Search Results: "ban"

9 February 2025

Dave Hibberd: Radio Activity 10-16 Feb 2025

It s been quite the week of radio related nonsense for me, where I ve been channelling my time and brainspace for radio into activity on air and system refinements, not working on Debian.

POTA, Antennas and why do my toys not work? Having had my interest piqued by Ian at mastodon.radio, I looked online and spotted a couple of parks within stumbling distance of my house, that s good news! It looks like the list has been refactored and expanded since I last looked at it, so there are now more entities to activate and explore. My concerns about antennas noted last week rumbled on. There was a second strand to this concern too, my end fed 64:1 (or 49:1?!) transformer from MM0OPX sits in my mind as not having worked very well in Spain last year, and I want to get to the bottom of why. As with most things in my life, it s probably a me problem. I came up with a cunning plan - firstly, buy a new mast to replace the one I broke a few weeks back on Cat Law. Secondly, buy a couple of new connectors and some heatshrink to reterminate my cable that I m sure is broken. Spending more money on a problem never hurt anyone, right? Come Wednesday, the new toys arrived and I figured combining everything into one convenient night time walk and radio was a good plan. So I walk out to the nearest park with my LoRa APRS doofer going and see what happens: APRS-Map After circling a bit to find somewhere suitable (there appear to be construction works in the park!) I set up my gear in 2C with frost on the ground, called CQ, spotted and got nothing on either the end fed half wave or the cheap vertical. As it was too late for 20m, I tried 40 and a bit of 80 using the inbuilt tuner, but wasn t heard by stations I called or when calling independently. I packed everything up and lora-doofered my way home, mildly deflated.

Try it at home It still didn t sit with me that the end fed wasn t working, so come Friday night I set it up in the back garden/woods behind the house to try and diagnose why it wasn t working. Up it went, I worked some Irish stations pretty effortlessly, and down everything came. No complaints - the only things I did differently was have the feedpoint a little higher and check my power, limiting it to 10W. The G90 can do 20W, I wonder if running at that was saturating the core in the 64:1. At some point in the evening I stepped in some dog s shit too, and spent some time cleaning my boots outside to avoid further tramping the smell through the house. Win some, lose some.

Take it to the Hills On Friday, some of the other GM-ES Sota-ists had been out for an activity day. On account of me being busy in work, I couldn t go outside to play, but I figured a weekend of activity was on the books.

Saturday - A day above the clouds On Saturday I took myself up Tap O Noth, a favourite of mine for some reason, and Lord Arthur s Hill. Before I hit the hills, I took myself to the hackerspace and printed myself a K6ARK Winder and a guy ring for the mast, cut string, tied it together and wound the string on to the winder. I also took time to buzz out my wonky coax and it showed great continuity. Hmm, that can be continued later. I didn t quite get to crimping the radial network of the Aliexpress whip with a 12mm stud crimp, that can also be put on the TODO list.

Tap O Noth Once finally out, the weather was a bit cloudy with passing snow showers, but in between the showers I was above the clouds and the air was clear: After a mild struggle on 2m, I set up the end fed the first hill and got to work from the old hill fort: The end fed worked flawlessly. Exactly as promised, switching between 7MHz, 14MHz, 21MHz and 28MHz without a tuner was perfect, I chased hills on all the bands, and had a great time. Apart from 40m, where there was absolutely no space due to a contest. That wasn t such a fun time! My fingers were bitterly cold, so on went the big gloves for the descent and I felt like I was warm by the time I made it back to the car. It worked so well, in fact, I took the 1/4 wave cheap vertical out my bag and decided to brave it on the next activation.

Lord Arthur s Hill GM5ALX has posted a .gpx to sotlas which is shorter than the other ascent, but much sharper - I figured this would be a fun new way to try up the hill! It takes you right through the heart of the Littlewood Park estate, and I felt a bit uncomfortable walking straight past the estate cottages, especially when there were vehicles moving and active work happening. Presumably this is where Lord Arthur lived, at the foot of his hill. I cut through the woods to the west of the cottages, disturbing some deer and many, many pheasants, but I met the path fairly quickly. From there it was a 2km walk, 300m vertical ascent. Short and sharp! At the top, I was treated to a view of the hill I had activated only an hour or so before, which is a view that always makes me smile: To get some height for the feedpoint, I wrapped the coax around my winder a couple of turns and trapped it with the elastic while draping the coax over the trig. This bought me some more height and I felt clever because of it. Maybe a pole would be easier? From here, I worked inter-G on 40m and had a wee pile up, eventually working 15 or so European stations on 20m. Pleased with that! I had been considering a third hill, but home was the call in the failing light. Back to the car I walked to find my key didn t have any battery, so out came the Audi App and I used the Internet of Things to unlock my car. The modern world is bizarre.

Sunday - Cloudy Head // Head in the Clouds Sunday started off migraney, so I stayed within the confines of my house until I felt safe driving! After some back and forth in my cloudy head, I opted for the easier option of Ladylea Hill as I wasn t feeling up for major physical exertion. It was a long drive, after which I felt more wonky, but I hit the path eventually - I run to Hibby Standard Time, a few hours to a few days behind the rest of GM/ES. I was ready to bail if my head didn t improve, but it turns out, fresh cold air, silence and bloodflow helped. Ladylea Hill was incredibly quiet, a feature I really appreciated. It feels incredibly remote, with a long winding drive down Glenbuchat, which still has ice on the surface of the lochs and standing water. A brooding summit crowned with grey cloud in fantastic scenery that only revealed itself upon the clouds blowing through: I set up at the cairn and picked up 30 contacts overall, split between 40m and 20m, with some inter-g on 40 and a couple of continental surprises. 20 had longer skip today, so I saw Spain, Finland, Slovenia, Poland. On teardown, I managed to snap the top segment of my brand new mast with my cold, clumsy fingers, but thankfully sotabeams stock replacements. More money at the problem, again. Back to the car, no app needed, and homeward bound as the light faded. At the end of the weekend, I find myself finally over 100 activator points and over 400 chaser points. Somehow I ve collected more points this year already than last year, the winter bonuses really do stack up!

Addendum - OSMAnd & Open Street Map I ve been using OSMAnd on my iPhone quite extensively recently, I think offline mapping is super important if you re going out to get mildly lost in the hills. On more than one occasion, I have confidently set off in the wrong direction in the mist, and maps have saved my bacon! As you can download .gpx files, it s great to have them on the device and available for guidance in case you get lost, coupled with an offline map. Plus, as I drive around I love to have the dark red of a hill I ve walked appear on the map in my car dash or in my hand: This weekend I discovered it s possible to have height maps for nice 3d maps and contours marked on the map - you just need to download some additions for the maps. This is a really nice feature, it makes maps more pretty and more useful when you re in the middle of nowhere. Open Street Map also has designators for SOTA summits here and similar for POTA here GM5ALX has set to adding the summits around Scotland here. While the benefits aren t immediately obvious, it allows developers of mapping applications access to more data at no extra cost, really. It helps add depth to an already rich set of information, and allows us as radio amateurs to do more interesting things with maps and not be shackled to Apple/Google. Because it s open data, we can also fix things we find wrong as users. I like to fix road surfaces after I ve been cycling as that will feed forward to route planning through Komoot and data on my wahoo too, which can be modified with osm maps. In the future, it s possible to have an OSMAnd plugin highlighting local SOTA summits or mimicking features of sotl.as but offline. It s cool to be able to put open technologies to use like this in the field and really is the convergence point of all my favourite things!

Antoine Beaupr : Qalculate hacks

This is going to be a controversial statement because some people are absolute nerds about this, but, I need to say it. Qalculate is the best calculator that has ever been made. I am not going to try to convince you of this, I just wanted to put out my bias out there before writing down those notes. I am a total fan. This page will collect my notes of cool hacks I do with Qalculate. Most examples are copy-pasted from the command-line interface (qalc(1)), but I typically use the graphical interface as it's slightly better at displaying complex formulas. Discoverability is obviously also better for the cornucopia of features this fantastic application ships.

Qalc commandline primer On Debian, Qalculate's CLI interface can be installed with: 
apt install qalc
Then you start it with the qalc command, and end up on a prompt: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
>
Then it's a normal calculator: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
> 1+1
  1 + 1 = 2
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.1429
> pi
  pi   3.142
>
There's a bunch of variables to control display, approximation, and so on: 
> set precision 6
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.142857
> set precision 20
> pi
  pi   3.1415926535897932385
When I need more, I typically browse around the menus. One big issue I have with Qalculate is there are a lot of menus and features. I had to fiddle quite a bit to figure out that set precision command above. I might add more examples here as I find them.

Bandwidth estimates I often use the data units to estimate bandwidths. For example, here's what 1 megabit per second is over a month ("about 300 GiB"): 
> 1 megabit/s * 30 day to gibibyte 
  (1 megabit/second)   (30 days)   301.7 GiB
Or, "how long will it take to download X", in this case, 1GiB over a 100 mbps link: 
> 1GiB/(100 megabit/s)
  (1 gibibyte) / (100 megabits/second)   1 min + 25.90 s

Password entropy To calculate how much entropy (in bits) a given password structure, you count the number of possibilities in each entry (say, [a-z] is 26 possibilities, "one word in a 8k dictionary" is 8000), extract the base-2 logarithm, multiplied by the number of entries. For example, an alphabetic 14-character password is: 
> log2(26*2)*14
  log (26   2)   14   79.81
... 80 bits of entropy. To get the equivalent in a Diceware password with a 8000 word dictionary, you would need: 
> log2(8k)*x = 80
  (log (8   000)   x) = 80  
  x   6.170
... about 6 words, which gives you: 
> log2(8k)*6
  log (8   1000)   6   77.79
78 bits of entropy.

Exchange rates You can convert between currencies! 
> 1 EUR to USD
  1 EUR   1.038 USD
Even fake ones! 
> 1 BTC to USD
  1 BTC   96712 USD
This relies on a database pulled form the internet (typically the central european bank rates, see the source). It will prompt you if it's too old: 
It has been 256 days since the exchange rates last were updated.
Do you wish to update the exchange rates now? y
As a reader pointed out, you can set the refresh rate for currencies, as some countries will require way more frequent exchange rates. The graphical version has a little graphical indicator that, when you mouse over, tells you where the rate comes from.

Other conversions Here are other neat conversions extracted from my history 
> teaspoon to ml
  teaspoon = 5 mL
> tablespoon to ml
  tablespoon = 15 mL
> 1 cup to ml 
  1 cup   236.6 mL
> 6 L/100km to mpg
  (6 liters) / (100 kilometers)   39.20 mpg
> 100 kph to mph
  100 kph   62.14 mph
> (108km - 72km) / 110km/h
  ((108 kilometers)   (72 kilometers)) / (110 kilometers/hour)  
  19 min + 38.18 s

Completion time estimates This is a more involved example I often do.

Background Say you have started a long running copy job and you don't have the luxury of having a pipe you can insert pv(1) into to get a nice progress bar. For example, rsync or cp -R can have that problem (but not tar!). (Yes, you can use --info=progress2 in rsync, but that estimate is incremental and therefore inaccurate unless you disable the incremental mode with --no-inc-recursive, but then you pay a huge up-front wait cost while the entire directory gets crawled.)

Extracting a process start time First step is to gather data. Find the process start time. If you were unfortunate enough to forget to run date --iso-8601=seconds before starting, you can get a similar timestamp with stat(1) on the process tree in /proc with: 
$ stat /proc/11232
  File: /proc/11232
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 1024   directory
Device: 0,21    Inode: 57021       Links: 9
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Modify: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Change: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
 Birth: -
So our start time is 2025-02-07 15:50:25, we shave off the nanoseconds there, they're below our precision noise floor. If you're not dealing with an actual UNIX process, you need to figure out a start time: this can be a SQL query, a network request, whatever, exercise for the reader.

