. This version included some substantial changes to split the server into a listener binary and a per-session binary, and those required some corresponding changes in the GSS-API key exchange patch. Sorting out the details of this and getting it to work again took some time.
• Colin upgraded 11 Python packages to new upstream versions, and modernized the build process and/or added non-superficial autopkgtests to several more.
• Rapha l Hertzog tweaked tracker.debian.org s debci task to work around changes in the JSON output. He also improved tracker.debian.org s ability to detect bounces due to spam to avoid unsubscribing emails that are not broken, but that are better than Debian at rejecting spam.
• Helmut Grohne monitored the /usr-move transition with few incidents. A notable one is that some systems have ended up with aliasing links that don t match the ones installed by base-files which could lead to an unpack error from dpkg. This is now prevented by having base-files.preinst error out.
• Helmut investigated toolchain bootstrap failures with gcc-14 in rebootstrap but would only discover the cause in August.
• Helmut sent a MR for the cross-exe-wrapper requested by Simon McVittie for gobject-introspection. It is a way of conditionally requesting qemu-user when emulation is required for execution during cross compilation.
• Helmut sent three patches for cross build failures.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded packages lprint and magicfilter to fix RC-bugs that appeared due to the introduction of gcc-14.
• Santiago continued to work on activities related to the DebConf24 Content Team, including reviewing the schedule and handling updates on it.
• Santiago worked on preparations for the DebConf25, to be held in Brest, France, next year. A video of the BoF presented during DebConf24 can be found here.
• Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf24, and helped to run the event.

Planing A Self Organized Solo Trip You know the movie Queen? The actor Kangana Ranaut plays in that movie the role of Rani Mehra, a 24-year-old Punjabi woman, who was a simple, homely girl that was always reliant on her family. Similar to Rani I too rarely ventured out without my parents and often needed my younger sibling by my side. Inspired by her transformation, I decided it was time to take control of my own story and discover who I truly am.

Trip Requirements

My First Passport The journey began with a significant first step: Obtaining my first passport Never having had one before, I scheduled the nearest available interview date on June 29 2022. This meant traveling to Solapur, a city 309 km from my hometown, accompanied by my father. After successfully completing the interview, I received my passport on July 14 2022.

Select A Country, Booking Flights And Accommodation Excited and ready to embark on my adventure, I planed trip to Albania and booked the flight tickets. Why? I had heard from friends that it was a beautiful European country with beaches and other attractions, and importantly, it didn t require a visa for Indian citizens and was more affordable than other European destinations. Before heading to Albania, I planned a overnight stop in Abu Dhabi with a transit visa, thanks to friend who knew the process for obtaining it. Some of my friends did travel also to Europe at the same time and quite close to my plannings, but that I realized just later the trip.

Day 1, Starting The Experience On July 20, 2022, I started my journey by traveling from Pune, Maharashtra, to Delhi, where my brother lives. He came to see me off at the airport, adding a touch of warmth and support to the beginning of my solo adventure. Upon arriving in Delhi, with my next flight scheduled for July 21, I stayed at a backpacker hostel named Zostel, Paharganj, Delhi to rest. During my stay, I noticed that many travelers at the hostel carried rucksacks, which sparked a desire in me to get one for my own trip to Europe. Up until then, I had always shopped with my mom and had never bought anything on my own. Inspired by the travelers, I set out to find a suitable rucksack. I traveled alone by metro from Paharganj to Rohini to visit a Decathlon store, where I purchased a 50-liter rucksack. This was a significant step in preparing for my European adventure and marked a milestone in my journey of self reliance.

Day 2, Flying To Abu Dhabi The following day, July 21 2024, I had a flight to Abu Dhabi. I spent the night at the hostel to rest before my journey. On the day of the flight, I needed to reach the airport by 3 PM, and a friend kindly came to drop me off. With my rucksack packed and excitement building, I was ready for the next leg of my adventure. When we arrived at the airport, my friend saw me off, marking the start of my international journey. With mom made spices, chutneys, and chilly flakes packed for comfort, I completed my immigration process in about two and a half hours. I then settled at the gate for my flight, feeling a mix of excitement and anxiety as thoughts raced through my mind. To ease my nerves, I struck up a conversation with a man seated nearby who was also traveling to Abu Dhabi for work. He provided helpful information about safety and transportation in Abu Dhabi, which reassured me. With the boarding process complete and my anxiety somewhat eased. I found my window seat on the flight and settled in, excited for the journey ahead. Next to me was a young man from Ranchi(Zarkhand, India), heading to Abu Dhabi for work at a mining factory. We had an engaging conversation about work culture in Abu Dhabi and recruitment from India. Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I completed my transit, collected my luggage, and began finding my way to the hotel Premier Inn AbuDhabi, which was in the airport area. To my surprise, I ran into the same man from the flight, now in a cab. He kindly offered to drop me at my hotel, which I gladly accepted since navigating an unfamiliar city with a short acquaintance felt safer. At the hotel gate, he asked if I had local currency (Dirhams) for payment, as sometimes online transactions can fail. That hadn t crossed my mind, and I realized I might be left stranded if a transaction failed. Recognizing his help as a godsend, I asked if he could lend me some Dirhams, promising to transfer the amount later. He kindly assured me to pay him back once I reached the hotel room. With that relief, I checked into the hotel, feeling deeply grateful for the unexpected assistance and transferred the money to him after getting to my room.

Day 3, Flying And Arrive In Tirana Once in the hotel room, I found it hard to sleep, anxious about waking up on time for my flight. I set an alarm to wake up early, but my subconscious mind kept me alert, and I woke up before the alarm went off. I got freshened up and went down for breakfast, where I found some vegetarian options like Idli-Sambar and bread with butter, along with some morning tea. After breakfast, I headed back to the airport, ready to catch my flight to my final destination: Tirana, Albania. I reached Tirana, Albania after a six hours flight, feeling exhausted and I was suffering from a headache. The air pressure had blocked my ears, and jet lag added to my fatigue. After collecting my checked luggage, I headed to the first ATM machine at the airport. Struggling to insert my card, I asked a nearby gentleman for help. He tried his best, but my card got stuck inside the machine. Panic set in as I worried about how I would survive without money. Taking a deep breath, I found an airport employee and explained the situation. The gentleman stayed with me, offering support and repeatedly apologizing for his mistake. However, it wasn t his fault, the ATM was out of order, which I hadn t noticed. My focus was solely on retrieving my ATM card. The airport employee worked diligently, using a hairpin to carefully extract my card. Finally, the card was freed, and I felt an immense sense of relief, grateful for the help of these kind strangers. I used another ATM, successfully withdrew money, and then went to an airport mobile SIM shop to buy a new SIM card for local internet and connectivity.

