During March and April, we had a number of performance issues that made Debusine s core functions of running work requests and reflecting their results in workflows quite unreliable. Investigating and fixing this took up a lot of time from both the Debusine development team and Freexian s sysadmins. The central problems involved a series of database concurrency and worker communication issues that interacted in complex ways. On bad days, this caused between 10% and 25% of processed work requests to fail unnecessarily. We communicated some of the problems to users on IRC, but not consistently since we didn t entirely understand the scope of the problems at the time. Most of the problems are fixed now, but we had a retrospective meeting to make sure we understood what happened and that we learn from it. Here s a summary.

Data model Debusine s workflows consist of many individual work requests. Each work request has a database row representing its state, which means that the overall state of a workflow is distributed across many rows. Changes to one work request (for example, when it is completed) can cause changes to other work requests (perhaps unblocking it so that it can be scheduled to an idle worker). Those changes may happen concurrently, and in practice often do. Workers typically need to create artifacts containing the output of tasks: these include things like packages, build logs, and test output. Debusine records task history so that it can make better decisions about how to schedule work requests. Since this might otherwise grow without bound, the server expires older parts of that history after a while. The same is true for many other kinds of data.

Causes

• Because workflows involve changes that propagate between work requests, there were historically some cases where different parts of the system could deadlock due to trying to take update locks on overlapping sets of work request rows in different orders. We mitigated that somewhere around 2025-11-05 by locking entire workflows in one go before making any change that might need to propagate between work requests like this; that dealt with the deadlocks, but it s quite a heavyweight locking strategy that sometimes caused significant delays.
• We ve been working for some time to make Debusine useful to Debian developers, and regression tracking is an important part of that: it lets developers test uploads without being too badly misled by tests in related packages that were already failing before they started. On 2026-03-11 we enabled this by default on debusine.debian.net, after testing it for a while. Although this is useful, it put more load on the system as a whole, often approximately doubling the number of work requests in a given workflow with many additional dependencies between them.
• Like much of the world, we re in an arms race with unethical scrapers desperately trying to feed everyone else s data into LLMs before they run out of money. We saw a substantial uptick here towards the end of March, which meant that we had to temporarily disable regression tracking and to put some other mitigations in front of our web interface.
• We historically haven t had systematic internal timeouts. Prompted by ruff, a Google Summer of Code applicant went through and added timeouts in many places, including some calls between the worker and the server. This was fiddly work and the student did a solid job, so I m not putting them on blast or anything! However, it did mean that some things that came in under load balancer timeouts now timed out earlier on the client side of the request (and hence in Debusine workers), which made some problems show up in different ways and be more obvious. This was deployed on 2026-04-03.

Fixes

Workflow orchestration Figuring out what individual work requests need to be run as part of a workflow - the process we call orchestration - can be challenging. Unlike typical CI pipelines, these workflows often span substantial chunks of a distribution: a glibc update can involve retesting nearly everything! Nevertheless, it s not particularly helpful for it to take hours just to build the workflow graph. Fixing this involved many classic database optimizations such as adding indexes and CTEs, but probably the most effective fix was adding a cache for lookups within each orchestrator run or work request. Profiling showed that resolving lookups was a hot spot, and the way that task data is often passed down through a workflow meant that the same lookup could be resolved hundreds or thousands of times in a large workflow.

Expiry We knew for quite some time that our expiry job took very aggressive locks, effectively blocking most of the rest of the system. This was an early decision to make the expiry logic simpler by allowing it to follow graphs without worrying about concurrent activity, but it clearly couldn t stay that way forever. Row locks in PostgreSQL was very helpful in figuring out the correct approach here. Since we re mainly concerned about the possibility of new foreign key references being created to artifacts we re considering for expiry, and since that would involve taking FOR KEY SHARE locks on those rows, we can explicitly take FOR UPDATE locks (which conflict with FOR KEY SHARE), and then recompute the set of artifacts to expire with any locked artifacts marked to keep. This was delicate work, but it saved minutes of downtime every day.

Whole-workflow locking I mentioned earlier that we avoided some deadlock issues by taking locks on entire workflows. To ensure that these locks are effective even against code that isn t specifically aware of them, this is implemented by using SELECT FOR UPDATE on all the work request rows in the workflow. In some cases the search for which rows to lock itself tripped up the PostgreSQL planner.

Scheduling We run multiple Celery workers for various purposes. Some of them can do many things in parallel, but in some specific cases (notably the task scheduler) we only ever want a single instance to run at once. Unfortunately a bug in the systemd service meant that the scheduler often ran concurrently anyway! Once we fixed that, the scheduler logs became a lot less confusing. When Debusine was small, it was reasonable for it to perform scheduling very aggressively, typically as soon as any change occurred to a work request or a worker that might possibly influence it. This doesn t scale very well, though, and even though we tried to batch multiple scheduling triggers that occurred within a single transaction, it could still make debugging very confusing. We reduced the number of changes that would result in immediate scheduling, and deferred everything else to a regular tick . The scheduler may not be able to assign a work request to an idle worker due to the workflow being locked. That isn t a major problem in itself; it can just try again later. However, in very large workflows, we found that it often worked its way down all the pending work requests one by one finding that each of them was locked, which was slow and also produced a huge amount of log noise. It now assumes that if a work request is locked, then it might as well skip other work requests in the same workflow until the next scheduler run. Between them, these changes reduced the number of locks typically being held on debusine.debian.net by about 80%:

Worker refactoring The Debusine worker has always been partially asynchronous, but while it was actually executing a task - in other words, most of the time, at least in busy periods - it didn t respond to inbound websocket messages, causing spurious disconnections. We restructured the whole worker to be fully event-based. We also had to put quite a bit of effort into improving the path by which workers report work request completion, because if that hits a timeout then it can mean throwing away hours of work. We have some further improvements in mind, but for now we defer most of this work to a Celery task so that whole-workflow locks aren t on the critical path.

Database write volume One of our sysadmins observed that our database write volume was consistently very high. This was a puzzle, but for a long time we left that unexplored. Eventually we thought to ask PostgreSQL s own statistics, and we found a surprise:

debusine=> SELECT relname AS table_name,
debusine->        n_tup_ins AS inserts,
debusine->        n_tup_upd AS updates,
debusine->        n_tup_del AS deletes,
debusine->        (n_tup_ins + n_tup_upd + n_tup_del) AS total_dml
debusine-> FROM pg_stat_user_tables
debusine-> WHERE (n_tup_ins + n_tup_upd + n_tup_del) > 0
debusine-> ORDER BY total_dml DESC
debusine-> LIMIT 20;
              table_name                inserts    updates     deletes   total_dml
--------------------------------------+---------+------------+---------+------------
 db_collectionitem                      1418251   3578202388   3630143   3583250782
 db_token                                 15143     11212106     11389     11238638
 db_workrequest                          386196      6399071   1820500      8605767
 db_fileinartifact                      2783021      1837929   1663887      6284837
 django_celery_results_taskresult       1819301      1501623   1791656      5112580
 db_artifact                             960077      3340859    663890      4964826
 db_collectionitemmatchconstraint       1550457            0   2207486      3757943
 db_artifactrelation                    2229382            0   1363825      3593207
 db_fileupload                          1023400      1057036   1023346      3103782
 db_file                                1673194            0    970252      2643446
 db_fileinstore                         1411995            0    970259      2382254
 db_filestore                                 0      2381578         0      2381578
 django_session                          645423      1519880       531      2165834
 db_workrequest_dependencies             365877            0    936537      1302414
 db_worker                                18317       949280      9487       977084
 db_collection                            10061           85    177741       187887
 db_workerpooltaskexecutionstatistics     28721            0         0        28721
 db_workerpoolstatistics                   1640            0         0         1640
 db_workflowtemplate                        130          158       649          937
 db_identity                                 76          661         0          737
(20 rows)

Oh my - that s a lot of db_collectionitem updates and must surely be out of proportion with what we really need. Can we narrow that down by asking about the most recently-updated tuples?