Saving a variable This is optional, but for the sake of demonstration, let's save this as a variable: 
> start="2025-02-07 15:50:25"
  save("2025-02-07T15:50:25"; start; Temporary; ; 1) =
  "2025-02-07T15:50:25"

Estimating data size Next, estimate your data size. That will vary wildly with the job you're running: this can be anything: number of files, documents being processed, rows to be destroyed in a database, whatever. In this case, rsync tells me how many bytes it has transferred so far: 
# rsync -ASHaXx --info=progress2 /srv/ /srv-zfs/
2.968.252.503.968  94%    7,63MB/s    6:04:58  xfr#464440, ir-chk=1000/982266)
Strip off the weird dots in there, because that will confuse qalculate, which will count this as: 
  2.968252503968 bytes   2.968 B
Or, essentially, three bytes. We actually transferred almost 3TB here: 
  2968252503968 bytes   2.968 TB
So let's use that. If you had the misfortune of making rsync silent, but were lucky enough to transfer entire partitions, you can use df (without -h! we want to be more precise here), in my case: 
Filesystem              1K-blocks       Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_hdd-srv 7512681384 7258298036  179205040  98% /srv
tank/srv               7667173248 2870444032 4796729216  38% /srv-zfs
(Otherwise, of course, you use du -sh $DIRECTORY.)

Digression over bytes Those are 1 K bytes which is actually (and rather unfortunately) Ki, or "kibibytes" (1024 bytes), not "kilobytes" (1000 bytes). Ugh. 
> 2870444032 KiB
  2870444032 kibibytes   2.939 TB

> 2870444032 kB
  2870444032 kilobytes   2.870 TB
At this scale, those details matter quite a bit, we're talking about a 69GB (64GiB) difference here: 
> 2870444032 KiB - 2870444032 kB
  (2870444032 kibibytes)   (2870444032 kilobytes)   68.89 GB
Anyways. Let's take 2968252503968 bytes as our current progress. Our entire dataset is 7258298064 KiB, as seen above.

Solving a cross-multiplication We have 3 out of four variables for our equation here, so we can already solve: 
> (now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB) to h
  ((actual   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes))
  x   59.24 h
The entire transfer will take about 60 hours to complete! Note that's not the time left, that is the total time. To break this down step by step, we could calculate how long it has taken so far: 
> now-start
  now   start   23 h + 53 min + 6.762 s
> now-start to s
  now   start   85987 s
... and do the cross-multiplication manually, it's basically: 
x/(now-start) = (total/current)
so: 
x = (total/current) * (now-start)
or, in Qalc: 
> ((7258298064  kibibytes) / ( 2996538438607 bytes) ) *  85987 s
  ((7258298064 kibibytes) / (2996538438607 bytes))   (85987 secondes)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.81 s
It's interesting it gives us different units here! Not sure why.

Now and built-in variables The now here is actually a built-in variable: 
> now
  now   "2025-02-08T22:25:25"
There is a bewildering list of such variables, for example: 
> uptime
  uptime = 5 d + 6 h + 34 min + 12.11 s
> golden
  golden   1.618
> exact
  golden = ( (5) + 1) / 2

Computing dates In any case, yay! We know the transfer is going to take roughly 60 hours total, and we've already spent around 24h of that, so, we have 36h left. But I did that all in my head, we can ask more of Qalc yet! Let's make another variable, for that total estimated time: 
> total=(now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB)
  save(((now   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes)); total; Temporary; ; 1)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.22 s
And we can plug that into another formula with our start time to figure out when we'll be done! 
> start+total
  start + total   "2025-02-10T03:28:52"
> start+total-now
  start + total   now   1 d + 11 h + 34 min + 48.52 s
> start+total-now to h
  start + total   now   35 h + 34 min + 32.01 s
That transfer has ~1d left, or 35h24m32s, and should complete around 4 in the morning on February 10th. But that's icing on top. I typically only do the cross-multiplication and calculate the remaining time in my head. I mostly did the last bit to show Qalculate could compute dates and time differences, as long as you use ISO timestamps. Although it can also convert to and from UNIX timestamps, it cannot parse arbitrary date strings (yet?).

Other functionality Qalculate can:
  • Plot graphs;
  • Use RPN input;
  • Do all sorts of algebraic, calculus, matrix, statistics, trigonometry functions (and more!);
  • ... and so much more!
I have a hard time finding things it cannot do. When I get there, I typically need to resort to programming code in Python, use a spreadsheet, and others will turn to more complete engines like Maple, Mathematica or R. But for daily use, Qalculate is just fantastic. And it's pink! Use it!

Further reading and installation This is just scratching the surface, the fine manual has more information, including more examples. There is also of course a qalc(1) manual page which also ships an excellent EXAMPLES section. Qalculate is packaged for over 30 Linux distributions, but also ships packages for Windows and MacOS. There are third-party derivatives as well including a web version and an Android app.

27 January 2025

Russ Allbery: Review: The House That Fought

Review: The House That Fought, by Jenny Schwartz
Series: Uncertain Sanctuary #3
Publisher: Jenny Schwartz
Copyright: December 2020
Printing: September 2024
ASIN: B0DBX6GP8Z
Format: Kindle
Pages: 199
The House That Fought is the third and final book of the self-published space fantasy trilogy starting with The House That Walked Between Worlds. I read it as part of the Uncertain Sanctuary omnibus, which is reflected in the sidebar metadata. At the end of the last book, one of Kira's random and vibe-based trust decisions finally went awry. She has been betrayed! She's essentially omnipotent, the betrayal does not hurt her in any way, and, if anything, it helps the plot resolution, but she has to spend some time feeling bad about it first. Eventually, though, the band of House residents return to the problem of Earth's missing magic. By Earth here, I mean our world, which technically isn't called Earth in the confusing world-building of this series. Earth within this universe is an archetypal world that is the origin world for humans, the two types of dinosaurs, and Neanderthals. There are numerous worlds that have split off from it, including Human, the one world where humans are dominant, which is what we think of as Earth and what Kira calls Earth half the time. And by worlds, I mean entire universes (I think?), because traveling between "worlds" is dimensional travel, not space travel. But there is also space travel? The world building started out confusing and has degenerated over the course of the series. Given that the plot, such as it is, revolves around a world-building problem, this is not a good sign. Worse, though, is that the quality of the writing has become unedited, repetitive drivel. I liked the first book and enjoyed a few moments of the second book, but this conclusion is just bad. This is the sort of book that the maxim "show, don't tell" was intended to head off. The dull, thudding description of the justification for every character emotion leaves no room for subtlety or reader curiosity.
Evander was elf and I was human. We weren't the same. I had magic. He had the magic I'd unconsciously locked into his augmentations. We were different and in love. Speaking of our differences could be a trigger. I peeked at him, worried. My customary confidence had taken a hit. "We're different," he answered my unspoken question. "And we work anyway. We'll work to make us work."
There is page after page after page of this sort of thing: facile emotional processing full of cliches and therapy-speak, built on the most superficial of relationships. There's apparently a romance now, which happened with very little build-up, no real discussion or communication between the characters, and only the most trite and obvious relationship work. There is a plot underneath all this, but it's hard to make it suspenseful given that Kira is essentially omnipotent. Schwartz tries to turn the story into a puzzle that requires Kira figure out what's going on before she can act, but this is undermined by the confusing world-building. The loose ends the plot has accumulated over the previous two books are mostly dropped, sometimes in a startlingly casual way. I thought Kira would care who killed her parents, for example; apparently, I was wrong. The previous books caught my attention with a more subtle treatment of politics than I expect from this sort of light space fantasy. The characters had, I thought, a healthy suspicion of powerful people and a willingness to look for manipulation or ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we discover here that this is not due to an appreciation of the complexity of power and motive in governments. Instead, it's a reflexive bias against authority and structured society that sounds like an Internet libertarian complaining about taxes. Powerful people should be distrusted because all governments are corrupt and bad and steal your money in order to waste it. Oh, except for the cops and the military; they're generally good people you should trust. In retrospect, I should have expected this turn given the degree to which Schwartz stressed the independence of sorcerers. I thought that was going somewhere more interesting than sorcerers as self-appointed vigilantes who are above the law and can and should do anything they damn well please. Sadly, it was not. Adding to the lynch mob feeling, the ending of this book is a deeply distasteful bit of magical medieval punishment that I thought was vile, and which is, of course, justified by bad things happening to children. No societal problems were solved, but Kira got her petty revenge and got to be gleeful and smug about it. This is apparently what passes for a happy ending. I don't even know what to say about the bizarre insertion of Christianity, which makes little sense given the rest of the world-building. It's primarily a way for Kira to avoid understanding or thinking about an important part of the plot. As sadly seems to often be the case in books like this, Kira's faith doesn't appear to prompt any moral analysis or thoughtful ethical concern about her unlimited power, just certainty that she's right and everyone else is wrong. This was dire. It is one of those self-published books that I feel a little bad about writing this negative of a review about, because I think most of the problem was that the author's skill was not up to the story that she wanted to tell. This happens a lot in self-published fiction, particularly since Kindle Unlimited has started rewarding quantity over quality. But given how badly the writing quality degraded over the course of the series, and how offensive the ending was, I do want to warn other people off of the series. There is so much better fiction out there. Avoid this one, and probably the rest of the series unless you're willing to stop after the first book. Rating: 2 out of 10

26 January 2025

Russ Allbery: Review: Dark Matters

Review: Dark Matters, by Michelle Diener
Series: Class 5 #4
Publisher: Eclipse
Copyright: October 2019
ISBN: 0-6454658-6-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 307
Dark Matters is the fourth book in the science fiction semi-romance Class 5 series. There are spoilers for all of the previous books, and although enough is explained that you could make sense of the story starting here, I wouldn't recommend it. As with the other books in the series, it follows new protagonists, but the previous protagonists make an appearance. You will be unsurprised to hear that the Tecran kidnapped yet another Earth woman. The repetitiveness of the setup would be more annoying if the book took itself too seriously, but it doesn't, and so I mostly find it entertaining. I thought Diener was going to dodge the obvious series structure, but now I am wondering if we're going to end up with one woman per Class 5 ship after all. Lucy is not on a ship, however, Tecran or otherwise. She is a captive in a military research facility on the Tecran home world. The Tecran are in very deep trouble given the events of the previous book and have decided that Lucy's existence is a liability. Only the intervention of some sympathetic Tecran scientists she partly befriended during her captivity lets her escape the facility before it's destroyed. Now she's alone, on an alien world, being hunted by the military. It's not entirely the fault of this book that it didn't tell the story that I wanted to read. The setup for Dark Matters implies this book will see the arrival of consequences for the Tecran's blatant violations of the Sentient Beings Agreement. I was looking forward to a more political novel about how such consequences could be administered. This is the sort of problem that we struggle with in our politics: Collective punishment isn't acceptable, but there have to be consequences sufficient to ensure that a state doesn't repeat the outlawed behavior, and yet attempting to deliver those consequences feels like occupation and can set off worse social ruptures and even atrocities. I wasn't expecting that deep of political analysis of what is, after all, a lighthearted SF adventure series, but Diener has been willing to touch on hard problems. The ethics of violence has been an ongoing theme of the series. Alas for me, this is not what we get. The arriving cavalry, in the form of a Class 5 and the inevitable Grih hunk to serve as the love interest du jour, quickly become more interested in helping Lucy elude pursuers (or escape captors) than in the delicate political situation. The conflict between the local population is a significant story element, but only as backdrop. Instead, this reads like a thriller or an action movie, complete with alien predators and a cinematic set piece finale. The political conflict between the Tecran and the United Council does reach a conclusion of sorts, but it's not that satisfying. Perhaps some of the political fallout will happen in future books, but here Diener simplifies the morality of the story in the climax and dodges out of the tricky ethical and social challenge of how to punish a sovereign nation. One of the things I like about this series is that it takes moral indignation seriously, but now that Diener has raised the (correct) complication that people have strong motivations to find excuses for the actions of their own side, I hope she can find a believable political resolution that isn't simple brute force. This entry in the series wasn't bad, but it didn't grab me. Lucy was fine as a protagonist; her ability to manipulate the Tecran into making mistakes fits the longer time she's had to study them and keeps her distinct from the other protagonists. But the small bit of politics we do see is unsatisfying and conveniently simplistic, and this book mostly degenerates into generic action sequences. Bane, the Class 5 ship featured in this story, is great when he's active, and I continue to be entertained by the obsession the Class 5 ships have with Earth women, but he's sidelined for too much of the story. I felt like Diener focused on the least interesting part of the story setup. If you've read this far, there's nothing wrong with this entry. You'll probably want to keep reading. But it felt like a missed opportunity. Followed in publication order by Dark Ambitions, a novella that returns to Rose to tell a side story. The next novel is Dark Class, in which we'll presumably see the last kidnapped Earth woman. Rating: 6 out of 10

25 January 2025

Bits from Debian: Infomaniak Platinum Sponsor of DebConf25

infomaniaklogo We are pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to sponsor DebConf25 as a Platinum Sponsor. Infomaniak is Switzerland s leading developer of Web technologies. With operations all over Europe and based exclusively in Switzerland, the company designs and manages its own data centers powered by 100% renewable energy, and develops all its solutions locally, without outsourcing. With millions of users and the trust of public and private organizations across Europe - such as RTBF, the United Nations, central banks, over 3,000 radio and TV stations, as well as numerous cities and security bodies - Infomaniak stands for sovereign, sustainable and independent digital technology. The company offers a complete suite of collaborative tools, cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions, while being owned by its employees and self-financed exclusively by its customers. With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak is contributing to the Debian annual Developers' conference, directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software. Infomaniak contributes to strengthen the community that collaborates on Debian projects from all around the world throughout all of the year. Thank you very much, Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf25! Become a sponsor too! DebConf25 will take place from 14th to July 20th 2025 in Brest, France, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 7th to 13th July 2025. DebConf25 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations should contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, or visit the DebConf25 website at https://debconf25.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.