Day 4, Arriving In Tirana, Facing Challenges In A Foreign Country I had booked a stay at a backpacker hostel near the city center of Tirana. After sorting out the ATM and SIM card issues, I searched for a bus or any transport to get there. It was quite late, around 8:30 PM, and being in a new city, I was in a hurry. I saw a bus nearly leaving the airport, stopped it, and asked if it went to the city center. They gave me the green flag, so I boarded the airport service bus and reached the city center. Feeling very tired, I discovered that the hostel was about an hour and a half away by walking. Deciding to take a cab, I faced a challenge as the driver couldn t understand my English or accent. Using a mobile translator to convert my address from English to Albanian, I finally communicated my destination to him. With that sorted out, I headed to the Blue Door Backpacker Hostel and arrived around 9 PM, relieved to have finally reached my destination and I checked in. I found my top bunk bed, only to realize I had booked a mixed-gender dormitory. This detail had completely escaped my notice during the booking process. I felt unsure about how to handle the situation. Coincidentally, my experience mirrored what Kangana faced in the movie Queen . Feeling acidic due to an empty stomach and the exhaustion of heavy traveling, I wasn t up to cooking in the hostel s kitchen. I asked the front desk about the nearest restaurant. It was nearly 9:30 PM, and the streets were deserted. To avoid any mishaps like in the movie Queen, I kept my passport securely locked in my bag, ensuring it wouldn t be a victim of theft. Venturing out for dinner, I felt uneasy on the quiet streets. I eventually found a restaurant recommended by the hostel, but the menu was almost entirely non-vegetarian. I struggled to ask about vegetarian options and was uncertain if any dishes contained eggs, as some people consider eggs to be vegetarian. Feeling frustrated and unsure, I left the restaurant without eating. I noticed a nearby grocery store that was about to close and managed to get a few extra minutes to shop. I bought some snacks, wafers, milk, and tea bags (though I couldn t find tea powder to make Indian-style tea). Returning to the hostel, I made do with wafers, cookies, and milk for dinner. That day was incredibly tough for me, I filled with exhaustion and struggle in a new country, I was on the verge of tears . I made a video call home before sleeping on the top bunk bed. It was a new experience for me, sharing a room with both unknown men and women. I kept my passport safe inside my purse and under my pillow while sleeping, staying very conscious about its security.

Day 5, Exploring Nearby Places I woke up the next day at noon. After having some coffee, the hostel management girl asked if I wanted breakfast. She offered curd with cornflakes, which I refused because I don t like curd. Instead, I ordered a pizza from a vegetarian pizza place with her help, and I started feeling better. I met some people in the hostel, some from Syria and others from Italy. I struggled to understand their accents but kept pushing myself to get involved in their discussions. Despite the challenges, I felt more at ease and was slowly adapting to my new environment. I went out from the hostel in the evening to buy some vegetables to cook something. I searched for shops and found some potatoes, tomatoes, and rice. I decided to cook Khichdi, an Indian dish made with rice, and added some chili flakes I brought from home. After preparing my dinner, I ate and then went to sleep again.

Day 6, Tiranas Recent History The next day, I planned to explore the city and visited Bunkart-1, a fascinating museum in a massive underground bunker from the communist era. Originally built as a shelter for Albania s political and military elite, it now offers a unique glimpse into the country s history under Enver Hoxha s oppressive regime. The museum s exhibits include historical artifacts, photographs, and multimedia displays that detail the lives of Albanians during that time. Walking through the dimly lit corridors, I felt the weight of history and gained a deeper understanding of Albania s past.

Day 7-8, Meeting Friends From India The next day, I accidentally met with Chirag, who was returning from the Debian Conference 2022 held in Prizren, Kosovo, and staying at the same hostel. When I encountered him, he was talking on the phone, and I recognized he was Indian by his accent. I introduced myself, and we discovered we had some mutual friends. Chirag told me that our common friend, Raju, was also coming to stay at the hostel the next day. This news made me feel relaxed and happy to have known people around. When Raju arrived, the three of us, Chirag, Raju, and I planned to have dinner at an Indian restaurant and explore Tirana city. I had a great time talking and enjoying their company.

Day 9-10, Meeting More Friends Raju had a ticket to leave soon, so Chirag and I made a plan to visit Shkod r and the nearby Komani Lake for kayaking. We started our journey early in the morning by bus and reached Shkod r. There, we met new friends from the conference, Pavit and Abraham, who were already there. We had dinner together and enjoyed an ice cream treat from Chirag.

Day 12, Kayaking And Say Good Bye To Friends The next day, Pavit and Abraham had a flight back to India, so Chirag and I went to Komani Lake. We had an adventurous time kayaking, even though neither of us knew how to swim. We took a ferry through the backwaters to the island on Komani Lake and enjoyed a fantastic adventure together. After our trip, Chirag returned to Tirana for his flight back to India, leaving me to continue my journey alone.

Day 13, Climbing Rozafa Castel By stopping at Shkod r, I visited Rozafa Castle. Despite the language barrier, as most locals only spoke Albanian, people around me guided me correctly on how to get there. At times, I used applications like Google Translate to communicate. To read signs or hotel menus, I used Google Photos' language converter. I even used the audio converter to understand and speak some basic Albanian phrases. I took a bus from Shkod r to the southern part of Albania, heading to Sarand . The journey lasted about five to six hours, and I had booked a stay at Mona s Hostel. Upon arrival, I met Eliza from America, and we went together to Ksamil Beach, spending a wonderful day there.

Day 14, Vlora Beach: Beach Side Cycling Next, I traveled to Vlor , where I stayed for one day. During my time there, I enjoyed beach side cycling with a cycle provided by the hostel owner and spent some time feeding fish. I also met a fellow traveler from Delhi who had brought along some preserved Indian curry. He kindly shared it with me, which was a welcome change after nearly 15 days without authentic Indian cuisine, except for what I had cooked myself in various hostels.

Day 15-16 Visiting Durress, Travelling Back To Tirana I then visited Durr s, exploring its beautiful beaches, before heading back to Tirana one day before my flight home. On the day of my flight, my alarm didn t go off, and I woke up late at the hostel. In a frantic rush, I packed everything in just five minutes and dashed toward the city center to catch the bus to the airport. If I had been just five minutes later, I would have missed the bus. Thankfully, I managed to stop it just in time and began my journey back home, reflecting on the incredible adventure I had experienced. Fortunately, I wasn t late; I arrived at the airport just in time. After clearing immigration, I boarded my flight, which had a layover in Warsaw, Poland. The journey from Tirana to Warsaw took about two and a half hours, followed by a seven to eight-hour flight from Poland back to India. Once I arrived in Delhi, I returned to Zostel and booked a train ticket to Aurangabad for the next three days.

Backview This trip was an incredible adventure for me. I never imagined I could accomplish something like this, but I did. Meeting diverse people, experiencing different cultures, and learning so much made this journey truly unforgettable. Looking back, I realize how much I ve grown from this experience. Although I may have more opportunities to travel abroad in the future, this trip will always hold a special place in my heart. The memories I made and the incredible people I met along the way are irreplaceable. This experience goes beyond what I can express through this blog or words; it was incredibly precious to me. Every moment of this journey is etched in my memory, and I am grateful for every part of it.

Welcome to the July 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. Reproducible Builds Summit 2024
2. Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps
3. Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?
4. AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts
5. Community updates
6. Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog
7. Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems
8. Development news
9. Website updates
10. Upstream patches
11. Reproducibility testing framework

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Reproducible Builds Summit 2024 Last month, we were very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps (LWN) In a recent edition of Linux Weekly News, Daroc Alden has written an article on bootstrappable builds. Starting with a brief introduction that

a bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process.

The article goes onto to describe that now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all. and concludes:

The real benefit of bootstrappable builds comes from a few things. Like reproducible builds, they can make users more confident that the binary packages downloaded from a package mirror really do correspond to the open-source project whose source code they can inspect. Bootstrappable builds have also had positive effects on the complexity of building a Linux distribution from scratch [ ]. But most of all, bootstrappable builds are a boon to the longevity of our software ecosystem. It s easy for old software to become unbuildable. By having a well-known, self-contained chain of software that can build itself from a small seed, in a variety of environments, bootstrappable builds can help ensure that today s software is not lost, no matter where the open-source community goes from here

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds? Trisquel developer Simon Josefsson wrote an interesting blog post comparing the output of the .deb files from our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework and the ones in the official Debian archive. Following up from a previous post on the reproducibility of Trisquel, Simon notes that typically [the] rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible , Simon correctly identifies that the purpose of [these] rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match. However, Simon s post swiftly moves on to announce a new tool called debdistrebuild that performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline and displays diffoscope output for further analysis.

AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts Mehdi Keshani, Tudor-Gabriel Velican, Gideon Bot and Sebastian Proksch of the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, have published a new paper in the ACM Software Engineering on a new tool to automatically reproduce Apache Maven artifacts:

Reproducible Central is an initiative that curates a list of reproducible Maven libraries, but the list is limited and challenging to maintain due to manual efforts. [We] investigate the feasibility of automatically finding the source code of a library from its Maven release and recovering information about the original release environment. Our tool, AROMA, can obtain this critical information from the artifact and the source repository through several heuristics and we use the results for reproduction attempts of Maven packages. Overall, our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 99.5% when compared field-by-field to the existing manual approach [and] we reveal that automatic reproducibility is feasible for 23.4% of the Maven packages using AROMA, and 8% of these packages are fully reproducible.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

• Nichita Morcotilo reached out to the community, first to share their efforts to build reproducible packages cross-platform with a new build tool called rattler-build, noting that as you can imagine, building packages reproducibly on Windows is the hardest challenge (so far!) . Nichita goes onto mention that the Apple ecosystem appears to be using ZERO_AR_DATE over SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]
• Roland Clobus announced that the Debian bookworm 12.6 live images are nearly reproducible , with more detail in the post itself and input in the thread from other contributors.
• As reported in last month s report, Pol Dellaiera completed his master thesis on Reproducibility in Software Engineering at the University of Mons, Belgium. This month, Pol announced this on the list with more background info. Since the master thesis sources have been available, it has received some feedback and contributions. As a result, an updated version of the thesis has been published containing those community fixes.
• Daniel Gr ber asked for help in getting the Yosys documentation to build reproducibly, citing issues in inter alia the PDF generation causing differing CreationDate metadata values.
• James Addison continued his long journey towards getting the Sphinx documentation generator to build reproducible documentation. In this thread, James concerns himself with the problem that even when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is configured, Sphinx projects that have configured their copyright notices using dynamic elements can produce nonsensical output under some circumstances. James query ended up generating a number of replies.
• Allen gunner Gunner posted a brief update on the progress the core team is making towards introducing a Code of Conduct (CoC) such that it is in place in time for the RB Summit in Hamburg in September . In particular, gunner asks if you are interested in helping with CoC design and development in the weeks ahead, simply email rb-core@lists.reproducible-builds.org and let us know . [ ]

Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog On our mailing list, Fay Stegerman announced a new Reproducible Builds collaboration in the Android ecosystem:

We are pleased to announce Reproducible Builds, special client support and more in our repo : a collaboration between various independent interoperable projects: the IzzyOnDroid team, 3rd-party clients Droid-ify & Neo Store, and rbtlog (part of my collection of tools for Android Reproducible Builds) to bring Reproducible Builds to IzzyOnDroid and the wider Android ecosystem.

Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems Congratulations to Marina Moore of the New York Tandon School of Engineering who has submitted her PhD thesis on Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems. The introduction outlines its contributions to the field:

[S]oftware repositories are a vital component of software development and release, with packages downloaded both for direct use and to use as dependencies for other software. Further, when software is updated due to patched vulnerabilities or new features, it is vital that users are able to see and install this patched version of the software. However, this process of updating software can also be the source of attack. To address these attacks, secure software update systems have been proposed. However, these secure software update systems have seen barriers to widespread adoption. The Update Framework (TUF) was introduced in 2010 to address several attacks on software update systems including repository compromise, rollback attacks, and arbitrary software installation. Despite this, compromises continue to occur, with millions of users impacted by such compromises. My work has addressed substantial challenges to adoption of secure software update systems grounded in an understanding of practical concerns. Work with industry and academic communities provided opportunities to discover challenges, expand adoption, and raise awareness about secure software updates. [ ]

Development news In Debian this month, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 13 were updated and 6 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new toolchain issue type was identified as well, specifically ordering_differences_in_pkg_info.
Colin Percival filed a bug against the LLVM compiler noting that building i386 binaries on the i386 architecture is different when building i386 binaries under amd64. The fix was narrowed down to x87 excess precision, which can result in slightly different register choices when the compiler is hosted on x86_64 or i386 and a fix committed. [ ]
Fay Stegerman performed some in-depth research surrounding her apksigcopier tool, after some Android .apk files signed with the latest apksigner could no longer be verified as reproducible. Fay identified the issue as follows:

Since build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, backwards-incompatible changes to apksigner break apksigcopier as it now by default forcibly replaces existing alignment padding and changed the default page alignment from 4k to 16k (same as Android Gradle Plugin >= 8.3, so the latter is only an issue when using older AGP). [ ]

She documented multiple available workarounds and filed a bug in Google s issue tracker.
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded version 272 and Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 273 to Debian, and the following changes were made as well:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Ensure that the convert utility is from ImageMagick version 6.x. The command-line interface has seemingly changed with the 7.x series of ImageMagick. [ ]
  • Factor out version detection in test_jpeg_image. [ ]
  • Correct the import of the identify_version method after a refactoring change in a previous commit. [ ]
  • Move away from using DSA OpenSSH keys in tests as support has been deprecated and removed in OpenSSH version 9.8p1. [ ]
  • Move to assert_diff in the test_openssh_pub_key package. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add support for ffmpeg version 7.x which adds some extra context to the diff. [ ]
  • Rework the handling of OpenSSH testing of DSA keys if OpenSSH is strictly 9.7, and add an OpenSSH key test with a ed25519-format key [ ][ ][ ]
  • Temporarily disable a few packages that are not available in Debian testing. [ ][ ]
  • Stop ignoring the results of Debian testing in the continuous integration system. [ ]
  • Adjust options in debian/source to make sure not to pack the Python sdist directory into the binary Debian package. [ ]
  • Adjust Lintian overrides. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann updated the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page to include instructions on how to create reproducible .zip files from within Python using the zipfile module. [ ]
• Chris Lamb fixed a potential duplicate heading on the Projects page. [ ]
• Fay Stegerman added rbtlog to the Tools page [ ] and IzzyOnDroid to the Projects page [ ], also ensuring that the latter page was always sorted regardless of the ordering within the input data files. [ ]
• Holger Levsen added Linus Nordberg to our global list of contributors [ ] as well as made a number of changes to the page for the upcoming Reproducible Builds summit later this year [ ][ ][ ][ ].
• Mattia Rizzolo updated the Civil Infrastructure Platform logo [ ] and also updated the 2024 summit page [ ][ ].
• Nichita Morcotilo added rattler-build to the Projects page. [ ][ ][ ]
• Pol Dellaiera updated the Academic Publications page, adding two publications. [ ][ ]

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • armagetron (date)
  • blaspp (hostname)
  • cligen (GnuTLSs date)
  • cloudflared (date)
  • dpdk (Sphinx doctrees)
  • fonttosfnt/xorg-x11-fonts (toolchain, date)
  • gegl (build machine details)
  • gettext-runtime (jar mtime)
  • kf6-kirigami+kf6-qqc2-desktop-style (race-condition)
  • kubernetes1.26 (backport upstream fix for random path)
  • lapackpp (hostname)
  • latex2html (nochecks)
  • libdb-4_8 (.jar modification time)
  • librcc (already merged upstream)
  • libreoffice (strip .jar mtimes + clucene-core toolchain)
  • maliit-keyboard (nocheck)
  • nautilus (date)
  • openblas (CPU type, fixed)
  • openssl-3 (random-related issue)
  • python-ruff (ASLR)
  • python3 (date, parallelism/race)
  • reproducible-faketools (0.5.2)
  • sphinx (GZip modification time)
  • sphinxcontrib (gzip mtime)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1076368 filed against nautilus.
  • #1076507 filed against mccode.
  • #1076806 filed against meson-python.
  • #1077479 filed against debcraft.
  • #1077485 filed against pytest.
  • #1077601 filed against setuptools.
• Fridrich Strba:
  • javapackages-tools
  • ant
  • java-21-openjdk
• Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras:
  • buffybox

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

• Grant bremner access to the ionos7 node. [ ][ ]
• Perform a dummy change to force update of all jobs. [ ][ ]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian performed some necessary node maintenance of the underlying build hosts. [ ]

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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.
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would. In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.