debusine=> SELECT DISTINCT category
debusine-> FROM db_collectionitem
debusine-> WHERE id IN (
debusine->     SELECT id FROM db_collectionitem
debusine->     ORDER BY xmin::text::integer DESC LIMIT 10000
debusine-> );
           category
------------------------------
 debusine:historical-task-run
(1 row)

That might not be absolutely reliable, but it was certainly a hint. As per PostgreSQL s documentation, by default UPDATE always performs physical updates to every matching row regardless of whether the data has changed, and our code to expire old task history entries wasn t doing that properly. Once we knew where to look, it was easy to add some extra constraints. This reduced our mean write volume on debusine.debian.net from about 23 MB/s to about 3 MB/s, which had an immediate knock-on effect on our request failure rate:

Current state Our metrics indicate that things are a lot better now. We still have a few things to deal with, such as:

• Some more performance fixes are on their way to fix some remaining cases where views are very slow or where file uploads from workers fail due to locks.
• We have some changes in the works to revamp how work request changes propagate through workflows in a way that doesn t require so many heavyweight locks.
• We have a number of monitoring and alerting improvements we d like to make, both for outcomes (things like slow Celery tasks) and possible root causes (database performance). We d also like to deploy some more modern observability tools; hunting for things using journalctl isn t terrible, but it s not really the state of the art.
• We need to improve how we communicate to users when we re having operational problems, both informally (IRC, etc.) and on the site.
• Retries don t always behave the way you d expect in workflows.

I hope this has been an interesting tour through the sorts of things that can go wrong in this kind of distributed system!