21 January 2025

Ravi Dwivedi: The Arduous Luxembourg Visa Process

In 2024, I was sponsored by The Document Foundation (TDF) to attend the LibreOffice annual conference in Luxembourg from the 10th to the 12th of October. Being an Indian passport holder, I needed a visa to visit Luxembourg. However, due to my Kenya trip coming up in September, I ran into a dilemma: whether to apply before or after the Kenya trip. To obtain a visa, I needed to submit my application with VFS Global (and not with the Luxembourg embassy directly). Therefore, I checked the VFS website for information on processing time, which says:
As a rule, the processing time of an admissible Schengen visa application should not exceed 15 calendar days (from the date the application is received at the Embassy).
It also mentions:
If the application is received less than 15 calendar days before the intended travel date, the Embassy can deem your application inadmissible. If so, your visa application will not be processed by the Embassy and the application will be sent back to VFS along with the passport.
If I applied for the Luxembourg visa before my trip, I would run the risk of not getting my passport back in time, and therefore missing my Kenya flight. On the other hand, if I waited until after returning from Kenya, I would run afoul of the aforementioned 15 working days needed by the embassy to process my application. I had previously applied for a Schengen visa for Austria, which was completed in 7 working days. My friends who had been to France told me they got their visa decision within a week. So, I compared Luxembourg s application numbers with those of other Schengen countries. In 2023, Luxembourg received 3,090 applications from India, while Austria received 39,558, Italy received 52,332 and France received 176,237. Since Luxembourg receives a far fewer number of applications, I expected the process to be quick. Therefore, I submitted my visa application with VFS Global in Delhi on the 5th of August, giving the embassy a month with 18 working days before my Kenya trip. However, I didn t mention my Kenya trip in the Luxembourg visa application. For reference, here is a list of documents I submitted: I submitted flight reservations instead of flight tickets . It is because, in case of visa rejection, I would have lost a significant amount of money if I booked confirmed flight tickets. The embassy also recommends the same. After the submission of documents, my fingerprints were taken. The expenses for the visa application were as follows:
Service Description Amount (INR)
Visa Fee 8,114
VFS Global Fee 1,763
Courier 800
Total 10,677
Going by the emails sent by VFS, my application reached the Luxembourg embassy the next day. Fast-forward to the 27th of August 14th day of my visa application. I had already booked my flight ticket to Nairobi for the 4th of September, but my passport was still with the Luxembourg embassy, and I hadn t heard back. In addition, I also obtained Kenya s eTA and got vaccinated for Yellow Fever, a requirement to travel to Kenya. In order to check on my application status, I gave the embassy a phone call, but missed their calling window, which was easy to miss since it was only 1 hour - 12:00 to 1:00 PM. So, I dropped them an email explaining my situation. At this point, I was already wondering whether to cancel the Kenya trip or the Luxembourg one, if I had to choose. After not getting a response to my email, I called them again the next day. The embassy told me they would look into it and asked me to send my flight tickets over email. One week to go before my flight now. I followed up with the embassy on the 30th by a phone call, and the person who picked up the call told me that my request had already been forwarded to the concerned department and is under process. They asked me to follow up on Monday, 2nd September. During the visa process, I was in touch with three other Indian attendees.1 In the meantime, I got to know that all of them had applied for a Luxembourg visa by the end of the month of August. Back to our story, over the next two days, the embassy closed for the weekend. I began weighing my options. On one hand, I could cancel the Kenya trip and hope that Luxembourg goes through. Even then, Luxembourg wasn t guaranteed as the visa could get rejected, so I might have ended up missing both the trips. On the other hand, I could cancel the Luxembourg visa application and at least be sure of going to Kenya. However, I thought it would make Luxembourg very unlikely because it didn t leave 15 working days for the embassy to process my visa after returning from Kenya. I also badly wanted to attend the LibreOffice conference because I couldn t make it two years ago. Therefore, I chose not to cancel my Luxembourg visa application. I checked with my travel agent and learned that I could cancel my Nairobi flight before September 4th for a cancelation fee of approximately 7,000 INR. On the 2nd of September, I was a bit frustrated because I hadn t heard anything from the embassy regarding my request. Therefore, I called the embassy again. They assured me that they would arrange a call for me from the concerned department that day, which I did receive later that evening. During the call, they offered to return my passport via VFS the next day and asked me to resubmit it after returning from Kenya. I immediately accepted the offer and was overjoyed, as it would enable me to take my flight to Nairobi without canceling my Luxembourg visa application. However, I didn t have the offer in writing, so it wasn t clear to me how I would collect my passport from VFS. The next day, I would receive it when I would be on my way to VFS in the form of an email from the embassy which read:
Dear Mr. Dwivedi, We acknowledge the receipt of your email. As you requested, we are returning your passport exceptionally through VFS, you can collect it directly from VFS Delhi Center between 14:00-17:00 hrs, 03 Sep 2024. Kindly bring the printout of this email along with your VFS deposit receipt and Original ID proof. Once you are back from your trip, you can redeposit the passport with VFS Luxembourg for our processing. With best regards,
Consular Section GRAND DUCHY OF LUXEMBOURG
Embassy in New Delhi
I took a printout of the email and submitted it to VFS to get my passport. This seemed like a miracle - just when I lost all hope of making it to my Kenya flight and was mentally preparing myself to miss it, I got my passport back exceptionally and now I had to mentally prepare again for Kenya. I had never heard of an embassy returning passport before completing the visa process before. The next day, I took my flight to Nairobi as planned. In case you are interested, I have written two blog posts on my Kenya trip - one on the OpenStreetMap conference in Nairobi and the other on my travel experience in Kenya. After returning from Kenya, I resubmitted my passport on the 17th of September. Fast-forward to the 25th of September; I didn t hear anything from the embassy about my application process. So, I checked with TDF to see whether the embassy reached out to them. They told me they confirmed my participation and my hotel booking to the visa authorities on the 19th of September (6 days ago). I was wondering what was taking so long after the verification. On the 1st of October, I received a phone call from the Luxembourg embassy, which turned out to be a surprise interview. They asked me about my work, my income, how I came to know about the conference, whether I had been to Europe before, etc. The call lasted around 10 minutes. At this point, my travel date - 8th of October - was just two working days away as the 2nd of October was off due to Gandhi Jayanti and 5th and 6th October were weekends, leaving only the 3rd and the 4th. I am not sure why the embassy saved this for the last moment, even though I submitted my application 2 months ago. I also got to know that one of the other Indian attendees missed the call due to being in their college lab, where he was not allowed to take phone calls. Therefore, I recommend that the embassy agree on a time slot for the interview call beforehand. Visa decisions for all the above-mentioned Indian attendees were sent by the embassy on the 4th of October, and I received mine on the 5th. For my travel date of 8th October, this was literally the last moment the embassy could send my visa. The parcel contained my passport and a letter. The visa was attached to a page in the passport. I was happy that my visa had been approved. However, the timing made my task challenging. The enclosed letter stated:
Subject: Your Visa Application for Luxembourg
Dear Applicant, We would like to inform you that a Schengen visa has been granted for the 8-day duration from 08/10/2024 to 30/10/2024 for conference purposes in Luxembourg. You are requested to report back to the Embassy of Luxembourg in New Delhi through an email (email address redacted) after your return with the following documents:
  • Immigration Stamps (Entry and Exit of Schengen Area)
  • Restaurant Bills
  • Shopping/Hotel/Accommodation bills
Failure to report to the Embassy after your return will be taken into consideration for any further visa applications.
I understand the embassy wanting to ensure my entry and exit from the Schengen area during the visa validity period, but found the demand for sending shopping bills excessive. Further, not everyone was as lucky as I was as it took a couple of days for one of the Indian attendees to receive their visa, delaying their plan. Another attendee had to send their father to the VFS center to collect their visa in time, rather than wait for the courier to arrive at their home. Foreign travel is complicated, especially for the citizens of countries whose passports and currencies are weak. Embassies issuing visas a day before the travel date doesn t help. For starters, a last-minute visa does not give enough time for obtaining a forex card as banks ask for the visa. Further, getting foreign currency (Euros in our case) in cash with a good exchange rate becomes difficult. As an example, for the Kenya trip, I had to get US Dollars at the airport due to the plan being finalized at the last moment, worsening the exchange rate. Back to the current case, the flight prices went up significantly compared to September, almost doubling. The choice of airlines also got narrowed, as most of the flights got booked by the time I received my visa. With all that said, I think it was still better than an arbitrary rejection. Credits: Contrapunctus, Badri, Fletcher, Benson, and Anirudh for helping with the draft of this post.
  1. Thanks to Sophie, our point of contact for the conference, for putting me in touch with them.

19 January 2025

Fran ois Marier: Blocking comment spammers on an Ikiwiki blog

Despite comments on my ikiwiki blog being fully moderated, spammers have been increasingly posting link spam comments on my blog. While I used to use the blogspam plugin, the underlying service was likely retired circa 2017 and its public repositories are all archived. It turns out that there is a relatively simple way to drastically reduce the amount of spam submitted to the moderation queue: ban the datacentre IP addresses that spammers are using.

Looking up AS numbers It all starts by looking at the IP address of a submitted comment: From there, we can look it up using whois: 
$ whois -r 2a0b:7140:1:1:5054:ff:fe66:85c5
% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See https://docs.db.ripe.net/terms-conditions.html
% Note: this output has been filtered.
%       To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.
% Information related to '2a0b:7140:1::/48'
% Abuse contact for '2a0b:7140:1::/48' is 'abuse@servinga.com'
inet6num:       2a0b:7140:1::/48
netname:        EE-SERVINGA-2022083002
descr:          servinga.com - Estonia
geoloc:         59.4424455 24.7442221
country:        EE
org:            ORG-SG262-RIPE
mnt-domains:    HANNASKE-MNT
admin-c:        CL8090-RIPE
tech-c:         CL8090-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED
mnt-by:         MNT-SERVINGA
created:        2020-02-18T11:12:49Z
last-modified:  2024-12-04T12:07:26Z
source:         RIPE
% Information related to '2a0b:7140:1::/48AS207408'
route6:         2a0b:7140:1::/48
descr:          servinga.com - Estonia
origin:         AS207408
mnt-by:         MNT-SERVINGA
created:        2020-02-18T11:18:11Z
last-modified:  2024-12-11T23:09:19Z
source:         RIPE
% This query was served by the RIPE Database Query Service version 1.114 (SHETLAND)
The important bit here is this line: 
origin:         AS207408
which referts to Autonomous System 207408, owned by a hosting company in Germany called Servinga.

