6 months ago I switched to Kitty for terminal emulation [1]. So far there s only been one thing that I couldn t effectively do with Kitty that I did with Konsole in the past, that is watching a music video in 1/4 of the screen while using the rest for terminals. I could setup multiple Kitty windows taking up the rest of the screen but I wanted to keep using a single Kitty with multiple terminals and just have mpv go over one of them. Kitty supports it s own graphical interface so mpv vo=kitty works but took 6* the CPU power in my tests which isn t good for a laptop. For X11 there s a ontop option for mpv that does what you expect, but that doesn t work on Wayland. Not working is mostly Wayland s fault as there is a long tail of less commonly used graphical operations that work in X11 but aren t yet implemented in Wayland. I have filed a Debian bug report about this, the mpv man page should note that it s only going to work on X11 on Linux. I have discovered a solution to that, in the KDE settings there s a Window Rules section, I created an entry for Window class exactly matching mpv and then added a rule Keep above other windows and set it for force and yes . After that I can just resize mpv to occlude just one terminal and keep using the rest. Also one noteworthy thing with this is that it makes mpv go on top of the KDE taskbar, which can be a feature.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/29/hello-kitty/

I wrote a blog post The Shape of Computers [1] exploring ideas of how computers might evolve and how we can use them. One of the devices I mentioned was the Humane AI Pin, which has just been the recipient of one of the biggest roast reviews I ve ever seen [2], good work Marques Brownlee! As an aside I was once given a product to review which didn t work nearly as well as I think it should have worked so I sent an email to the developers saying sorry this product failed to work well so I can t say anything good about it and didn t publish a review. One of the first things that caught my attention in the review is the note that the AI Pin doesn t connect to your phone. I think that everything should connect to everything else as a usability feature. For security we don t want so much connecting and it s quite reasonable to turn off various connections at appropriate times for security, the Librem5 is an example of how this can be done with hardware switches to disable Wifi etc. But to just not have connectivity is bad. The next noteworthy thing is the external battery which also acts as a magnetic attachment from inside your shirt. So I guess it s using wireless charging through your shirt. A magnetically attached external battery would be a great feature for a phone, you could quickly swap a discharged battery for a fresh one and keep using it. When I tried to make the PinePhonePro my daily driver [3] I gave up and charging was one of the main reasons. One thing I learned from my experiment with the PinePhonePro is that the ratio of charge time to discharge time is sometimes more important than battery life and being able to quickly swap batteries without rebooting is a way of solving that. The reviewer of the AI Pin complains later in the video about battery life which seems to be partly due to wireless charging from the detachable battery and partly due to being physically small. It seems the phablet form factor is the smallest viable personal computer at this time. The review glosses over what could be the regarded as the 2 worst issues of the device. It does everything via the cloud (where the cloud means a computer owned by someone I probably shouldn t trust ) and it records everything. Strange that it s not getting the hate the Google Glass got. The user interface based on laser projection of menus on the palm of your hand is an interesting concept. I d rather have a Bluetooth attached tablet or something for operations that can t be conveniently done with voice. The reviewer harshly criticises the laser projection interface later in the video, maybe technology isn t yet adequate to implement this properly. The first criticism of the device in the review part of the video is of the time taken to answer questions, especially when Internet connectivity is poor. His question who designed the Washington Monument took 8 seconds to start answering it in his demonstration. I asked the Alpaca LLM the same question running on 4 cores of a E5-2696 and it took 10 seconds to start answering and then printed the words at about speaking speed. So if we had a free software based AI device for this purpose it shouldn t be difficult to get local LLM computation with less delay than the Humane device by simply providing more compute power than 4 cores of a E5-2696v3. How does a 32 core 1.05GHz Mali G72 from 2017 (as used in the Galaxy Note 9) compare to 4 cores of a 2.3GHz Intel CPU from 2015? Passmark says that Intel CPU can do 48GFlop with all 18 cores so 4 cores can presumably do about 10GFlop which seems less than the claimed 20-32GFlop of the Mali G72. It seems that with the right software even older Android phones could give adequate performance for a local LLM. The Alpaca model I m testing with takes 4.2G of RAM to run which is usable in a Note 9 with 8G of RAM or a Pixel 8 Pro with 12G. A Pixel 8 Pro could have 4.2G of RAM reserved for a LLM and still have as much RAM for other purposes as my main laptop as of a few months ago. I consider the speed of Alpaca on my workstation to be acceptable but not great. If we can get FOSS phones running a LLM at that speed then I think it would be great for a first version we can always rely on newer and faster hardware becoming available. Marques notes that the cause of some of the problems is likely due to a desire to make it a separate powerful product in the future and that if they gave it phone connectivity in the start they would have to remove that later on. I think that the real problem is that the profit motive is incompatible with good design. They want to have a product that s stand-alone and justifies the purchase price plus subscription and that means not making it a phone accessory . While I think that the best thing for the user is to allow it to talk to a phone, a PC, a car, and anything else the user wants. He compares it to the Apple Vision Pro which has the same issue of trying to be a stand-alone computer but not being properly capable of it. One of the benefits that Marques cites for the AI Pin is the ability to capture voice notes. Dictaphones have been around for over 100 years and very few people have bought them, not even in the 80s when they became cheap. While almost everyone can occasionally benefit from being able to make a note of an idea when it s not convenient to write it down there are few people who need it enough to carry a separate device, not even if that device is tiny. But a phone as a general purpose computing device with microphone can easily be adapted to such things. One possibility would be to program a phone to start a voice note when the volume up and down buttons are pressed at the same time or when some other condition is met. Another possibility is to have a phone have a hotkey function that varies by what you are doing, EG if bushwalking have the hotkey be to take a photo or if on a flight have it be taking a voice note. On the Mobile Apps page on the Debian wiki I created a section for categories of apps that I think we need [4]. In that section I added the following list:

1. Voice input for dictation
2. Voice assistant like Google/Apple
3. Voice output
4. Full operation for visually impaired people

One thing I really like about the AI Pin is that it has the potential to become a really good computing and personal assistant device for visually impaired people funded by people with full vision who want to legally control a computer while driving etc. I have some concerns about the potential uses of the AI Pin while driving (as Marques stated an aim to do), but if it replaces the use of regular phones while driving it will make things less bad. Marques concludes his video by warning against buying a product based on the promise of what it can be in future. I bought the Librem5 on exactly that promise, the difference is that I have the source and the ability to help make the promise come true. My aim is to spend thousands of dollars on test hardware and thousands of hours of development time to help make FOSS phones a product that most people can use at low price with little effort. Another interesting review of the pin is by Mrwhostheboss [5], one of his examples is of asking the pin for advice about a chair but without him knowing the pin selected a different chair in the room. He compares this to using Google s apps on a phone and seeing which item the app has selected. He also said that he doesn t want to make an order based on speech he wants to review a page of information about it. I suspect that the design of the pin had too much input from people accustomed to asking a corporate travel office to find them a flight and not enough from people who look through the details of the results of flight booking services trying to save an extra $20. Some people might say if you need to save $20 on a flight then a $24/month subscription computing service isn t for you , I reject that argument. I can afford lots of computing services because I try to get the best deal on every moderately expensive thing I pay for. Another point that Mrwhostheboss makes is regarding secret SMS, you probably wouldn t want to speak a SMS you are sending to your SO while waiting for a train. He makes it clear that changing between phone and pin while sharing resources (IE not having a separate phone number and separate data store) is a desired feature. The most insightful point Mrwhostheboss made was when he suggested that if the pin had come out before the smartphone then things might have all gone differently, but now anything that s developed has to be based around the expectations of phone use. This is something we need to keep in mind when developing FOSS software, there s lots of different ways that things could be done but we need to meet the expectations of users if we want our software to be used by many people. I previously wrote a blog post titled Considering Convergence [6] about the possible ways of using a phone as a laptop. While I still believe what I wrote there I m now considering the possibility of ease of movement of work in progress as a way of addressing some of the same issues. I ve written a blog post about Convergence vs Transferrence [7].

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/03/13/shape-computers/
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/MobileApps
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2yTG3n1Vc
• [6] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/04/26/convergence-vs-transference/

Review: Nation, by Terry Pratchett

Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	2008
Printing:	2009
ISBN:	0-06-143303-9
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	369

Nation is a stand-alone young adult fantasy novel. It was published in the gap between Discworld novels Making Money and Unseen Academicals. Nation starts with a plague. The Russian influenza has ravaged Britain, including the royal family. The next in line to the throne is off on a remote island and must be retrieved and crowned as soon as possible, or an obscure provision in Magna Carta will cause no end of trouble. The Cutty Wren is sent on this mission, carrying the Gentlemen of Last Resort. Then comes the tsunami. In the midst of fire raining from the sky and a wave like no one has ever seen, Captain Roberts tied himself to the wheel of the Sweet Judy and steered it as best he could, straight into an island. The sole survivor of the shipwreck: one Ermintrude Fanshaw, daughter of the governor of some British island possessions. Oh, and a parrot. Mau was on the Boys' Island when the tsunami came, going through his rite of passage into manhood. He was to return to the Nation the next morning and receive his tattoos and his adult soul. He survived in a canoe. No one else in the Nation did. Terry Pratchett considered Nation to be his best book. It is not his best book, at least in my opinion; it's firmly below the top tier of Discworld novels, let alone Night Watch. It is, however, an interesting and enjoyable book that tackles gods and religion with a sledgehammer rather than a knife. It's also very, very dark and utterly depressing at the start, despite a few glimmers of Pratchett's humor. Mau is the main protagonist at first, and the book opens with everyone he cares about dying. This is the place where I thought Pratchett diverged the most from his Discworld style: in Discworld, I think most of that would have been off-screen, but here we follow Mau through the realization, the devastation, the disassociation, the burials at sea, the thoughts of suicide, and the complete upheaval of everything he thought he was or was about to become. I found the start of this book difficult to get through. The immediate transition into potentially tragic misunderstandings between Mau and Daphne (as Ermintrude names herself once there is no one to tell her not to) didn't help. As I got farther into the book, though, I warmed to it. The best parts early on are Daphne's baffled but scientific attempts to understand Mau's culture and her place in it. More survivors arrive, and they start to assemble a community, anchored in large part by Mau's stubborn determination to do what's right even though he's lost all of his moorings. That community eventually re-establishes contact with the rest of the world and the opening plot about the British monarchy, but not before Daphne has been changed profoundly by being part of it. I think Pratchett worked hard at keeping Mau's culture at the center of the story. It's notable that the community that reforms over the course of the book essentially follows the patterns of Mau's lost Nation and incorporates Daphne into it, rather than (as is so often the case) the other way around. The plot itself is fiercely anti-colonial in a way that mostly worked. Still, though, it's a quasi-Pacific-island culture written by a white British man, and I had some qualms. Pratchett quite rightfully makes it clear in the afterward that this is an alternate world and Mau's culture is not a real Pacific island culture. However, that also means that its starkly gender-essentialist nature was a free choice, rather than one based on some specific culture, and I found that choice somewhat off-putting. The religious rituals are all gendered, the dwelling places are gendered, and one's entire life course in Mau's world seems based on binary classification as a man or a woman. Based on Pratchett's other books, I assume this was more an unfortunate default than a deliberate choice, but it's still a choice he could have avoided. The end of this book wrestles directly with the relative worth of Mau's culture versus that of the British. I liked most of this, but the twists that Pratchett adds to avoid the colonialist results we saw in our world stumble partly into the trap of making Mau's culture valuable by British standards. (I'm being a bit vague here to avoid spoilers.) I think it is very hard to base this book on a different set of priorities and still bring the largely UK, US, and western European audience along, so I don't blame Pratchett for failing to do it, but I'm a bit sad that the world still revolved around a British axis. This felt quite similar to Discworld to me in its overall sensibilities, but with the roles of moral philosophy and humor reversed. Discworld novels usually start with some larger-than-life characters and an absurd plot, and then the moral philosophy sneaks up behind you when you're not looking and hits you over the head. Nation starts with the moral philosophy: Mau wrestles with his gods and the problem of evil in a way that reminded me of Job, except with a far different pantheon and rather less tolerance for divine excuses on the part of the protagonist. It's the humor, instead, that sneaks up on you and makes you laugh when the plot is a bit too much. But the mix arrives at much the same place: the absurd hand-in-hand with the profound, and all seen from an angle that makes it a bit easier to understand. I'm not sure I would recommend Nation as a good place to start with Pratchett. I felt like I benefited from having read a lot of Discworld to build up my willingness to trust where Pratchett was going. But it has the quality of writing of late Discworld without the (arguable) need to read 25 books to understand all of the backstory. Regardless, recommended, and you'll never hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in quite the same way again. Rating: 8 out of 10