Discussion of AI systems seems to be dominated by fears of uncommon and unlikely threats. I think that we should be focusing more on real issues with LLMs and with society in general and put the most effort towards the biggest problems. It s Not AI True Artificial Intelligence [1] (IE a computer that has the mental capacity of a household pet) is something that I think can be developed, but it hasn t been developed and we don t have good plans for developing it. We seem to be a lot further away from achieving that goal than we were from landing on the moon in 1962 when JFK gave his historic speech. What we have is a variety of pattern recognition systems that can predict what fits into a pattern. The most well known type of Machine Learning (ML) is the Large Language Model (LLM) which means ChatGPT and similar systems which predict which text would be likely to come next and can make an essay from it. They can give interesting and useful output, but there is no thought behind it, it s just a better form of Eliza (the famous program from 1964 that simulates conversation by pattern matching) [2]. By analysing billions of documents, storing the data in a condensed mathematical way, and then using computation to extract from that record LLMs can produce output that is unfortunately considered by some people to be good enough to include in legal documents submitted to courts, university assignments, and many other documents. But they do so without even having the thinking ability of a mouse. To call current systems AIs without any significant qualifiers when criticising them is to concede the debate about the worth of such things. If we develop AIs that can actually think we will have to deal with the issues in the SciFi horror short story Lena by qntm [3]. The Bad Arguments Here is a list of some of the most unreasonable arguments I ve seen against AI which distract attention from real problems both related to AI and other problems in society. Suicide and Homicide Wikipedia has a page listing Deaths Linked to Chatbots [4] which right now has 16 entries from 2023 to Feb 2026. They are all tragedies and as a society we should try to prevent such things. But what I would like to see from the media is some analysis of overall trends, yes it gets people s attention when someone dies in an unusual way but we need to have attention paid to the more numerous deaths which are preventable. It has become a standard practice to give information on Lifeline in media referencing suicide, it would be good if they also developed a practice of mentioning the relative incidence of a problem when publishing an article about it. One of the many factors that cause more suicides than chatbots is school, Scientific American has an informative article from 2022 about the correlation between child suicide and school [5]. It is based on US statistics and shows that the lowest suicide rate is in July (a no-school month in the US) which has a rate of 2.3 per 100,000 person years. So if kids had a quality of life equivalent to July all year around then there would be 2.3 suicides per 100,000 kids every year while if they had a quality of life equivalent to a Monday in January or November it would be 3.9 suicides per 100,000 kids every year. The article states Any time I present these data to teachers, parents, principals or school administrators, they are shocked. This should be common knowledge. It is common knowledge to anyone who takes any notice of what happens in schools, but paying attention to serious problems is unpleasant, it s more fun to pretend that school is good for everyone. No parent wants to think that they sent their child to a place that was horrible, no teacher wants to think that they are part of a system that harms kids. The US CDC has an informative article about youth suicide [6] which documents it as the 3rd largest cause of death in the 14-18 age range fro 2021. This article was published in 2024 and based on statistics from 2023 and earlier. It notes significant differences in suicides, attempts, and persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness which had girls at more than twice the rate of boys and LGBQ+ kids at more than twice the rate of heterosexual students. It seems obvious that misogyny and homophobia is correlated with suicide and that s something that could and should be addressed in schools. My state has a Safer Schools program [7] to try and alleviate the problems related to homophobia, but I expect that things are getting worse in the US in that regard. 39.7% of kids in US high schools had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness before LLMs became popular, school could and should be a happy time for the vast majority of kids but instead almost half of the kids don t enjoy it and a majority of girls and LGBQ+ kids don t. Having no mention of trans kids is a significant omission from that article, based on everything I ve heard from trans people I expect that their statistics would be even worse. One could argue that the small number of deaths inspired by use or misuse of LLMs is an indication of a larger number of people suffering in ways that don t result in death and don t get noticed. But I don t think that can compare to the fact that the majority of girls and LGBQ+ kids have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the current school system. Regarding homicide, the Australian Institute of Criminology has an article showing that in the 2003-2004 time period 49% of women who were killed were listed as a domestic argument [8], that s something that could and should be addressed. That article claimed 308 homicide victims in that time period which is larger than the world-wide death toll from LLMs but also less than 1/3 the death toll from car accidents in Australia. Australia has less than 0.4% of the world population, a fairly low homicide rate, and a number of homicides that vastly outnumbers all world homicides related to LLMs. I think it s great to address any cause of suicide or homicide, but devoting government resources and legislation towards very uncommon causes instead of things that happen every day is not a good strategy. It would be fine to address all factors leading to suicide, but problems with the school system have been a major factor for decades with little effort applied to fix it. Fraud and Other Crime There is evidence of criminals using LLMs to help prepare for crimes, the ability to generate large amounts of text quickly can be used for fraud and extortion. This is going to be a serious problem and we need structural changes to society to deal with it. There is an ongoing issue of scammers convincing older people that their child or other young relative is in trouble and a large amount of cash is required to address it. This sort of scam as well as the more well known Nigerian scams will probably become more common as the cost of running them decreases. This may be more of a problem for people in developing countries as currently a common scam business model is to have people in regions where wages are low (such as Pakistan for one who I spoke to) scamming people in relatively wealthy countries like Australia so an attack with a low probability of success is financially viable. Cheaper attacks will make less affluent victims financially viable to the scammers. While writing this post I received a financial scam phone call trying to get me to invest in SpaceX that was run by an AI chat system, I expect to receive more of them and this is something that needs to be dealt with via both technical measures and legislation. Do we have to accept less freedom and less anonymity in finances as a cost of reducing financial crime? Greater restrictions on the use of cash would make some crimes more difficult or less profitable for criminals. As a society I think we need to have a discussion about a balance between financial freedom and freedom from criminal exploitation, failing to have such a discussion is likely to lead to policies which don t work well. Also one thing that ML systems are good at is recognising patterns in data. Banks could scan all their transactions and look for patterns that correlate with fraud. They currently do this badly and do things like locking credit cards when someone goes to another country and spends money. They could do a better job of that and involve the police in cases of obvious fraud even when the customer doesn t realise that they are a victim. This isn t a reason to criticise AIs , it s a reason to plan defensive technology that matches the capabilities of attackers. As an aside I used to work for a company that was developing AI software to scan bank phone calls and allow banks to recognise employees who acted illegally. Unfortunately the Royal Commission into banking misconduct [9] didn t impose any penalties that gave the banks a financial reason to avoid criminal activity. Unemployment and Inequality There are many claims about AI systems making large numbers of jobs obsolete, some of them are outlandish such as the claims that all white-collar jobs will be obsolete in the near future. There are some reasonable claims like the ability to replace some mundane jobs. Replacing jobs that suck with computers, robots, and other machinery is a good thing! Very few people wish that they were working on a farm without a tractor. In 1900 it s estimated that between 60% and 70% of the world labour force worked in agriculture and 40% of the US labour force did so. Now it s something like 27% globally and between 1% and 3% in developed countries. Automated factories are also a good thing, it s best to avoid boring and dangerous work. The most plausible claims about job replacement from AI is jobs that involve analysing and summarising documents. One example that comes to mind is the worst kind of journalism where press releases from companies are massaged into the format of a feature article. I don t think anyone wants that sort of job and doing it with AI hopefully means no human has to sign their name to it. For work like programming few people will be directly replaced by AI but if people can do their work more efficiently while using it then less people are required. I don t think that any programmer likes the part of their job where they have to skim read long documents looking for a clue about how to solve a problem with a library or protocol. A LLM processing the document and finding the potentially useful things will take away the drudgery from the work and allow greater productivity. The trend in replacing people has been making people work longer. If you force all employees to work 60 hour weeks then that can theoretically allow hiring fewer people than having 40 hour weeks. For some work that applies but for skilled work it mostly doesn t as productivity and work quality on average drops when people work more than 40 hours in a week. Another trend for exploiting people is having a low minimum wage and making accommodation expensive so that many people need to work two jobs. What we need is legislation to restore the situation in the 70s where a single full time job was sufficient to provide for a family. The low minimum wage and high expenses for many things is a problem that s been slowly developing over the course of decades while being mostly ignored by journalists. If they could concentrate on the real issues that are hurting workers today they could incite political action to fix these problems. Academic Cheating There is no shortage of ways of cheating in school and university. There are people who are paid to write essays, mobile phones are used for cheating in exams, etc. Getting an AI to write essays makes it easier to cheat for the essay writing part but does so with lower quality and in a less stealthy way. What s the worst case scenario? That we have to change to oral exams for all university subjects? In the US the average annual price for tuition at a university is apparently $25,000, if each student had individually supervised assessment for their exams at a cost of $100 per hour it would make the degree cost 4% more. The cost of university in the US is unreasonably high and that s a problem that needs to be fixed, but a hypothetical case of increasing the price by 4% isn t going to be a major part of it. Weak Arguments Against AI Computer Security Attacks There have been many claims made that AI will break the security of all systems and cause the type of disruption that was previously predicted for year 2000. Bruce Schneier has written a good analysis of the issues including how AI can be used by both attackers and defenders [10], he doesn t have a strong conclusion on whether the net result will be good or bad but his article does make it clear that the result is not going to be a total disaster. While I was working on this post I read another post by Bruce Schneier that was significantly more negative about this issue [11]. While I still don t think this will destroy civilisation I found his other post convincing enough to move computer security from the bad argument section to the weak argument section. Spidering the Web to Death There are issues of bots from AI companies doing a bad job of trying to download all the Internet s content and using a lot of resources. When it was just the major search engines and the Wayback Machine doing it the load was small due to having a small number of organisations that were very good at the way they did it having evolved practices over many years. Now we have a lot of idiots doing it badly and repeatedly hitting generated content. This is really annoying but is something that we can deal with. Currently my blog and many other sites are hosted on a Hetzner server with a E3-1271 v3 CPU with 32G of RAM and there are occasions where more than half the CPU power is being used to service web requests from such systems. Even on the server bidding (renting servers previously used by other customers) Hetzner isn t offering systems so slow nowadays, the slowest they offer is about 20% faster than that. This is something that can be dealt with by spending a little more on hosting until the companies doing that go bankrupt. I m sure this is a serious problem for some people, but for most people it s not a big deal. Also hostile traffic on the Internet is something we have all had to deal with as a part of life since the mid to late 90s. RAM Prices The unreasonably high prices for RAM are annoying and hurt the development of useful computer projects. Big companies can afford it, even with current high prices and large quantities of RAM used for some servers it s still not significant. But it is a major issue for hobbyists and small projects. Things like setting up a dozen test VMs for FOSS development are now too expensive for many people who develop software in their spare time. But this is a temporary thing, if AI companies were to keep buying RAM at high rates for a few years companies would just manufacture more of it to meet demand. In some situations capitalism can work. Environmental Damage There are many people claiming that power used by data centers for AI will lead to environmental damage, using power and water when there isn t enough. The trend of computer hardware is to get smaller and faster. It hasn t been going as fast as it used to in many areas but it hasn t stopped either and it s an exponential trend. There has been an increase in data centers (DCs) for AI use as the use has been increasing faster than the hardware gets smaller. Eventually they will stop increasing faster than advances in hardware and software can match and the size of DCs will decrease. As the production of renewable energy is increases the environmental cost of energy hungry industries decreases. In a few years this won t be an issue anyone is bothered about. False Claims About Danger as PR Jamie McClelland makes an interesting claim that the AI companies are pushing dangers of AI as a method of PR [12]. That seems plausible and combined with the tendency of many journalists to just massage press releases from companies into articles could be the reason for a lot of the bad arguments against AI. Good Arguments Against AI Spam Everywhere I ve previously written about Communication and Hostile AIs [13]. I think that filling all communication channels with rubbish is a denial of service attack against society. In the past communication took some effort, even the simplest email that was directly targeted at the recipient took some human effort and that reduced it s frequency. I get a lot of spam saying something like I see your web site doesn t rank in the top for Google searches while my web site in fact rates well and the actor named Russell Coker is ranking below me, so I know that such spam hasn t had the minimum of human involvement. Now a spammer who wanted to do a better job could get an LLM written spam for every target so the message was specifically aimed at them and would take much longer to be recognised by a human as spam and would also avoid most anti-spam software. Searching for businesses used to be easy, the phone book had listings for them and there was a real cost to being in the book as well as humans actively trying to stop fraud. Creating fake web sites to get business isn t too difficult but it s also not trivial at the moment and such fake sites won t look complete. Now with LLMs it s possible to create hundreds of sites that have content and look reasonable without human involvement. Instead of the small number of suicides and homicides inspired by AI chat systems we should probably be concerned about people who need psychological or medical advice being misled by bogus web sites created as part of fraud campaigns. Imagine people searching for mental health assistance finding web sites run by cults who oppose psychology as a profession. Imagine people searching for basic medical advice such as how to cook a healthy meal getting sucked in to web sites that start sane and then lead people to Ivermectin as a universal medicine. LLMs have the potential to take spam from quick and simple attacks to large scale targeted fraud aimed at people and organisations that don t have the resources to defend against it. There have been many reports of CEO impersonation fraud against major corporations aiming to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars and fraud against individuals who are persuaded to get amounts like $50,000 to help a relative who is allegedly in a difficult situation. But if every corner store experienced the same type of attack that CEOs experience and if every child had someone trying to steal the pocket money in the same way that relatively wealthy people are being targeted now it would really change things. David Brin wrote an insightful and informative blog post about this focusing on how AI generated content is being allowed to destroy YouTube [14]. Deep Fakes There is some overlap between filling all communications channels with rubbish (fake news etc) and deep fake. Making a fake photo of a politician or celebrity to lobby for legislative changes is a real issue but it s not what most people think of when the term deep fake is used. Using photo and video faking targeting non-consenting people is a serious issue. It s not just fake porn (which is a major issue and will cause some suicides) as there are many other possibilities. Fake videos showing behaviour that justifies sacking people from their jobs is going to become an issue, for people in public facing positions even proof that the videos are fake won t necessarily help them. Will we find ourselves in a situation where every politician gets deep-fake porn made of them and the only people who run for public office are ones who are cool with that? Will positions of leadership in the technology industry be restricted to people who aren t bothered by having the most depraved fake porn made of them? The Justice System We have seen a lot of evidence of law enforcement and the court system based on bias leading to bad results. The Innocence Project attempts to correct that and it s web site documents some of the things that have gone wrong [15]. Using AI systems to do some of the work of law enforcement by training computers on the flawed results of current systems can entrench bias and also make it harder to spot. When determining whether someone should be considered a suspect or whether a prisoner should be eligible for parole the number of factors that a human can use is limited. But a computer can take many more factors into account so the issues of whether inappropriate factors are being used can be masked. Computers are also unable to explain decisions that they made and are also able to come up with better fake reasons. In the past there have been racist policies in the US about banks not lending to people living in suburbs where most houses were owned by non-white people, these policies were documented and the documents have become part of the historical record showing racist policies. If a LLM decides not to lend money to people based on mathematical correlations it determined based on historical banking practices it could assign negative weights to factors such as non-English names and implement the racism in a large array of numbers with no proof. The current cases of lawyers getting LLM systems to do some of their work and having their incompetence revealed when the computer generated work is shown to be ridiculously bad are amusing. But that is not the real problem. The real problems will start when the computers in police cars start flagging every car owned by a non-write person as having a probable cause for a drug stop. Technically Not Financial Fraud The majority of the ecosystem around AI is a financial scam [16]. There are companies and individuals doing good things with machine learning some of which is based on hardware and software developed as part of this ecosystem. But the majority of it has no plausible path to profits and a the future of it inevitably ends with some bankruptcies. There are circular flows of money that have the major cloud providers and NVidia looped in, when the values of these companies correct it will become apparent that they have all burned a lot of money keeping this running and all the senior people have got a share of it (the entire purpose of stock options is to allow senior people to suck money out of the company). Then every cloud provider will increase costs while under chapter 11 and all the companies that depend on them will pay whatever it takes. That includes all major companies and most governments. Unlike the dot-com boom and crash and the housing crash the coming financial crash will impact every company that we deal with and most governments. So the people in first-world countries will effectively be taxed to pay for this scam while the executives go party in Monaco. This may seem like an extreme claim but it all happened before with the dot com crash and the housing market crash. The CEO class has an ongoing practice of doing things that aren t crimes because they lobby (bribe) politicians to make them legal. So the current stock market shenanigans around AI don t seem to involve things that governments consider to be crimes. But any normal person might be surprised to learn that such things are legal and most people would vote for such things to be crimes if they had the opportunity. A global financial crisis is the least of the problems that seem likely to afflict society from AI systems. But it will be more immediately obvious when it happens which could be this year! Propaganda Creating art requires skills that the type of people who want to create propaganda tend to lack. AI technologies allow creating art that is based on mathematical models of actual art to the requirements of the person running the program. I have seen the term AI Fascism used to describe the use of AI to help authoritarian governments. I am dubious about whether it deserves that term and while every article I ve read about the topic has had some good points I thought that they were all weak points. But there are lots of ways that governments can abuse their populations without going full fascist. In the last century there were lots of truly terrible governments that didn t even make the top 10 of fascism. AI Sycophants Bruce Schneier wrote an informative blog post about AI Chatbots and Trust which focused on sycophantic chatbots [17]. We have seen a lot of evidence of terrible behaviour and stupid decisions from rich people due to having no negative consequences for bad choices. The vast majority of the history of kings concerns bad decisions made by such people. A future where middle class and poor people can make the same bad decisions as rich people wouldn t be good. Good Things About ML Machine Learning (abbreviated as ML) can do useful things. It s not just Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT etc. There are also ML systems that can analyse images and other data sets. I have found ChatGPT to be very useful for making suggestions for improving blog posts. I don t get it to write anything just ask for suggestions. It has pointed out things that I missed such as when I didn t include the price when reviewing a car because the car in question was much more expensive than I will ever pay, the price wasn t relevant to me but would be to some readers. It has also made useful suggestions about structure of blog posts, repeating points, and having a good conclusion. It has some downsides which include trying to erase my voice from my writing, suggesting that the rhetorical question does email suck? is unprofessional. I have worked for a company that used ML systems to analyse driver performance and alert people if a driver is falling asleep, using a phone, or otherwise seems unable to drive safely. Their business model involved a human reviewing the images from the drivers the computer flagged and then determining who is actually doing the wrong thing. This seems a good use of the technology. I have also worked for a company that used ML systems to analyse the performance of bank employees and detect potentially fraudulent behaviour. Preventing crime seems to be clearly a good thing and in this case the manager of the employee in question would review the evidence to make sure that they weren t being falsely accused. Conclusion I don t think that the problems with managing the changes that so called AI is introducing are particularly new. An example of how society handles change that s worth considering is car safety. The seat belt first became mandatory for aeroplanes in some jurisdictions in 1928. The Model T Ford is widely regarded as the first vehicle to start a mass market for cars and it was released in 1925. So if society acted in a reasonable way then for the majority of mass market cars seat belts would have been a standard feature. However seat belts were first made compulsory in 1970 in Victoria Australia and there are still people who think that they are safer without seat belts! The delay in adoption of car seat belts is only one example of needless deaths caused by not taking reasonable measures for car safety but it s one that s easy to demonstrate and measure. The difference between past problems like car safety and the current problems of AI is that the AI problems will be more pervasive. Most of my history as a car driver and car passenger was in cars that are much less safe than cars made in the last 10 years. But partly through luck I ve never been in a serious crash so being in cars that wouldn t have given me a low probability of surviving a freeway speed crash didn t affect me. There is no possibility that through any combination of luck and skill someone could avoid the downsides of AI . If nothing else the results of elections will be affected and no-one can avoid that. As a society we really need to address the real issues related to AI which in some cases requires legislation.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
• [3] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
• [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/262hrtke
• [6] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a9.htm
• [7] https://www.vic.gov.au/safe-schools
• [8] https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/cfi110.pdf
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2cbhq737
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/254wy3br
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2cnx7t48
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/27wgwqu4
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/2354dewc
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/28vhagfz
• [15] https://innocenceproject.org/
• [16] https://fromtheprism.com/anthropic-30-billion
• [17] https://tinyurl.com/2cc6tyov