Looking up IP blocks Autonomous Systems are essentially organizations to which IPv4 and IPv6 blocks have been allocated. These allocations can be looked up easily on the command line either using a third-party service: 
$ curl -sL https://ip.guide/as207408   jq .routes.v4 >> servinga
$ curl -sL https://ip.guide/as207408   jq .routes.v6 >> servinga
or a local database downloaded from IPtoASN. This is what I ended up with in the case of Servinga: 
[
  "45.11.183.0/24",
  "80.77.25.0/24",
  "194.76.227.0/24"
]
[
  "2a0b:7140:1::/48"
]

Preventing comment submission While I do want to eliminate this source of spam, I don't want to block these datacentre IP addresses outright since legitimate users could be using these servers as VPN endpoints or crawlers. I therefore added the following to my Apache config to restrict the CGI endpoint (used only for write operations such as commenting): 
<Location /blog.cgi>
        Include /etc/apache2/spammers.include
        Options +ExecCGI
        AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
</Location>
and then put the following in /etc/apache2/spammers.include: 
<RequireAll>
    Require all granted
    # https://ipinfo.io/AS207408
    Require not ip 46.11.183.0/24
    Require not ip 80.77.25.0/24
    Require not ip 194.76.227.0/24
    Require not ip 2a0b:7140:1::/48
</RequireAll>
Finally, I can restart the website and commit my changes: 
$ apache2ctl configtest && systemctl restart apache2.service
$ git commit -a -m "Ban all IP blocks from Servinga"

Future improvements I will likely automate this process in the future, but at the moment my blog can go for a week without a single spam message (down from dozens every day). It's possible that I've already cut off the worst offenders. I have published the list I am currently using.

9 January 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the world of software supply-chain security when relevant. As ever, however, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. reproduce.debian.net
  2. debian-repro-status
  3. On our mailing list
  4. Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains
  5. diffoscope
  6. Supply-chain attack in the Solana ecosystem
  7. Website updates
  8. Debian changes
  9. Other development news
  10. Upstream patches
  11. Reproducibility testing framework

reproduce.debian.net Last month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. This month, however, we are pleased to announce that not only does the service now produce graphs, the reproduce.debian.net homepage itself has become a start page of sorts, and the amd64.reproduce.debian.net and i386.reproduce.debian.net pages have emerged. The first of these rebuilds the amd64 architecture, naturally, but it also is building Debian packages that are marked with the no architecture label, all. The second builder is, however, only rebuilding the i386 architecture. Both of these services were also switched to reproduce the Debian trixie distribution instead of unstable, which started with 43% of the archive rebuild with 79.3% reproduced successfully. This is very much a work in progress, and we ll start reproducing Debian unstable soon. Our i386 hosts are very kindly sponsored by Infomaniak whilst the amd64 node is sponsored by OSUOSL thank you! Indeed, we are looking for more workers for more Debian architectures; please contact us if you are able to help.

debian-repro-status Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd has published a client program for reproduce.debian.net (see above) that queries the status of the locally installed packages and rates the system with a percentage score. This tool works analogously to arch-repro-status for the Arch Linux Reproducible Builds setup. The tool was packaged for Debian and is currently available in Debian trixie: it can be installed with apt install debian-repro-status.

On our mailing list On our mailing list this month:
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote a detailed post on his long journey towards a bit-reproducible Emacs package. In his interesting message, Bernhard goes into depth about the tools that they used and the lower-level technical details of, for instance, compatibility with the version for glibc within openSUSE.
  • Shivanand Kunijadar posed a question pertaining to the reproducibility issues with encrypted images. Shivanand explains that they must use a random IV for encryption with AES CBC. The resulting artifact is not reproducible due to the random IV used. The message resulted in a handful of replies, hopefully helpful!
  • User Danilo posted an in interesting question related to their attempts in trying to achieve reproducible builds for Threema Desktop 2.0. The question resulted in a number of replies attempting to find the right combination of compiler and linker flags (for example).
  • Longstanding contributor David A. Wheeler wrote to our list announcing the release of the Census III of Free and Open Source Software: Application Libraries report written by Frank Nagle, Kate Powell, Richie Zitomer and David himself. As David writes in his message, the report attempts to answer the question what is the most popular Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)? .
  • Lastly, kpcyrd followed-up to a post from September 2024 which mentioned their desire for someone to implement a hashset of allowed module hashes that is generated during the kernel build and then embedded in the kernel image , thus enabling a deterministic and reproducible build. However, they are now reporting that somebody implemented the hash-based allow list feature and submitted it to the Linux kernel mailing list . Like kpcyrd, we hope it gets merged.

Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains: Methods and Practices Mehdi Keshani of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has published their thesis on Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains: Methods and Practices . Their introductory summary first begins with an outline of software supply chains and the importance of the Maven ecosystem before outlining the issues that it faces that threaten its security and effectiveness . To address these:
First, we propose an automated approach for library reproducibility to enhance library security during the deployment phase. We then develop a scalable call graph generation technique to support various use cases, such as method-level vulnerability analysis and change impact analysis, which help mitigate security challenges within the ecosystem. Utilizing the generated call graphs, we explore the impact of libraries on their users. Finally, through empirical research and mining techniques, we investigate the current state of the Maven ecosystem, identify harmful practices, and propose recommendations to address them.
A PDF of Mehdi s entire thesis is available to download.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 283 and 284 to Debian:
  • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Update tests to support file 5.46. [ ][ ]
  • Simplify tests_quines.py::test_ differences,differences_deb to simply use assert_diff and not mangle the test fixture. [ ]

Supply-chain attack in the Solana ecosystem A significant supply-chain attack impacted Solana, an ecosystem for decentralised applications running on a blockchain. Hackers targeted the @solana/web3.js JavaScript library and embedded malicious code that extracted private keys and drained funds from cryptocurrency wallets. According to some reports, about $160,000 worth of assets were stolen, not including SOL tokens and other crypto assets.

Website updates Similar to last month, there was a large number of changes made to our website this month, including:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Make the landing page hero look nicer when the vertical height component of the viewport is restricted, not just the horizontal width.
    • Rename the Buy-in page to Why Reproducible Builds? [ ]
    • Removing the top black border. [ ][ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
  • hulkoba:
    • Remove the sidebar-type layout and move to a static navigation element. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Create and merge a new Success stories page, which highlights the success stories of Reproducible Builds, showcasing real-world examples of projects shipping with verifiable, reproducible builds. These stories aim to enhance the technical resilience of the initiative by encouraging community involvement and inspiring new contributions. . [ ]
    • Further changes to the homepage. [ ]
    • Remove the translation icon from the navigation bar. [ ]
    • Remove unused CSS styles pertaining to the sidebar. [ ]
    • Add sponsors to the global footer. [ ]
    • Add extra space on large screens on the Who page. [ ]
    • Hide the side navigation on small screens on the Documentation pages. [ ]

Debian changes There were a significant number of reproducibility-related changes within Debian this month, including:
  • Santiago Vila uploaded version 0.11+nmu4 of the dh-buildinfo package. In this release, the dh_buildinfo becomes a no-op ie. it no longer does anything beyond warning the developer that the dh-buildinfo package is now obsolete. In his upload, Santiago wrote that We still want packages to drop their [dependency] on dh-buildinfo, but now they will immediately benefit from this change after a simple rebuild.
  • Holger Levsen filed Debian bug #1091550 requesting a rebuild of a number of packages that were built with a very old version of dpkg.
  • Fay Stegerman contributed to an extensive thread on the debian-devel development mailing list on the topic of Supporting alternative zlib implementations . In particular, Fay wrote about her results experimenting whether zlib-ng produces identical results or not.
  • kpcyrd uploaded a new rust-rebuilderd-worker, rust-derp, rust-in-toto and debian-repro-status to Debian, which passed successfully through the so-called NEW queue.
  • Gioele Barabucci filed a number of bugs against the debrebuild component/script of the devscripts package, including:
    • #1089087: Address a spurious extra subdirectory in the build path.
    • #1089201: Extra zero bytes added to .dynstr when rebuilding CMake projects.
    • #1089088: Some binNMUs have a 1-second offset in some timestamps.
  • Gioele Barabucci also filed a bug against the dh-r package to report that the Recommends and Suggests fields are missing from rebuilt R packages. At the time of writing, this bug has no patch and needs some help to make over 350 binary packages reproducible.
  • Lastly, 8 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 11 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Other development news In other ecosystem and distribution news:
  • Lastly, in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for the distribution. There, Bernhard reports about the success of building R-B-OS , a partial fork of openSUSE with only 100% bit-reproducible packages. This effort was sponsored by the NLNet NGI0 initiative.

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:

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 November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related:
    • Add a new i386.reproduce.debian.net rebuilder. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Make a number of updates to the documentation. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Run i386.reproduce.debian.net run on a public port to allow external workers. [ ]
    • Add a link to the /api/v0/pkgs/list endpoint. [ ]
    • Add support for a statistics page. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Limit build logs to 20 MiB and diffoscope output to 10 MiB. [ ]
    • Improve the frontpage. [ ][ ]
    • Explain that we re testing arch:any and arch:all on the amd64 architecture, but only arch:any on i386. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Remove code for testing Arch Linux, which has moved to reproduce.archlinux.org. [ ][ ]
    • Don t install dstat on Jenkins nodes anymore as its been removed from Debian trixie. [ ]
    • Prepare the infom08-i386 node to become another rebuilder. [ ]
    • Add debug date output for benchmarking the reproducible_pool_buildinfos.sh script. [ ]
    • Install installation-birthday everywhere. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable automatic updates of pool links on buildinfos.debian.net. [ ]
    • Install Recommends by default on Jenkins nodes. [ ]
    • Rename rebuilder_stats.py to rebuilderd_stats.py. [ ]
    • r.d.n/stats: minor formatting changes. [ ]
    • Install files under /etc/cron.d/ with the correct permissions. [ ]
and Jochen Sprickerhof made the following changes: Lastly, Gioele Barabucci also classified packages affected by 1-second offset issue filed as Debian bug #1089088 [ ][ ][ ][ ], Chris Hofstaedtler updated the URL for Grml s dpkg.selections file [ ], Roland Clobus updated the Jenkins log parser to parse warnings from diffoscope [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo banned a number of bots and crawlers from the service [ ][ ].
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:

Valhalla's Things: Poor Man Media Server

Posted on January 9, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits
Some time ago I installed minidlna on our media server: it was pretty easy to do, but quite limited in its support for the formats I use most, so I ended up using other solutions such as mounting the directory with sshfs. Now, doing that from a phone, even a pinephone running debian, may not be as convenient as doing it from the laptop where I already have my ssh key :D and I needed to listed to music from the pinephone. So, in anger, I decided to configure a web server to serve the files. I installed lighttpd because I already had a role for this kind of configuration in my ansible directory, and configured it to serve the relevant directory in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/20-music.conf: 
$HTTP["host"] =~ "music.example.org"  
    server.name          = "music.example.org"
    server.document-root = "/path/to/music"
the domain was already configured in my local dns (since everything is only available to the local network), and I enabled both 20-music.conf and 10-dir-listing.conf. And. That s it. It works. I can play my CD rips on a single flac exactly in the same way as I was used to (by ssh-ing to the media server and using alsaplayer). Then this evening I was talking to normal people1, and they mentioned that they wouldn t mind being able to skip tracks and fancy things like those :D and I ve found one possible improvement. For the directories with the generated single-track ogg files I ve added some playlists with the command ls *.ogg > playlist.m3u, then in the directory above I ve run ls */*.m3u > playlist.m3u and that also works. With vlc I can now open http://music.example.org/band/album/playlist.m3u to listen to an album that I have in ogg, being able to move between tracks, or I can open http://music.example.org/band/playlist.m3u and in the playlist view I can browse between the different albums. Left as an exercise to the reader2 are writing a bash script to generate all of the playlist.m3u files (and running it via some git hook when the files change) or writing a php script to generate them on the fly.
Update 2025-01-10: another reader3 wrote the php script and has authorized me to post it here. 
<?php
define("MUSIC_FOLDER", __DIR__);
define("ID3v2", false);


function dd()  
    echo "<pre>"; call_user_func_array("var_dump", func_get_args());
    die();
 

function getinfo($file)  
    $cmd = 'id3info "' . MUSIC_FOLDER . "/" . $file . '"';
    exec($cmd, $output);
    $res = [];
    foreach($output as $line)  
    if (str_starts_with($line, "=== "))  
        $key = explode(" ", $line)[1];
        $val = end(explode(": ", $line, 2));
        $res[$key] = $val;
     
     
    if (isset($res['TPE1'])   isset($res['TIT2']))
    echo "#EXTINF: , " . ($res['TPE1'] ?? "Unk") . " - " . ($res['TIT2'] ?? "Untl") . "\r\n";
    if (isset($res['TALB']))
    echo "#EXTALB: " . $res['TALB'] . "\r\n";
 


function pathencode($path, $name)  
    $path = urlencode($path);
    $path =  str_replace("%2F", "/", $path);
    $name = urlencode($name);
    if ($path != "") $path = "/" . $path;
    return $path . "/" . $name;
 

function serve_playlist($path)  
    echo "#EXTM3U";
    echo "# PATH: $path\n\r";
    foreach (glob(MUSIC_FOLDER . "/$path/*") as $filename)  
    $name = basename($filename);
    if (is_dir($filename))  
        echo pathencode($path, $name) . ".m3u\r\n";
     