Having setup recursive DNS it was time to actually sort out a backup internet connection. I live in a Virgin Media area, but I still haven t forgiven them for my terrible Virgin experiences when moving here. Plus it involves a bigger contractual commitment. There are no altnets locally (though I m watching youfibre who have already rolled out in a few Belfast exchanges), so I decided to go for a 5G modem. That gives some flexibility, and is a bit easier to get up and running. I started by purchasing a ZTE MC7010. This had the advantage of being reasonably cheap off eBay, not having any wifi functionality I would just have to disable (it s going to plug it into the same router the FTTP connection terminates on), being outdoor mountable should I decide to go that way, and, finally, being powered via PoE. For now this device sits on the window sill in my study, which is at the top of the house. I printed a table stand for it which mostly does the job (though not as well with a normal, rather than flat, network cable). The router lives downstairs, so I ve extended a dedicated VLAN through the study switch, down to the core switch and out to the router. The PoE study switch can only do GigE, not 2.5Gb/s, but at present that s far from the limiting factor on the speed of the connection. The device is 3 branded, and, as it happens, I ve ended up with a 3 SIM in it. Up until recently my personal phone was with them, but they ve kicked me off Go Roam, so I ve moved. Going with 3 for the backup connection provides some slight extra measure of resiliency; we now have devices on all 4 major UK networks in the house. The SIM is a preloaded data only SIM good for a year; I don t expect to use all of the data allowance, but I didn t want to have to worry about unexpected excess charges. Performance turns out to be disappointing; I end up locking the device to 4G as the 5G signal is marginal - leaving it enabled results in constantly switching between 4G + 5G and a significant extra latency. The smokeping graph below shows a brief period where I removed the 4G lock and allowed 5G: (There s a handy zte.js script to allow doing this from the device web interface.) I get about 10Mb/s sustained downloads out of it. EE/Vodafone did not lead to significantly better results, so for now I m accepting it is what it is. I tried relocating the device to another part of the house (a little tricky while still providing switch-based PoE, but I have an injector), without much improvement. Equally pinning the 4G to certain bands provided a short term improvement (I got up to 40-50Mb/s sustained), but not reliably so. This is disappointing, but if it turns out to be a problem I can look at mounting it externally. I also assume as 5G is gradually rolled out further things will naturally improve, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. Rather than wait until my main link had a problem I decided to try a day working over the 5G connection. I spend a lot of my time either in browser based apps or accessing remote systems via SSH, so I m reasonably sensitive to a jittery or otherwise flaky connection. I picked a day that I did not have any meetings planned, but as it happened I ended up with an adhoc video call arranged. I m pleased to say that it all worked just fine; definitely noticeable as slower than the FTTP connection (to be expected), but all workable and even the video call was fine (at least from my end). Looking at the traffic graph shows the expected ~ 10Mb/s peak (actually a little higher, and looking at the FTTP stats for previous days not out of keeping with what we see there), and you can just about see the ~ 3Mb/s symmetric use by the video call at 2pm: The test run also helped iron out the fact that the content filter was still enabled on the SIM, but that was easily resolved. Up next, vaguely automatic failover.

With the release of Libntlm version 1.8 the release tarball can be reproduced on several distributions. We also publish a signed minimal source-only tarball, produced by git-archive which is the same format used by Savannah, Codeberg, GitLab, GitHub and others. Reproducibility of both tarballs are tested continuously for regressions on GitLab through a CI/CD pipeline. If that wasn t enough to excite you, the Debian packages of Libntlm are now built from the reproducible minimal source-only tarball. The resulting binaries are reproducible on several architectures. What does that even mean? Why should you care? How you can do the same for your project? What are the open issues? Read on, dear reader This article describes my practical experiments with reproducible release artifacts, following up on my earlier thoughts that lead to discussion on Fosstodon and a patch by Janneke Nieuwenhuizen to make Guix tarballs reproducible that inspired me to some practical work. Let s look at how a maintainer release some software, and how a user can reproduce the released artifacts from the source code. Libntlm provides a shared library written in C and uses GNU Make, GNU Autoconf, GNU Automake, GNU Libtool and gnulib for build management, but these ideas should apply to most project and build system. The following illustrate the steps a maintainer would take to prepare a release:

git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make distcheck
gpg -b libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

The generated files libntlm-1.8.tar.gz and libntlm-1.8.tar.gz.sig are published, and users download and use them. This is how the GNU project have been doing releases since the late 1980 s. That is a testament to how successful this pattern has been! These tarballs contain source code and some generated files, typically shell scripts generated by autoconf, makefile templates generated by automake, documentation in formats like Info, HTML, or PDF. Rarely do they contain binary object code, but historically that happened. The XZUtils incident illustrate that tarballs with files that are not included in the git archive offer an opportunity to disguise malicious backdoors. I blogged earlier how to mitigate this risk by using signed minimal source-only tarballs. The risk of hiding malware is not the only motivation to publish signed minimal source-only tarballs. With pre-generated content in tarballs, there is a risk that GNU/Linux distributions such as Trisquel, Guix, Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora ship generated files coming from the tarball into the binary *.deb or *.rpm package file. Typically the person packaging the upstream project never realized that some installed artifacts was not re-built through a typical autoconf -fi && ./configure && make install sequence, and never wrote the code to rebuild everything. This can also happen if the build rules are written but are buggy, shipping the old artifact. When a security problem is found, this can lead to time-consuming situations, as it may be that patching the relevant source code and rebuilding the package is not sufficient: the vulnerable generated object from the tarball would be shipped into the binary package instead of a rebuilt artifact. For architecture-specific binaries this rarely happens, since object code is usually not included in tarballs although for 10+ years I shipped the binary Java JAR file in the GNU Libidn release tarball, until I stopped shipping it. For interpreted languages and especially for generated content such as HTML, PDF, shell scripts this happens more than you would like. Publishing minimal source-only tarballs enable easier auditing of a project s code, to avoid the need to read through all generated files looking for malicious content. I have taken care to generate the source-only minimal tarball using git-archive. This is the same format that GitLab, GitHub etc offer for the automated download links on git tags. The minimal source-only tarballs can thus serve as a way to audit GitLab and GitHub download material! Consider if/when hosting sites like GitLab or GitHub has a security incident that cause generated tarballs to include a backdoor that is not present in the git repository. If people rely on the tag download artifact without verifying the maintainer PGP signature using GnuPG, this can lead to similar backdoor scenarios that we had for XZUtils but originated with the hosting provider instead of the release manager. This is even more concerning, since this attack can be mounted for some selected IP address that you want to target and not on everyone, thereby making it harder to discover. With all that discussion and rationale out of the way, let s return to the release process. I have added another step here:

make srcdist
gpg -b libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz

Now the release is ready. I publish these four files in the Libntlm s Savannah Download area, but they can be uploaded to a GitLab/GitHub release area as well. These are the SHA256 checksums I got after building the tarballs on my Trisquel 11 aramo laptop:

91de864224913b9493c7a6cec2890e6eded3610d34c3d983132823de348ec2ca  libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
ce6569a47a21173ba69c990965f73eb82d9a093eb871f935ab64ee13df47fda1  libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

So how can you reproduce my artifacts? Here is how to reproduce them in a Ubuntu 22.04 container:

podman run -it --rm ubuntu:22.04
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-*.tar.gz

You should see the exact same SHA256 checksum values. Hooray! This works because Trisquel 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 uses the same version of git, autoconf, automake, and libtool. These tools do not guarantee the same output content for all versions, similar to how GNU GCC does not generate the same binary output for all versions. So there is still some delicate version pairing needed. Ideally, the artifacts should be possible to reproduce from the release artifacts themselves, and not only directly from git. It is possible to reproduce the full tarball in a AlmaLinux 8 container replace almalinux:8 with rockylinux:8 if you prefer RockyLinux:

podman run -it --rm almalinux:8
dnf update -y
dnf install -y make wget gcc
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
cd libntlm-1.8
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

The source-only minimal tarball can be regenerated on Debian 11:

podman run -it --rm debian:11
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
make -f cfg.mk srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz 

As the Magnus Opus or chef-d uvre, let s recreate the full tarball directly from the minimal source-only tarball on Trisquel 11 replace docker.io/kpengboy/trisquel:11.0 with ubuntu:22.04 if you prefer.

podman run -it --rm docker.io/kpengboy/trisquel:11.0
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make wget git ca-certificates
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
cd libntlm-v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