Review: What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2026
ISBN:	1-250-36474-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	339

What We Are Seeking is a bit hard to classify beyond science fiction. I think I would call it anthropological science fiction, but it's also a first contact story and a planetary colony story. It is a standalone novel (well, so far as I know; see later in the review for caveats). This is Cameron Reed's second novel after the excellent and memorable cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, first published in 1996 under Reed's former name of Raphael Carter. John Maraintha is a doctor from the world of Essius. He took what he thought was a temporary job on the Free Ship Edgar's Folly, where he's endured considerable culture shock. As the novel opens, John learns that the colonists on Scythia have requested a translator to talk to one of the native life forms, and a doctor since they're down to only one. John will be that doctor. The captain has decided, and by the rules of the free ships, John does not get a choice in the matter. The Scythian colony is about four hundred people, now located in a desert climate since the complex native life forms destroyed their previous settlement. The colonists are a split between Ischnurans and Zandaheans, two other human civilizations from the scatter of colony worlds left after Earth embraced AIs (aiyis here) and turned inward. Both of those groups marry, something John considers a moral abomination. Neither of them seem likely to understand Essian sexual ethics. More devastatingly, John had intended to spend some time as a ship doctor and then return home to a new place in Essian society. Once he lands on Scythia, the chances of that are gone; it is highly unlikely any ship would pick him up again and take him home. I have been trying to find the right books to compare What We Are Seeking with ever since I read it. The best I've come up with are Ursula K. Le Guin (particularly The Dispossessed), Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People, and Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate. The start of the book felt like an intentional revisiting of an earlier era of science fiction, with somewhat updated science and politics, but the last half of the book, where the action picks up considerably, is a meditation on gender, social systems, religion, and small-group politics. All of that is mixed with biological exploration and a first-contact story with some quite-alien aliens. This is the sort of novel where the protagonist's culture is as foreign to the reader as any of the other cultures he counters, so the reader is assembling several jigsaw puzzles at once. John is dropped into an established colony with its own social norms and established hierarchies. The one other outsider, the translator Sudharma Jain, is, as his name implies, a Jain who keeps very strict religious observances. Half of the colony is from something akin to a fundamentalist Christian religious sect that practices patriarchy and strict marriage codes. The other half is more gently sexist (but still sexist) and has its own tradition of a third gender that becomes central to the story. John, meanwhile, is a strong believer in the Essian approach to social organization: Any two partners of any gender freely have sex by mutual consent and without obligation, and family is based solely on blood relations. These beliefs do not fit comfortably together, even when people are trying (as they mostly do) to be welcoming. The first half of this book is very slow. This gives all of the characters space to breathe and become comfortable, and the characterization is superb, but it is a book to start when you're in the mood for something slow and observational. There is a plot that gradually becomes apparent, or rather there are several plots that are intertwined, but tension and urgency are mostly reserved for the second half of the book. Instead, the book opens with a lot of close observation of alien flora and fauna and the untangling of subtle social dynamics among the Scythians. There is also a visitor from earth, much to the distress of the Scythians. Earth presence means the ships will not return and the colony may be cut off from any sort of technological resupply. Despite speaking a common language, that visitor is as mutually alien to the other groups as they are to the native flora. Her life is fully integrated with aiyis, giving her essentially godlike powers and the ability to turn off inconvenient emotions and disregard anything she doesn't want to see. What she and the Earth aiyis are doing on the planet is one of the early mysteries. The dialogue in this book is truly excellent. Each characters has their own voice, there are fascinating digressions on different words that lead to tidbits of world-building, and some of the culture-specific idioms are delightful.