    $t = explode(".", $filename);
    $ext = array_pop($t);
    if (in_array($ext, ["mp3", "ogg", "flac", "mp4", "m4a"]))  
        if (ID3v2)  
 	   getinfo($path . "/" . $name);
          else  
 	   echo "#EXTINF: , " . $path . "/" . $name . "\r\n";
         
        echo pathencode($path, $name) . "\r\n";
     
     
    die();
 



$path = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
$path = urldecode($path);
$path = trim($path, "/");

if (str_ends_with($path, ".m3u"))  
    $path = str_replace(".m3u", "", $path);

    serve_playlist($path);
 

$path = MUSIC_FOLDER . "/" . $path;
if (file_exists($path) && is_file($path))  
    header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
    header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
    header('Expires: 0');
    header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
    header('Pragma: public');
    header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));
    readfile($path);
It s php, so I assume no responsability for it :D
  1. as much as the members of our LUG can be considered normal.
  2. i.e. the person in the LUG who wanted me to share what I had done.
  3. i.e. the other person in the LUG who was in that conversation and suggested the php script option.

8 January 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGetconf 0.0.4 on CRAN: Updates

A minor package update, the first in over six years, for the RcppGetconf package for reading system configuration not unlike getconf from the libc library is now on CRAN The changes are all minor package maintenance items of keeping URLs, continuous integration, and best practices current. We had two helper scripts use bash in their shebangs, and we just got dinged in one of them. Tedious as this can at times seem, it ensures CRAN packages do in fact compile just about anywhere which is a Good Thing (TM) so we obliged and updated the package with that change and all the others that had accumulated over six years. No interface or behaviour changes, just maintenance as one does at times. The short list of changes in this release follows:

Changes in inline version 0.0.4 (2025-01-07)
  • Dynamically linked compiled code is now registered in NAMESPACE
  • The continuous integration setup was update several times
  • The README was updated with current badges and URLs
  • The DESCRIPTION file now uses Authors@R
  • The configure and cleanup scripts use /bin/sh

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. More about the package is at the local RcppGetconf page and the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

John Goerzen: Censorship Is Complicated: What Internet History Says about Meta/Facebook

In light of this week s announcement by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc), I have been pondering this question: Why am I, a person that has long been a staunch advocate of free speech and encryption, leery of sites that talk about being free speech-oriented? And, more to the point, why an I a person that has been censored by Facebook for mentioning the Open Source social network Mastodon not cheering a lighter touch ? The answers are complicated, and take me back to the early days of social networking. Yes, I mean the 1980s and 1990s. Before digital communications, there were barriers to reaching a lot of people. Especially money. This led to a sort of self-censorship: it may be legal to write certain things, but would a newspaper publish a letter to the editor containing expletives? Probably not. As digital communications started to happen, suddenly people could have their own communities. Not just free from the same kinds of monetary pressures, but free from outside oversight (parents, teachers, peers, community, etc.) When you have a community that the majority of people lack the equipment to access and wouldn t understand how to access even if they had the equipment you have a place where self-expression can be unleashed. And, as J. C. Herz covers in what is now an unintentional history (her book Surfing on the Internet was published in 1995), self-expression WAS unleashed. She enjoyed the wit and expression of everything from odd corners of Usenet to the text-based open world of MOOs and MUDs. She even talks about groups dedicated to insults (flaming) in positive terms. But as I ve seen time and again, if there are absolutely no rules, then whenever a group gets big enough more than a few dozen people, say there are troublemakers that ruin it for everyone. Maybe it s trolling, maybe it s vicious attacks, you name it it will arrive and it will be poisonous. I remember the debates within the Debian community about this. Debian is one of the pillars of the Internet today, a nonprofit project with free speech in its DNA. And yet there were inevitably the poisonous people. Debian took too long to learn that allowing those people to run rampant was causing more harm than good, because having a well-worn Delete key and a tolerance for insults became a requirement for being a Debian developer, and that drove away people that had no desire to deal with such things. (I should note that Debian strikes a much better balance today.) But in reality, there were never absolutely no rules. If you joined a BBS, you used it at the whim of the owner (the sysop or system operator). The sysop may be a 16-yr-old running it from their bedroom, or a retired programmer, but in any case they were letting you use their resources for free and they could kick you off for any or no reason at all. So if you caused trouble, or perhaps insulted their cat, you re banned. But, in all but the smallest towns, there were other options you could try. On the other hand, sysops enjoyed having people call their BBSs and didn t want to drive everyone off, so there was a natural balance at play. As networks like Fidonet developed, a sort of uneasy approach kicked in: don t be excessively annoying, and don t be easily annoyed. Like it or not, it seemed to generally work. A BBS that repeatedly failed to deal with troublemakers could risk removal from Fidonet. On the more institutional Usenet, you generally got access through your university (or, in a few cases, employer). Most universities didn t really even know they were running a Usenet server, and you were generally left alone. Until you did something that annoyed somebody enough that they tracked down the phone number for your dean, in which case real-world consequences would kick in. A site may face the Usenet Death Penalty delinking from the network if they repeatedly failed to prevent malicious content from flowing through their site. Some BBSs let people from minority communities such as LGBTQ+ thrive in a place of peace from tormentors. A lot of them let people be themselves in a way they couldn t be in real life . And yes, some harbored trolls and flamers. The point I am trying to make here is that each BBS, or Usenet site, set their own policies about what their own users could do. These had to be harmonized to a certain extent with the global community, but in a certain sense, with BBSs especially, you could just use a different one if you didn t like what the vibe was at a certain place. That this free speech ethos survived was never inevitable. There were many attempts to regulate the Internet, and it was thanks to the advocacy of groups like the EFF that we have things like strong encryption and a degree of freedom online. With the rise of the very large platforms and here I mean CompuServe and AOL at first, and then Facebook, Twitter, and the like later the low-friction option of just choosing a different place started to decline. You could participate on a Fidonet forum from any of thousands of BBSs, but you could only participate in an AOL forum from AOL. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. Not only that, but as social media became conceived of as very large sites, it became impossible for a person with enough skill, funds, and time to just start a site themselves. Instead of neading a few thousand dollars of equipment, you d need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and employees. All that means you can t really run Facebook as a nonprofit. It is a business. It should be absolutely clear to everyone that Facebook s mission is not the one they say it is [to] give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. If that was their goal, they wouldn t be creating AI users and AI spam and all the rest. Zuck isn t showing courage; he s sucking up to Trump and those that will pay the price are those that always do: women and minorities. Really, the point of any large social network isn t to build community. It s to make the owners their next billion. They do that by convincing people to look at ads on their site. Zuck is as much a windsock as anyone else; he will adjust policies in whichever direction he thinks the wind is blowing so as to let him keep putting ads in front of eyeballs, and stomp all over principles even free speech doing it. Don t expect anything different from any large commercial social network either. Bluesky is going to follow the same trajectory as all the others. The problem with a one-size-fits-all content policy is that the world isn t that kind of place. For instance, I am a pacifist. There is a place for a group where pacifists can hang out with each other, free from the noise of the debate about pacifism. And there is a place for the debate. Forcing everyone that signs up for the conversation to sign up for the debate is harmful. Preventing the debate is often also harmful. One company can t square this circle. Beyond that, the fact that we care so much about one company is a problem on two levels. First, it indicates how succeptible people are to misinformation and such. I don t have much to offer on that point. Secondly, it indicates that we are too centralized. We have a solution there: Mastodon. Mastodon is a modern, open source, decentralized social network. You can join any instance, easily migrate your account from one server to another, and so forth. You pick an instance that suits you. There are thousands of others you can choose from. Some aggressively defederate with instances known to harbor poisonous people; some don t. And, to harken back to the BBS era, if you have some time, some skill, and a few bucks, you can run your own Mastodon instance. Personally, I still visit Facebook on occasion because some people I care about are mainly there. But it is such a terrible experience that I rarely do. Meta is becoming irrelevant to me. They are on a path to becoming irrelevant to many more as well. Maybe this is the moment to go shrug, this sucks and try something better. (And when you do, feel free to say hi to me at @jgoerzen@floss.social on Mastodon.)

2 January 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian, as well as one direct donation via Liberapay (thanks!). OpenSSH I issued a bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which was quite broken in bookworm. base-passwd A few months ago, the adduser maintainer started a discussion with me (as the base-passwd maintainer) and the shadow maintainer about bringing all three source packages under one team, since they often need to cooperate on things like user and group names. I agreed, but hadn t got round to doing anything about it until recently. I ve now officially moved it under team maintenance. debconf Gioele Barabucci has been working on eliminating duplicated code between debconf and cdebconf, ultimately with the goal of migrating to cdebconf (which I m not sure I m convinced of as a goal, but if we can make improvements to both packages as part of working towards it then there s no harm in that). I finally got round to reviewing and merging confmodule changes in each of debconf and cdebconf. This caused an installer regression due to a weirdness in cdebconf-udeb s packaging, which I fixed - sorry about that! I ve also been dealing with a few patch submissions that had been in my queue for a long time, but more on that next month if all goes well. CI issues I noticed and fixed a problem with Restrictions: needs-sudo in autopkgtest. I fixed broken aptly images in the Salsa CI pipeline. Python team Last month, I mentioned some progress on sorting out the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728), and said that I thought we d be able to finish it soon. I was right! We got it all done this month: The Python 3.13 transition continues, and last month we were able to add it to the supported Python versions in testing. (The next step will be to make it the default.) I fixed lots of problems in aid of this, including: Sphinx 8.0 removed some old intersphinx_mapping syntax which turned out to still be in use by many packages in Debian. The fixes for this were individually trivial, but there were a lot of them: I found that twisted 24.11.0 broke tests in buildbot and wokkel, and fixed those. I packaged python-flatdict, needed for a new upstream version of python-semantic-release. I tracked down a test failure in vdirsyncer (which I ve been using for some years, but had never previously needed to modify) and contributed a fix upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools: I fixed django-cte to remove a build-dependency on the obsolete python3-nose package. I added Django 5.1 support to django-polymorphic. (There are a number of other packages that still need work here.) I fixed various other build/test failures: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I updated the team s library style guide to remove material related to Python 2 and early versions of Python 3, which is no longer relevant to any current Python packaging work. Other Python upstream work I happened to notice a Twisted upstream issue requesting the removal of the deprecated twisted.internet.defer.returnValue, realized it was still used in many places in Debian, and went on a PR-filing spree informed by codesearch to try to reduce the future impact of such a change on Debian: Other small fixes Santiago Vila has been building the archive with make --shuffle (also see its author s explanation). I fixed associated bugs in cccc (contributed upstream), groff, and spectemu. I backported an upstream patch to putty to fix undefined behaviour that affected use of the small keypad . I removed groff s Recommends: libpaper1 (#1091375, #1091376), since it isn t currently all that useful and was getting in the way of a transition to libpaper2. I filed an upstream bug suggesting better integration in this area.

