Search Results: "benjamin"

10 August 2024

Benjamin Mako Hill: For Additional Confusion

The Wikipedia article on antipopes can be pretty confusing! If you d like to be even more confused, it can help with that!

4 March 2024

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana: Bits from FOSDEM 2023 and 2024

Link para vers o em portugu s

Intro Since 2019, I have traveled to Brussels at the beginning of the year to join FOSDEM, considered the largest and most important Free Software event in Europe. The 2024 edition was the fourth in-person edition in a row that I joined (2021 and 2022 did not happen due to COVID-19) and always with the financial help of Debian, which kindly paid my flight tickets after receiving my request asking for help to travel and approved by the Debian leader. In 2020 I wrote several posts with a very complete report of the days I spent in Brussels. But in 2023 I didn t write anything, and becayse last year and this year I coordinated a room dedicated to translations of Free Software and Open Source projects, I m going to take the opportunity to write about these two years and how it was my experience. After my first trip to FOSDEM, I started to think that I could join in a more active way than just a regular attendee, so I had the desire to propose a talk to one of the rooms. But then I thought that instead of proposing a tal, I could organize a room for talks :-) and with the topic translations which is something that I m very interested in, because it s been a few years since I ve been helping to translate the Debian for Portuguese.

Joining FOSDEM 2023 In the second half of 2022 I did some research and saw that there had never been a room dedicated to translations, so when the FOSDEM organization opened the call to receive room proposals (called DevRoom) for the 2023 edition, I sent a proposal to a translation room and it was accepted! After the room was confirmed, the next step was for me, as room coordinator, to publicize the call for talk proposals. I spent a few weeks hoping to find out if I would receive a good number of proposals or if it would be a failure. But to my happiness, I received eight proposals and I had to select six to schedule the room programming schedule due to time constraints . FOSDEM 2023 took place from February 4th to 5th and the translation devroom was scheduled on the second day in the afternoon. Fosdem 2023 The talks held in the room were these below, and in each of them you can watch the recording video. And on the first day of FOSDEM I was at the Debian stand selling the t-shirts that I had taken from Brazil. People from France were also there selling other products and it was cool to interact with people who visited the booth to buy and/or talk about Debian.
Fosdem 2023

Fosdem 2023
Photos

Joining FOSDEM 2024 The 2023 result motivated me to propose the translation devroom again when the FOSDEM 2024 organization opened the call for rooms . I was waiting to find out if the FOSDEM organization would accept a room on this topic for the second year in a row and to my delight, my proposal was accepted again :-) This time I received 11 proposals! And again due to time constraints, I had to select six to schedule the room schedule grid. FOSDEM 2024 took place from February 3rd to 4th and the translation devroom was scheduled for the second day again, but this time in the morning. The talks held in the room were these below, and in each of them you can watch the recording video. This time I didn t help at the Debian stand because I couldn t bring t-shirts to sell from Brazil. So I just stopped by and talked to some people who were there like some DDs. But I volunteered for a few hours to operate the streaming camera in one of the main rooms.
Fosdem 2024

Fosdem 2024
Photos

Conclusion The topics of the talks in these two years were quite diverse, and all the lectures were really very good. In the 12 talks we can see how translations happen in some projects such as KDE, PostgreSQL, Debian and Mattermost. We had the presentation of tools such as LibreTranslate, Weblate, scripts, AI, data model. And also reports on the work carried out by communities in Africa, China and Indonesia. The rooms were full for some talks, a little more empty for others, but I was very satisfied with the final result of these two years. I leave my special thanks to Jonathan Carter, Debian Leader who approved my flight tickets requests so that I could join FOSDEM 2023 and 2024. This help was essential to make my trip to Brussels because flight tickets are not cheap at all. I would also like to thank my wife Jandira, who has been my travel partner :-) Bruxelas As there has been an increase in the number of proposals received, I believe that interest in the translations devroom is growing. So I intend to send the devroom proposal to FOSDEM 2025, and if it is accepted, wait for the future Debian Leader to approve helping me with the flight tickets again. We ll see.

16 November 2023

Dimitri John Ledkov: Ubuntu 23.10 significantly reduces the installed kernel footprint


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 November 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2023

Welcome to the October 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort, and this instance was no different. During this enriching event, participants had the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. A number of concrete outcomes from the summit will documented in the report for November 2023 and elsewhere. Amazingly the agenda and all notes from all sessions are already online. The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Reflections on Reflections on Trusting Trust Russ Cox posted a fascinating article on his blog prompted by the fortieth anniversary of Ken Thompson s award-winning paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust:
[ ] In March 2023, Ken gave the closing keynote [and] during the Q&A session, someone jokingly asked about the Turing award lecture, specifically can you tell us right now whether you have a backdoor into every copy of gcc and Linux still today?
Although Ken reveals (or at least claims!) that he has no such backdoor, he does admit that he has the actual code which Russ requests and subsequently dissects in great but accessible detail.

Ecosystem factors of reproducible builds Rahul Bajaj, Eduardo Fernandes, Bram Adams and Ahmed E. Hassan from the Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence of Software (MCIS) laboratory within the School of Computing, Queen s University in Ontario, Canada have published a paper on the Time to fix, causes and correlation with external ecosystem factors of unreproducible builds. The authors compare various response times within the Debian and Arch Linux distributions including, for example:
Arch Linux packages become reproducible a median of 30 days quicker when compared to Debian packages, while Debian packages remain reproducible for a median of 68 days longer once fixed.
A full PDF of their paper is available online, as are many other interesting papers on MCIS publication page.

NixOS installation image reproducible On the NixOS Discourse instance, Arnout Engelen (raboof) announced that NixOS have created an independent, bit-for-bit identical rebuilding of the nixos-minimal image that is used to install NixOS. In their post, Arnout details what exactly can be reproduced, and even includes some of the history of this endeavour:
You may remember a 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences. This was due to some remaining problems in the hydra cache and the way the ISO was created. By the time we fixed those, regressions had popped up (notably an upstream problem in Python 3.10), and it isn t until this week that we were back to having everything reproducible and being able to validate the complete chain.
Congratulations to NixOS team for reaching this important milestone! Discussion about this announcement can be found underneath the post itself, as well as on Hacker News.

CPython source tarballs now reproducible Seth Larson published a blog post investigating the reproducibility of the CPython source tarballs. Using diffoscope, reprotest and other tools, Seth documents his work that led to a pull request to make these files reproducible which was merged by ukasz Langa.