Recovering DPL It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it. It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August. During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything. Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!

Video team I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.

It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ). I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks. This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)

Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!

Packaging I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:

• Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).
• Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.
• Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.
• Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).
• Backport obs-gradient-source for bookworm.
• Did some initial packaging on Cambalache, I ll upload to unstable once wlroots (0.18) hits unstable.
• Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)

Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

Social Conference Dinner

Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago

The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.

Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+

Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.

• I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
• I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
• Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
• I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).
• We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
• and many other fly-by discussions.

Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf

• loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
• toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
• extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
• Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
• Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.

So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

Most banks are behind CDNs and DDoS mitigation providers nowadays, though they still hold their own IP space. Was interested in this, so compiled a list from BGP.Tools and Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit.

• AS17436 ICICIBANK Ltd, Banking, Mumbai
• AS24055 Deutsche Bank AG-India Internet AS
• AS38029 Citibank N.A. - ISP Peering, Chennai, India
• AS38468 ASN for Yes Bank
• AS45644 SBI-EMS-NET-IN
• AS59194 Central Bank of India
• AS131283 HDFC Bank House
• AS132440 Unity Small Finance Bank Pvt. Ltd.
• AS132946 Ujjivan Small Finance Bank Ltd
• AS132989 Sangli Urban Co-operative Bank Ltd
• AS133640 Indian Overseas Bank
• AS133657 IndusInd Bank Ltd
• AS134909 The South Indian Bank Ltd
• AS135086 Axis Bank Limited
• AS135745 UCO Bank
• AS135819 Chaitanya Godavari Grameena Bank
• AS136252 The Bank of Baroda Limited
• AS136324 IDBI Bank Ltd
• AS136622 Equitas Small Finance Bank Ltd
• AS136680 Bank of Maharashtra
• AS136707 The Kalupur Commercial Co-operative Bank Limited
• AS137104 India Post Payments Bank Limited
• AS137108 Bank of India
• AS137130 Punjab National Bank
• AS137662 IDFC Bank Ltd
• AS137670 Canara Bank
• AS138318 The Visakhapatnam Cooperative Bank Ltd
• AS140156 Karnataka Gramin Bank
• AS141222 Telangana State Coorperative Apex Bank Ltd
• AS141561 Punjab and Sind Bank
• AS146870 TJSB Sahakari Bank Ltd
• AS149202 The Jammu And Kashmir Bank Pvt Ltd
• AS149528 Indian Bank
• AS149603 Suryoday Small Finance Bank Limited
• AS150029 The Karnataka Bank Ltd
• AS151172 CSB Bank Ltd
• AS151692 Small Industries Development Bank of India

Other noteable mentions:

• AS141857 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development
• AS151773 Reserve Bank Information Technology Pvt Ltd

Let me know if I m missing someone. Many thanks to Saswata Sarkar for helping with the list.

It s not often that a company is willing to make a sworn statement to a court about how its IT practices are incompatible with the needs of the Internet, but when they do it s popcorn time.

The Combatants In the red corner, weighing in at nah, I m not going to do that schtick. The plaintiff in the case is Alegeus Technologies, LLC, a Delaware Corporation that, according to their filings, is a leading provider of a business-tobusiness, white-label funding and payment platform for healthcare carriers and third-party administrators to administer consumer-directed employee benefit programs . Not being subject to the US bonkers health care system, I have only a passing familiarity with the sorts of things they do, but presumably it involves moving a lot of money around, which is sometimes important. The defendant is DigiCert, a CA which, based on analysis I ve done previously, is the second-largest issuer of WebPKI certificates by volume.

The History According to a recently opened Mozilla CA bug, DigiCert found an issue in their domain control validation workflow, that meant it may have been possible for a miscreant to have certificates issued to them that they weren t legitimately entitled to. Given that validating domain names is basically the YOU HAD ONE JOB! of a CA, this is a big deal. The CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements (BRs) (which all CAs are required to adhere to, by virtue of their being included in various browser and OS trust stores), say that revocation is required within 24 hours when [t]he CA obtains evidence that the validation of domain authorization or control for any Fully Qualified Domain Name or IP address in the Certificate should not be relied upon (section 4.9.1.1, point 5). DigiCert appears to have at least tried to do the right thing, by opening the above Mozilla bug giving some details of the problem, and notifying their customers that their certificates were going to be revoked. One may quibble about how fast they re doing it, but they re giving it a decent shot, at least. A complicating factor in all this is that, only a touch over a month ago, Google Chrome announced the removal of another CA, Entrust, from its own trust store program, citing a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly disclosed incident reports . Many of these compliance failures were failures to revoke certificates in a timely manner. One imagines that DigiCert would not like to gain a reputation for tardy revocation, particularly at the moment.

The Legal Action Now we come to Alegeus Technologies. They ve opened a civil case whose first action is to request the issuance of a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that prevents DigiCert from revoking certificates issued to Alegeus (which the court has issued). This is a big deal, because TROs are legal instruments that, if not obeyed, constitute contempt of court (or something similar) and courts do not like people who disregard their instructions. That means that, in the short term, those certificates aren t getting revoked, despite the requirement imposed by root stores on DigiCert that the certificates must be revoked. DigiCert is in a real rock / hard place situation here: revoke and get punished by the courts, or don t revoke and potentially (though almost certainly not, in the circumstances) face removal from trust stores (which would kill, or at least massively hurt, their business). The reasons that Alegeus gives for requesting the restraining order is that [t]o Reissue and Reinstall the Security Certificates, Alegeus must work with and coordinate with its Clients, who are required to take steps to rectify the certificates. Alegeus has hundreds of such Clients. Alegeus is generally required by contract to give its clients much longer than 24 hours notice before executing such a change regarding certification. In the filing, Alegeus does acknowledge that DigiCert is a voluntary member of the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CABF), which has bylaws stating that certificates with an issue in their domain validation must be revoked within 24 hours. This is a misstatement of the facts, though. It is the BRs, not the CABF bylaws, that require revocation, and the BRs apply to all CAs that wish to be included in browser and OS trust stores, not just those that are members of the CABF. In any event, given that Alegeus was aware that DigiCert is required to revoke certificates within 24 hours, one wonders why Alegeus went ahead and signed agreements with their customers that required a lengthy notice period before changing certificates. What complicates the situation is that there is apparently a Master Services Agreement (MSA) that states that it constitutes the entire agreement between the parties and that MSA doesn t mention certificate revocation anywhere relevant. That means that it s not quite so cut-and-dried that DigiCert does, in fact, have the right to revoke those certificates. I d expect a lot of update to your Master Services Agreement emails to be going out from DigiCert (and other CAs) in the near future to clarify this point. Not being a lawyer, I can t imagine which way this case might go, but there s one thing we can be sure of: some lawyers are going to able to afford that trip to a tropical paradise this year.

The Security Issues The requirement for revocation within 24 hours is an important security control in the WebPKI ecosystem. If a certificate is misissued to a malicious party, or is otherwise compromised, it needs to be marked as untrustworthy as soon as possible. While revocation is far from perfect, it is the best tool we have. In this court filing, Alegeus has claimed that they are unable to switch certificates with less than 24 hours notice (due to contractual SLAs ). This is a pretty big problem, because there are lots of reasons why a certificate might need to be switched out Very Quickly. As a practical example, someone with access to the private key for your SSL certificate might decide to use it in a blog post. Letting that sort of problem linger for an extended period of time might end up being a Pretty Big Problem of its own. An organisation that cannot respond within hours to a compromised certificate is playing chicken with their security.