"I'm making a mess of this. None of that matters. Let me fall out the window and come in the door again. This is how my story ought to start:"

The challenges for the characters in this story are slow but deep ones: belonging and self-definition, the conflict between cultural tradition and personal circumstance, and the sacrifices required to live with small groups in situations where civil war is viscerally attractive. It has one of the most comprehensive and fascinating treatments of transgender issues that I've read in science fiction. Its commentary on current politics is subtle and estranged in the way that science fiction does best, but still pointed and satisfying. And, well, there are passages like this that I absolutely adore:

"I wouldn't go that far. It could be they are right, the universe we see exists because a mind like ours created it at least, a mind enough like ours that we can say it wants one thing and not another, and when it acts it does so with intent. That's as good an idea as any. But it is certainly not plausible that such a being believes that people everywhere should marry, or that men should never visit men, or no one should become a jess. Look at what they have created. The universe could have been nothing at all, or one atom of hydrogen floating in a void, or a diamond crystal infinite in all directions, if their mind cared for simplicity or tidiness. Instead we have stars and planets and black holes and nebulas. It could have all been cold and dead, but there is life. They could have made one species for each world, or just a few, which could have stayed the same forever, but instead we have millions and millions, all of which are changing every moment, varying among themselves and boiling off in all directions. Such a god is like an artist who fills up a library of sketchbooks with their drawings of strange creatures, and when every scrap of paper in the place is used up, goes back with a different color ink and scribbles over them again. They are obsessed with variation they gorge themselves with it and never grow full. Do you really think a mind like that could want us all to live in the same way?"

I had one problem with this book, though, and for me it was a big one: There is no ending. Reed effectively builds tension, gets me caring about all of the characters, sets up several problems, starts down a path towards resolution, and then the book just... ends. Long-time readers of my reviews will know that I'm a denouement fanatic. I want the scouring of the shire, I want the chapter set in the happily ever after, I want the catharsis of an ending. This made me so grumpy! To be clear, this is not sequel bait (at least so far as I can tell). I can write a philosophical defense of the ending. The types of problems and lives that Reed set up don't have clear endings; this is, to some extent, the point. We muddle through, and then those who come after us muddle through some more, and the cumulative effect is called human civilization. And there is some denouement; Reed doesn't leave the reader at a cliffhanger or anything that egregious. But still, I wanted the happy ending, even though that was unrealistic for the style of story this is, because I'm a happy ending reader. This is not an ending sort of book; it's the sort of book where I get a sinking feeling at the 95% mark because there aren't enough pages left for the number of remaining unresolved problems. I've gotten less annoyed in the days since I finished the book, and I can appreciate the thematic point made by how the book ends, but I still feel like it's worth an advance warning if you're a reader like I am. I would be delighted by a sequel, but it didn't feel like that was the intent. Apart from that, this was both excellent and rather unlike a lot of current science fiction. I think the closest comparison I can make among recent novels I've read is Sue Burke's Semiosis. What We Are Seeking has a similar sort of world-building, but I liked these characters so much more. It felt like a classic literary science fiction novel, but very much written in 2026. Highly recommended, just beware of the lack of closure. Content notes: Sexism, homophobia, stomach illness, and some religious abuse. Rating: 8 out of 10

Debian LTS/ELTS This was my hundred-forty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [DLA 4500-1] gimp security update to fix four CVEs related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
• [DLA 4503-1] evolution-data-server to fix one CVE related to a missing canonicalization of a file path.
• [DLA 4512-1] strongswan security update to fix one CVE related to a denial of service.
• [ELA-1656-1] gimp security update to fix four CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
• [ELA-1660-1] evolution-data-server security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch related to a missing canonicalization of a file path.
• [ELA-1665-1] strongswan security update to fix one CVE in Buster related to a denial of service.
• [ELA-1666-1] libvpx security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch related to a denial of service or potentially execution of arbitrary code.

I also worked on the check-advisories script and proposed a fix for cases where issues would be assigned to the coordinator instead of the person who forgot doing something. I also did some work for a kernel update and packages snapd and ldx on security-master and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Last but not least I started to work on gst-plugins-bad1.0 Debian Printing This month I uploaded a new upstream versions:

• epson-inkjet-printer-escpr to unstable.
• sane-airscan to unstable.
• printer-driver-oki to unstable.

Several packages take care of group lpadmin in their maintainer scripts. With the upload of version 260.1-1 of systemd there is now a central package (systemd systemd-standalone-sysusers systemd-sysusers) that takes care of this. Other dependencies like adduser can now be dropped. This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Lomiri This month I continued to work on unifying packaging on Debian and Ubuntu. This makes it easier to work on those packages independent of the used platform. I am also able to upload Debian packages to the corresponding Ubuntu PPA now. A small bug had to be fixed in the python script to allow the initial configuration in Launchpad. This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• libplayerone to experimental. For a list of other packages please see below.

I also uploaded lots of indi-drivers (libplayerone, libsbig, libricohcamerasdk, indi-asi, indi-eqmod, indi-fishcamp, indi-inovaplx, indi-pentax, indi-playerone, indi-sbig, indi-mi, libahp-xc, indi-aagcloudwatcher, indi-aok, indi-apogee, libapogee3, indi-nightscape, libasi, libinovasdk, libmicam, indi-avalon, indi-beefocus, indi-bresserexos2, indi-dsi, indi-ffmv, indi-fli, indi-gige, info-gphoto, indi-gpsd, indi-gpsnmea, indi-limesdr, indi-maxdomeii, indi-mgen, indi-rtklib, indi-shelyak, indi-starbook, indi-starbookten, indi-talon6, indi-weewx-json, indi-webcam, indi-orion-ssg3, indi-armadillo-playtypus ) to experimental to make progress with the indi-transition. No problems with those drivers appeared and the next step would be the upload of indi version 2.x to unstable. I hope this will happen soon, as new drivers are already waiting in the pipeline. There have been also four packages, that migrated to the official indi package and are no longer needed as 3rdparty drivers (indi-astrolink4, indi-astromechfoc, indi-dreamfocuser, indi-spectracyber). While working on these packages, I thought about testing them. Unfortunately I don t have enough hardware to really check out every package, so I can upload most of them only as is. In case anybody is interested in a better testing coverage and me being able to provide upstream patches, I would be very glad about hardware donations. Debian IoT This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• pywws to unstable.

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

• osmo-trx to unstable.

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

• cc-tool to unstable.
• mailio to unstable.
• gnupg-pkcs11-scd to unstable.
• odoo to unstable.