New arm64 hardware from Codethink Long-time sponsor of the project, Codethink, have generously replaced our old Moonshot-Slides , which they have generously hosted since 2016 with new KVM-based arm64 hardware. Holger Levsen integrated these new nodes to the Reproducible Builds continuous integration framework.

Community updates On our mailing list during October 2023 there were a number of threads, including:
  • Vagrant Cascadian continued a thread about the implementation details of a snapshot archive server required for reproducing previous builds. [ ]
  • Akihiro Suda shared an update on BuildKit, a toolkit for building Docker container images. Akihiro links to a interesting talk they recently gave at DockerCon titled Reproducible builds with BuildKit for software supply-chain security.
  • Alex Zakharov started a thread discussing and proposing fixes for various tools that create ext4 filesystem images. [ ]
Elsewhere, Pol Dellaiera made a number of improvements to our website, including fixing typos and links [ ][ ], adding a NixOS Flake file [ ] and sorting our publications page by date [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian presented Reproducible Builds All The Way Down at the Open Source Firmware Conference.

Distribution work distro-info is a Debian-oriented tool that can provide information about Debian (and Ubuntu) distributions such as their codenames (eg. bookworm) and so on. This month, Benjamin Drung uploaded a new version of distro-info that added support for the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable in order to close bug #1034422. In addition, 8 reviews of packages were added, 74 were updated and 56 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.

Software development 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: In addition, Chris Lamb fixed an issue in diffoscope, where if the equivalent of file -i returns text/plain, fallback to comparing as a text file. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1053668) by Niels Thykier. [ ] This was then uploaded to Debian (and elsewhere) as version 251.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Refine the handling of package blacklisting, such as sending blacklisting notifications to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Install systemd-oomd on all Debian bookworm nodes (re. Debian bug #1052257). [ ]
    • Detect more cases of failures to delete schroots. [ ]
    • Document various bugs in bookworm which are (currently) being manually worked around. [ ]
  • Node-related changes:
    • Integrate the new arm64 machines from Codethink. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve various node cleanup routines. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • General node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Monitoring-related changes:
    • Remove unused Munin monitoring plugins. [ ]
    • Complain less visibly about too many installed kernels. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Enhance the firewall handling on Jenkins nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Install the fish shell everywhere. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added some packages and configuration for snapshot experiments. [ ]
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:

26 November 2022

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Financial Times has been printing an obvious error on its Market Data page for 18 months and nobody else seems to have noticed

Market Data section of the Financial Times US Edition print edition from May 5, 2021.
If you ve flipped through printed broadsheet newspapers, you ve probably seen pages full of tiny text listing prices and other market information for stocks and commodities. And you ve almost certainly just turned the page. Anybody interested in this market prices today will turn to the internet where these numbers are available in real time and where you don t need to squint to find what you need. This is presumably why many newspapers have stopped printing these types of pages or dramatically reduced the space devoted to them. Major financial newspapers however like the Financial Times (FT) still print multiple pages of market data daily. But does anybody read them? The answer appears to be no. How do I know? I noticed an error in the FT s Market Data page that anybody looking in the relevant section of the page would have seen. And I have seen it reproduced every single day for the last 18 months. In early May last year, I noticed that the Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) was listed twice on the FT s list of the 500 largest global companies: once as Nippon T&T and also as Nippon TT. One right above the other. All the numbers are identical. Clearly a mistake.
Reproduction of the FT Market Data section showing a subset of Japanese companies from the FT 500 list of global companies. The duplicate lines are highlighted in yellow. This page is from today s paper (November 26, 2022).
Wondering if it was a one-off error, I looked at a copy of the paper from about a week before and saw that the error did not exist then. I looked at a copy from one day before and saw that it did. Since the issue was apparently recurring, but new at the time, I figured someone at the paper would notice and fix it quickly. I was wrong. It has been 18 months now and the error has been reproduced every single day. Looking through the archives, it seems that the first day the error showed up was May 5, 2021. I ve included a screenshot from the electronic paper version from that day and from the fifth of every month since then (or the sixth if the paper was not printed on the fifth) that shows that the error is reproduced every day. A quick look in the archives suggests it not only appears in the US edition but also in the UK, European, Asian, and Middle East editions. All of them. Why does this matter? The FT prints over 112,000 copies of its paper, six days a week. This duplicate line takes up almost no space, of course, so it s not a big deal on its own. But devoting two full broadsheet pages to market data that is out date as soon as it is printed much of which nobody appears to be reading doesn t seem like a great use of resources. There s an argument to made that papers like the FT print these pages not because they are useful but because doing so is a signal of the publications identities as serious financial papers. But that hardly seems like a good enough reason on its own if nobody is looking at them. It seems well past time for newspapers to stop wasting paper and ink on these pages. I respect that some people think that printing paper newspapers at all is wasteful when one can just read the material online. Plenty of people disagree, of course. But who will disagree with a call to stop printing material that evidence suggests is not being seen by anybody? If an error this obvious can exist for so long, it seems clear that nobody not even anybody at the FT itself is reading it.

9 November 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts

Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating? This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks while still making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also, an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors who already have accounts and are typically the source of most valuable contributions. Creating accounts might even help community members build deeper relationships and commitments to the group in ways that lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.
In a new paper published in Communication Research, I worked with Aaron Shaw provide an answer. We analyze data from natural experiments that occurred when 136 wikis on Fandom.com started requiring user accounts. Although we find strong evidence that the account requirements deterred low quality contributions, this came at a substantial (and usually hidden) cost: a much larger decrease in high quality contributions. Surprisingly, the cost includes lost contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.
A version of this post was first posted on the Community Data Science blog. The full citation for the paper is: Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. 2020. The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Peer Production. Communication Research, 48 (6): 771 95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220910345. If you do not have access to the paywalled journal, please check out this pre-print or get in touch with us. We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analysis and compile the paper itself.