The Takeaways Contractual obligations that require you to notify anyone else of a certificate (or private key) changing are bonkers, and completely antithetical to the needs of the WebPKI. If you have to have them, you re going to want to start transitioning to a private PKI, wherein you can do whatever you darn well please with revocation (or not). As these sorts of problems keep happening, trust stores (and hence CAs) are going to crack down on this sort of thing, so you may as well move sooner rather than later. If you are an organisation that uses WebPKI certificates, you ve got to be able to deal with any kind of certificate revocation event within hours, not days. This basically boils down to automated issuance and lifecycle management, because having someone manually request and install certificates is terrible on many levels. There isn t currently a completed standard for notifying subscribers if their certificates need premature renewal (say, due to needing to be revoked), but the ACME Renewal Information Extension is currently being developed to fill that need. Ask your CA if they re tracking this standards development, and when they intend to have the extension available for use. (Pro-tip: if they say we ll start doing development when the RFC is published , run for the hills; that s not how responsible organisations work on the Internet).

The Givings If you ve found this helpful, consider shouting me a refreshing beverage. Reading through legal filings is thirsty work!

Recently, Ola started rolling out Ola Maps in their main mobile app, replacing Google Maps, while also offering maps as a service to other organizations. The interesting part for me was the usage of OpenStreetMap data as base map with Ola s proprietary data sources. I ll mostly about talk about map data part here. OpenStreetMap (OSM) for starters, is a community owned and edited map data resource which gives freedom to use map data for any purpose. This includes the condition that attribution is given back to OSM which in turn ideally would encourage other users to contribute, correct and edit, helping everyone in turn. Due to this, OSM is also regarded as Wikipedia of maps. OSM data is not just used by Ola. Many others use it for various purposes like Wikipedia Maps, Strava Maps, Snapchat Map, bus tracking in GoIbibo/Redbus. OSM India community has been following Ola map endeavor to use and contribute to OSM since they went public. As required by OSM for organized mapping efforts, Ola created wiki entry with information regarding their editors, usage, policy and mentions following as their data usage case:

OSM data is used for the road network, traffic signs and signals, buildings, natural features, landuse polygons and some POIs.

Creating a map product is a task in itself, an engineering hurdle creating the tech stack for collection, validation, import and serving the map and the map data part. Ola has done a good job describing the development of tech stack in their blog post. Ola holds an enormous corpus of live and constantly updated GPS trace data. Their drivers, users, and delivery partners generate those, which they harness to validate, correct and add missing map data. Ola employees now regularly contribute new or missing roads (including adding dual carriageway to existing ones), fix road geometry, classification, road access type and restrictions pan India. They have been active and engaging in OSM India community channels, though community members have raised some concerns on their OSM edit practices. Ola s venture into the map industry isn t something out of the ordinary. Grab, a South East Asian company which has business interests in food deliveries, ride hailing and a bunch of other services too switched to their in-house map based on OpenStreetMap, followed by launching of their map product. Grab too contributed back data like Ola. Both Ola and Grab heavily rely on map for their business operations and seem to chose to go independent for it, bootstrapping the products on OSM. In India too, a bunch of organizations contribute to OSM like Swiggy, Stackbox, Amazon, Apple. Microsoft, Meta/Facebook and many others. Everyone wants a better map (data), so everyone works together. Ola could have gone their own route, bootstrapping map data from scratch, which would have been a gargantuan task when you re competing against the likes of Google Maps and Bing Maps, which have been into this since many years. Deciding to use OSM and actively giving back to make data better for everyone deserves accolades. Now I m waiting to for their second blog post, which they mention would be on map data. If you re an Ola map user through Ola Electric or Ola app, and find some road unmapped, you can always edit them in OSM. What I have heard from their employee, they import new OSM data weekly, which means your changes should start reflecting for you (and everyone else) by next week. If you re new, follow Beginners guide and join OSM India community community.osm.be/resources/asia/india/ for any doubts and participating in various mapping events. PS You can see live OSM edits in India subcontinent here.

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

• Dennis van Dok (dvandok)
• Peter Wienemann (wiene)
• Quentin Lejard (valde)
• Sven Geuer (sge)
• Taavi V n nen (taavi)
• Hilmar Preusse (hille42)
• Matthias Geiger (werdahias)
• Yogeswaran Umasankar (yogu)

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

• Bernhard Miklautz
• Felix Moessbauer
• Maytham Alsudany
• Aquila Macedo
• David Lamparter
• Tim Theisen
• Stefano Brivio
• Shengqi Chen

Congratulations!

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Adrian Bunk did 47.0h (out of 74.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 39.0h to the next month.
• Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned).
• Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 15.5h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 4.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.25h (out of 49.5h assigned and 10.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.75h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 4.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 25.0h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
• Lucas Kanashiro did 5.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 6.5h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 5.25h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 22.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
• Sean Whitton did 6.5h (out of 6.0h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
• Stefano Rivera did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 9.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 51.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 31 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included:

• git: multiple vulnerabilities, which may result in privilege escalation, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution
• sendmail: SMTP smuggling allowed remote attackers bypass SPF protection checks
• cups: arbitrary remote code execution

Looking further afield to the broader Debian ecosystem, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s also patched sendmail in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the previously mentioned SMTP smuggling vulnerability. Furthermore, LTS contributor Thorsten Alteholz provided fixes for the cups packages in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the aforementioned arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability. Additionally, LTS contributor Ben Hutchings has commenced work on an updated backport of Linux kernel 6.1 to Debian 11 (bullseye), in preparation for bullseye transitioning to the responsibility of the LTS (and the associated closure of the bullseye-backports repository). LTS Lucas Kanashiro also began the preparatory work of backporting parts of the rust/cargo toolchain to Debian 11 (bullseye) in order to make future updates of the clamav virus scanner possible. June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right away if you sill have Debian 10 which must be kept secure (and which cannot yet be upgraded).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 105 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 73 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 37 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 115 months)
  • Linode (for 109 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 99 months)
  • Plat Home (for 98 months)
  • CINECA (for 73 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 55 months)
  • Deveryware (for 42 months)
  • EDF SA (for 27 months)
  • Dataport A R
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 120 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 114 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 106 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 106 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 100 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 90 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 84 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 68 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 57 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 55 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 49 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 49 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 43 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 41 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 39 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 39 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 30 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 27 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 120 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 120 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 117 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 117 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 116 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 115 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 115 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 114 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 114 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 113 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 109 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 104 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 102 months)
  • Tesorion (for 97 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 96 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 96 months)
  • Bearstech (for 88 months)
  • LiHAS (for 88 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 83 months)
  • Supagro (for 78 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 77 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 63 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 55 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 52 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 48 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 43 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 39 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 34 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 33 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 32 months)
  • Alter Way (for 25 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 15 months)

Debian Contributions: 2024-06 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

YubiHSM packaging, by Colin Watson Freexian is starting to use YubiHSM devices (hardware security modules) as part of some projects, and we wanted to have the supporting software directly in Debian rather than needing to use third-party repositories. Since Yubico publish everything we need under free software licences, Colin packaged yubihsm-connector, yubihsm-shell, and python-yubihsm from https://developers.yubico.com/, in some cases based partly on the upstream packaging, and got them all into Debian unstable. Backports to bookworm will be forthcoming once they ve all reached testing.

unschroot by Helmut Grohne Following an in-person discussion at MiniDebConf Berlin, Helmut attempted splitting the containment functionality of sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare into a dedicated tool interfacing with sbuild as a variant of --chroot-mode=schroot providing a sufficiently compatible interface. While this seemed technically promising initially, a discussion on debian-devel indicated a desire to rely on an existing container runtime such as podman instead of using another Debian-specific tool with unclear long term maintenance. None of the existing container runtimes meet the specific needs of sbuild, so further advancing this matter implies a compromise one way or another.