I also sponsored the upload of Matomo. Thanks a lot to William for preparing the package.

Charles Stross has a good theory of why AI is being pushed on corporations, really we need to just replace CEOs with LLMs [1]. This disturbing and amusing article describes how an Open AI investor appears to be having psychological problems releated to SCP based text generated by ChatGPT [2]. Definitely going to be a recursive problem as people who believe in it invest in it. interesting analysis of dbus and design for a more secure replacement [3]. Scott Jenson gave an insightful lecture for Canonical about future potential developments in the desktop UX [4]. Ploum wrote an insightful article about the problems caused by the Github monopoly [5]. Radicale sounds interesting. Niki Tonsky write an interesting article about the UI problems with Tahoe (latest MacOS release) due to trying to make an icon for everything [6]. They have a really good writing style as well as being well researched. Fil-C is an interesting project to compile C/C++ programs in a memory safe way, some of which can be considered a software equivalent of CHERI [7]. Brian Krebs wrote a long list of the ways that Trump has enabled corruption and a variety of other crimes including child sex abuse in the last year [8]. This video about designing a C64 laptop is a masterclass in computer design [9]. Salon has an interesting article about the abortion thought experiment that conservatives can t handle [10]. Ron Garrett wrote an insightful blog post about abortion [11]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about the potential of LLM systems for advertising and enshittification [12]. We need serious legislation about this ASAP!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/27q8xtuv
• [2] https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
• [3] https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-dbusSucks
• [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
• [5] https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html
• [6] https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
• [7] https://lwn.net/Articles/1042938/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2b4sh2s9
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5QQ0ECfwyE
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2d9l8wqm
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2yp94bpo
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/29o67syo

Review: This Brutal Moon, by Bethany Jacobs

Series:	Kindom Trilogy #3
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	December 2025
ISBN:	0-316-46373-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	497

This Brutal Moon is a science fiction thriller with bits of cyberpunk and space opera. It concludes the trilogy begun with These Burning Stars. The three books tell one story in three volumes, and ideally you would read all three in close succession. There is a massive twist in the first book that I am still not trying to spoil, so please forgive some vague description. At the conclusion of These Burning Stars, Jacobs had moved a lot of pieces into position, but it was not yet clear to me where the plot was going, or even if it would come to a solid ending in three volumes as promised by the series title. It does. This Brutal Moon opens with some of the political maneuvering that characterized These Burning Stars, but once things start happening, the reader gets all of the action they could wish for and then some. I am pleased to report that, at least as far as I'm concerned, Jacobs nails the ending. Not only is it deeply satisfying, the characterization in this book is so good, and adds so smoothly to the characterization of the previous books, that I saw the whole series in a new light. I thought this was one of the best science fiction series finales I've ever read. Take that with a grain of salt, since some of those reasons are specific to me and the mood I was in when I read it, but this is fantastic stuff. There is a lot of action at the climax of this book, split across at least four vantage points and linked in a grand strategy with chaotic surprises. I kept all of the pieces straight and understood how they were linked thanks to Jacobs's clear narration, which is impressive given the number of pieces in motion. That's not the heart of this book, though. The action climax is payoff for the readers who want to see some ass-kicking, and it does contain some moving and memorable moments, but it relies on some questionable villain behavior and a convenient plot device introduced only in this volume. The action-thriller payoff is competent but not, I think, outstanding. What put this book into a category of its own were the characters, and specifically how Jacobs assembles sweeping political consequences from characters who, each alone, would never have brought about such a thing, and in some cases had little desire for it. Looking back on the trilogy, I think Jacobs has captured, among all of the violence and action-movie combat and space-opera politics, the understanding that political upheaval is a relay race. The people who have the personalities to start it don't have the personality required to nurture it or supply it, and those who can end it are yet again different. This series is a fascinating catalog of political actors the instigator, the idealist, the pragmatist, the soldier, the one who supports her friends, and several varieties and intensities of leaders and it respects all of them without anointing any of them as the One True Revolutionary. The characters are larger than life, yes, and this series isn't going to win awards for gritty realism, but it's saying something satisfyingly complex about where we find courage and how a cause is pushed forward by different people with different skills and emotions at different points in time. Sometimes accidentally, and often in entirely unexpected ways. As before, the main story is interwoven with flashbacks. This time, we finally see the full story of the destruction of the moon of Jeve. The reader has known about this since the first volume, but Jacobs has a few more secrets to show (including, I will admit, setting up a plot device) and some pointed commentary on resource extraction economies. I think this part of the book was a bit obviously constructed, although the characterization was great and the visible junction points of the plot didn't stop me from enjoying the thrill when the pieces came together. But the best part of this book was the fact there was 10% of it left after the climax. Jacobs wrote an actual denouement, and it was everything I wanted and then some. We get proper story conclusions for each of the characters, several powerful emotional gut punches, some remarkably subtle and thoughtful discussion of political construction for a series that tended more towards space-opera action, and a conclusion for the primary series relationship that may not be to every reader's taste but was utterly, perfectly, beautifully correct for mine. I spent a whole lot of the last fifty pages of this book trying not to cry, in the best way. The character evolution over the course of this series is simply superb. Each character ages like fine wine, developing more depth, more nuance, but without merging. They become more themselves, which is an impressive feat across at least four very different major characters. You can see the vulnerabilities and know what put them there, you can see the strengths they developed to compensate, and you can see why they need the support the other characters provide. And each of them is so delightfully different. This was so good. This was so precisely the type of story that I was in the mood for, with just the type of tenderness for its characters that I wanted, that I am certain I am not objective about it. It will be one of those books where other people will complain about flaws that I didn't see or didn't care about because it was doing the things I wanted from it so perfectly. It's so good that it elevated the entire trilogy; the journey was so worth the ending. I'm afraid this review will be less than helpful because it's mostly nonspecific raving. This series is such a spoiler minefield that I'd need a full spoiler review to be specific, but my reaction is so driven by emotion that I'm not sure that would help if the characters didn't strike you the way that they struck me. I think the best advice I can offer is to say that if you liked the emotional tone of the end of These Burning Stars (not the big plot twist, the character reaction to the political goal that you learn drove the plot), stick with the series, because that's a sign of the questions Jacobs is asking. If you didn't like the characters at the end (not the middle) of the first novel, bail out, because you're going to get a lot more of that. Highly, highly recommended, and the best thing I've read all year, with the caveats that you should read the content notes, and that some people are going to bounce off this series because it's too intense and melodramatic. That intensity will not let up, so if that's not what you're in the mood for, wait on this trilogy until you are. Content notes: Graphic violence, torture, mentions of off-screen child sexual assault, a graphic corpse, and a whole lot of trauma. One somewhat grumbly postscript: This is the sort of book where I need to not read other people's reviews because I'll get too defensive of it (it's just a book I liked!). But there is one bit of review commentary I've seen about the trilogy that annoys me enough I have to mention it. Other reviewers seem to be latching on to the Jeveni (an ethnic group in the trilogy) as Space Jews and then having various feelings about that. I can see some parallels, I'm not going to say that it's completely wrong, but I also beg people to read about a fictional oppressed ethnic and religious minority and not immediately think "oh, they must be stand-ins for Jews." That's kind of weird? And people from the US, in particular, perhaps should not read a story about an ethnic group enslaved due to their productive skill and economic value and think "they must be analogous to Jews, there are no other possible parallels here." There are a lot of other comparisons that can be made, including to the commonalities between the methods many different oppressed minorities have used to survive and preserve their culture. Rating: 10 out of 10

Informative video about the way corporations charge different rates based on location and even type of device used on the web site [1]. This should be illegal everywhere! Bruce Schneier with Heather Adkins and Gadi Evron wrote an insightful post about AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity, the future seems grim [2]. Slaughterbots is an interesting Dust SciFi movie exploring the future of autonoms weapons [3]. Arstechnica has an intersting article on a genetically engineered plant with a more efficient system for photosynthesis [4]. If this goes to plan it could revolutionise agriculture! David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the Seldon Paradox [5]. Also he wrote the final book in the Foundation series so he is the current living export on Hari Seldon. Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post about the pivot away from fossil fuels and the future of computers without Moore s Law [6]. Audrey Woods wrote an insightful article about the end of Moore s Law, we can get more transistors from multichip modules bit it s only small linear improvements not exponential [7]. Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan wrote an interesting article about AI s OODA loop problem, it s a good way of thinking about some of these issues [8]. I think that LLM security is a losing game. Getting them to mostly not tell people how to commit crimes is the limit of controls. Manga telling the story of Revelations in all it s drug inspired madness [9]. When I read the entire Bible I skipped Revelations because it s too obviously the product of mental illness. CNN has an interesting article about bitcoin ARMs which are almost exclusively used for crime [10].