Yay! You should now have great confidence in that the release artifacts correspond to what s in version control and also to what the maintainer intended to release. Your remaining job is to audit the source code for vulnerabilities, including the source code of the dependencies used in the build. You no longer have to worry about auditing the release artifacts. I find it somewhat amusing that the build infrastructure for Libntlm is now in a significantly better place than the code itself. Libntlm is written in old C style with plenty of string manipulation and uses broken cryptographic algorithms such as MD4 and single-DES. Remember folks: solving supply chain security issues has no bearing on what kind of code you eventually run. A clean gun can still shoot you in the foot. Side note on naming: GitLab exports tarballs with pathnames libntlm-v1.8/ (i.e.., PROJECT-TAG/) and I ve adopted the same pathnames, which means my libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz tarballs are bit-by-bit identical to GitLab s exports and you can verify this with tools like diffoscope. GitLab name the tarball libntlm-v1.8.tar.gz (i.e., PROJECT-TAG.ARCHIVE) which I find too similar to the libntlm-1.8.tar.gz that we also publish. GitHub uses the same git archive style, but unfortunately they have logic that removes the v in the pathname so you will get a tarball with pathname libntlm-1.8/ instead of libntlm-v1.8/ that GitLab and I use. The content of the tarball is bit-by-bit identical, but the pathname and archive differs. Codeberg (running Forgejo) uses another approach: the tarball is called libntlm-v1.8.tar.gz (after the tag) just like GitLab, but the pathname inside the archive is libntlm/, otherwise the produced archive is bit-by-bit identical including timestamps. Savannah s CGIT interface uses archive name libntlm-1.8.tar.gz with pathname libntlm-1.8/, but otherwise file content is identical. Savannah s GitWeb interface provides snapshot links that are named after the git commit (e.g., libntlm-a812c2ca.tar.gz with libntlm-a812c2ca/) and I cannot find any tag-based download links at all. Overall, we are so close to get SHA256 checksum to match, but fail on pathname within the archive. I ve chosen to be compatible with GitLab regarding the content of tarballs but not on archive naming. From a simplicity point of view, it would be nice if everyone used PROJECT-TAG.ARCHIVE for the archive filename and PROJECT-TAG/ for the pathname within the archive. This aspect will probably need more discussion. Side note on git archive output: It seems different versions of git archive produce different results for the same repository. The version of git in Debian 11, Trisquel 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 behave the same. The version of git in Debian 12, AlmaLinux/RockyLinux 8/9, Alpine, ArchLinux, macOS homebrew, and upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 behave in another way. Hopefully this will not change that often, but this would invalidate reproducibility of these tarballs in the future, forcing you to use an old git release to reproduce the source-only tarball. Alas, GitLab and most other sites appears to be using modern git so the download tarballs from them would not match my tarballs even though the content would. Side note on ChangeLog: ChangeLog files were traditionally manually curated files with version history for a package. In recent years, several projects moved to dynamically generate them from git history (using tools like git2cl or gitlog-to-changelog). This has consequences for reproducibility of tarballs: you need to have the entire git history available! The gitlog-to-changelog tool also output different outputs depending on the time zone of the person using it, which arguable is a simple bug that can be fixed. However this entire approach is incompatible with rebuilding the full tarball from the minimal source-only tarball. It seems Libntlm s ChangeLog file died on the surgery table here. So how would a distribution build these minimal source-only tarballs? I happen to help on the libntlm package in Debian. It has historically used the generated tarballs as the source code to build from. This means that code coming from gnulib is vendored in the tarball. When a security problem is discovered in gnulib code, the security team needs to patch all packages that include that vendored code and rebuild them, instead of merely patching the gnulib package and rebuild all packages that rely on that particular code. To change this, the Debian libntlm package needs to Build-Depends on Debian s gnulib package. But there was one problem: similar to most projects that use gnulib, Libntlm depend on a particular git commit of gnulib, and Debian only ship one commit. There is no coordination about which commit to use. I have adopted gnulib in Debian, and add a git bundle to the *_all.deb binary package so that projects that rely on gnulib can pick whatever commit they need. This allow an no-network GNULIB_URL and GNULIB_REVISION approach when running Libntlm s ./bootstrap with the Debian gnulib package installed. Otherwise libntlm would pick up whatever latest version of gnulib that Debian happened to have in the gnulib package, which is not what the Libntlm maintainer intended to be used, and can lead to all sorts of version mismatches (and consequently security problems) over time. Libntlm in Debian is developed and tested on Salsa and there is continuous integration testing of it as well, thanks to the Salsa CI team. Side note on git bundles: unfortunately there appears to be no reproducible way to export a git repository into one or more files. So one unfortunate consequence of all this work is that the gnulib *.orig.tar.gz tarball in Debian is not reproducible any more. I have tried to get Git bundles to be reproducible but I never got it to work see my notes in gnulib s debian/README.source on this aspect. Of course, source tarball reproducibility has nothing to do with binary reproducibility of gnulib in Debian itself, fortunately. One open question is how to deal with the increased build dependencies that is triggered by this approach. Some people are surprised by this but I don t see how to get around it: if you depend on source code for tools in another package to build your package, it is a bad idea to hide that dependency. We ve done it for a long time through vendored code in non-minimal tarballs. Libntlm isn t the most critical project from a bootstrapping perspective, so adding git and gnulib as Build-Depends to it will probably be fine. However, consider if this pattern was used for other packages that uses gnulib such as coreutils, gzip, tar, bison etc (all are using gnulib) then they would all Build-Depends on git and gnulib. Cross-building those packages for a new architecture will therefor require git on that architecture first, which gets circular quick. The dependency on gnulib is real so I don t see that going away, and gnulib is a Architecture:all package. However, the dependency on git is merely a consequence of how the Debian gnulib package chose to make all gnulib git commits available to projects: through a git bundle. There are other ways to do this that doesn t require the git tool to extract the necessary files, but none that I found practical ideas welcome! Finally some brief notes on how this was implemented. Enabling bootstrappable source-only minimal tarballs via gnulib s ./bootstrap is achieved by using the GNULIB_REVISION mechanism, locking down the gnulib commit used. I have always disliked git submodules because they add extra steps and has complicated interaction with CI/CD. The reason why I gave up git submodules now is because the particular commit to use is not recorded in the git archive output when git submodules is used. So the particular gnulib commit has to be mentioned explicitly in some source code that goes into the git archive tarball. Colin Watson added the GNULIB_REVISION approach to ./bootstrap back in 2018, and now it no longer made sense to continue to use a gnulib git submodule. One alternative is to use ./bootstrap with --gnulib-srcdir or --gnulib-refdir if there is some practical problem with the GNULIB_URL towards a git bundle the GNULIB_REVISION in bootstrap.conf. The srcdist make rule is simple:

git archive --prefix=libntlm-v1.8/ -o libntlm-v1.8.tar.gz HEAD

Making the make dist generated tarball reproducible can be more complicated, however for Libntlm it was sufficient to make sure the modification times of all files were set deterministically to the timestamp of the last commit in the git repository. Interestingly there seems to be a couple of different ways to accomplish this, Guix doesn t support minimal source-only tarballs but rely on a .tarball-timestamp file inside the tarball. Paul Eggert explained what TZDB is using some time ago. The approach I m using now is fairly similar to the one I suggested over a year ago. If there are problems because all files in the tarball now use the same modification time, there is a solution by Bruno Haible that could be implemented. Side note on git tags: Some people may wonder why not verify a signed git tag instead of verifying a signed tarball of the git archive. Currently most git repositories uses SHA-1 for git commit identities, but SHA-1 is not a secure hash function. While current SHA-1 attacks can be detected and mitigated, there are fundamental doubts that a git SHA-1 commit identity uniquely refers to the same content that was intended. Verifying a git tag will never offer the same assurance, since a git tag can be moved or re-signed at any time. Verifying a git commit is better but then we need to trust SHA-1. Migrating git to SHA-256 would resolve this aspect, but most hosting sites such as GitLab and GitHub does not support this yet. There are other advantages to using signed tarballs instead of signed git commits or git tags as well, e.g., tar.gz can be a deterministically reproducible persistent stable offline storage format but .git sub-directory trees or git bundles do not offer this property. Doing continous testing of all this is critical to make sure things don t regress. Libntlm s pipeline definition now produce the generated libntlm-*.tar.gz tarballs and a checksum as a build artifact. Then I added the 000-reproducability job which compares the checksums and fails on mismatches. You can read its delicate output in the job for the v1.8 release. Right now we insists that builds on Trisquel 11 match Ubuntu 22.04, that PureOS 10 builds match Debian 11 builds, that AlmaLinux 8 builds match RockyLinux 8 builds, and AlmaLinux 9 builds match RockyLinux 9 builds. As you can see in pipeline job output, not all platforms lead to the same tarballs, but hopefully this state can be improved over time. There is also partial reproducibility, where the full tarball is reproducible across two distributions but not the minimal tarball, or vice versa. If this way of working plays out well, I hope to implement it in other projects too. What do you think? Happy Hacking!

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
7. Distribution work
8. Mailing list highlights
9. Website updates
10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
11. diffoscope updates
12. Upstream patches
13. Reproducibility testing framework

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Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible In remarkable news, Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd reported that that the Arch Linux minimal container userland is now 100% reproducible after work by developers dvzv and Foxboron on the one remaining package. This represents a real world , widely-used Linux distribution being reproducible. Their post, which kpcyrd suffixed with the question now what? , continues on to outline some potential next steps, including validating whether the container image itself could be reproduced bit-for-bit. The post, which was itself a followup for an Arch Linux update earlier in the month, generated a significant number of replies.

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):

So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.

That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible In March, Davide Cavalca gave a talk at the 2024 Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE 21x) about the ongoing effort to make the Fedora Linux distribution reproducible. Documented in more detail on Fedora s website, the talk touched on topics such as the specifics of implementing reproducible builds in Fedora, the challenges encountered, the current status and what s coming next. (YouTube video)

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:

Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF

Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds In a long line of commendably detailed blog posts, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier have together published two interesting posts on the GNU Guix blog this month. In early March, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier wrote about software and source code identification and how that might be performed using Guix, rhetorically posing the questions: What does it take to identify software ? How can we tell what software is running on a machine to determine, for example, what security vulnerabilities might affect it? Later in the month, Ludovic Court s wrote a solo post describing adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment. Ludovic s post touches on GNU Guix s aim to support time travel , the ability to reliably (and reproducibly) revert to an earlier point in time, employing the iconic image of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock in Safety Last! (1925) to poetically illustrate both the slapstick nature of current modern technology and the gymnastics required to navigate hazards of our own making.

Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced add-determinism, a work-in-progress reimplementation of the Reproducible Builds project s own strip-nondeterminism tool in the Rust programming language, intended to be used as a post-processor in RPM-based distributions such as Fedora In addition, Yossi Kreinin published a blog post titled refix: fast, debuggable, reproducible builds that describes a tool that post-processes binaries in such a way that they are still debuggable with gdb, etc.. Yossi post details the motivation and techniques behind the (fast) performance of the tool.

Distribution work In Debian this month, since the testing framework no longer varies the build path, James Addison performed a bulk downgrade of the bug severity for issues filed with a level of normal to a new level of wishlist. In addition, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 23 were removed this month adding to ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. As part of this effort, a number of issue types were updated, including Chris Lamb adding a new ocaml_include_directories toolchain issue [ ] and James Addison adding a new filesystem_order_in_java_jar_manifest_mf_include_resource issue [ ] and updating the random_uuid_in_notebooks_generated_by_nbsphinx to reference a relevant discussion thread [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 24th status update of reproducible Debian ISO images. Roland highlights that the images for Debian unstable often cannot be generated due to changes in that distribution related to the 64-bit time_t transition. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his reproducibility work in openSUSE.

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

• Alexander Railean of Siemens asked the list to aid in understanding how one can independently verify the reproducibility of Java projects from the Maven Central repository. Having explored those repositories, Alexander could not find examples where the buildinfo file was present. Arnout Engelen responded with some details.
• Fay Stegerman resuscitated a long-dormant thread to report that she added support in her diff-zip-meta.py tool to expose extra timestamps embedded in .zip and .apk metadata.

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

• Pol Dellaiera noticed the frequent need to correctly cite the website itself in academic work. To facilitate easier citation across multiple formats, Pol contributed a Citation File Format (CIF) file. As a result, an export in BibTeX format is now available in the Academic Publications section. Pol encourages community contributions to further refine the CITATION.cff file. Pol also added an substantial new section to the buy in page documenting the role of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and ephemeral development environments. [ ][ ]
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a new commandments page to the documentation [ ][ ] and fixed some incorrect YAML elsewhere on the site [ ].
• Chris Lamb add three recent academic papers to the publications page of the website. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo and Holger Levsen collaborated to add Infomaniak as a sponsor of amd64 virtual machines. [ ][ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus updated the stable outputs page, dropping version numbers from Python documentation pages [ ] and noting that Python s set data structure is also affected by the PYTHONHASHSEED functionality. [ ]

Delta chat clients now reproducible Delta Chat, an open source messaging application that can work over email, announced this month that the Rust-based core library underlying Delta chat application is now reproducible.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
  • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
  • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
  • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
  • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
  • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
  • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
  • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
  • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]

In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a large number of patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • helm (SSL-related build failure)
  • java-21-openjdk (parallelism)
  • libressl (SSL-related build failure)
  • nfdump (date issue)
  • python-django-q (avoid stuck build)
  • python-smart-open (fails to build on single-CPU machines)
  • python-stdnum (fails to build in 2039)
  • python-yarl (regression)
  • qemu (build failure)
  • rabbitmq-java-client (with Fridrich Strba; Maven timestamp issue)
  • rmw (build fails in 2038)
  • warewulf (with Egbert Eich; cpio modification time and inode issue)
  • wxWidgets (fails to build in 2038)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1066042 filed against python-quantities.
  • #1066083 filed against gnome-maps.
  • #1066084 filed against tox.
  • #1066085 filed against q2cli.
  • #1067098 filed against mpl-sphinx-theme.
  • #1067099 filed against woof-doom.
  • #1067100 filed against bochs.
  • #1067101 filed against storm-lang.
  • #1067102 filed against librsvg.
  • #1067218 filed against gretl.
  • #1067483 filed against postfix.
  • #1067484 filed against node-function-bind.
  • #1067485 filed against python-pysaml2.
  • #1067947 filed against golang-github-stvp-tempredis.
• James Addison:
  • #1065124 filed against matplotlib.
  • #1066014 filed against pathos.
  • #1066016 filed against rdflib.
  • #1066017 filed against xonsh.
  • #1066045 filed against maven-bundle-plugin. (This patch was then uploaded by Mattia Rizzollo.)
• Ji Techet:
  • geany (toolchain-related issue for glfw)

Bernhard M. Wiedemann used reproducibility-tooling to detect and fix packages that added changes in their %check section, thus failing when built with the --no-checks option. Only half of all openSUSE packages were tested so far, but a large number of bugs were filed, including ones against caddy, exiv2, gnome-disk-utility, grisbi, gsl, itinerary, kosmindoormap, libQuotient, med-tools, plasma6-disks, pspp, python-pypuppetdb, python-urlextract, rsync, vagrant-libvirt and xsimd. Similarly, Jean-Pierre De Jesus DIAZ employed reproducible builds techniques in order to test a proposed refactor of the ath9k-htc-firmware package. As the change produced bit-for-bit identical binaries to the previously shipped pre-built binaries:

I don t have the hardware to test this firmware, but the build produces the same hashes for the firmware so it s safe to say that the firmware should keep working.

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 March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
  • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
  • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
  • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
  • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
  • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
  • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
  • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
  • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
  • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
  • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
  • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
  • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
  • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
  • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
• Arch Linux-related changes:
  • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
  • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
  • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
  • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
  • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
  • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
  • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
  • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
  • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
  • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]

Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
  • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
  • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
  • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
  • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
  • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
  • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
  • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
  • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
• Other changes:
  • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
  • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
  • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
  • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
  • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
  • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
  • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
  • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]

The following changes were also made by:

• Jan-Benedict Glaw:
  • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
  • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
  • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
  • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]

Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]

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

Last year a Debian Developer blogged about writing Haskell code to give a bad result for LLMs that were trained on it. I forgot who wrote the post and I d appreciate the URL if anyone has it. I respect such technical work to enforce one s legal rights when they aren t respected by corporations, but I have a different approach. As an aside the Fosdem lecture Fortify AI against regulation, litigation and lobotomies is interesting on this topic [1], it s what inspired me to write about this. For what I write I am at this time happy to allow it to be used as part of a large training data set (consider this blog post a licence grant that applies until such time as I edit this post to change it). But only if aggregated with so much other data that my content is only a tiny portion of the data set by any metric. So I don t want someone to make a programming LLM that has my code as the only C code or a political data set that has my blog posts as the only left-wing content. If someone wants to train an LLM on only my content to make a Russell-simulator then I don t license my work for that purpose but also as it s small enough that anyone with a bit of skill could do it on a weekend I can t stop it. I would be really interested in seeing the results if someone from the FOSS community wanted to make a Russell-simulator and would probably issue them a license for such work if asked. If my work comprises more than 0.1% of the content in a particular measure (theme, programming language, political position, etc) in a training data set then I don t permit that without prior discussion. Finally if someone wants to make a FOSS training data set to be used for FOSS LLM systems (maybe under the AGPL or some similar license) then I ll allow my writing to be used as part of that.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/24sptqxo

Getting the Belgian eID to work on Linux systems should be fairly easy, although some people do struggle with it. For that reason, there is a lot of third-party documentation out there in the form of blog posts, wiki pages, and other kinds of things. Unfortunately, some of this documentation is simply wrong. Written by people who played around with things until it kind of worked, sometimes you get a situation where something that used to work in the past (but wasn't really necessary) now stopped working, but it's still added to a number of locations as though it were the gospel. And then people follow these instructions and now things don't work anymore. One of these revolves around OpenSC. OpenSC is an open source smartcard library that has support for a pretty large number of smartcards, amongst which the Belgian eID. It provides a PKCS#11 module as well as a number of supporting tools. For those not in the know, PKCS#11 is a standardized C API for offloading cryptographic operations. It is an API that can be used when talking to a hardware cryptographic module, in order to make that module perform some actions, and it is especially popular in the open source world, with support in NSS, amongst others. This library is written and maintained by mozilla, and is a low-level cryptographic library that is used by Firefox (on all platforms it supports) as well as by Google Chrome and other browsers based on that (but only on Linux, and as I understand it, only for linking with smartcards; their BoringSSL library is used for other things). The official eID software that we ship through eid.belgium.be, also known as "BeID", provides a PKCS#11 module for the Belgian eID, as well as a number of support tools to make interacting with the card easier, such as the "eID viewer", which provides the ability to read data from the card, and validate their signatures. While the very first public version of this eID PKCS#11 module was originally based on OpenSC, it has since been reimplemented as a PKCS#11 module in its own right, with no lineage to OpenSC whatsoever anymore. About five years ago, the Belgian eID card was renewed. At the time, a new physical appearance was the most obvious difference with the old card, but there were also some technical, on-chip, differences that are not so apparent. The most important one here, although it is not the only one, is the fact that newer eID cards now use a NIST P-384 elliptic curve-based private keys, rather than the RSA-based ones that were used in the past. This change required some changes to any PKCS#11 module that supports the eID; both the BeID one, as well as the OpenSC card-belpic driver that is written in support of the Belgian eID. Obviously, the required changes were implemented for the BeID module; however, the OpenSC card-belpic driver was not updated. While I did do some preliminary work on the required changes, I was unable to get it to work, and eventually other things took up my time so I never finished the implementation. If someone would like to finish the work that I started, the preliminal patch that I wrote could be a good start -- but like I said, it doesn't yet work. Also, you'll probably be interested in the official documentation of the eID card. Unfortunately, in the mean time someone added the Applet 1.8 ATR to the card-belpic.c file, without also implementing the required changes to the driver so that the PKCS#11 driver actually supports the eID card. The result of this is that if you have OpenSC installed in NSS for either Firefox or any Chromium-based browser, and it gets picked up before the BeID PKCS#11 module, then NSS will stop looking and pass all crypto operations to the OpenSC PKCS#11 module rather than to the official eID PKCS#11 module, and things will not work at all, causing a lot of confusion. I have therefore taken the following two steps:

1. The official eID packages now conflict with the OpenSC PKCS#11 module. Specifically only the PKCS#11 module, not the rest of OpenSC, so you can theoretically still use its tools. This means that once we release this new version of the eID software, when you do an upgrade and you have OpenSC installed, it will remove the PKCS#11 module and anything that depends on it. This is normal and expected.
2. I have filed a pull request against OpenSC that removes the Applet 1.8 ATR from the driver, so that OpenSC will stop claiming that it supports the 1.8 applet.