3 November 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: Q&A about doing a PhD with my research group

Ever considered doing research about online communities, free culture/software, and peer production full time? It s PhD admission season and my research group the Community Data Science Collective is doing an open-to-anyone Q&A about PhD admissions this Friday November 5th. We ve got room in the session and its not too late to sign up to join us! The session will be a good opportunity to hear from and talk to faculty recruiting students to our various programs at the University of Washington, Purdue, and Northwestern and to talk with current and previous students in the group. I am hoping to admit at least one new PhD advisee to the Department of Communication at UW this year (maybe more) and am currently co-advising (and/or have previously co-advised) students in UW s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, and Information School. One thing to keep in mind is that my primary/home department Communication has a deadline for PhD applications of November 15th this year. The registration deadline for the Q&A session is listed as today but we ll do what we can to sneak you in even if you register late. That said, please do register ASAP so we can get you the link to the session!
Join us for the CDSC PhD Application Q & A

6 October 2021

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2021

The goal behind reproducible builds is to ensure that no deliberate flaws have been introduced during compilation processes via promising or mandating that identical results are always generated from a given source. This allowing multiple third-parties to come to an agreement on whether a build was compromised or not by a system of distributed consensus. In these reports we outline the most important things that have been happening in the world of reproducible builds in the past month:
First mentioned in our March 2021 report, Martin Heinz published two blog posts on sigstore, a project that endeavours to offer software signing as a public good, [the] software-signing equivalent to Let s Encrypt . The two posts, the first entitled Sigstore: A Solution to Software Supply Chain Security outlines more about the project and justifies its existence:
Software signing is not a new problem, so there must be some solution already, right? Yes, but signing software and maintaining keys is very difficult especially for non-security folks and UX of existing tools such as PGP leave much to be desired. That s why we need something like sigstore - an easy to use software/toolset for signing software artifacts.
The second post (titled Signing Software The Easy Way with Sigstore and Cosign) goes into some technical details of getting started.
There was an interesting thread in the /r/Signal subreddit that started from the observation that Signal s apk doesn t match with the source code:
Some time ago I checked Signal s reproducibility and it failed. I asked others to test in case I did something wrong, but nobody made any reports. Since then I tried to test the Google Play Store version of the apk against one I compiled myself, and that doesn t match either.

BitcoinBinary.org was announced this month, which aims to be a repository of Reproducible Build Proofs for Bitcoin Projects :
Most users are not capable of building from source code themselves, but we can at least get them able enough to check signatures and shasums. When reputable people who can tell everyone they were able to reproduce the project s build, others at least have a secondary source of validation.

Distribution work Fr d ric Pierret announced a new testing service at beta.tests.reproducible-builds.org, showing actual rebuilds of binaries distributed by both the Debian and Qubes distributions. In Debian specifically, however, 51 reviews of Debian packages were added, 31 were updated and 31 were removed this month to our database of classified issues. As part of this, Chris Lamb refreshed a number of notes, including the build_path_in_record_file_generated_by_pybuild_flit_plugin issue. Elsewhere in Debian, Roland Clobus posted his Fourth status update about reproducible live-build ISO images in Jenkins to our mailing list, which mentions (amongst other things) that:
  • All major configurations are still built regularly using live-build and bullseye.
  • All major configurations are reproducible now; Jenkins is green.
    • I ve worked around the issue for the Cinnamon image.
    • The patch was accepted and released within a few hours.
  • My main focus for the last month was on the live-build tool itself.
Related to this, there was continuing discussion on how to embed/encode the build metadata for the Debian live images which were being worked on by Roland Clobus.
Ariadne Conill published another detailed blog post related to various security initiatives within the Alpine Linux distribution. After summarising some conventional security work being done (eg. with sudo and the release of OpenSSH version 3.0), Ariadne included another section on reproducible builds: The main blocker [was] determining what to do about storing the build metadata so that a build environment can be recreated precisely . Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

Community news On our website this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixed some broken links [ ] and Holger Levsen made a number of changes to the Who is Involved? page [ ][ ][ ]. On our mailing list, Magnus Ihse Bursie started a thread with the subject Reproducible builds on Java, which begins as follows:
I m working for Oracle in the Build Group for OpenJDK which is primary responsible for creating a built artifact of the OpenJDK source code. [ ] For the last few years, we have worked on a low-effort, background-style project to make the build of OpenJDK itself building reproducible. We ve come far, but there are still issues I d like to address. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 183, 184 and 185 as well as performed significant triaging of merge requests and other issues in addition to making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Support a newer format version of the R language s .rds files. [ ]
    • Update tests for OCaml 4.12. [ ]
    • Add a missing format_class import. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t call close_archive when garbage collecting Archive instances, unless open_archive definitely returned successfully. This prevents, for example, an AttributeError where PGPContainer s cleanup routines were rightfully assuming that its temporary directory had actually been created. [ ]
    • Fix (and test) the comparison of R language s .rdb files after refactoring temporary directory handling. [ ]
    • Ensure that RPM archives exists in the Debian package description, regardless of whether python3-rpm is installed or not at build time. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Use our assert_diff routine in tests/comparators/test_rdata.py. [ ]
    • Move diffoscope.versions to diffoscope.tests.utils.versions. [ ]
    • Reformat a number of modules with Black. [ ][ ]
However, the following changes were also made:
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Fix an autopkgtest caused by the androguard module not being in the (expected) python3-androguard Debian package. [ ]
    • Appease a shellcheck warning in debian/tests/control.sh. [ ]
    • Ignore a warning from h5py in our tests that doesn t concern us. [ ]
    • Drop a trailing .1 from the Standards-Version field as it s required. [ ]
  • Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek:
    • Stop using the deprecated distutils.spawn.find_executable utility. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Adjust an LLVM-related test for LLVM version 13. [ ]
    • Update invocations of llvm-objdump. [ ]
    • Adjust a test with a one-byte text file for file version 5.40. [ ]
And, finally, Benjamin Peterson added a --diff-context option to control unified diff context size [ ] and Jean-Romain Garnier fixed the Macho comparator for architectures other than x86-64 [ ].

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:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Drop my package rebuilder prototype as it s not useful anymore. [ ]
    • Schedule old packages in Debian bookworm. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages for Debian buster. [ ][ ]
    • Don t include PostgreSQL debug output in package lists. [ ]
    • Detect Python library mismatches during build in the node health check. [ ]
    • Update a note on updating the FreeBSD system. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Silence a warning from Git. [ ]
    • Update a setting to reflect that Debian bookworm is the new testing. [ ]
    • Upgrade the PostgreSQL database to version 13. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
    • Workaround non-reproducible config files in the libxml-sax-perl package. [ ]
    • Use the new DNS for the snapshot service. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Also note that the armhf architecture also systematically varies by the kernel. [ ]

Contributing 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:

21 September 2021

Russell Coker: Links September 2021

Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting and insightful blog post about the license of software developed or co-developed by machine-learning systems [1]. One of his main points is that people in the FOSS community should aim for less copyright protection. The USENIX ATC 21/OSDI 21 Joint Keynote Address titled It s Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware has some inssightful points to make [2]. Timothy Roscoe makes some incendiaty points but backs them up with evidence. Is Linux really an OS? I recommend that everyone who s interested in OS design watch this lecture. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting set of 6 articles about Disneyland, ride pricing, and crowd control [3]. He proposes some interesting ideas for reforming Disneyland. Benjamin Bratton wrote an insightful article about how philosophy failed in the pandemic [4]. He focuses on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who has a history of writing stupid articles that match Qanon talking points but with better language skills. Arstechnica has an interesting article about penetration testers extracting an encryption key from the bus used by the TPM on a laptop [5]. It s not a likely attack in the real world as most networks can be broken more easily by other methods. But it s still interesting to learn about how the technology works. The Portalist has an article about David Brin s Startide Rising series of novels and his thought s on the concept of Uplift (which he denies inventing) [6]. Jacobin has an insightful article titled You re Not Lazy But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are [7]. Making people identify as lazy is bad for them and bad for getting them to do work. But this is the first time I ve seen it described as a facet of abusive capitalism. Jacobin has an insightful article about free public transport [8]. Apparently there are already many regions that have free public transport (Tallinn the Capital of Estonia being one example). Fare free public transport allows bus drivers to concentrate on driving not taking fares, removes the need for ticket inspectors, and generally provides a better service. It allows passengers to board buses and trams faster thus reducing traffic congestion and encourages more people to use public transport instead of driving and reduces road maintenance costs. Interesting research from Israel about bypassing facial ID [9]. Apparently they can make a set of 9 images that can pass for over 40% of the population. I didn t expect facial recognition to be an effective form of authentication, but I didn t expect it to be that bad. Edward Snowden wrote an insightful blog post about types of conspiracies [10]. Kevin Rudd wrote an informative article about Sky News in Australia [11]. We need to have a Royal Commission now before we have our own 6th Jan event. Steve from Big Mess O Wires wrote an informative blog post about USB-C and 4K 60Hz video [12]. Basically you can t have a single USB-C hub do 4K 60Hz video and be a USB 3.x hub unless you have compression software running on your PC (slow and only works on Windows), or have DisplayPort 1.4 or Thunderbolt (both not well supported). All of the options are not well documented on online store pages so lots of people will get unpleasant surprises when their deliveries arrive. Computers suck. Steinar H. Gunderson wrote an informative blog post about GaN technology for smaller power supplies [13]. A 65W USB-C PSU that fits the usual wall wart form factor is an interesting development.
Related posts:
  1. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  2. Links April 2021 Dr Justin Lehmiller s blog post comparing his official (academic style)...
  3. Links September 2014 Matt Palmer wrote a short but informative post about enabling...

17 September 2021

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 184 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 184. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix the semantic comparison of R's .rdb files after a refactoring of
  temporary directory handling in a previous version.
* Support a newer format version of R's .rds files.
* Update tests for OCaml 4.12. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#274)
* Move diffoscope.versions to diffoscope.tests.utils.versions.
* Use assert_diff in tests/comparators/test_rdata.py.
* Reformat various modules with Black.
[ Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek ]
* Stop using the deprecated distutils module by adding a version
  comparison class based on the RPM version rules.
* Update invocations of llvm-objdump for the latest version of LLVM.
* Adjust a test with one-byte text file for file(1) version 5.40.
* Improve the parsing of the version of OpenSSH.
[ Benjamin Peterson ]
* Add a --diff-context option to control the unified diff context size.
  (reproducible-builds/diffoscope!88)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

31 August 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: Returning to DebConf

I first started using Debian sometime in the mid 90s and started contributing as a developer and package maintainer more than two decades years ago. My first very first scholarly publication, collaborative work led by Martin Michlmayr that I did when I was still an undergrad at Hampshire College, was about quality and the reliance on individuals in Debian. To this day, many of my closest friends are people I first met through Debian. I met many of them at Debian s annual conference DebConf. Given my strong connections to Debian, I find it somewhat surprising that although all of my academic research has focused on peer production, free culture, and free software, I haven t actually published any Debian related research since that first paper with Martin in 2003! So it felt like coming full circle when, several days ago, I was able to sit in the virtual DebConf audience and watch two of my graduate student advisees Kaylea Champion and Wm Salt Hale present their research about Debian at DebConf21. Salt presented his masters thesis work which tried to understand the social dynamics behind organizational resilience among free software projects. Kaylea presented her work on a new technique she developed to identifying at risk software packages that are lower quality than we might hope given their popularity (you can read more about Kaylea s project in our blog post from earlier this year). If you missed either presentation, check out the blog post my research collective put up or watch the videos below. If you want to hear about new work we re doing including work on Debian you should follow our research group blog, and/or follow or engage with us in the Fediverse (@communitydata@social.coop), or on Twitter (@comdatasci). And if you re interested in joining us perhaps to do more research on FLOSS and/or Debian and/or a graduate degree of your own? please be in touch with me directly!
Wm Salt Hale s presentation plus Q&A. (WebM available)
Kaylea Champion s presentation plus Q&A. (WebM available)

4 May 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: NSF CAREER Award

In exciting professional news, it was recently announced that I got an National Science Foundation CAREER award! The CAREER is the US NSF s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. In addition to the recognition, the award involves a bunch of money for me to put toward my research over the next 5 years. The Department of Communication at the University of Washington has put up a very nice web page announcing the thing. It s all very exciting and a huge honor. I m very humbled. The grant will support a bunch of new research to develop and test a theory about the relationship between governance and online community lifecycles. If you ve been reading this blog for a while, you ll know that I ve been involved in a bunch of research to describe how peer production communities tend to follow common patterns of growth and decline as well as a studies that show that many open communities become increasingly closed in ways that deter lots of the kinds contributions that made the communities successful in the first place. Over the last few years, I ve worked with Aaron Shaw to develop the outlines of an explanation for why many communities because increasingly closed over time in ways that hurt their ability to integrate contributions from newcomers. Over the course of the work on the CAREER, I ll be continuing that project with Aaron and I ll also be working to test that explanation empirically and to develop new strategies about what online communities can do as a result. In addition to supporting research, the grant will support a bunch of new outreach and community building within the Community Data Science Collective. In particular, I m planning to use the grant to do a better job of building relationships with community participants, community managers, and others in the platforms we study. I m also hoping to use the resources to help the CDSC do a better job of sharing our stuff out in ways that are useful as well doing a better job of listening and learning from the communities that our research seeks to inform. There are many to thank. The proposed work was the direct research of the work I did as the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford where I got to spend the 2018-2019 academic year in Claude Shannon s old office and talking through these ideas with an incredible range of other scholars over lunch every day. It s also the product of years of conversations with Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler. The proposal itself reflects the excellent work of the whole CDSC who did the work that made the award possible and provided me with detailed feedback on the proposal itself.