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is working on the development of linux live-patching for Debian. For the moment, this is in an exploratory phase, that includes how to handle the different patches that will need to be provided. kpatch could help significantly in this regard. However, kpatch was removed from unstable because there are some RC bugs affecting the version that was present in Debian unstable. Santiago packaged the most recent upstream version (0.9.9) and filed an Intent to Salvage bug. Santiago is waiting for an ACK by the maintainer, and will upload to unstable after July 10th, following the package salvaging rules. While kpatch 0.9.9 fixes the main issues, it still needs some work to properly support Debian and the Linux kernel versions packaged in our distribution. More on this in the report next month.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n The work by Santiago in Salsa CI this month includes a merge request to ease testing how the production images are built from the changes introduced by future merge requests. By default, the pipelines triggered by a merge request build a subset of the images built for production, to reduce the use of resources, and because most of the time the subset of staging images is enough to test the proposed modifications. However, sometimes it is needed to test how the full set of production images is built, and the above mentioned MR helps to do that. The changes include documentation, so hopefully this will make it easier to test future contributions. Also, for being able to include support for RISC-V, Salsa CI needs to replace kaniko as the tool used to build the images. Santiago tested buildah, but there are some issues when pushing built images for non-default platform architectures (i386, armhf, armel) to the container registry. Santiago will continue to work on this to find a solution.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera prepared updates for a number of Python modules.
• Stefano uploaded the latest point release of Python 3.12 and the latest Python 3.13 beta. Both uncovered upstream regressions that had to be addressed.
• Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf 24.
• Stefano helped SPI to reconcile their financial records for DebConf 23.
• Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 36 packages to new upstream versions (including fixes for four CVEs in python-aiohttp), fixing RC bugs in ipykernel, ipywidgets, khard, and python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, and packaging zope.deferredimport which was needed for a new upstream version of python-persistent.
• Colin removed the user_readenv option from OpenSSH s PAM configuration (#1018260), and prepared a release note.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cups.
• Nicholas Skaggs updated xmacro to support reproducible builds (#1014428), DEP-3 and DEP-5 compatibility, along with utilizing hardening build flags. Helmut supported and uploaded package.
• As a result of login having become non-essential, Helmut uploaded debvm to unstable and stable and fixed a crossqa.debian.net worker.
• Santiago worked on the Content Team activities for DebConf24. Together with other DebConf25 team members, Santiago wrote a document for the head of the venue to describe the project of the conference.

I keep on going back and correcting bootload of grammatical and other errors in my posts here. I somewhat feel embarrassed how such mistakes slip through when I was proofreading. Back then it was all good and suddenly this mistake cropped up in my text, which everyone might have already noticed by now. A thought just stuck around that. Those mistakes signify that the text is written by a real human, and humans makes mistakes. :) PS - Even LanguageTool (non-premium) couldn t identify those errors.

tl;dr Starting with curl 8.0.0-2, you can now use HTTP3.

curl --http3-only https://example.com

Or, if you would like to try it out in a container:

podman run debian:unstable apt install --update -y curl && curl --http3-only https://example.com

(in case you haven't noticed, apt now has the --update option for the upgrade and install commands, although not available on stable yet)

Availability

• Debian unstable - Since 2024-07-02
• Debian testing - Since 2024-07-18
• Debian 12/bookworm backports - Expected by the end of August 2024.
• Debian 12/bookworm - Due to the mechanisms we have in place to make sure Debian stable is in fact stable, we will never be able to ship this in the regular repository. Users can make use of the backports repositories instead.
• Debian derivatives - Rolling releases will get it by the time it's on Debian testing (e.g.: Kali Linux). Stable derivatives only in their next major release.

The challenge HTTP3 is fresh new, well... not really, but at least fresh enough that I'm not aware of any other Linux distribution supporting it on curl, the reason is likely two-fold:

1. OpenSSL is not there yet OpenSSL still doesn't have proper HTTP3 support, and given that OpenSSL is so widely used, almost every curl distributor/packager will build curl with it and thus changing the TLS backend to something else is risky. Unfortunately, proper support for the OpenSSL libcurl is unlikely to come anytime before the end of this year, the OpenSSL performance is not good enough yet as of version 3.3. Daniel Stenberg has written about the state of this multiple times, most recently at HTTP/3 in curl mid 2024, if you're interested, I suggest reading through his other posts as well. Some might have noticed that nginx does support HTTP3 through OpenSSL, although when you look closely, it's not exactly perfect:

   An SSL library that provides QUIC support is recommended to build nginx, such as BoringSSL, LibreSSL, or QuicTLS. Otherwise, the OpenSSL compatibility layer will be used that does not support early data.

   As you can see, they don't recommend using OpenSSL, and when doing so, you don't get complete support.

2. HTTP3 support for GnuTLS/nghttp3/ngtcp2 is recent The non-experimental support arrived back in October 2023, and so that's when I started seriously planning for this. curl has been working on HTTP3 support for years, and so it did support other TLS backends before that, but out of them, the one most feasible for a distribution to ship would be GnuTLS, which gets HTTP3 support through ngctp2 and nghttp3.

How it was done The Debian curl package has historically shipped at least two variants of libcurl, an OpenSSL and a GnuTLS one. The OpenSSL libcurl can't support HTTP3 for the reasons explained above, but the GnuTLS libcurl can (with ngtcp2 and nghtp3). Debian packages can choose which version of libcurl to link against (without having to modify any upstream source code). Debian's "git" package being a famous example of a package that links against the GnuTLS libcurl. Enabling HTTP3 on curl was done in three steps:

1. Make sure all required dependencies fulfill the minimum requirements.
2. Enable HTTP3 for GnuTLS libcurl.
3. Change the libcurl used by the curl CLI, from OpenSSL to GnuTLS.

curl's HTTP3 support requires a somewhat recent version of nghttp3 and updating that required a transition (due to the SONAME bump), while we've also had months of freeze for transitions due to the time_t transition. After the dependencies were in place, enabling HTTP3 for the GnuTLS libcurl was straightforward. Then, for the last part, we had to switch the TLS backend used by the curl CLI. Doing the swap is also quite easy on the packaging level, but we have to consider the chances of this change breaking our users' environments.

Ensuring there are no breakages The first thing to consider regarding breakages is that this change is not going to be pushed directly to the current Debian stable releases, it will be present in the next stable release (13/trixie) but the current one will stick to the version that's already shipped. Secondly, we have to consider the risk of losing the ability to use certain parameters from the curl CLI which could be limited to the OpenSSL backend. During curl-up 2024, the curl developers pointed out the existence of a page that lists the TLS related options and the backends they work with. Analysing that page, ignoring all of the options that are suffixed with "BLOB" (only pertinent to the library, not the CLI), the only one left which is attention worthy is CURLOPT_ECH.

This experimental feature requires a special build of OpenSSL, as ECH is not yet supported in OpenSSL releases. In contrast ECH is supported by the latest BoringSSL and wolfSSL releases.

As it turns out, Encrypted Client Hello is experimental and it's not supported by the vanilla OpenSSL. This was enough of an investigation for me to go ahead with the change. Noting that even in the worst case scenario (we find a horrible regression), we can rollback without having affected a single stable release. Now that the package is on Debian unstable, the CI tests (autopkgtest) of every package that depends on curl is currently running, the results are compared against the migration-reference (in this case, the curl CLI with OpenSSL, before the change). If everything goes right, curl with HTTP3 support will migrate to Debian testing in around 5 days. If we spot any issues, we'll have to solve them first and it's going to be hard to predict how long it takes, although it's fair to expect less than a month.