When the pull request is accepted, we will update the official eID software to make the conflict versioned, so that as soon as it works again you will again be able to install the OpenSC and BeID packages at the same time. In the mean time, if you have the OpenSC PKCS#11 module installed on your system, and your eID authentication does not work, try removing it.

ceb and I are members of the Derril Water Solar Park cooperative. We were recently invited to vote on whether the coop should bid for a Contract for Difference, in a government green electricity auction. We ve voted No.

• Green electricity from your mainstream supplier is a lie
• Ripple
• Contracts for Difference
• Ripple and CfD
• Voting No

Green electricity from your mainstream supplier is a lie For a while ceb and I have wanted to contribute directly to green energy provision. This isn t really possible in the mainstream consumer electricy market. Mainstream electricity suppliers 100% green energy tariffs are pure greenwashing. In a capitalist boondoogle, they basically divvy up the electricity so that customers on the (typically more expensive) green tariff get the green electricity, and the other customers get whatever is left. (Of course the electricity is actually all mixed up by the National Grid.) There are fewer people signed up for these tariffs than there is green power generated, so this basically means signing up for a green tariff has no effect whatsoever, other than giving evil people more money. Ripple About a year ago we heard about Ripple. The structure is a little complicated, but the basic upshot is: Ripple promote and manage renewable energy schemes. The schemes themselves are each an individual company; the company is largely owned by a co-operative. The co-op is owned by consumers of electricity in the UK., To stop the co-operative being an purely financial investment scheme, shares ownership is limited according to your electricity usage. The electricity is be sold on the open market, and the profits are used to offset members electricity bills. (One gotcha from all of this is that for this to work your electricity billing provider has to be signed up with Ripple, but ours, Octopus, is.) It seemed to us that this was a way for us to directly cause (and pay for!) the actual generation of green electricity. So, we bought shares in one these co-operatives: we are co-owners of the Derril Water Solar Farm. We signed up for the maximum: funding generating capacity corresponding to 120% of our current electricity usage. We paid a little over 5000 for our shares. Contracts for Difference The UK has a renewable energy subsidy scheme, which goes by the name of Contracts for Difference. The idea is that a renewable energy generation company bids in advance, saying that they ll sell their electricity at Y price, for the duration of the contract (15 years in the current round). The lowest bids win. All the electricity from the participating infrastructure is sold on the open market, but if the market price is low the government makes up the difference, and if the price is high, the government takes the winnings. This is supposedly good for giving a stable investment environment, since the price the developer is going to get now doesn t depends on the electricity market over the next 15 years. The CfD system is supposed to encourage development, so you can only apply before you ve commissioned your generation infrastructure. Ripple and CfD Ripple recently invited us to agree that the Derril Water co-operative should bid in the current round of CfDs. If this goes ahead, and we are one of the auction s winners, the result would be that, instead of selling our electricity at the market price, we ll sell it at the fixed CfD price. This would mean that our return on our investment (which show up as savings on our electricity bills) would be decoupled from market electricity prices, and be much more predictable. They can t tell us the price they d want to bid at, and future electricity prices are rather hard to predict, but it s clear from the accompanying projections that they think we d be better off on average with a CfD. The documentation is very full of financial projections and graphs; other factors aren t really discussed in any detail. The rules of the co-op didn t require them to hold a vote, but very sensibly, for such a fundamental change in the model, they decided to treat it roughly the same way as for a rules change: they re hoping to get 75% Yes votes. Voting No The reason we re in this co-op at all is because we want to directly fund renewable electricity. Participating in the CfD auction would involve us competing with capitalist energy companies for government subsidies. Subsidies which are supposed to encourage the provision of green electricity. It seems to us that participating in this auction would remove most of the difference between what we hoped to do by investing in Derril Water, and just participating in the normal consumer electricity market. In particular, if we do win in the auction, that s probably directly removing the funding and investment support model for other, market-investor-funded, projects. In other words, our buying into Derril Water ceases to be an additional green energy project, changing (in its minor way) the UK s electricity mix. It becomes a financial transaction much more tenously connected (if connected at all) to helping mitigate the climate emergency. So our conclusion was that we must vote against.

comments

FTP master This month I accepted 147 and rejected 12 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 151.

If you file an RM bug, please do check whether there are reverse dependencies as well and file RM bugs for them. It is annoying and time-consuming when I have to do the moreinfo dance. Debian LTS This was my hundred-seventeenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3770-1] libnet-cidr-lite-perl security update for one CVE to fix IP parsing and ACLs based on the result
• [#1067544] Bullseye PU bug for libmicrohttpd
• Unfortunately XZ happened at the end of month and I had to delay/intentionally delayed other uploads: they will appear as DLA-3781-1 and DLA-3784-1 in April

I also continued to work on qtbase-opensource-src and last but not least did a week of FD. Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-eighth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [ELA-1062-1]libnet-cidr-lite-perl security update for one CVE to improve parsing of IP addresses in Jessie and Stretch
• Due to XZ I also delayed the uploads here. They will appear as ELA-1069-1 and DLA-1070-1 in April

I also continued on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well) and did a week of FD. Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• cjet
• lprng
• rlpr
• epson-inkjet-printer-escpr

This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of:

• indi-gige

Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• radlib

Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of:

• osmo-iuh

misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• dvbstream
• liburjtag
• spim
• setserial
• entropybroker

The Debian Project Developers will shortly vote for a new Debian Project Leader known as the DPL. The Project Leader is the official representative of The Debian Project tasked with managing the overall project, its vision, direction, and finances. The DPL is also responsible for the selection of Delegates, defining areas of responsibility within the project, the coordination of Developers, and making decisions required for the project. Our outgoing and present DPL Jonathan Carter served 4 terms, from 2020 through 2024. Jonathan shared his last Bits from the DPL post to Debian recently and his hopes for the future of Debian. Recently, we sat with the two present candidates for the DPL position asking questions to find out who they really are in a series of interviews about their platforms, visions for Debian, lives, and even their favorite text editors. The interviews were conducted by disaster2life (Yashraj Moghe) and made available from video and audio transcriptions:

• Andreas Tille [this document]
• Sruthi Chandran [Interview]

Voting for the position starts on April 6, 2024. Editors' note: This is our official return to Debian interviews, readers should stay tuned for more upcoming interviews with Developers and other important figures in Debian as part of our "Meet your Debian Developer" series. We used the following tools and services: Turboscribe.ai for the transcription from the audio and video files, IRC: Oftc.net for communication, Jitsi meet for interviews, and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for editing and video. While we encountered many technical difficulties in the return to this process, we are still able and proud to present the transcripts of the interviews edited only in a few areas for readability. 2024 Debian Project Leader Candidate: Andrea Tille Andreas' Interview Who are you? Tell us a little about yourself. [Andreas]:

How am I? Well, I'm, as I wrote in my platform, I'm a proud grandfather doing a lot of free software stuff, doing a lot of sports, have some goals in mind which I like to do and hopefully for the best of Debian.

And How are you today? [Andreas]:

How I'm doing today? Well, actually I have some headaches but it's fine for the interview. So, usually I feel very good. Spring was coming here and today it's raining and I plan to do a bicycle tour tomorrow and hope that I do not get really sick but yeah, for the interview it's fine.

What do you do in Debian? Could you mention your story here? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well, I started with Debian kind of an accident because I wanted to have some package salvaged which is called WordNet. It's a monolingual dictionary and I did not really plan to do more than maybe 10 packages or so. I had some kind of training with xTeddy which is totally unimportant, a cute teddy you can put on your desktop. So, and then well, more or less I thought how can I make Debian attractive for my employer which is a medical institute and so on. It could make sense to package bioinformatics and medicine software and it somehow evolved in a direction I did neither expect it nor wanted to do, that I'm currently the most busy uploader in Debian, created several teams around it. DebianMate is very well known from me. I created the Blends team to create teams and techniques around what we are doing which was Debian TIS, Debian Edu, Debian Science and so on and I also created the packaging team for R, for the statistics package R which is technically based and not topic based. All these blends are covering a certain topic and R is just needed by lots of these blends. So, yeah, and to cope with all this I have written a script which is routing an update to manage all these uploads more or less automatically. So, I think I had one day where I uploaded 21 new packages but it's just automatically generated, right? So, it's on one day more than I ever planned to do.

What is the first thing you think of when you think of Debian? Editors' note: The question was misunderstood as the worst thing you think of when you think of Debian [Andreas]:

The worst thing I think about Debian, it's complicated. I think today on Debian board I was asked about the technical progress I want to make and in my opinion we need to standardize things inside Debian. For instance, bringing all the packages to salsa, follow some common standards, some common workflow which is extremely helpful. As I said, if I'm that productive with my own packages we can adopt this in general, at least in most cases I think. I made a lot of good experience by the support of well-formed teams. Well-formed teams are those teams where people support each other, help each other. For instance, how to say, I'm a physicist by profession so I'm not an IT expert. I can tell apart what works and what not but I'm not an expert in those packages. I do and the amount of packages is so high that I do not even understand all the techniques they are covering like Go, Rust and something like this. And I also don't speak Java and I had a problem once in the middle of the night and I've sent the email to the list and was a Java problem and I woke up in the morning and it was solved. This is what I call a team. I don't call a team some common repository that is used by random people for different packages also but it's working together, don't hesitate to solve other people's problems and permit people to get active. This is what I call a team and this is also something I observed in, it's hard to give a percentage, in a lot of other teams but we have other people who do not even understand the concept of the team. Why is working together make some advantage and this is also a tough thing. I [would] like to tackle in my term if I get elected to form solid teams using the common workflow. This is one thing. The other thing is that we have a lot of good people in our infrastructure like FTP masters, DSA and so on. I have the feeling they have a lot of work and are working more or less on their limits, and I like to talk to them [to ask] what kind of change we could do to move that limits or move their personal health to the better side.

The DPL term lasts for a year, What would you do during that you couldn't do now? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well this is basically what I said are my main issues. I need to admit I have no really clear imagination what kind of tasks will come to me as a DPL because all these financial issues and law issues possible and issues [that] people who are not really friendly to Debian might create. I'm afraid these things might occupy a lot of time and I can't say much about this because I simply don't know.

What are three key terms about you and your candidacy? [Andreas]:

As I said, I like to work on standards, I d like to make Debian try [to get it right so] that people don't get overworked, this third key point is be inviting to newcomers, to everybody who wants to come. Yeah, I also mentioned in my term this diversity issue, geographical and from gender point of view. This may be the three points I consider most important.

Preferred text editor? [Andreas]:

Yeah, my preferred one? Ah, well, I have no preferred text editor. I'm using the Midnight Commander very frequently which has an internal editor which is convenient for small text. For other things, I usually use VI but I also use Emacs from time to time. So, no, I have not preferred text editor. Whatever works nicely for me.