29 March 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: Identifying Underproduced Software

I wrote this blog post with Kaylea Champion and a version of this post was originally posted on the Community Data Science Collective blog. Critical software we all rely on can silently crumble away beneath us. Unfortunately, we often don t find out software infrastructure is in poor condition until it is too late. Over the last year or so, I have been supporting Kaylea Champion on a project my group announced earlier to measure software underproduction a term we use to describe software that is low in quality but high in importance. Underproduction reflects an important type of risk in widely used free/libre open source software (FLOSS) because participants often choose their own projects and tasks. Because FLOSS contributors work as volunteers and choose what they work on, important projects aren t always the ones to which FLOSS developers devote the most attention. Even when developers want to work on important projects, relative neglect among important projects is often difficult for FLOSS contributors to see. Given all this, what can we do to detect problems in FLOSS infrastructure before major failures occur? Kaylea Champion and I recently published a paper laying out our new method for measuring underproduction at the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) 2021 that we believe provides one important answer to this question.

A conceptual diagram of underproduction. The x-axis shows relative importance, the y-axis relative quality. The top left area of the graph described by these axes is 'overproduction' -- high quality, low importance. The diagonal is Alignment: quality and importance are approximately the same. The lower right depicts underproduction -- high importance, low quality -- the area of potential risk.Conceptual diagram showing how our conception of underproduction relates to quality and importance of software.
In the paper, we describe a general approach for detecting underproduced software infrastructure that consists of five steps: (1) identifying a body of digital infrastructure (like a code repository); (2) identifying a measure of quality (like the time to takes to fix bugs); (3) identifying a measure of importance (like install base); (4) specifying a hypothesized relationship linking quality and importance if quality and importance are in perfect alignment; and (5) quantifying deviation from this theoretical baseline to find relative underproduction. To show how our method works in practice, we applied the technique to an important collection of FLOSS infrastructure: 21,902 packages in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Although there are many ways to measure quality, we used a measure of how quickly Debian maintainers have historically dealt with 461,656 bugs that have been filed over the last three decades. To measure importance, we used data from Debian s Popularity Contest opt-in survey. After some statistical machinations that are documented in our paper, the result was an estimate of relative underproduction for the 21,902 packages in Debian we looked at. One of our key findings is that underproduction is very common in Debian. By our estimates, at least 4,327 packages in Debian are underproduced. As you can see in the list of the most underproduced packages again, as estimated using just one more measure many of the most at risk packages are associated with the desktop and windowing environments where there are many users but also many extremely tricky integration-related bugs.
This table shows the 30 packages with the most severe underproduction problem in Debian, shown as a series of boxplots.These 30 packages have the highest level of underproduction in Debian according to our analysis.
We hope these results are useful to folks at Debian and the Debian QA team. We also hope that the basic method we ve laid out is something that others will build off in other contexts and apply to other software repositories.
In addition to the paper itself and the video of the conference presentation on Youtube by Kaylea, we ve put a repository with all our code and data in an archival repository Harvard Dataverse and we d love to work with others interested in applying our approach in other software ecosytems.

For more details, check out the full paper which is available as a freely accessible preprint.

This project was supported by the Ford/Sloan Digital Infrastructure Initiative. Wm Salt Hale of the Community Data Science Collective and Debian Developers Paul Wise and Don Armstrong provided valuable assistance in accessing and interpreting Debian bug data. Ren Just generously provided insight and feedback on the manuscript.

Paper Citation: Kaylea Champion and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2021. Underproduction: An Approach for Measuring Risk in Open Source Software. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2021). IEEE.

Contact Kaylea Champion (kaylea@uw.edu) with any questions or if you are interested in following up.

26 March 2021

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman

I served as a director and as a voting member of the Free Software Foundation for more than a decade. I left both positions over the last 18 months and currently have no formal authority in the organization. So although it is now just my personal opinion, I will publicly add my voice to the chorus of people who are expressing their strong opposition to Richard Stallman s return to leadership in the FSF and to his continued leadership in the free software movement. The current situation makes me unbelievably sad. I stuck around the FSF for a long time (maybe too long) and worked hard (I regret I didn t accomplish more) to try and make the FSF better because I believe that it is important to have voices advocating for social justice inside our movement s most important institutions. I believe this is especially true when one is unhappy with the existing state of affairs. I am frustrated and sad that I concluded that I could no longer be part of any process of organizational growth and transformation at FSF. I have nothing but compassion, empathy, and gratitude for those who are still at the FSF especially the staff who are continuing to work silently toward making the FSF better under intense public pressure. I still hope that the FSF will emerge from this as a better organization.

15 January 2021

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.6: Some Updates

rcpp logo The Rcpp team is proud to announce release 1.0.6 of Rcpp which arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian too. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days. This marks the first release on the new six-months cycle announced with release 1.0.5 in July. As reminder, interim dev or rc releases will often be available in the Rcpp drat repo; this cycle there were four. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. As of today, 2174 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further (which is an 8.5% increase just since the last release), along with 207 in BioConductor. This release features six different pull requests from five different contributors, mostly fixing fairly small corner cases, plus some minor polish on documentation and continuous integration. Before releasing we once again made numerous reverse dependency checks none of which revealed any issues. So the passage at CRAN was pretty quick despite the large dependency footprint, and we are once again grateful for all the work the CRAN maintainers do.

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.6 (2021-01-14)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Replace remaining few uses of EXTPTR_PTR with R_ExternalPtrAddr (Kevin in #1098 fixing #1097).
    • Add push_back and push_front for DataFrame (Walter Somerville in #1099 fixing #1094).
    • Remove a misleading-to-wrong comment (Mattias Ellert in #1109 cleaning up after #1049).
    • Address a sanitizer report by initializing two private bool variables (Benjamin Christoffersen in #1113).
    • External pointer finalizer toggle default values were corrected to true (Dirk in #1115).
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • Several URLs were updated to https and/or new addresses (Dirk).
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Added GitHub Actions CI using the same container-based setup used previously, and also carried code coverage over (Dirk in #1128).
  • Changes in Rcpp support functions:
    • Rcpp.package.skeleton() avoids warning from R. (Dirk)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2616 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub. My sincere thanks to my current sponsors for me keeping me caffeinated.