Feedback Feel free to join the Matrix room for the Debian curl maintainers:
https://matrix.to/#/#debian-curl-maintainers:matrix.org

Acknowledgements It took us a bit longer than expected to be able to enable HTTP3, nonetheless it's still early enough to be excited about. A lot of people were crucial to make this happen. I should recognize in the first place, obviously, the curl developers and the developers of the supporting libraries: GnuTLS, nghttp3, ngtcp2. Participating in the curl-up 2024 conference helped me get motivated to push this through, besides becoming aware of the right documentation to research for impact. On the Debian side, Sakirnth Nagarasa <sakirnth> was responsible for updating and taking care of the transition for nghttp3 and ngtcp2. Also on the Debian side, I've got loads of help and support from the co-maintainers of the curl package: Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>.

Changes since publication

2024-07-18

• Update date of availability for Debian testing and expected date for bookworm backports.
• We have historically spoken Portuguese in the room but we'll switch to English in case anyone joins.

I became interested in Network Time Protocol (NTP) last year after learning how fundamental this protocol is to the functioning of the global Internet. NTP helps synchronize clocks on devices over the Internet, which is essential for secure browsing, timestamping, keeping everyone in sync or just checking what time it is. Computers usually have a hardware real-time clock (RTC) but that deviates over time, so an occasional sync over NTP is required to keep the time accurate. Many network and IoT devices don t have hardware RTC so have even more reliance on NTP. Accurate time keeping starts with reference clocks like atomic clocks, GPS etc. Multiple government standard agencies host these reference clocks, which are regarded as Stratum 0. Stratum 1 servers are known as primary servers, and directly connect to Stratum 0 clocks for time. Stratum 1 servers then distribute time to Stratum 2 and further down the hierarchy. Computers typically connects to one or more Stratum 1/2/3 servers to get their time. Someone has to host these public Stratum 1,2,3 NTP servers. That s what NTP pool, a global effort by volunteers does. They provide NTP servers for the public to use. As of today, there are 4700+ servers in the pool which are free to use for anyone. Now let s come to the reason for writing this post. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in April 2022 released a set of cybersecurity directions which set the alarm bells ringing. Internet Society (and almost everyone else) wrote about it. And then there was this specific section about NTP:

All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and Government organisations shall connect to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server of National Informatics Centre (NIC) or National Physical Laboratory (NPL) or with NTP servers traceable to these NTP servers, for synchronisation of all their ICT systems clocks. Entities having ICT infrastructure spanning multiple geographies may also use accurate and standard time source other than NPL and NIC, however it is to be ensured that their time source shall not deviate from NPL and NIC.

CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the official timekeeper for India and hosts the only public Stratum 1 clock in India, according to NTP pool website. So I was naturally curious to know what kind of infrastructure they re running for NTP. India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act which, like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States, gives citizens rights to request information from governmental entities, to which they have to respond in under 30 days. So last year, I filed two sets of RTI (one after the first reply came) inquiring about NPL s public NTP server setup. The first RTI had some generic questions: This gave a vague idea about the setup, so I sat down and came with some specific questions in the next RTI. Feel free to make your conclusions from it now. Bear in mind these were filled last year so things might have changed. Do let me know if you have more information about it. Update (07/07/2024): Found an article from Medianama about Indian government time servers with information sourced through RTI.

Internet and it s working are interesting and complex. We need an IP address to connect to the Internet. A group of IP addresses with common routing policy is known as an Autonomous System (AS). Each AS has a globally unique Autonomous System Number (ASN) and is maintained by a single entity or individual(s). Your ISP would have an ASN. IP addresses/prefixes are advertised (announced) by an AS through Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to its peers (ASes which it connects to) to steer traffic in its direction or back. Take for example Google DNS service at 8.8.8.8 owned and operated by AS15169 Google LLC. AS15169 through BGP announcements, lets all its peers know that traffic for whole of 8.8.8.0/24 (including 8.8.8.8) prefix should be sent to them. See the following screenshot response of mtr -zt 8.8.8.8 from my system. From my Internet Service Provider (ISP), AS133982 Excitel Broadband, traffic travels to AS15169 to reach 8.8.8.8 (dns.google) and returns via the same path. This Inter-AS traffic makes the Internet tick. ASes comes in different sizes and purposes. Like AS749 DoD Network Information Center which holds more than 200 million+ IPv4 addresses for historical reasons or AS23860 Alliance Broadband Services which has 68 thousand+ IPv4 address for purpose of providing consumer Internet. Similarly, some individuals also run their personal ASN including a bunch of Indians. Most of these Indian ASNs are IPv6 (primary or only) networks run for hobby and educational purposes. I was interested in this data, so complied a list of active ones (visible in the global routing table) from BGP.Tools:

• AS213326 Kalpak Mukhopadhyay Network Lab
• AS207941 Jiten Pathy
• AS149794 Daryll Swer
• AS203145 Debdut Biswas
• AS202340 Sanoj Kumar
• AS200730 Ankit Yadav
• AS199693 Bihaan Sen
• AS199347 Ishan Jain
• AS210965 Soundarahari Parthiban
• AS198383 Suhail Haris
• AS216452 Edvin Basil Samuval
• AS214676 Arun Malik

Let me know if I m missing someone.