What is the importance of the community in the Debian Project? How would like to see it evolving over the next few years? [Andreas]:

Yeah, I think the community is extremely important. So, I was on a lot of DebConfs. I think it's not really 20 but 17 or 18 DebCons and I really enjoyed these events every year because I met so many friends and met so many interesting people that it's really enriching my life and those who I never met in person but have read interesting things and yeah, Debian community makes really a part of my life.

And how do you think it should evolve specifically? [Andreas]:

Yeah, for instance, last year in Kochi, it became even clearer to me that the geographical diversity is a really strong point. Just discussing with some women from India who is afraid about not coming next year to Busan because there's a problem with Shanghai and so on. I'm not really sure how we can solve this but I think this is a problem at least I wish to tackle and yeah, this is an interesting point, the geographical diversity and I'm running the so-called mentoring of the month. This is a small project to attract newcomers for the Debian Med team which has the focus on medical packages and I learned that we had always men applying for this and so I said, okay, I dropped the constraint of medical packages. Any topic is fine, I teach you packaging but it must be someone who does not consider himself a man. I got only two applicants, no, actually, I got one applicant and one response which was kind of strange if I'm hunting for women or so. I did not understand but I got one response and interestingly, it was for me one of the least expected counters. It was from Iran and I met a very nice woman, very open, very skilled and gifted and did a good job or have even lose contact today and maybe we need more actively approach groups that are underrepresented. I don't know if what's a good means which I did but at least I tried and so I try to think about these kind of things.

What part of Debian has made you smile? What part of the project has kept you going all through the years? [Andreas]:

Well, the card game which is called Mao on the DebConf made me smile all the time. I admit I joined only two or three times even if I really love this kind of games but I was occupied by other stuff so this made me really smile. I also think the first online DebConf in 2020 made me smile because we had this kind of short video sequences and I tried to make a funny video sequence about every DebConf I attended before. This is really funny moments but yeah, it's not only smile but yeah. One thing maybe it's totally unconnected to Debian but I learned personally something in Debian that we have a do-ocracy and you can do things which you think that are right if not going in between someone else, right? So respect everybody else but otherwise you can do so. And in 2020 I also started to take trees which are growing widely in my garden and plant them into the woods because in our woods a lot of trees are dying and so I just do something because I can. I have the resource to do something, take the small tree and bring it into the woods because it does not harm anybody. I asked the forester if it is okay, yes, yes, okay. So everybody can do so but I think the idea to do something like this came also because of the free software idea. You have the resources, you have the computer, you can do something and you do something productive, right? And when thinking about this I think it was also my Debian work. Meanwhile I have planted more than 3,000 trees so it's not a small number but yeah, I enjoy this.

What part of Debian would you have some criticisms for? [Andreas]:

Yeah, it's basically the same as I said before. We need more standards to work together. I do not want to repeat this but this is what I think, yeah.

What field in Free Software generally do you think requires the most work to be put into it? What do you think is Debian's part in the field? [Andreas]:

It's also in general, the thing is the fact that I'm maintaining packages which are usually as modern software is maintained in Git, which is fine but we have some software which is at Sourceport, we have software laying around somewhere, we have software where Debian somehow became Upstream because nobody is caring anymore and free software is very different in several things, ways and well, I in principle like freedom of choice which is the basic of all our work. Sometimes this freedom goes in the way of productivity because everybody is free to re-implement. You asked me for the most favorite editor. In principle one really good working editor would be great to have and would work and we have maybe 500 in Debian or so, I don't know. I could imagine if people would concentrate and say five instead of 500 editors, we could get more productive, right? But I know this will not happen, right? But I think this is one thing which goes in the way of making things smooth and productive and we could have more manpower to replace one person who's [having] children, doing some other stuff and can't continue working on something and maybe this is a problem I will not solve, definitely not, but which I see.

What do you think is Debian's part in the field? [Andreas]:

Yeah, well, okay, we can bring together different Upstreams, so we are building some packages and have some general overview about similar things and can say, oh, you are doing this and some other person is doing more or less the same, do you want to join each other or so, but this is kind of a channel we have to our Upstreams which is probably not very successful. It starts with code copies of some libraries which are changed a little bit, which is fine license-wise, but not so helpful for different things and so I've tried to convince those Upstreams to forward their patches to the original one, but for this and I think we could do some kind of, yeah, [find] someone who brings Upstream together or to make them stop their forking stuff, but it costs a lot of energy and we probably don't have this and it's also not realistic that we can really help with this problem.

Do you have any questions for me? [Andreas]:

I enjoyed the interview, I enjoyed seeing you again after half a year or so. Yeah, actually I've seen you in the eating room or cheese and wine party or so, I do not remember we had to really talk together, but yeah, people around, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

You ve probably heard of the recent backdoor in xz. There have been a lot of takes on this, most of them boiling down to some version of:

The problem here is with Open Source Software.

I want to say not only is that view so myopic that it pushes towards the incorrect, but also it blinds us to more serious problems. Now, I don t pretend that there are no problems in the FLOSS community. There have been various pieces written about what this issue says about the FLOSS community (usually without actionable solutions). I m not here to say those pieces are wrong. Just that there s a bigger picture. So with this xz issue, it may well be a state actor (aka spy ) that added this malicious code to xz. We also know that proprietary software and systems can be vulnerable. For instance, a Twitter whistleblower revealed that Twitter employed Indian and Chinese spies, some knowingly. A recent report pointed to security lapses at Microsoft, including preventable lapses in security. According to the Wikipedia article on the SolarWinds attack, it was facilitated by various kinds of carelessness, including passwords being posted to Github and weak default passwords. They directly distributed malware-infested updates, encouraged customers to disable anti-malware tools when installing SolarWinds products, and so forth. It would be naive indeed to assume that there aren t black hat actors among the legions of programmers employed by companies that outsource work to low-cost countries some of which have challenges with bribery. So, given all this, we can t really say the problem is Open Source. Maybe it s more broad:

The problem here is with software.

Maybe that inches us closer, but is it really accurate? We have all heard of Boeing s recent issues, which seem to have some element of root causes in corporate carelessness, cost-cutting, and outsourcing. That sounds rather similar to the SolarWinds issue, doesn t it?

Well then, the problem is capitalism.

Maybe it has a role to play, but isn t it a little too easy to just say capitalism and throw up our hands helplessly, just as some do with FLOSS as at the start of this article? After all, capitalism also brought us plenty of products of very high quality over the years. When we can point to successful, non-careless products and I own some of them (for instance, my Framework laptop). We clearly haven t reached the root cause yet. And besides, what would you replace it with? All the major alternatives that have been tried have even stronger downsides. Maybe you replace it with better regulated capitalism , but that s still capitalism.

Then the problem must be with consumers.

As this argument would go, it s consumers buying patterns that drive problems. Buyers individual and corporate seek flashy features and low cost, prizing those over quality and security. No doubt this is true in a lot of cases. Maybe greed or status-conscious societies foster it: Temu promises people to shop like a billionaire , and unloads on them cheap junk, which all but guarantees that shipments from Temu containing products made with forced labor are entering the United States on a regular basis . But consumers are also people, and some fraction of them are quite capable of writing fantastic software, and in fact, do so. So what we need is some way to seize control. Some way to do what is right, despite the pressures of consumers or corporations. Ah yes, dear reader, you have been slogging through all these paragraphs and now realize I have been leading you to this:

Then the solution is Open Source.

Indeed. Faults and all, FLOSS is the most successful movement I know where people are bringing us back to the commons: working and volunteering for the common good, unleashing a thousand creative variants on a theme, iterating in every direction imaginable. We have FLOSS being vital parts of everything from $30 Raspberry Pis to space missions. It is bringing education and communication to impoverished parts of the world. It lets everyone write and release software. And, unlike the SolarWinds and Twitter issues, it exposes both clever solutions and security flaws to the world. If an authentication process in Windows got slower, we would all shrug and mutter Microsoft under our breath. Because, really, what else can we do? We have no agency with Windows. If an authentication process in Linux gets slower, anybody that s interested anybody at all can dive in and ask why and trace it down to root causes. Some look at this and say FLOSS is responsible for this mess. I look at it and say, this would be so much worse if it wasn t FLOSS and experience backs me up on this. FLOSS doesn t prevent security issues itself. What it does do is give capabilities to us all. The ability to investigate. Ability to fix. Yes, even the ability to break and its cousin, the power to learn. And, most rewarding, the ability to contribute.

Happy to share that ulid is now (back) on CRAN. It provides universally unique identifiers that are lexicographically sortable, which improves over the more well-known uuid generators. ulid is a neat little package put together by Bob Rudis a few years ago. It had recently drifted off CRAN so I offered to brush it up and re-submit it. And as tooted earlier today, it took just over an hour to finish that (after the lead up work I had done, including prior email with CRAN in the loop, the repo transfer from Bob s to my ulid repo plus of course a wee bit of actual maintenance; see below for more). The NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.3.1 (2024-04-02)

• New Maintainer
• Deleted several repository files no longer used or needed
• Added .editorconfig, ChangeLog and cleanup
• Converted NEWS.md to NEWS.Rd
• Simplified R/ directory to one source file
• Simplified src/ removing redundant Makevars
• Added ulid() alias
• Updated / edited roxygen and README.md documention
• Removed vignette which was identical to README.md
• Switched continuous integration to GitHub Actions
• Placed upstream (header-only) library into src/ulid/
• Renamed single interface file to src/wrapper

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

It s been a while that I haven t posted anything on my blog, the truth is that Freexian has been doing very well in the last years and that I have a hard time to allocate time to write articles or even to contribute to my usual Debian projects the exception being debusine since that s part of the Freexian work (have a look at our most recent announce!). That being said, given Freexian s growth and in the hope to reduce my workload, we are looking to extend our team with Debian members of more varied backgrounds and skills, so they can help us in areas like sales / marketing / project management. Have a look at our announce on debian-jobs@lists.debian.org. As a mission-oriented company, we are looking to work with persons already involved in Debian (or persons who were waiting the right opportunity to get involved). All our collaborators can spend 20% of their paid work time on the Debian projects they care about.

I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy. In a way it is surprising and reassuring that, as far as I can tell, this commonly does not happen. Most open source developers out there seem to be nice and well-meaning, after all.