1 January 2025

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities December 2024

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. The larger blocks are the Phosh 0.44 release and landing the initial Cell Broadcast support in phosh. The rest is all just small bits of bug, fallout/regression fixing here and there. phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings libphosh-rs phosh-osk-stub phosh-tour pfs xdg-desktop-portal-phosh phog Debian git-buildpackage wlr-randr python-dbusmock livi Chatty feedbackd libadwaita phosh-ev Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is incomplete, but I hope to improve on this in the upcoming months. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development Thanks a lot to all the those who supported my work on this in 2024. Happy new year! If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2024 A Musical Retrospective

Another musical retrospective. If you enjoy this, I also did a 2022 and a 2023 one. Albums In 2024, I added 88 new albums to my collection that's a lot! This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. To be honest, I'm quite distraught by what's become of that website. Although it stays a wonderful place to buy underground music, Songtradr, the new owner of the platform, has been shown to be viciously anti-union. Money continues to ruin the world, I guess.
Khepera - Glutamate Monosodik
O.T.H. - R ussite
Monolithe - Black Hole District
Iotunn - Kinship
65 Mines Street - Sick & Bitchin'
CUIR - ALBUM ALBUM
Tenaz - Demo
Toltshock - R trospective 1999-2003
O.T.H. - Sur des charbons ardents
Forndom - Mo ir
White Knuckle - ICSTQ
Claimed Choice - 45T
Population II - Mulchulation II
Lowkey - Soundtrack to the Struggle 3
Cartouche - corps perdu
65 Mines Street - Fix the Clock!
Bambu - Sharpest Tool in the Shed
Bambu - Party Worker
Chat Pile - Cool World
Battery March - Winter in America
Collision - Sur les trottoirs
Kon-Fusion - Si no pa k
Fleshgod Apocalypse - Opera
UZU - UZU
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28-340 DEAD
Dawn Treader - Bloom & Decay
Crypt Sermon - The Stygian Rose
Octoploid - Beyond the Aeons
Wind Rose - Trollslayer
Taqbir - Taqbir
The Prowlers - Prowl Around
The Slads - Demo
The Slads - Tough Times
Chat Pile - God's Country
Kap bl d - On sera l
Lee Reed - The Butcher, The Banker, The Bitumen Tanker
Lee Reed - Emergency Broadcast
La Gachette - En route vers demain
La Gachette - Dans les tranch es
La Gachette - 20 ans d'insoumission
Resaka Sonara - Buenaventura
Fighting Chance - Thus Hopes Fades
La Gachette - Quoi qu'il advienne
Resaka Sonara - Frekuenzia
Bull Brigade - Vita Libert
2 Stone 2 Skank - Souvenirs de Longueuil Beach
2 Stone 2 Skank - Trois Complices
Inspecter 7 - The Infamous
Inspecter 7 - Escapes and Illusions
Inspecter 7 - Banished to Bogeyland
Johnny Osbourne - Truths and Rights
Francb tards - Tipa Tipa
Skarface - Mythic Enemy #1
Skarface - Best & Next
Skarface - Merci
Skarface - Full Fool Rules
Skarface - Hold Up in Skacity!
Evan Call - Sousou no Frieren Original Soundtrack
Bull Brigade - Strade Smarrite
Deadman's Prophecy - The Vanishing Dawn
Camera Silens - R alit
Les Partisans - Sono Mondiale
Les Partisans - Rallumer tous les soleils
Esclaves Salari s - Et un probl me s'en suit...
Agriculture - Living is Easy
Fuerza Bruta - Verdugo
Fuerza Bruta - Contra
CRAN - Rejet
Ultra Sect - Rose of Victory
Ultra Sect - Echoes from the Past
Random Hand - Another Change of Plan
Agriculture - Agriculture
Counting Hours - The Wishing Tomb
Borknagar - Fall
Early Moods - A Sinner's Past
Ya Basta ! - Sans retour
Ya Basta ! - Lucha y Fiesta
Ya Basta ! - Toujours debout
8 6 Crew - Bad Bad Reggae
8 6 Crew - Old Reggae Friends
8 6 Crew - Working Class Reggae
8 6 Crew - Green and White Ska
Plus Minus - Progression Through Ignorance
Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle-Earth
Kavinsky - Reborn
The Oppressed - Fight For Your Life - The Best of the Oppressed
Mortier - LA PEUR DU VIDE
Sham 69 - The Very Best of the Hersham Boys
Total Nada - TOTAL NADA II E.P
Concerts I continued to go to a lot of concerts in 2024 (25!). Over the past 3 years, I have been going to more and more concerts, and I think I've reached my "peak". A mean of a concert every two weeks is quite a lot :) If you also like music and concerts, but find yourself not going to as many as you would like, the real secret is not to be afraid to go to concerts alone. Going with friends is always fun, but if I restricted myself to only going to concerts in a group, I'd barely see a few each year. Another good advice is to bring a book or something else1 to pass the time between sets. It can often take 30-45 minutes between sets for the artists to get their instruments ready, which can get quite boring if you just stand there and wait. Anyway, here are the concerts I went to in 2024: Shout out to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there. See you all in 2025!
  1. I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a handheld Linux console running OnionOS, for that express reason. So far it's been great and I've been very happy to revisit some childhood classics.

31 December 2024

Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2024

Here are my favourite books and movies that I read and watched throughout 2024. It wasn't quite the stellar year for books as previous years: few of those books that make you want to recommend and/or buy them for all your friends. In subconscious compensation, perhaps, I reread a few classics (e.g. True Grit, Solaris), and I'm almost finished my second read of War and Peace.

Books

Elif Batuman: Either/Or (2022) Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (1932) Michel Faber: Under The Skin (2000) Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety (1987) Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1857) Rachel Cusk: Outline (2014) Sara Gran: The Book of the Most Precious Substance (2022) Anonymous: The Railway Traveller s Handy Book (1862) Natalie Hodges: Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (2022)Gary K. Wolf: Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981)

Films Recent releases

Seen at a 2023 festival. Disappointments this year included Blitz (Steve McQueen), Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass), The Room Next Door (Pedro Almod var) and Emilia P rez (Jacques Audiard), whilst the worst new film this year was likely The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), followed by Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), Unfrosted (Jerry Seinfeld) and Joker: Folie Deux (Todd Phillips).
Older releases ie. Films released before 2023, and not including rewatches from previous years. Distinctly unenjoyable watches included The Island of Dr. Moreau (John Frankenheimer, 1996), Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999) & The Hairdresser s Husband (Patrice Leconte, 19990). On the other hand, unforgettable cinema experiences this year included big-screen rewatches of Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988).

Russ Allbery: Review: Metal from Heaven

Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke
Publisher: Erewhon
Copyright: November 2024
ISBN: 1-64566-099-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 443
Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.
Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.
Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched. She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City, alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and hallucinations for hours afterwards. As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the workers, including the entirety of her family.
The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning." An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.
Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and powerful and then disappearing into the hills. The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff, Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and to whom this story is narrated. First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.
We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.
The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice! That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good. Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but in the sense of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary, threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the people who already lived there. Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that gathering only by being entirely unexpected. Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists, and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.
Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.
The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians, discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others. Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals. We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history, but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels. Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book. Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the Otherwise Award recommendation list. I can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done, but every other major character is female by at least some gender definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a matter of personal taste.) I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on, and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me. Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book. This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.
She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.
Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this. I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author I want to follow. Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and a lot of serious injuries and death. Rating: 8 out of 10

29 December 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds, by Melissa Caruso
Series: The Echo Archives #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: November 2024
ISBN: 0-316-30364-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 388
The Last Hour Between Worlds is urban, somewhat political high fantasy with strong fae vibes. It is the first book of a series, but it stands alone quite well. Kembral Thorne is a Hound, a member of the guild that serves as guards, investigators, and protectors. Kembral's specialty is Echo retrieval: rescues of people and animals who have fallen through a weak spot in reality into one of the strange, dangerous, and malleable layers called Echoes. Kem once rescued a dog from six layers down, an almost unheard-of feat. Kem is also a new single mother, which means her past two months have been spent in a sleep-deprived haze revolving exclusively around her much-beloved infant. Dona Marjorie Swift's year-turning party is the first time she's been out without Emmi since she gave birth, and she's only there because her sister took the child and practically shoved her out the door. Now, she's desperately trying to remember how to be social and normal, which is not made easier by the unexpected presence of Rika at the party. Rika Nonesuch is not a Hound. She's a Cat, a member of the guild of thieves and occasional assassins. They are the nemesis of the Hounds, but in a stylized and formalized way in which certain courtesies are expected. (The politics of this don't really make sense; you just have to go with it.) Kem has complicated feelings about Rika's grace, banter, and intoxicating perfume, feelings that she thought might be reciprocated until Rika drugged her during an apparent date and left her buried under a pile of garbage. She was not expecting Rika to be at this party and is definitely not ready to have a conversation with her. This emotional turmoil is rudely interrupted by the death of nearly everyone at the party via an Echo poison, the appearance of a dark figure driving a black sword into someone, and the descent of the entire party into an Echo. This was one of those books that kept getting better the farther into the book I read. I was a bit leery at first because the publisher's blurb made it sound more like horror than I prefer, but this is more the disturbing strangeness of fae creatures than the sort of gruesomeness, disgust, or body horror that I find off-putting. Most importantly, the point of this book is not to torture the characters or scare the reader. It's instead structured a bit like a murder mystery, but one whose resolution requires working out obscure fantasy rules and hidden political agendas. One of the currencies in the world of Echos is blood, but another is emotion, revelation, and the stories that bring both, and Caruso focuses the story more on that aspect than on horrifying imagery.
Rika frowned. "Resolve it? How?" "I have no idea." I couldn't keep my frustration from leaking through. "Might be that we have to delve deep into our own hearts to confront the unhealed wounds we've carried with us in secret. Might be that we have to say their names backward, or just close our eyes and they'll go away. Echoes never make any damned sense." Rika made a face. "We'd better not have to confront our unhealed wounds, or I'm leaving you to die."
All of The Last Hour Between Worlds is told in the first person from Kem's perspective, but Rika is the best character in this book. Kem is a rather straightforward, dogged, stubborn protector; Rika is complicated, selfish, conflicted, and considerably more dynamic. The first obvious twist in her background I spotted so long before Kem found out that it was a bit frustrating, but there were multiple satisfying twists after that. As advertised in the blurb, there's a sapphic romance angle here, but it's the sort that comes from a complicated friendship and a lot of mutual respect rather than love at first sight. Some of their relationship conflict is driven by misunderstanding, but the misunderstanding happens before the novel begins, which means the reader doesn't have to sit through the bit where one yells at the characters for being stupid. It helps that the characters have something concrete to do, and that driving plot problem is multi-layered and satisfying. Each time the party falls through a layer of reality, it's mostly reset to the start of the book, but the word "mostly" is hiding a lot of subtlety. Given the clock at the start of each chapter and the blurb (if one read it), the reader can make a good guess that the plot problem will not be fully resolved until the characters fall quite deep into the Echoes, but the story never felt repetitive the way that some time loop stories can. As the characters gain more understanding, the problems change, the players change, and they have to make several excursions into the surrounding world. This is the sort of fantasy that feels a bit like science fiction. You're thrown into a world with a different culture and different rules that are foreign to the reader and natural to the characters. Part of the fun of reading is figuring out the rules, history, and backstory while watching the characters try to solve the puzzles they're faced with. The writing is good but not great. Characterization was good enough for a story primarily focused on action and puzzle-solving, but it was a bit lacking in subtlety. I think Caruso's strengths showed most in the world design, particularly the magic system and the rules followed by the Echo creatures. The excursions outside of the somewhat-protected house struck a balance between eeriness and comprehensibility that reminded me of T. Kingfisher or Sandman. The human politics were unfortunately less successful and rested on some tired centrist cliches. Thankfully, this was not the main point of the story. I should also warn that there is a lot of talk about babies. Kem's entire identity at the start of the novel, to the point of incessant monologue, is "new mother." This is not a perspective we get very often in fantasy, and Kem eventually finds a steadier balance between her bond with her daughter and the other parts of her life. I think some readers will feel very seen. But Caruso leans hard into maternal bonding. So hard. If you don't want to read about someone who is deliriously obsessed with their new child, you may want to skip this one. Right after I finished this book, I thought it was amazing. Now that I've had a few days to think about it, the lack of subtlety and the facile human politics brought it down a notch. I'm a science fiction reader at heart, so I loved the slow revelation of mechanics; the reader starts the story by knowing that Kem can "blink step" but not knowing what that means, and by the end of the story one not only knows but has opinions about its limitations, political implications, and interactions with other forms of magic. The Echo worlds are treated similarly, and this type of world-building is my jam. But the cost is that the human characters, particularly the supporting cast, don't get the same focus and therefore are a bit straightforward and obvious. The subplot with Dona Vandelle was particularly annoying. Ah well. Kem and Rika's relationship did work, and it's the center of the book. If you like fantasy mechanics but are a bit leery of fae stories because they feel too symbolic or arbitrary, give this a try. It's the most satisfyingly constructed fae story that I've read in a long time. It's not great literary fiction, but it's also not trying to be; it's a puzzle adventure, and a well-executed one. Recommended, and I will definitely be reading the sequel. Content notes: Lots of violent death and other physical damage, creepy dream worlds with implied but not explicit horror, and rather a lot of blood. Followed by The Last Soul Among Wolves, not yet published at the time I wrote this review. Rating: 8 out of 10