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

12 January 2021

John Goerzen: The Good, Bad, and Scary of the Banning of Donald Trump, and How Decentralization Makes It All Better

It is undeniable that banning Donald Trump from Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites is a benefit for the moment. It may well save lives, perhaps lots of lives. But it raises quite a few troubling issues. First, as EFF points out, these platforms have privileged speakers with power, especially politicians, over regular users. For years now, it has been obvious to everyone that Donald Trump has been violating policies on both platforms, and yet they did little or nothing about it. The result we saw last week was entirely forseeable and indeed, WAS forseen, including by elements in those companies themselves. (ACLU also raises some good points) Contrast that with how others get treated. Facebook, two days after the coup attempt, banned Benjamin Wittes, apparently because he mentioned an Atlantic article opposed to nutcase conspiracy theories. The EFF has also documented many more egregious examples: taking down documentation of war crimes, childbirth images, black activists showing the racist messages they received, women discussing online harassment, etc. The list goes on; YouTube, for instance, has often been promoting far-right violent videos while removing peaceful LGBTQ ones. In short, have we simply achieved legal censorship by outsourcing it to dominant corporations? It is worth pausing at this point to recognize two important princples: First, that we do not see it as right to compel speech. Secondly, that there exist communications channels and other services that nobody is calling on to suspend Donald Trump. Let s dive into those a little bit. There have been no prominent calls for AT&T, Verizon, Gmail, or whomever provides Trump and his campaign with cell phones or email to suspend their service to him. Moreover, the gas stations that fuel his vehicles and the airports that service his plane continue to provide those services, and nobody has seriously questioned that, either. Even his Apple phone that he uses to post to Twitter remains, as far as I know, fully active. Secondly, imagine you were starting up a small web forum focused on raising tomato plants. It is, and should be, well within your rights to keep tomato-haters out, as well as people that have no interest in tomatoes but would rather talk about rutabagas, politics, or Mars. If you are going to host a forum about tomatoes, you have the right to keep it a forum about tomatoes; you cannot be forced to distribute someone else s speech. Likewise in traditional media, a newspaper cannot be forced to print every letter to the editor in full. In law, there is a notion of a common carrier, that provides services to the general public without discrimination. Phone companies and ISPs fall under this. Facebook, Twitter, and tomato sites don t. But consider what happens if Facebook bans you. You might be using Facebook-owned Whatsapp to communicate with family and friends, and suddenly find yourself unable to ask someone to pick you up. Or your treasured family photos might be in Facebook-owned Instagram, lost forever. It s not just Facebook; similar things happen with Google, locking people out of their phones and laptops, their emails, even their photos. Is it right that Facebook and Google aren t regulated as common carriers? Perhaps, or perhaps we need some line of demarcation between their speech-to-the-public services (Facebook timeline posts, YouTube) and private communication (Whatsapp, Gmail). It s a thorny issue; should government be regulating speech instead? That s also fraught. So is corporate control. Decentralization Helps Dramatically With email, you get to pick your email provider (yes, there are two or three big ones, but still plenty of others). Each email provider will have its own set of things it considers acceptable, and its own set of other servers and accounts it s willing to exchange mail with. (It is extremely common for mail providers to choose not to accept mail from various other mail servers based on ISP, IP address, reputation, and so forth.) What if we could do something like that for Twitter and Facebook? Let you join whatever instance you like. Maybe one instance is all about art and they don t talk about politics. Or another is all about Free Software and they don t have advertising. And then there are plenty of open instances that accept anything that s respectful. And, like email, people of one server can interact with those using another just as easily as if they were using the same one. Well, this isn t hypothetical; it already exists in the Fediverse. The most common option is Mastodon, and it so happens that a month ago I wrote about its benefits for other reasons, and included some links on getting started. There is no reason that we must all let our online speech be controlled by companies with a profit motive to keep hate speech on their platforms. There is no reason that we must all have a single set of rules, or accept strong corporate or government control, either. The quality of conversation on Mastodon is far higher than either Twitter or Facebook; decentralization works and it s here today.

8 November 2020

Russell Coker: Links November 2020

KDE has a long term problem of excessive CPU time used by the screen locker [1]. Part of it is due to software GL emulation, and part of it is due to the screen locker doing things like flashing the cursor when nothing else is happening. One of my systems has an NVidia card and enabling GL would cause it to crash. So now I have kscreenlocker using 30% of a CPU core even when the screen is powered down. Informative NYT article about the latest security features for iPhones [2]. Android needs new features like this! Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado [3], it s about poverty in the US and related things. Linda first became Internet famous for her essay Why I Make Terrible Decisions or Poverty Thoughts which is very insightful and well written, this is the latest iteration of that essay [4]. This YouTube video by Ruby Payne gives great insights to class based attitudes towards time and money [5]. News Week has an interesting article about chicken sashimi, apparently you can safely eat raw chicken if it s prepared well [6]. Vanity Fair has an informative article about how Qanon and Trumpism have infected the Catholic Church [7]. Some of Mel Gibson s mental illness is affecting a significant portion of the Catholic Church in the US and some parts in the rest of the world. Noema has an interesting article on toxic Internet culture, Japan s 2chan, 4chan, 8chan/8kun, and the conspiracy theories they spawned [8]. Benjamin Corey is an ex-Fundie who wrote an amusing analysis of the Biblical statements about the anti-Christ [9]. NYMag has an interesting article The Final Gasp of Donald Trump s Presidency [10]. Mother Jones has an informative article about the fact that Jim Watkins (the main person behind QAnon) has a history of hosting child porn on sites he runs [11], but we all knew QAnon was never about protecting kids. Eand has an insightful article America s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State [12].
Related posts:
  1. Links March 2020 Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian...
  2. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  3. Links June 2020 Bruce Schneier wrote an informative post about Zoom security problems...

9 September 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2020

Welcome to the August 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our monthly reports, we summarise the things that we have been up to over the past month. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.

This month, Jennifer Helsby launched a new reproduciblewheels.com website to address the lack of reproducibility of Python wheels. To quote Jennifer s accompanying explanatory blog post:
One hiccup we ve encountered in SecureDrop development is that not all Python wheels can be built reproducibly. We ship multiple (Python) projects in Debian packages, with Python dependencies included in those packages as wheels. In order for our Debian packages to be reproducible, we need that wheel build process to also be reproducible
Parallel to this, transparencylog.com was also launched, a service that verifies the contents of URLs against a publicly recorded cryptographic log. It keeps an append-only log of the cryptographic digests of all URLs it has seen. (GitHub repo) On 18th September, Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a presentation in German, titled Wie reproducible builds Software sicherer machen ( How reproducible builds make software more secure ) at the Internet Security Digital Days 2020 conference.