Convenient or it won t happen Nevertheless I thought I should do something about this. The safest option would probably to use dedicated virtual machines for the development work, with very little interaction with my main system. But knowing me, that did not seem likely to happen, as it sounded like a fair amount of hassle. So I aimed for a viable compromise between security and convenient, and one that does not get too much in the way of my current habits. For instance, it seems desirable to have the project files accessible from my unconstrained environment. This way, I could perform certain actions that need access to secret keys or tokens, but are (unlikely) to run code (e.g. git push, git pull from private repositories, gh pr create) from the outside , and the actual build environment can do without access to these secrets. The user experience I thus want is a quick way to enter a development environment where I can do most of the things I need to do while programming (network access, running command line and GUI programs), with access to the current project, but without access to my actual /home directory. I initially followed the blog post Application Isolation using NixOS Containers by Marcin Sucharski and got something working that mostly did what I wanted, but then a colleague pointed out that tools like firejail can achieve roughly the same with a less global setup. I tried to use firejail, but found it to be a bit too inflexible for my particular whims, so I ended up writing a small wrapper around the lower level sandboxing tool https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap.

Selective bubblewrapping This script, called dev and included below, builds a new filesystem namespace with minimal /proc and /dev directories, it s own /tmp directories. It then binds-mound some directories to make the host s NixOS system available inside the container (/bin, /usr, the nix store including domain socket, stuff for OpenGL applications). My user s home directory is taken from ~/.dev-home and some configuration files are bind-mounted for convenient sharing. I intentionally don t share most of the configuration for example, a direnv enable in the dev environment should not affect the main environment. The X11 socket for graphical applications and the corresponding .Xauthority file is made available. And finally, if I run dev in a project directory, this project directory is bind mounted writable, and the current working directory is preserved. The effect is that I can type dev on the command line to enter dev mode rather conveniently. I can run development tools, including graphical ones like VSCode, and especially the latter with its extensions is part of the sandbox. To do a git push I either exit the development environment (Ctrl-D) or open a separate terminal. Overall, the inconvenience of switching back and forth seems worth the extra protection. Clearly, isn t going to hold against a determined and maybe targeted attacker (e.g. access to the X11 and the nix daemon socket can probably be used to escape easily). But I hope it will help against a compromised dev dependency that just deletes or exfiltrates data, like keys or passwords, from the usual places in $HOME.

Rough corners There is more polishing that could be done.

• In particular, clicking on a link inside VSCode in the container will currently open Firefox inside the container, without access to my settings and cookies etc. Ideally, links would be opened in the Firefox running outside. This is a problem that has a solution in the world of applications that are sandboxed with Flatpak, and involves a bunch of moving parts (a xdg-desktop-portal user service, a filtering dbus proxy, exposing access to that proxy in the container). I experimented with that for a bit longer than I should have, but could not get it to work to satisfaction (even without a container involved, I could not get xdg-desktop-portal to heed my default browser settings ). For now I will live with manually copying and pasting URLs, we ll see how long this lasts.
• With this setup (and unlike the NixOS container setup I tried first), the same applications are installed inside and outside. It might be useful to separate the set of installed programs: There is simply no point in running evolution or firefox inside the container, and if I do not even have VSCode or cabal available outside, so that it s less likely that I forget to enter dev before using these tools. It shouldn t be too hard to cargo-cult some of the NixOS Containers infrastructure to be able to have a separate system configuration that I can manage as part of my normal system configuration and make available to bubblewrap here.

So likely I will refine this some more over time. Or get tired of typing dev and going back to what I did before

The script

The dev script (at the time of writing)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

extra=()
if [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/build/* ]]   [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/projekte/programming/* ]]
then
extra+=(--bind "$PWD" "$PWD" --chdir "$PWD")
fi

if [ -n "$1" ]
then
    cmd=( "$@" )
else
    cmd=( bash )
fi

# Caveats:
# * access to all of  /etc 
# * access to  /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket , and is trusted user (but needed to run nix)
# * access to X11

exec bwrap \
  --unshare-all \
\
 # blank slate  \
  --share-net \
  --proc /proc \
  --dev /dev \
  --tmpfs /tmp \
  --tmpfs /run/user/1000 \
\
 # Needed for GLX applications, in paticular alacritty  \
  --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri \
  --ro-bind /sys/dev/char /sys/dev/char \
  --ro-bind /sys/devices/pci0000:00 /sys/devices/pci0000:00 \
  --ro-bind /run/opengl-driver /run/opengl-driver \
\
  --ro-bind /bin /bin \
  --ro-bind /usr /usr \
  --ro-bind /run/current-system /run/current-system \
  --ro-bind /nix /nix \
  --ro-bind /etc /etc \
  --ro-bind /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf \
\
  --bind ~/.dev-home /home/jojo \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/alacritty ~/.config/alacritty  \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.local/share/nvim ~/.local/share/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.bin ~/.bin \
\
  --bind /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 \
  --bind ~/.Xauthority ~/.Xauthority \
  --setenv DISPLAY :0 \
\
  --setenv container dev \
  "$ extra[@] " \
  -- \
  "$ cmd[@] "

FTP master This month I accepted 242 and rejected 42 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 251.

This was just a short month and the weather outside was not really motivating. I hope it will be better in March. Debian LTS This was my hundred-sixteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3739-1] libjwt security update for one CVE to fix some constant-time-for-execution-issue
• [libjwt] upload to unstable
• [#1064550] Bullseye PU bug for libjwt
• [#1064551] Bookworm PU bug for libjwt
• [#1064551] Bookworm PU bug for libjwt; upload after approval
• [DLA 3741-1] engrampa security update for one CVE to fix a path traversal issue with CPIO archives
• [#1060186] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265 was flagged for acceptance
• [#1056935] Bullseye PU-bug for libde265 was flagged for acceptance

I also started to work on qtbase-opensource-src (an update is needed for ELTS, so an LTS update seems to be appropriate as well, especially as there are postponed CVE). Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-seventth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [ELA-1047-1]bind9 security update for one CVE to fix an stack exhaustion issue in Jessie and Stretch

The upload of bind9 was a bit exciting, but all occuring issues with the new upload workflow could be quickly fixed by Helmut and the packages finally reached their destination. I wonder why it is always me who stumbles upon special cases? This month I also worked on the Jessie and Stretch updates for exim4. I also started to work on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well). Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• cpdb-libs

This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Matomo I started a new team debian-matomo-maintainers. Within this team all matomo related packages should be handled. PHP PEAR or PECL packages shall be still maintained in their corresponding teams. This month I uploaded:

• matomo-searchengine-and-social-list
• matomo-referrer-spam-list
• matomo-php-tracker
• matomo-device-detector
• matomo-component-ini

This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version of:

• libahp-xc

Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• libjwt to fix a CVE

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

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Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Three new reproducibility-related academic papers A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month: Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:

Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)

Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time by Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Th o Zimmermann (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France) addresses:

[The] principle of reusability [ ] makes it harder to reproduce projects build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.

The abstract continues with the claim that Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision. (arXiv, full PDF)
Options Matter: Documenting and Fixing Non-Reproducible Builds in Highly-Configurable Systems by Georges Aaron Randrianaina, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Olivier Zendra and Mathieu Acher (Inria centre at Rennes University, France):

This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

• User cen posted a query asking How to verify a package by rebuilding it locally on Debian which received a followup from Vagrant Cascadian.
• James Addison asked Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian regarding the differences in the testing performed by Debian s GitLab continuous integration (CI) pipeline and the Debian-specific testing performed by the Reproducible Builds project itself, and followed this with a separate but related question regarding misconfigured reprotest configurations.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]
• Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). [ ]
• Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]
• Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. [ ]
• Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]
• Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]
• Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]
• Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]
• Make test_zip black clean. [ ]

In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:

• Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]
• Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [ ][ ]
• Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

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

• Chris Lamb:
  • Improve the relative sizing of headers. [ ]
  • Re-order and punch up the introduction and documentation on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. [ ]
  • Update SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation re. datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp. Thanks, James Addison. [ ]
  • Add a post about Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Update the GNU Guix page to include their reproducibility QA page. [ ]
  • Add Sune Vuorela and Jan-Benedict Glaw to our contributors list. [ ][ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add Sovereign Tech Fund s logo to our sponsors. [ ]
  • Update our sponsors list. [ ]

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

• Debian-related changes:
  • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]
  • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]
  • Add an Erlang package set. [ ]
• Other changes:
  • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]
  • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
  • Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]
  • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. [ ]
  • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]
  • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]

Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:

• Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]
• Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]

In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

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:

• Philip Rinn:
  • gimagereader (date)
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • grass (date-related issue)
  • grub2 (filesystem ordering issue)
  • latex2html (drop a non-deterministic log)
  • mhvtl (tar)
  • obs (build-tool issue)
  • ollama (GZip embedding the modification time)
  • presenterm (filesystem-ordering issue)
  • qt6-quick3d (parallelism)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1064506 filed against geophar.
  • #1064891 filed against pytest-repeat.
  • #1064892 filed against klepto.
• James Addison:
  • #1064519 filed against flask-limiter.
  • python-parsl-doc (disable dynamic argument evaluation by Sphinx autodoc extension)
  • python3-pytest-repeat (remove entry_points.txt creation that varied by shell)
  • python3-selinux (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • python3-sepolicy (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • #1064575 filed against pyswarms.
  • #1064638 filed against python-x2go.
  • snapd (fix timestamp header in packaged manual-page)
  • zzzeeksphinx (existing RB patch forwarded and merged (with modifications))
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • #1063939 filed against fop.

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

First I would like to give a big congratulations to KDE for a superb KDE 6 mega release While we couldn t go with 6 on our upcoming LTS release, I do recommend KDE neon if you want to give it a try! I want to say it again, I firmly stand by the Kubuntu Council in the decision to stay with the rock solid Plasma 5 for the 24.04 LTS release. The timing was just to close to feature freeze and the last time we went with the shiny new stuff on an LTS release, it was a nightmare ( KDE 4 anyone? ). So without further ado, my weekly wrap-up. Kubuntu: Continuing efforts from last week Kubuntu: Week 3 wrap up, Contest! KDE snaps, Debian uploads. , it has been another wild and crazy week getting everything in before feature freeze yesterday. We will still be uploading the upcoming Plasma 5.27.11 as it is a bug fix release and right now it is all about the finding and fixing bugs! Aside from many uploads my accomplishments this week are:

• Kept a close eye on Excuses and fixed tests as needed. Seems riscv64 tests were turned off by default which broke several of our builds.
• I did a complete revamp of our seed / kubuntu-desktop meta package! I have ensured we are following KDE packaging recommendations. Unfortunately, we cannot ship maliit-keyboard as we get hit by LP 2039721 which makes for an unpleasant experience.
• I did some more work on our custom plasma-welcome which now just needs some branding, which leads to a friendly reminder the contest is still open! https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-graphic-design-contest/
• Bug triage! Oh so many bugs! From back when I worked on Kubuntu 10 years ago and plasma5 was new.. I am triaging and reducing this list to more recent bugs ( which is a much smaller list ). This reaffirms our decision to go with a rock solid stable Plasma5 for this LTS release.
• I spent some time debugging kio-gdrive which no longer works ( It works in Jammy ) so I am tracking down what is broken. I thought it was 2FA but my non 2FA doesn t work either, it just repeatedly throws up the google auth dialog. So this is still a WIP. It was suggested to me to disable online accounts all together, but I would prefer to give users the full experience.
• Fixed our ISO builds. We are still not quite ready for testers as we have some Calamares fixes in the pipeline. Be on the lookout for a call for testers soon
• Wrote a script to update our ( Kubuntu ) packageset to cover all the new packages accumulated over the years and remove packages that are defunct / removed.