24 December 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Number Go Up

Review: Number Go Up, by Zeke Faux
Publisher: Crown Currency
Copyright: 2023
Printing: 2024
ISBN: 0-593-44382-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 373
Number Go Up is a cross between a history and a first-person account of investigative journalism around the cryptocurrency bubble and subsequent collapse in 2022. The edition I read has an afterward from June 2024 that brings the story up to date with Sam Bankman-Fried's trial and a few other events. Zeke Faux is a reporter for Bloomberg News and a fellow of New America. Last year, I read Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, a somewhat-sympathetic book-length profile of Sam Bankman-Fried that made a lot of people angry. One of the common refrains at the time was that people should read Number Go Up instead, and since I'm happy to read more about the absurdities of the cryptocurrency world, I finally got around to reading the other big crypto book of 2023. This is a good book, with some caveats that I am about to explain at absurd length. If you want a skeptical history of the cryptocurrency bubble, you should read it. People who think that it's somehow in competition with Michael Lewis's book or who think the two books disagree (including Faux himself) have profoundly missed the point of Going Infinite. I agree with Matt Levine: Both of these books are worth your time if this is the sort of thing you like reading about. But (much) more on Faux's disagreements with Lewis later. The frame of Number Go Up is Faux's quixotic quest to prove that Tether is a fraud. To review this book, I therefore need to briefly explain what Tether is. This is only the first of many extended digressions. One natural way to buy cryptocurrency would be to follow the same pattern as a stock brokerage account. You would deposit some amount of money into the account (or connect the brokerage account to your bank account), and then exchange money for cryptocurrency or vice versa, using bank transfers to put money in or take it out. However, there are several problems with this. One is that swapping cryptocurrency for money is awkward and sometimes expensive. Another is that holding people's investment money for them is usually highly regulated, partly for customer safety but also to prevent money laundering. These are often called KYC laws (Know Your Customer), and the regulation-hostile world of cryptocurrency didn't want to comply with them. Tether is a stablecoin, which means that the company behind Tether attempts to guarantee that one Tether is always worth exactly one US dollar. It is not a speculative investment like Bitcoin; it's a cryptocurrency substitute for dollars. People exchange dollars for Tether to get their money into the system and then settle all of their subsequent trades in Tether, only converting the Tether back to dollars when they want to take their money out of cryptocurrency entirely. In essence, Tether functions like the cash reserve in a brokerage account: Your Tether holdings are supposedly guaranteed to be equivalent to US dollars, you can withdraw them at any time, and because you can do so, you don't bother, instead leaving your money in the reserve account while you contemplate what new coin you want to buy. As with a bank, this system rests on the assurance that one can always exchange one Tether for one US dollar. The instant people stop believing this is true, people will scramble to get their money out of Tether, creating the equivalent of a bank run. Since Tether is not a regulated bank or broker and has no deposit insurance or strong legal protections, the primary defense against a run on Tether is Tether's promise that they hold enough liquid assets to be able to hand out dollars to everyone who wants to redeem Tether. (A secondary defense that I wish Faux had mentioned is that Tether limits redemptions to registered accounts redeeming more than $100,000, which is a tiny fraction of the people who hold Tether, but for most purposes this doesn't matter because that promise is sufficient to maintain the peg with the dollar.) Faux's firmly-held belief throughout this book is that Tether is lying. He believes they do not have enough money to redeem all existing Tether coins, and that rather than backing every coin with very safe liquid assets, they are using the dollars deposited in the system to make illiquid and risky investments. Faux never finds the evidence that he's looking for, which makes this narrative choice feel strange. His theory was tested when there was a run on Tether following the collapse of the Terra stablecoin. Tether passed without apparent difficulty, redeeming $16B or about 20% of the outstanding Tether coins. This doesn't mean Faux is wrong; being able to redeem 20% of the outstanding tokens is very different from being able to redeem 100%, and Tether has been fined for lying about its reserves. But Tether is clearly more stable than Faux thought it was, which makes the main narrative of the book weirdly unsatisfying. If he admitted he might be wrong, I would give him credit for showing his work even if it didn't lead where he expected, but instead he pivots to focusing on Tether's role in money laundering without acknowledging that his original theory took a serious blow. In Faux's pursuit of Tether, he wanders through most of the other elements of the cryptocurrency bubble, and that's the strength of this book. Rather than write Number Go Up as a traditional history, Faux chooses to closely follow his own thought processes and curiosity. This has the advantage of giving Faux an easy and natural narrative, something that non-fiction books of this type can struggle with, and it lets Faux show how confusing and off-putting the cryptocurrency world is to an outsider. The best parts of this book were the parts unrelated to Tether. Faux provides an excellent summary of the Axie Infinity speculative bubble and even traveled to the Philippines to interview people who were directly affected. He then wandered through the bizarre world of NFTs, and his first-hand account of purchasing one (specifically a Mutant Ape) to get entrance to a party (which sounded like a miserable experience I would pay money to get out of) really drives home how sketchy and weird cryptocurrency-related software and markets can be. He also went to El Salvador to talk to people directly about the country's supposed embrace of Bitcoin, and there's no substitute for that type of reporting to show how exaggerated and dishonest the claims of cryptocurrency adoption are. The disadvantage of this personal focus on Faux himself is that it sometimes feels tedious or sensationalized. I was much less interested in his unsuccessful attempts to interview the founder of Tether than Faux was, and while the digression into forced labor compounds in Cambodia devoted to pig butchering scams was informative (and horrific), I think Faux leaned too heavily on an indirect link to Tether. His argument is that cryptocurrency enables a type of money laundering that is particularly well-suited to supporting scams, but both scams and this type of economic slavery existed before cryptocurrency and will exist afterwards. He did not make a very strong case that Tether was uniquely valuable as a money laundering service, as opposed to a currently useful tool that would be replaced with some other tool should it go away. This part of the book is essentially an argument that money laundering is bad because it enables crime, and sure, to an extent I agree. But if you're going to put this much emphasis on the evils of money laundering, I think you need to at least acknowledge that many people outside the United States do not want to give US government, which is often openly hostile to them, veto power over their financial transactions. Faux does not. The other big complaint I have with this book, and with a lot of other reporting on cryptocurrency, is that Faux is sloppy with the term "Ponzi scheme." This is going to sound like nit-picking, but I think this sloppiness matters because it may obscure an ongoing a shift in cryptocurrency markets. A Ponzi scheme is not any speculative bubble. It is a very specific type of fraud in which investors are promised improbably high returns at very low risk and with safe principal. These returns are paid out, not via investment in some underlying enterprise, but by taking the money from new investments and paying it to earlier investors. Ponzi schemes are doomed because satisfying their promises requires a constantly increasing flow of new investors. Since the population of the world is finite, all Ponzi schemes are mathematically guaranteed to eventually fail, often in a sudden death spiral of ever-increasing promises to lure new investors when the investment stream starts to dry up. There are some Ponzi schemes in cryptocurrency, but most practices that are called Ponzi schemes are not. For example, Faux calls Axie Infinity a Ponzi scheme, but it was missing the critical elements of promised safe returns and fraudulently paying returns from the investments of later investors. It was simply a speculative bubble that people bought into on the assumption that its price would increase, and like any speculative bubble those who sold before the peak made money at the expense of those who bought at the peak. The reason why this matters is that Ponzi schemes are a self-correcting problem. One can decry the damage caused when they collapse, but one can also feel the reassuring certainty that they will inevitably collapse and prove the skeptics correct. The same is not true of speculative assets in general. You may think that the lack of an underlying economic justification for prices means that a speculative bubble is guaranteed to collapse eventually, but in the famous words of Gary Schilling, "markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." One of the people Faux interviews explains this distinction to him directly:
Rong explained that in a true Ponzi scheme, the organizer would have to handle the "fraud money." Instead, he gave the sneakers away and then only took a small cut of each trade. "The users are trading between each other. They are not going through me, right?" Rong said. Essentially, he was arguing that by downloading the Stepn app and walking to earn tokens, crypto bros were Ponzi'ing themselves.
Faux is openly contemptuous of this response, but it is technically correct. Stepn is not a Ponzi scheme; it's a speculative bubble. There are no guaranteed returns being paid out of later investments and no promise that your principal is safe. People are buying in at price that you may consider irrational, but Stepn never promised you would get your money back, let alone make a profit, and therefore it doesn't have the exponential progression of a Ponzi scheme. One can argue that this is a distinction without a moral difference, and personally I would agree, but it matters immensely if one is trying to analyze the future of cryptocurrencies. Schemes as transparently unstable as Stepn (which gives you coins for exercise and then tries to claim those coins have value through some vigorous hand-waving) are nearly as certain as Ponzi schemes to eventually collapse. But it's also possible to create a stable business around allowing large numbers of people to regularly lose money to small numbers of sophisticated players who are collecting all of the winnings. It's called a poker room at a casino, and no one thinks poker rooms are Ponzi schemes or are doomed to collapse, even though nearly everyone who plays poker will lose money. This is the part of the story that I think Faux largely missed, and which Michael Lewis highlights in Going Infinite. FTX was a legitimate business that made money (a lot of money) off of trading fees, in much the same way that a casino makes money off of poker rooms. Lots of people want to bet on cryptocurrencies, similar to how lots of people want to play poker. Some of those people will win; most of those people will lose. The casino doesn't care. Its profit comes from taking a little bit of each pot, regardless of who wins. Bankman-Fried also speculated with customer funds, and therefore FTX collapsed, but there is no inherent reason why the core exchange business cannot be stable if people continue to want to speculate in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps people will get tired of this method of gambling, but poker has been going strong for 200 years. It's also important to note that although trading fees are the most obvious way to be a profitable cryptocurrency casino, they're not the only way. Wall Street firms specialize in finding creative ways to take a cut of every financial transaction, and many of those methods are more sophisticated than fees. They are so good at this that buying and selling stock through trading apps like Robinhood is free. The money to run the brokerage platform comes from companies that are delighted to pay for the opportunity to handle stock trades by day traders with a phone app. This is not, as some conspiracy theories would have you believe, due to some sort of fraudulent price manipulation. It is because the average person with a Robinhood phone app is sufficiently unsophisticated that companies that have invested in complex financial modeling will make a steady profit taking the other side of their trades, mostly because of the spread (the difference between offered buy and sell prices). Faux is so caught up in looking for Ponzi schemes and fraud that I think he misses this aspect of cryptocurrency's transformation. Wall Street trading firms aren't piling into cryptocurrency because they want to do securities fraud. They're entering this market because there seems to be persistent demand for this form of gambling, cryptocurrency markets reward complex financial engineering, and running a legal casino is a profitable business model. Michael Lewis appears as a character in this book, and Faux portrays him quite negatively. The root of this animosity appears to stem from a cryptocurrency conference in the Bahamas that Faux attended. Lewis interviewed Bankman-Fried on stage, and, from Faux's account, his questions were fawning and he praised cryptocurrencies in ways that Faux is certain he knew were untrue. From that point on, Faux treats Lewis as an apologist for the cryptocurrency industry and for Sam Bankman-Fried specifically. I think this is a legitimate criticism of Lewis's methods of getting close to the people he wants to write about, but I think Faux also makes the common mistake of assuming Lewis is a muckraking reporter like himself. This has never been what Lewis is interested in. He writes about people he finds interesting and that he thinks a reader will also find interesting. One can legitimately accuse him of being credulous, but that's partly because he's not even trying to do the same thing Faux is doing. He's not trying to judge; he's trying to understand. This shows when it comes to the parts of this book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Faux's default assumption is that everyone involved in cryptocurrency is knowingly doing fraud, and a lot of his research is looking for evidence to support the conclusion he had already reached. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that approach: Faux is largely, although not entirely, correct, and this type of hostile journalism is incredibly valuable for society at large. Upton Sinclair didn't start writing The Jungle with an open mind about the meat-packing industry. But where Faux and Lewis disagree on Bankman-Fried's motivations and intentions, I think Lewis has the much stronger argument. Faux's position is that Bankman-Fried always intended to steal people's money through fraud, perhaps to fund his effective altruism donations, and his protestations that he made mistakes and misplaced funds are obvious lies. This is an appealing narrative if one is looking for a simple villain, but Faux's evidence in support of this is weak. He mostly argues through stereotype: Bankman-Fried was a physics major and a Jane Street trader and therefore could not possibly be the type of person to misplace large amounts of money or miscalculate risk. If he wants to understand how that could be possible, he could read Going Infinite? I find it completely credible that someone with what appears to be uncontrolled, severe ADHD could be adept at trading and calculating probabilities and yet also misplace millions of dollars of assets because he wasn't thinking about them and therefore they stopped existing. Lewis made a lot of people angry by being somewhat sympathetic to someone few people wanted to be sympathetic towards, but Faux (and many others) are also misrepresenting his position. Lewis agrees that Bankman-Fried intentionally intermingled customer funds with his hedge fund and agrees that he lied about doing this. His only contention is that Bankman-Fried didn't do this to steal the money; instead, he invested customer money in risky bets that he thought would pay off. In support of this, Lewis made a prediction that was widely scoffed at, namely that much less of FTX's money was missing than was claimed, and that likely most or all of it would be found. And, well, Lewis was basically correct? The FTX bankruptcy is now expected to recover considerably more than the amount of money owed to creditors. Faux argues that this is only because the bankruptcy clawed back assets and cryptocurrencies have gone up considerably since the FTX bankruptcy, and therefore that the lost money was just replaced by unexpected windfall profits on other investments, but I don't think this point is as strong as he thinks it is. Bankman-Fried lost money on some of what he did with customer funds, made money on other things, and if he'd been able to freeze withdrawals for the year that the bankruptcy froze them, it does appear most of the money would have been recoverable. This does not make what he did legal or morally right, but no one is arguing that, only that he didn't intentionally steal money for his own personal gain or for effective altruism donations. And on that point, I don't think Faux is giving Lewis's argument enough credit. I have a lot of complaints about this book because I know way too much about this topic than anyone should probably know. I think Faux missed the plot in a couple of places, and I wish someone would write a book about where cryptocurrency markets are currently going. (Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter is quite good, but it's about all sorts of things other than cryptocurrency and isn't designed to tell a coherent story.) But if you know less about cryptocurrency and just want to hear the details of the run-up to the 2022 bubble, this is a great book for that. Faux is writing for people who are already skeptical and is not going to convince people who are cryptocurrency true believers, but that's fine. The details are largely correct (and extensively footnoted) and will satisfy most people's curiosity. Lewis's Going Infinite is a better book, though. It's not the same type of book at all, and it will not give you the broader overview of the cryptocurrency world. But if you're curious about what was going through the head of someone at the center of all of this chaos, I think Lewis's analysis is much stronger than Faux's. I'm happy I read both books. Rating: 8 out of 10