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PL1d0xiHRhg
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/242xna4c
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2yyj3tgz
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2ytuvkfp
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2b2a98kr
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2a6csfk9
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2y7zk5zz
• [9] https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/apocamon/
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/27ge7gcf

Review: On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs

Series:	Kindom Trilogy #2
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	October 2024
ISBN:	0-316-46362-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	444

On Vicious Worlds is a science fiction thriller with bits of cyberpunk and a direct sequel to These Burning Stars. This is one of those series where each book has massive spoilers for the previous book and builds on characters and situations from that book. I would not read it out of order. It is Bethany Jacobs's second novel. Whooboy, how to review this without spoilers. There are so many major twists in the first book with lingering consequences that it's nearly impossible. I said at the end of my review of These Burning Stars that I was impressed with the ending for reasons that I can't reveal. One thread of this book follows the aftermath: What do you do after the plan? If you have honed yourself for one purpose, can you repurpose yourself? The other thread of the book is a murder mystery. The protectors of the community are being picked off, one by one. The culprit might be a hacker so good that they are causing Jun, the expert hacker of the first book, serious problems. Meanwhile, the political fault lines of the community are cracking open under pressure, and the leaders are untested, exhausted, and navigating difficult emotional terrain. These two story threads alternate, and interspersed are yet more flashbacks. As with the first book, the flashbacks fill in the backstory of Chono and and Esek. This time, though, we get Six's viewpoint. The good news is that On Vicious Worlds tones down the sociopathy considerably without letting up on the political twists. This is the book where Chono comes into her own. She has much more freedom of action, despite being at the center of complicated and cut-throat politics, and I thoroughly enjoyed her principled solidity. She gets a chance to transcend her previous role as an abuse victim, and it's worth the wait. The bad news is that this is very much a middle book of a trilogy. While there are a lot of bloody battles, emotional drama, political betrayals, and plot twists, the series plot has not advanced much by the end of the book. I would not say the characters were left in the same position they started the character development is real and the perils have changed but neither would I say that any of the open questions from These Burning Stars have resolved. The last book I read used science-fiction world-building to tell a story about moral philosophy that was somewhat less drama-filled than one might have expected. That is so not the case here. On Vicious Worlds is, if anything, even more dramatic than the first book of the series. In Chono's thread, the slow burn attempt to understand Six's motives has been replaced with almost non-stop melodrama, full of betrayals, reversals, risky attempts, and emotional roller coasters. Jun's part of the story is a bit more sedate at first, but there too the interpersonal drama setting is headed towards 10. This is the novel equivalent of an action movie. Jun, and her part of the story, are fine. I like the new viewpoint character, I find their system of governance somewhat interesting (although highly optimized for small groups), and I think the climax worked. But I'm invested in this series for Chono and Six. Both of them, but particularly Six, are absurdly over the top, ten people's worth of drama stuffed into one character, unable to communicate in anything less than dramatic gestures and absurd plans, but I find them magnetically fascinating. I'm not sure if written characters can have charisma, but if so, they have it. I liked this entry in the series, but then I also liked the first book. It's trauma-filled and dramatic and involved a bit too much bloody maiming for my tastes, but this whole series is about revolutions and what happens when you decide to fight, and sometimes I'm in the mood for complicated and damaged action heroes who loathe oppression and want to kill some people. This is the sort of series book that will neither be the reason you read the series nor the reason why you stop reading. If you enjoyed These Burning Stars, this is more of the same, with arguably better character development but less plot catharsis. If you didn't like These Burning Stars, this probably won't change your mind, although if you hated it specifically because of Esek's sociopathy, I think you would find this book more congenial. But maybe not; Jacobs is still the same author, and most of the characters in this series are made of sharp edges. I'm still in; I have already pre-ordered the next book. Followed by This Brutal Moon, due out in December of 2025 and advertised as the conclusion. Rating: 7 out of 10

The discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils in the spring of 2024 shocked the open source community, raising critical questions about software supply chain security. This post explores whether better Debian packaging practices could have detected this threat, offering a guide to auditing packages and suggesting future improvements. The XZ backdoor in versions 5.6.0/5.6.1 made its way briefly into many major Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora, but luckily didn t reach that many actual users, as the backdoored releases were quickly removed thanks to the heroic diligence of Andres Freund. We are all extremely lucky that he detected a half a second performance regression in SSH, cared enough to trace it down, discovered malicious code in the XZ library loaded by SSH, and reported promtly to various security teams for quick coordinated actions. This episode makes software engineers pondering the following questions:

• Why didn t any Linux distro packagers notice anything odd when importing the new XZ version 5.6.0/5.6.1 from upstream?
• Is the current software supply-chain in the most popular Linux distros easy to audit?
• Could we have similar backdoors lurking that haven t been detected yet?

As a Debian Developer, I decided to audit the xz package in Debian, share my methodology and findings in this post, and also suggest some improvements on how the software supply-chain security could be tightened in Debian specifically. Note that the scope here is only to inspect how Debian imports software from its upstreams, and how they are distributed to Debian s users. This excludes the whole story of how to assess if an upstream project is following software development security best practices. This post doesn t discuss how to operate an individual computer running Debian to ensure it remains untampered as there are plenty of guides on that already.

Downloading Debian and upstream source packages Let s start by working backwards from what the Debian package repositories offer for download. As auditing binaries is extremely complicated, we skip that, and assume the Debian build hosts are trustworthy and reliably building binaries from the source packages, and the focus should be on auditing the source code packages. As with everything in Debian, there are multiple tools and ways to do the same thing, but in this post only one (and hopefully the best) way to do something is presented for brevity. The first step is to download the latest version and some past versions of the package from the Debian archive, which is easiest done with debsnap. The following command will download all Debian source packages of xz-utils from Debian release 5.2.4-1 onwards:

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$ debsnap --verbose --first 5.2.4-1 xz-utils Getting json https://snapshot.debian.org/mr/package/xz-utils/ ... Getting dsc file xz-utils_5.2.4-1.dsc: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/a98271e4291bed8df795ce04d9dc8e4ce959462d Getting file xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz.asc: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/59ccbfb2405abe510999afef4b374cad30c09275 Getting file xz-utils_5.2.4-1.debian.tar.xz: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/667c14fd9409ca54c397b07d2d70140d6297393f source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.2.4-1.dsc: Good signature found validating xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz validating xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz.asc validating xz-utils_5.2.4-1.debian.tar.xz All files validated successfully.

$ debsnap --verbose --first 5.2.4-1 xz-utils
Getting json https://snapshot.debian.org/mr/package/xz-utils/
...
Getting dsc file xz-utils_5.2.4-1.dsc: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/a98271e4291bed8df795ce04d9dc8e4ce959462d
Getting file xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz.asc: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/59ccbfb2405abe510999afef4b374cad30c09275
Getting file xz-utils_5.2.4-1.debian.tar.xz: https://snapshot.debian.org/file/667c14fd9409ca54c397b07d2d70140d6297393f
source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.2.4-1.dsc:
Good signature found
validating xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz
validating xz-utils_5.2.4.orig.tar.xz.asc
validating xz-utils_5.2.4-1.debian.tar.xz
All files validated successfully.