Introduction In Australia the 3G mobile frequencies are to be reused so they are in the process of shutting down the 3G service. That means that everyone has to use VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) for phone calls (including emergency calls). The shutdown time varies by telco, Kogan Mobile (one of the better services which has good value for money and generally works well) shut down their 3G service in January. Aldi Mobile (another one of the good services which is slightly more expensive but has included free calls to most first-world countries and uses the largest phone network) will shut theirs down at the end of August. For background there s a Fosdem talk about OpenSIPS with VoLTE and VoNR [1], it s more complex than you want to know. Also VoNR (Voice over New Radio) is the standard for 5G voice and it s different from VoLTE and has a fallback to VoLTE. Another good lecture for background information is the Fosdem talk on VoLTE at the handset end [2]. The PinePhonePro In October 2023 I tried using my PinePhonePro as my main phone but that only lasted a few days due to problems with calls and poor battery life [3]. Since then I went back to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. So that has been my main phone for 5 years now, giving a cost of $1.50 per week. I had tried using a Huawei Nova 7i running Android without Google Play as an experiment but that had failed, I do many things that need Android apps [4]. I followed the PinePhone wiki to get my PinePhonePro working with VoLTE [5]. That worked fine for me, the only difference from the instructions is that I had to use device /dev/ttyUSB3 and that the modem kept resetting itself during the process and when that happened I had to kill minicom and start again. After changing the setting and saving it the PinePhonePro seemed to work well with VoLTE on a Kogan Mobile SIM (so definitely not using 3G). One issue I have found is that Plasma Mobile (my preferred FOSS phone GUI) appears to have a library issue that results in polling every 14ms even when the screen is locked [6]. If you have a few processes doing that (which means the most lightly used Plasma system) it really hurts battery use. The maintainer has quite reasonably deferred action on this bug report given the KDE 6 transition. Later on in the Trixie development cycle I hope to get this issue resolved, I don t expect it to suddenly make battery life good. But it might make battery life acceptable. I am now idly considering carrying around my PinePhonePro in a powered off state for situations where I might need to do high security operations (root logins to servers or online banking) but for which carrying a laptop isn t convenient. It will do well for the turn on, do 30 mins of work that needs security, and then turn off scenario. Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Redmi 9A The Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been my main phone for 5 years and it has worked well, so it would be ideal if it could do VoLTE as the PinePhonePro isn t ready yet. All the web pages I ve seen about the Mate 10 Pro say that it will either allow upgrading to a VoLTE configuration if run with the right SIM or only support it with the right SIM. I did a test with a Chinese SIM which gave an option of turning on VoLTE but didn t allow any firmware updates and the VoLTE option went away when I put an Australian SIM in. Some forum comments had led me to believe that it would either permanently enable VoLTE or allow upgrading the firmware to one that enables VoLTE if I used a Chinese SIM but that is not the case. I didn t expect a high probability of success but I had to give it a go as it s a nice phone. I did some tests on a Redmi 9A (a terrible phone that has really bad latency on the UI in spite of having reasonably good hardware). The one I tested on didn t have VoLTE enabled when I got it, to test that I used the code *#*#4636#*#* in the dialler to get the menu of SIM information and it showed that VoLTE was not provisioned. I then had to update to the latest release of Android for that phone and enter *#*#86583#*#* in the dialler to enable VoLTE, the message displayed after entering that magic number must end in DISABLE . I get the impression that the code in question makes the phone not check certain aspects of whether the carrier is good for VoLTE and just do it. So apparently Kogan Mobile somehow gives the Redmi 9A the impression that VoLTE isn t supported but if the phone just goes ahead and connects it will work. I don t plan to use a Redmi 9A myself as it s too slow, but I added it to my collection to offer to anyone else I know who needs a phone with VoLTE and doesn t use the phone seriously or to someone who needs a known good phone for testing things. Samsung Galaxy Note 9 I got some Samsung Galaxy Note 9 phones to run Droidian as an experiment [7]. But Droidian dropped support for the Note 9 and I couldn t figure out how to enable VoLTE via Droidian, which was very annoying after I had spent $109 on a test phone and $215 on a phone for real use (I have no plans to try Droidian again at this time). I tried installing LineageOS on one Note 9 [8] which was much easier than expected (especially after previously installing Droidian). But VoLTE wasn t an option. According to Reddit LineageOS doesn t support VoLTE on Samsung devices and you can use a magisk module or a VoLTE enabler module but those aren t supported by LineageOS either [9]. I downloaded an original image for the Note 9 from SamsMobile.com [10]. That image booted past the orange stage (where if you have problems then your phone is probably permanently useless) but didn t boot into the OS. A friend helped me out with that and it turned out that the Heimdal flash tool on Linux didn t do something it needed to do and that Odin on Windows was required. After using Odin everything was fine and I have a Note 9 with VoLTE running the latest Samsung firmware which is security patch level 1st July 2022!!! So I have a choice between using a Note 9 for data and SMS while running a current version of Lineage OS with all security fixes or running a Samsung image with no security updates for 2 years which supports phone calls. So based on this I have to recommend Pixel as the phone of choice, it has a decent level of support from Google and long term support from LineageOS. According to the LineageOS web site you can run the current version of Lineage on the original Pixel phone from 2016! Of course getting VoLTE to work on it might be another saga, but it would probably be easier to do with LineageOS on a Pixel than on a Samsung phone. Conclusion The operation of the Note 9 for me is decent now apart from the potential security issues. The same goes for selling one of the phones. The PinePhonePro still has potential to become my daily driver at some future time if I and others can optimise power use. Also a complicating factor is that I want to have both Jabber and Matrix be actually instant IM systems not IM with a 5 minute delay, so suspend mode isn t a good option. Pixel phones will be a much higher priority when looking at phones to buy in future. The older Pixel phones go for as little as $100 on eBay and can still run the latest LineageOS. VoLTE seems needlessly complicated.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2y4ul68z
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/27sa46fz
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/20/android-without-play/
• [5] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone#VoLTE
• [6] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1073294
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/04/28/note9-droidian/
• [8] https://download.lineageos.org/devices/crownlte/builds
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2652h7vk
• [10] https://www.sammobile.com/

Review: Bitter Angels, by C.L. Anderson

Publisher:	Ballantine Books
Copyright:	2009
ISBN:	0-553-59217-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	438

Bitter Angels is a stand-alone science fiction novel. It won the Philip K. Dick award for best SF original paperback in 2010. C.L. Anderson is a pen name for Sarah Zettel. Terese was a Guardian, one of the agents of the Pax Solaris who find ways to keep the peace in troubled systems and high-stress situations with the help of an implanted Companion, an assistant AI. Forty years ago, on one of those missions, she was captured and her Companion was forcibly removed. She was rescued by her friend and mentor and retired afterwards, starting a new life and a new family, trying to leave the memories behind. Now, the woman who rescued her is dead. She was murdered on duty in the Erasmus system, a corporate hellhole that appears to be on the verge of exploding into a political hot spot. Bianca's last instructions asked for Terese to replace her. Terese's family is furious at her for even considering returning to the Guardians, but she can't say no. Duty, and Bianca's dying request, call too strongly. Amerand is Security on Dazzle, one of the Erasmus stations. He is one of the refugees from Oblivion, the station that the First Bloods who rule the system let die. He keeps his head above water and tries to protect his father and find his mother without doing anything that the ever-present Clerks might find concerning. Keeping an eye on newly-arriving Solaris saints is a typical assignment, since the First Bloods don't trust the meddling do-gooders. But something is not quite right, and a cryptic warning from his Clerk makes him even more suspicious. This is the second book by Sarah Zettel that I've read, and both of them have been tense, claustrophobic thrillers set in a world with harsh social inequality and little space for the characters to maneuver. In this case, the structure of her future universe reminded me a bit of Iain M. Banks's Culture, but with less advanced technology and only humans. The Pax Solaris has eliminated war within its borders and greatly extended lifespans. That peace is maintained by Guardians, who play a role similar to Special Circumstances but a bit more idealist and less lethal. They show up where there are problems and meddle, manipulating and pushing to try to defuse the problems before they reach the Pax Solaris. Like a Culture novel, nearly all of the action takes place outside the Pax Solaris in the Erasmus system. Erasmus is a corporate colony that has turned into a cross between a hereditary dictatorship and the Corporate Rim from Martha Wells's Murderbot series. Debt slavery is ubiquitous, economic inequality is inconceivably vast, and the Clerks are everywhere. Erasmus natives like Amerand have very little leeway and even fewer options. Survival is a matter of not drawing the attention of the wrong people. Terese and her fellow Guardians are appalled, but also keenly aware that destabilizing the local politics may make the situation even worse and get a lot of people killed. Bitter Angels is structured like a mystery: who killed Bianca, and what was her plan when she was killed? Unlike a lot of books of this type, the villains are not idiots and their plan is both satisfyingly complex and still depressingly relevant. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that I have read recent news articles about people with very similar plans, albeit involving less science-fiction technology. Anderson starts with a tense situation and increases the pressure relentlessly, leaving the heroes one step behind the villains for almost the entire novel. It is not happy or optimistic reading at times, the book is quite dark but it certainly was engrossing. The one world-building quibble that I had is that the Erasmus system is portrayed partly as a hydraulic empire, and while this is arguably feasible given that spaceship travel is strictly controlled, it seemed like a weird choice given the prevalence of water on the nearby moons. Water smuggling plays a significant role in the plot, and I wasn't entirely convinced of the politics and logistics behind it. If this sort of thing bugs you, there are some pieces that may require suspension of disbelief. Bitter Angels is the sort of tense thriller where catastrophe is barely avoided and the cost of victory is too high, so you will want to be in the mood for that before you dive in. But if that's what you're looking for, I thought Anderson delivered a complex and satisfying story. Content warning: major character suicide. Rating: 7 out of 10

I received a mail today from Google (noreply-findmydevice@google.com) notifying me that they would unconditionally enable the Find my device functionality I have been repeatedly marking as unwanted in my Android phone. The mail goes on to explain this functionality works even when the device is disconnected, by Bluetooth signals (aha, so turn off Bluetooth will no longer turn off Bluetooth? Hmmm ) Of course, the mail hand-waves that only I can know the location of my device. Google cannot see or use it for other ends . First, should we trust this blanket statement? Second, the fact they don t do it now means they won t ever? Not even if law enforcement requires them to? The devices will be generating this information whether we want it or not, so it s just a matter of opening the required window. Of course, it is a feature many people will appreciate and find useful. And it s not only for finding lost (or stolen) phones, but the mail also mentions tags can be made available to store in your wallet, bike, keys or whatever. But it should be opt-in. As it is, it seems it s not even to opt out of it.