23 December 2024

Sahil Dhiman: Debian Mirrors Hierarchy

After finding AlmaLinux mirror sync capacity at Tier 0 (or Tier 1, however you look at it) is around 140 Gbps, I wanted to find source and hierarchy in Debian mirroring systems. There are two main types of mirrors in Debian - Debian package mirrors (for package installs and updates) and Debian CD mirrors (for ISO and others medias). Let s talk about package mirrors (and it s hierarchy) first.

Package mirror hierarchy Trace file was a good starting point for checking upstream for a package mirror in Debian. It resides at <URL>/debian/project/trace/_traces and shows flow of data. Sample trace file from jing.rocks s mirror. It showed, canonical source for packages is ftp-master.debian.org. Checking via https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi, showed it s fasolo.d.o hosted at Brown University, US. This serves as Master Archive Server , making it a Tier 0 mirror. It s entry mentions that it has 1 Gbps shared LAN connectivity (dated information?) but it only has to push to 3 other machines/sites. Side note - .d.o is .debian.org As shown on https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, the three sites are:
  • syncproxy2.eu.debian.org ie smit.d.o hosted by University of Twente, Netherlands with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
  • syncproxy4.eu.debian.org ie schmelzer.d.o hosted by Conova in Austria with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
  • syncproxy2.wna.debian.org - https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi entry mentions it being hosted at UBC here, but IP seems to be pointing to OSUOSL IP range as of now. IIRC few months ago, syncproxy2.wna.d.o was made to point to other host due to some issue (?). mirror-osuosl.d.o seems to be serving as syncproxy2.wna.d.o now. Bandwidth isn t explicitly mentioned but from my experience seeing bandwidths which other free software projects hosted at OSUOSL have, it would be atleast 10 Gbps and maybe more for Debian.

                     syncproxy2.eu.d.o (NL) ---> to the world
                    /
ftp-master.d.o (US) -- syncproxy4.eu.d.o (AT)  --> to the world 
                    \
                     syncproxy2.wna.d.o (US) --> to the world
A visualation of flow of package from ftp-master.d.o
These form the Debian Tier 1 mirror network, as all the mirrors sync from them. So Debian has atleast 50 Gbps+ capacity at Tier 1. A normal Debian user might never directly interact with any of these 3 machines, but every Debian package they run/download/install flows through these machines. Though, I m unsure what wna stands for in syncproxy2.wna.d.o. NA probably is North America and W is west (coast)? If you know, do let me know. After Tier 1, there are a few more syncproxies (detailed below). There are atleast 45 mirrors at Tier 2, updates for which are directly pushed from the three Tier 1 sync proxies. Most country mirrors i.e. ftp..debian.org are at Tier 2 too (barring a few like ftp.au.d.o, ftp.nz.do etc). Coming back to Sync proxies at Tier 2:
  • syncproxy3.wna.debian.org - gretchaninov.d.o which is marked as syncproxy2 on db.d.o (information dated). It s hosted in University of British Columbia, Canada, where a lot of Debian infrastructure including Salsa is hosted.
  • syncproxy.eu.debian.org - Croatian Academic and Research Network managed machine. CNAME directs to debian.carnet.hr.
  • syncproxy.au.debian.org - mirror-anu.d.o hosted by Australian National University with 100Mbps connectivity. Closest sync proxy for all Australian mirrors.
  • syncproxy4.wna.debian.org - syncproxy-aws-wna-01.d.o hosted in AWS, in US (according to GeoIP). IPv6 only (CNAME to syncproxy-aws-wna-01.debian.org. which only has an AAAA record, no A record). A m6g.2xlarge instance which has speeds upto 10 Gbps.
Coming back to https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, one can see chain extend till Tier 6 like in case of this mirror in AU which should add some latency for the updates from being pushed at ftp-master.d.o to them. Ideally, which shouldn t be a problem as https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#when mentions The main archive gets updated four times a day . In my case, I get my updates from NITC mirror, so my updates flows from US > US > TW > IN > me in IN. CDNs have to internally manage cache purging too unlike normal mirrors which directly serve static file. Both deb.debian.org (sponsored by Fastly) and cdn-aws.deb.debian.org (sponsored by Amazon Cloudfront) sync from following CDN backends: See deb.d.o trace file and cdn-aws.deb.d.o trace file. (Thanks to Philipp Kern for the heads up here.)

CD image mirrors Hierarchy Till now, I have only talked about Debian package mirrors. When you see /debian directory on various mirrors, they re usually for package install and updates. If you want to grab the latest (and greatest) Debian ISO, you go to Debian CD (as they re still called) mirror site. casulana.d.o is mentioned as CD builder site hosted by Bytemark while pettersson-ng.d.o is mentioned as CD publishing server hosted at Academic Computer Club in Ume , Sweden. Primary download site for Debian CD when you click download on debian.org homepage is https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/ is hosted here as well. This essentially becomes Tier 0 mirror for Debian CD. All Debian CD mirrors are downstream to it. 
pettersson-ng.d.o / cdimage.d.o (SE) ---> to the world
A visualation of flow of Debian CD from cdimage.d.o
Academic Computer Club s mirror setup uses a combination of multiple machines (called frontends and offloading servers) to load balance requests. Their document setup is a highly recommended read. Also, in that document, they mention , All machines are reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6 and connected with 10 or 25 gigabit Ethernet, external bandwidth available is 200 gigabit/s. For completeness sake, following mirror (or mirror systems) exists too for Debian: Debian heavily rely on various organizations to donate resources (hosting and hardware) to distribute and update Debian. Compiling above information made me thankful to all these organizations. Many thanks to DSA and mirror team as well for managing these stuffs. I relied heavily on https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi which seems to be manually updated, so things might have changed along the way. If anything looks amiss, feel free to ping.

Joey Hess: the twenty-fifth year of my free software career

I've been lucky to be able to spend twenty! five! years! developing free software and making a living on it, and this was a banner year for that career. To start with, there was the Distribits conference. There's a big ecosystem of tools and projects that are based on git-annex, especially in scientific data management, and this was the first conference focused on that. Basically every talk involved git-annex in some way. It's been a while since I was at a conference where my software was in the center like that -- reminded me of Debconf days. I gave a talk on how git-annex was probably basically feature complete. I have been very busy ever since adding new features to it, because in mapping out git-annex's feature set, I discovered new possibilities. Meeting people and getting a better feel for the shape of that ecosytem, both technically and funding wise, led to several big developments in funding later in the year. Going into the year, I had an ongoing source of funding from several projects at Dartmouth that use git-annex, but after 10 years, some of that was winding up. That all came together in my essentially writing a grant proposal to the OpenNeuro project at Stanford, to spend 6 months building out a whole constellation of features. The summer became a sprint to get it all done. Signficant amounts of very productive design work were done while swimming in the river. That was great. (Somehow in there, I ended up onstage at FOSSY in Portland, in a keynote panel on Open Source and AI. This required developing a nuanced understanding of the mess of the OSI's Open Source AI definition, but I was mostly on the panel as the unqualified guy.) Capping off the year, I have a new maintenance contract with Forschungszentrum J lich. This covers the typical daily grind kind of tasks, like bug triage, keeping on top of security, release preparation, and updating dependencies, which is the kind of thing I've never been able to find dedicated funding for before. A career in free software is a succession of hurdles. How to do something new and worthwhile? How to make any income while developing it at all? How to maintain your independant vision when working on it for hire? How to deal with burn-out? How to grow a project to be more than a one developer affair? And on and on. How does a free software project keep paying the bills once it's feature complete? Maybe I am starting to get a glimpse of an answer.

Next.