Reproducible builds at DebConf20 There were a number of talks at the recent online-only DebConf20 conference on the topic of reproducible builds. Holger gave a talk titled Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org are made from their claimed sources. It also served as a general update on the status of reproducible builds within Debian. The video (145 MB) and slides are available. There were also a number of other talks that involved Reproducible Builds too. For example, the Malayalam language mini-conference had a talk titled , ? ( I want to join Debian, what should I do? ) presented by Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, the Clojure Packaging Team BoF session led by Elana Hashman, as well as Where is Salsa CI right now? that was on the topic of Salsa, the collaborative development server that Debian uses to provide the necessary tools for package maintainers, packaging teams and so on. Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) also gave a talk in Spanish titled Un camino verificable desde el origen hasta el binario ( A verifiable path from source to binary ). (Video, 88MB)

Development work After many years of development work, the compiler for the Rust programming language now generates reproducible binary code. This generated some general discussion on Reddit on the topic of reproducibility in general. Paul Spooren posted a request for comments to OpenWrt s openwrt-devel mailing list asking for clarification on when to raise the PKG_RELEASE identifier of a package. This is needed in order to successfully perform rebuilds in a reproducible builds context. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Chris Lamb provided some comments and pointers on an upstream issue regarding the reproducibility of a Snap / SquashFS archive file. [ ]

Debian Holger Levsen identified that a large number of Debian .buildinfo build certificates have been tainted on the official Debian build servers, as these environments have files underneath the /usr/local/sbin directory [ ]. He also filed against bug for debrebuild after spotting that it can fail to download packages from snapshot.debian.org [ ]. This month, several issues were uncovered (or assisted) due to the efforts of reproducible builds. For instance, Debian bug #968710 was filed by Simon McVittie, which describes a problem with detached debug symbol files (required to generate a traceback) that is unlikely to have been discovered without reproducible builds. In addition, Jelmer Vernooij called attention that the new Debian Janitor tool is using the property of reproducibility (as well as diffoscope when applying archive-wide changes to Debian:
New merge proposals also include a link to the diffoscope diff between a vanilla build and the build with changes. Unfortunately these can be a bit noisy for packages that are not reproducible yet, due to the difference in build environment between the two builds. [ ]
56 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 24 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Specifically, Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_version_generated_by_python_param and the lessc_nondeterministic_keys toolchain issues. [ ][ ] Holger Levsen sponsored Lukas Puehringer s upload of the python-securesystemslib pacage, which is a dependency of in-toto, a framework to secure the integrity of software supply chains. [ ] Lastly, Chris Lamb further refined his merge request against the debian-installer component to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no]) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure and sent a ping to the team that maintains that code.

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 these patches, including:

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In August, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 155, 156, 157 and 158 to Debian:
  • New features:
    • Support extracting data of PGP signed data. (#214)
    • Try files named .pgp against pgpdump(1) to determine whether they are Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) files. (#211)
    • Support multiple options for all file extension matching. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t raise an exception when we encounter XML files with <!ENTITY> declarations inside the Document Type Definition (DTD), or when a DTD or entity references an external resource. (#212)
    • pgpdump(1) can successfully parse some binary files, so check that the parsed output contains something sensible before accepting it. [ ]
    • Temporarily drop gnumeric from the Debian build-dependencies as it has been removed from the testing distribution. (#968742)
    • Correctly use fallback_recognises to prevent matching .xsb binary XML files.
    • Correct identify signed PGP files as file(1) returns data . (#211)
  • Logging improvements:
    • Emit a message when ppudump version does not match our file header. [ ]
    • Don t use Python s repr(object) output in Calling external command messages. [ ]
    • Include the filename in the not identified by any comparator message. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Bump Python requirement from 3.6 to 3.7. Most distributions are either shipping with Python 3.5 or 3.7, so supporting 3.6 is not only somewhat unnecessary but also cumbersome to test locally. [ ]
    • Drop some unused imports [ ], drop an unnecessary dictionary comprehensions [ ] and some unnecessary control flow [ ].
    • Correct typo of output in a comment. [ ]
  • Release process:
    • Move generation of debian/tests/control to an external script. [ ]
    • Add some URLs for the site that will appear on PyPI.org. [ ]
    • Update author and author email in setup.py for PyPI.org and similar. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Update PPU tests for compatibility with Free Pascal versions 3.2.0 or greater. (#968124)
    • Mark that our identification test for .ppu files requires ppudump version 3.2.0 or higher. [ ]
    • Add an assert_diff helper that loads and compares a fixture output. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Misc:
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo documented in setup.py that diffoscope works with Python version 3.8 [ ] and Frazer Clews applied some Pylint suggestions [ ] and removed some deprecated methods [ ].

Website This month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to:
  • Clarify & fix a few entries on the who page [ ][ ] and ensure that images do not get to large on some viewports [ ].
  • Clarify use of a pronoun re. Conservancy. [ ]
  • Use View all our monthly reports over View all monthly reports . [ ]
  • Move a is a suffix out of the link target on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH age. [ ]
In addition, Javier Jard n added the freedesktop-sdk project [ ] and Kushal Das added SecureDrop project [ ] to our projects page. Lastly, Michael P hn added internationalisation and translation support with help from Hans-Christoph Steiner [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operate a Jenkins-based testing framework to power tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • System health checks:
    • Improve explanation how the status and scores are calculated. [ ][ ]
    • Update and condense view of detected issues. [ ][ ]
    • Query the canonical configuration file to determine whether a job is disabled instead of duplicating/hardcoding this. [ ]
    • Detect several problems when updating the status of reporting-oriented metapackage sets. [ ]
    • Detect when diffoscope is not installable [ ] and failures in DNS resolution [ ].
  • Debian:
    • Update the URL to the Debian security team bug tracker s Git repository. [ ]
    • Reschedule the unstable and bullseye distributions often for the arm64 architecture. [ ]
    • Schedule buster less often for armhf. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Force the build of certain packages in the work-in-progress package rebuilder. [ ][ ]
    • Only update the stretch and buster base build images when necessary. [ ]
  • Other distributions:
    • For F-Droid, trigger jobs by commits, not by a timer. [ ]
    • Disable the Archlinux HTML page generation job as it has never worked. [ ]
    • Disable the alternative OpenWrt rebuilder jobs. [ ]
  • Misc;
Many other changes were made too, including:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Use <pre> HTML tags when dumping fixed-width debugging data in the self-serve package scheduler. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Mark that the u-boot Universal Boot Loader should not build architecture independent packages on the arm64 architecture anymore. [ ]
Finally, build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Mailing list On our mailing list this month, Leo Wandersleb sent a message to the list after he was wondering how to expand his WalletScrutiny.com project (which aims to improve the security of Bitcoin wallets) from Android wallets to also monitor Linux wallets as well:
If you think you know how to spread the word about reproducibility in the context of Bitcoin wallets through WalletScrutiny, your contributions are highly welcome on this PR [ ]
Julien Lepiller posted to the list linking to a blog post by Tavis Ormandy titled You don t need reproducible builds. Morten Linderud (foxboron) responded with a clear rebuttal that Tavis was only considering the narrow use-case of proprietary vendors and closed-source software. He additionally noted that the criticism that reproducible builds cannot prevent against backdoors being deliberately introduced into the upstream source ( bugdoors ) are decidedly (and deliberately) outside the scope of reproducible builds to begin with. Chris Lamb included the Reproducible Builds mailing list in a wider discussion regarding a tentative proposal to include .buildinfo files in .deb packages, adding his remarks regarding requiring a custom tool in order to determine whether generated build artifacts are identical in a reproducible context. [ ] Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) posted a quick email to the list requesting whether there was a list of To do tasks in Reproducible Builds. Lastly, Chris Lamb responded at length to a query regarding the status of reproducible builds for Debian ISO or installation images. He noted that most of the technical work has been performed but there are at least four issues until they can be generally advertised as such . He pointed that the privacy-oriented Tails operation system, which is based directly on Debian, has had reproducible builds for a number of years now. [ ]
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:

20 July 2017

Benjamin Mako Hill: Testing Our Theories About Eternal September

Graph of subscribers and moderators over time in /r/NoSleep. The image is taken from our 2016 CHI paper.
Last year at CHI 2016, my research group published a qualitative study examining the effects of a large influx of newcomers to the /r/nosleep online community in Reddit. Our study began with the observation that most research on sustained waves of newcomers focuses on the destructive effect of newcomers and frequently invokes Usenet s infamous Eternal September. Our qualitative study argued that the /r/nosleep community managed its surge of newcomers gracefully through strategic preparation by moderators, technological systems to reign in on norm violations, and a shared sense of protecting the community s immersive environment among participants. We are thrilled that, less a year after the publication of our study, Zhiyuan Jerry Lin and a group of researchers at Stanford have published a quantitative test of our study s findings! Lin analyzed 45 million comments and upvote patterns from 10 Reddit communities that a massive inundation of newcomers like the one we studied on /r/nosleep. Lin s group found that these communities retained their quality despite a slight dip in its initial growth period. Our team discussed doing a quantitative study like Lin s at some length and our paper ends with a lament that our findings merely reflected, propositions for testing in future work. Lin s study provides exactly such a test! Lin et al. s results suggest that our qualitative findings generalize and that sustained influx of newcomers need not doom a community to a descent into an Eternal September. Through strong moderation and the use of a voting system, the subreddits analyzed by Lin appear to retain their identities despite the surge of new users. There are always limits to research projects work quantitative and qualitative. We think the Lin s paper compliments ours beautifully, we are excited that Lin built on our work, and we re thrilled that our propositions seem to have held up! This blog post was written with Charlie Kiene. Our paper about /r/nosleep, written with Charlie Kiene and Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, was published in the Proceedings of CHI 2016 and is released as open access. Lin s paper was published in the Proceedings of ICWSM 2017 and is also available online.

27 June 2017

Benjamin Mako Hill: Learning to Code in One s Own Language

I recently published a paper with Sayamindu Dasgupta that provides evidence in support of the idea that kids can learn to code more quickly when they are programming in their own language. Millions of young people from around the world are learning to code. Often, during their learning experiences, these youth are using visual block-based programming languages like Scratch, App Inventor, and Code.org Studio. In block-based programming languages, coders manipulate visual, snap-together blocks that represent code constructs instead of textual symbols and commands that are found in more traditional programming languages. The textual symbols used in nearly all non-block-based programming languages are drawn from English consider if statements and for loops for common examples. Keywords in block-based languages, on the other hand, are often translated into different human languages. For example, depending on the language preference of the user, an identical set of computing instructions in Scratch can be represented in many different human languages:
Examples of a short piece of Scratch code shown in four different human languages: English, Italian, Norwegian Bokm l, and German.
Although my research with Sayamindu Dasgupta focuses on learning, both Sayamindu and I worked on local language technologies before coming back to academia. As a result, we were both interested in how the increasing translation of programming languages might be making it easier for non-English speaking kids to learn to code. After all, a large body of education research has shown that early-stage education is more effective when instruction is in the language that the learner speaks at home. Based on this research, we hypothesized that children learning to code with block-based programming languages translated to their mother-tongues will have better learning outcomes than children using the blocks in English. We sought to test this hypothesis in Scratch, an informal learning community built around a block-based programming language. We were helped by the fact that Scratch is translated into many languages and has a large number of learners from around the world. To measure learning, we built on some of our our own previous work and looked at learners cumulative block repertoires similar to a code vocabulary. By observing a learner s cumulative block repertoire over time, we can measure how quickly their code vocabulary is growing. Using this data, we compared the rate of growth of cumulative block repertoire between learners from non-English speaking countries using Scratch in English to learners from the same countries using Scratch in their local language. To identify non-English speakers, we considered Scratch users who reported themselves as coming from five primarily non-English speaking countries: Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Germany, and Norway. We chose these five countries because they each have one very widely spoken language that is not English and because Scratch is almost fully translated into that language. Even after controlling for a number of factors like social engagement on the Scratch website, user productivity, and time spent on projects, we found that learners from these countries who use Scratch in their local language have a higher rate of cumulative block repertoire growth than their counterparts using Scratch in English. This faster growth was despite having a lower initial block repertoire. The graph below visualizes our results for two prototypical learners who start with the same initial block repertoire: one learner who uses the English interface, and a second learner who uses their native language.
Summary of the results of our model for two prototypical individuals.
Our results are in line with what theories of education have to say about learning in one s own language. Our findings also represent good news for designers of block-based programming languages who have spent considerable amounts of effort in making their programming languages translatable. It s also good news for the volunteers who have spent many hours translating blocks and user interfaces. Although we find support for our hypothesis, we should stress that our findings are both limited and incomplete. For example, because we focus on estimating the differences between Scratch learners, our comparisons are between kids who all managed to successfully use Scratch. Before Scratch was translated, kids with little working knowledge of English or the Latin script might not have been able to use Scratch at all. Because of translation, many of these children are now able to learn to code.
This blog post and the work that it describes is a collaborative project with Sayamindu Dasgupta. Sayamindu also published a very similar version of the blog post in several places. Our paper is open access and you can read it here. The paper was published in the proceedings of the ACM Learning @ Scale Conference. We also recently gave a talk about this work at the International Communication Association s annual conference. We received support and feedback from members of the Scratch team at MIT (especially Mitch Resnick and Natalie Rusk), as well as from Nathan TeBlunthuis at the University of Washington. Financial support came from the US National Science Foundation.

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