What comes next? Testing, testing, testing! Bug fixes and of course our re-branding. My focus is on bug triage right now. I am also working on new projects in launchpad to easily track our bugs as right now they are all over the place and hard to track down. Snaps: I have started the MRs to fix our latest 23.08.5 snaps, I hope to get these finished in the next week or so. I have also been speaking to a prospective student with some GSOC ideas that I really like and will mentor, hopefully we are not too late. Happy with my work? My continued employment depends on you! Please consider a donation http://kubuntu.org/donate Thank you!

Review: The Fund, by Rob Copeland

Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-27694-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	310

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisher plastered advertisements for The Principles all over the San Francisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, there were also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. My brain is very good at tuning out advertisements, so my only thought at the time was "some business guy wrote a self-help book." I think I vaguely assumed he was a CEO of some traditional business, since that's usually who writes heavily marketed books like this. I did not connect him with hedge funds or Bridgewater, which I have a bad habit of confusing with Blackwater. The Principles turns out to be more of a laundered cult manual than a self-help book. And therein lies a story. Rob Copeland is currently with The New York Times, but for many years he was the hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He covered, among other things, Bridgewater Associates, the enormous hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio. The Fund is a biography of Ray Dalio and a history of Bridgewater from its founding as a vehicle for Dalio's advising business until 2022 when Dalio, after multiple false starts and title shuffles, finally retired from running the company. (Maybe. Based on the history recounted here, it wouldn't surprise me if he was back at the helm by the time you read this.) It is one of the wildest, creepiest, and most abusive business histories that I have ever read. It's probably worth mentioning, as Copeland does explicitly, that Ray Dalio and Bridgewater hate this book and claim it's a pack of lies. Copeland includes some of their denials (and many non-denials that sound as good as confirmations to me) in footnotes that I found increasingly amusing.

A lawyer for Dalio said he "treated all employees equally, giving people at all levels the same respect and extending them the same perks."

Uh-huh. Anyway, I personally know nothing about Bridgewater other than what I learned here and the occasional mention in Matt Levine's newsletter (which is where I got the recommendation for this book). I have no independent information whether anything Copeland describes here is true, but Copeland provides the typical extensive list of notes and sourcing one expects in a book like this, and Levine's comments indicated it's generally consistent with Bridgewater's industry reputation. I think this book is true, but since the clear implication is that the world's largest hedge fund was primarily a deranged cult whose employees mostly spied on and rated each other rather than doing any real investment work, I also have questions, not all of which Copeland answers to my satisfaction. But more on that later. The center of this book are the Principles. These were an ever-changing list of rules and maxims for how people should conduct themselves within Bridgewater. Per Copeland, although Dalio later published a book by that name, the version of the Principles that made it into the book was sanitized and significantly edited down from the version used inside the company. Dalio was constantly adding new ones and sometimes changing them, but the common theme was radical, confrontational "honesty": never being silent about problems, confronting people directly about anything that they did wrong, and telling people all of their faults so that they could "know themselves better." If this sounds like textbook abusive behavior, you have the right idea. This part Dalio admits to openly, describing Bridgewater as a firm that isn't for everyone but that achieves great results because of this culture. But the uncomfortably confrontational vibes are only the tip of the iceberg of dysfunction. Here are just a few of the ways this played out according to Copeland:

• Dalio decided that everyone's opinions should be weighted by the accuracy of their previous decisions, to create a "meritocracy," and therefore hired people to build a social credit system in which people could use an app to constantly rate all of their co-workers. This almost immediately devolved into out-group bullying worthy of a high school, with employees hurriedly down-rating and ostracizing any co-worker that Dalio down-rated.
• When an early version of the system uncovered two employees at Bridgewater with more credibility than Dalio, Dalio had the system rigged to ensure that he always had the highest ratings and was not affected by other people's ratings.
• Dalio became so obsessed with the principle of confronting problems that he created a centralized log of problems at Bridgewater and required employees find and report a quota of ten or twenty new issues every week or have their bonus docked. He would then regularly pick some issue out of the issue log, no matter how petty, and treat it like a referendum on the worth of the person responsible for the issue.
• Dalio's favorite way of dealing with a problem was to put someone on trial. This involved extensive investigations followed by a meeting where Dalio would berate the person and harshly catalog their flaws, often reducing them to tears or panic attacks, while smugly insisting that having an emotional reaction to criticism was a personality flaw. These meetings were then filmed and added to a library available to all Bridgewater employees, often edited to remove Dalio's personal abuse and to make the emotional reaction of the target look disproportionate. The ones Dalio liked the best were shown to all new employees as part of their training in the Principles.
• One of the best ways to gain institutional power in Bridgewater was to become sycophantically obsessed with the Principles and to be an eager participant in Dalio's trials. The highest levels of Bridgewater featured constant jockeying for power, often by trying to catch rivals in violations of the Principles so that they would be put on trial.

In one of the common and all-too-disturbing connections between Wall Street finance and the United States' dysfunctional government, James Comey (yes, that James Comey) ran internal security for Bridgewater for three years, meaning that he was the one who pulled evidence from surveillance cameras for Dalio to use to confront employees during his trials. In case the cult vibes weren't strong enough already, Bridgewater developed its own idiosyncratic language worthy of Scientology. The trials were called "probings," firing someone was called "sorting" them, and rating them was called "dotting," among many other Bridgewater-specific terms. Needless to say, no one ever probed Dalio himself. You will also be completely unsurprised to learn that Copeland documents instances of sexual harassment and discrimination at Bridgewater, including some by Dalio himself, although that seems to be a relatively small part of the overall dysfunction. Dalio was happy to publicly humiliate anyone regardless of gender. If you're like me, at this point you're probably wondering how Bridgewater continued operating for so long in this environment. (Per Copeland, since Dalio's retirement in 2022, Bridgewater has drastically reduced the cult-like behaviors, deleted its archive of probings, and de-emphasized the Principles.) It was not actually a religious cult; it was a hedge fund that has to provide investment services to huge, sophisticated clients, and by all accounts it's a very successful one. Why did this bizarre nightmare of a workplace not interfere with Bridgewater's business? This, I think, is the weakest part of this book. Copeland makes a few gestures at answering this question, but none of them are very satisfying. First, it's clear from Copeland's account that almost none of the employees of Bridgewater had any control over Bridgewater's investments. Nearly everyone was working on other parts of the business (sales, investor relations) or on cult-related obsessions. Investment decisions (largely incorporated into algorithms) were made by a tiny core of people and often by Dalio himself. Bridgewater also appears to not trade frequently, unlike some other hedge funds, meaning that they probably stay clear of the more labor-intensive high-frequency parts of the business. Second, Bridgewater took off as a hedge fund just before the hedge fund boom in the 1990s. It transformed from Dalio's personal consulting business and investment newsletter to a hedge fund in 1990 (with an earlier investment from the World Bank in 1987), and the 1990s were a very good decade for hedge funds. Bridgewater, in part due to Dalio's connections and effective marketing via his newsletter, became one of the largest hedge funds in the world, which gave it a sort of institutional momentum. No one was questioned for putting money into Bridgewater even in years when it did poorly compared to its rivals. Third, Dalio used the tried and true method of getting free publicity from the financial press: constantly predict an upcoming downturn, and aggressively take credit whenever you were right. From nearly the start of his career, Dalio predicted economic downturns year after year. Bridgewater did very well in the 2000 to 2003 downturn, and again during the 2008 financial crisis. Dalio aggressively takes credit for predicting both of those downturns and positioning Bridgewater correctly going into them. This is correct; what he avoids mentioning is that he also predicted downturns in every other year, the majority of which never happened. These points together create a bit of an answer, but they don't feel like the whole picture and Copeland doesn't connect the pieces. It seems possible that Dalio may simply be good at investing; he reads obsessively and clearly enjoys thinking about markets, and being an abusive cult leader doesn't take up all of his time. It's also true that to some extent hedge funds are semi-free money machines, in that once you have a sufficient quantity of money and political connections you gain access to investment opportunities and mechanisms that are very likely to make money and that the typical investor simply cannot access. Dalio is clearly good at making personal connections, and invested a lot of effort into forming close ties with tricky clients such as pools of Chinese money. Perhaps the most compelling explanation isn't mentioned directly in this book but instead comes from Matt Levine. Bridgewater touts its algorithmic trading over humans making individual trades, and there is some reason to believe that consistently applying an algorithm without regard to human emotion is a solid trading strategy in at least some investment areas. Levine has asked in his newsletter, tongue firmly in cheek, whether the bizarre cult-like behavior and constant infighting is a strategy to distract all the humans and keep them from messing with the algorithm and thus making bad decisions. Copeland leaves this question unsettled. Instead, one comes away from this book with a clear vision of the most dysfunctional workplace I have ever heard of, and an endless litany of bizarre events each more astonishing than the last. If you like watching train wrecks, this is the book for you. The only drawback is that, unlike other entries in this genre such as Bad Blood or Billion Dollar Loser, Bridgewater is a wildly successful company, so you don't get the schadenfreude of seeing a house of cards collapse. You do, however, get a helpful mental model to apply to the next person who tries to talk to you about "radical honesty" and "idea meritocracy." The flaw in this book is that the existence of an organization like Bridgewater is pointing to systematic flaws in how our society works, which Copeland is largely uninterested in interrogating. "How could this have happened?" is a rather large question to leave unanswered. The sheer outrageousness of Dalio's behavior also gets a bit tiring by the end of the book, when you've seen the patterns and are hearing about the fourth variation. But this is still an astonishing book, and a worthy entry in the genre of capitalism disasters. Rating: 7 out of 10