Once debsnap completes there will be a subfolder source-<package name> with the following types of files:

• *.orig.tar.xz: source code from upstream
• *.orig.tar.xz.asc: detached signature (if upstream signs their releases)
• *.debian.tar.xz: Debian packaging source, i.e. the debian/ subdirectory contents
• *.dsc: Debian source control file, including signature by Debian Developer/Maintainer

Example:

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$ ls -1 source-xz-utils/ ... xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz.asc xz-utils_5.6.4-1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.6.4-1.dsc xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz.asc xz-utils_5.8.0-1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0-1.dsc xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc xz-utils_5.8.1-1.1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1-1.1.dsc xz-utils_5.8.1-1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1-1.dsc xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc

$ ls -1 source-xz-utils/
...
xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz.asc
xz-utils_5.6.4-1.debian.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.6.4-1.dsc
xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz.asc
xz-utils_5.8.0-1.debian.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.0-1.dsc
xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc
xz-utils_5.8.1-1.1.debian.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.1-1.1.dsc
xz-utils_5.8.1-1.debian.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.1-1.dsc
xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc

Verifying authenticity of upstream and Debian sources using OpenPGP signatures As seen in the output of debsnap, it already automatically verifies that the downloaded files match the OpenPGP signatures. To have full clarity on what files were authenticated with what keys, we should verify the Debian packagers signature with:

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$ gpg --verify --auto-key-retrieve --keyserver hkps://keyring.debian.org xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc gpg: Signature made Fri Oct 3 22:04:44 2025 UTC gpg: using RSA key 57892E705233051337F6FDD105641F175712FA5B gpg: requesting key 05641F175712FA5B from hkps://keyring.debian.org gpg: key 7B96E8162A8CF5D1: public key "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior" imported gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: imported: 1 gpg: Good signature from "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior" [unknown] gpg: aka "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>" [unknown] gpg: aka "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>" [unknown] gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature! gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner. Primary key fingerprint: 6425 4695 FFF0 AA44 66CC 19E6 7B96 E816 2A8C F5D1 Subkey fingerprint: 5789 2E70 5233 0513 37F6 FDD1 0564 1F17 5712 FA5B

$ gpg --verify --auto-key-retrieve --keyserver hkps://keyring.debian.org xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc
gpg: Signature made Fri Oct 3 22:04:44 2025 UTC
gpg: using RSA key 57892E705233051337F6FDD105641F175712FA5B
gpg: requesting key 05641F175712FA5B from hkps://keyring.debian.org
gpg: key 7B96E8162A8CF5D1: public key "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
gpg: Good signature from "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 6425 4695 FFF0 AA44 66CC 19E6 7B96 E816 2A8C F5D1
Subkey fingerprint: 5789 2E70 5233 0513 37F6 FDD1 0564 1F17 5712 FA5B

The upstream tarball signature (if available) can be verified with:

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$ gpg --verify --auto-key-retrieve xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc gpg: assuming signed data in 'xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz' gpg: Signature made Thu Apr 3 11:38:23 2025 UTC gpg: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620 gpg: key 38EE757D69184620: public key "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" imported gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: imported: 1 gpg: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" [unknown] gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature! gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner. Primary key fingerprint: 3690 C240 CE51 B467 0D30 AD1C 38EE 757D 6918 4620

$ gpg --verify --auto-key-retrieve xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc
gpg: assuming signed data in 'xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz'
gpg: Signature made Thu Apr 3 11:38:23 2025 UTC
gpg: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620
gpg: key 38EE757D69184620: public key "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
gpg: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 3690 C240 CE51 B467 0D30 AD1C 38EE 757D 6918 4620

Note that this only proves that there is a key that created a valid signature for this content. The authenticity of the keys themselves need to be validated separately before trusting they in fact are the keys of these people. That can be done by checking e.g. the upstream website for what key fingerprints they published, or the Debian keyring for Debian Developers and Maintainers, or by relying on the OpenPGP web-of-trust .

Verifying authenticity of upstream sources by comparing checksums In case the upstream in question does not publish release signatures, the second best way to verify the authenticity of the sources used in Debian is to download the sources directly from upstream and compare that the sha256 checksums match. This should be done using the debian/watch file inside the Debian packaging, which defines where the upstream source is downloaded from. Continuing on the example situation above, we can unpack the latest Debian sources, enter and then run uscan to download:

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$ tar xvf xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz ... debian/rules debian/source/format debian/source.lintian-overrides debian/symbols debian/tests/control debian/tests/testsuite debian/upstream/signing-key.asc debian/watch ... $ uscan --download-current-version --destdir /tmp Newest version of xz-utils on remote site is 5.8.1, specified download version is 5.8.1 gpgv: Signature made Thu Apr 3 11:38:23 2025 UTC gpgv: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620 gpgv: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" Successfully symlinked /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz to /tmp/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.

$ tar xvf xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz
...
debian/rules
debian/source/format
debian/source.lintian-overrides
debian/symbols
debian/tests/control
debian/tests/testsuite
debian/upstream/signing-key.asc
debian/watch
...
$ uscan --download-current-version --destdir /tmp
Newest version of xz-utils on remote site is 5.8.1, specified download version is 5.8.1
gpgv: Signature made Thu Apr 3 11:38:23 2025 UTC
gpgv: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620
gpgv: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>"
Successfully symlinked /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz to /tmp/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.

The original files downloaded from upstream are now in /tmp along with the files renamed to follow Debian conventions. Using everything downloaded so far the sha256 checksums can be compared across the files and also to what the .dsc file advertised:

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$ ls -1 /tmp/ xz-5.8.1.tar.xz xz-5.8.1.tar.xz.sig xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc $ sha256sum xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz 0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz 0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz $ grep -A 3 Sha256 xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc Checksums-Sha256: 0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e 1461872 xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz 4138f4ceca1aa7fd2085fb15a23f6d495d27bca6d3c49c429a8520ea622c27ae 833 xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc 3ed458da17e4023ec45b2c398480ed4fe6a7bfc1d108675ec837b5ca9a4b5ccb 24648 xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz

$ ls -1 /tmp/
xz-5.8.1.tar.xz
xz-5.8.1.tar.xz.sig
xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz
xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc
$ sha256sum xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz
0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz
0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e /tmp/xz-5.8.1.tar.xz
$ grep -A 3 Sha256 xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc
Checksums-Sha256:
0b54f79df85912504de0b14aec7971e3f964491af1812d83447005807513cd9e 1461872 xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz
4138f4ceca1aa7fd2085fb15a23f6d495d27bca6d3c49c429a8520ea622c27ae 833 xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc
3ed458da17e4023ec45b2c398480ed4fe6a7bfc1d108675ec837b5ca9a4b5ccb 24648 xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz

In the example above the checksum 0b54f79df85... is the same across the files, so it is a match.

Repackaged upstream sources can t be verified as easily Note that uscan may in rare cases repackage some upstream sources, for example to exclude files that don t adhere to Debian s copyright and licensing requirements. Those files and paths would be listed under the Files-Excluded section in the debian/copyright file. There are also other situations where the file that represents the upstream sources in Debian isn t bit-by-bit the same as what upstream published. If checksums don t match, an experienced Debian Developer should review all package settings (e.g. debian/source/options) to see if there was a valid and intentional reason for divergence.

Reviewing changes between two source packages using diffoscope Diffoscope is an incredibly capable and handy tool to compare arbitrary files. For example, to view a report in HTML format of the differences between two XZ releases, run:

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diffoscope --html-dir xz-utils-5.6.4_vs_5.8.0 xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz browse xz-utils-5.6.4_vs_5.8.0/index.html

diffoscope --html-dir xz-utils-5.6.4_vs_5.8.0 xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz
browse xz-utils-5.6.4_vs_5.8.0/index.html

If the changes are extensive, and you want to use a LLM to help spot potential security issues, generate the report of both the upstream and Debian packaging differences in Markdown with:

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diffoscope --markdown diffoscope-debian.md xz-utils_5.6.4-1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz diffoscope --markdown diffoscope.md xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz

diffoscope --markdown diffoscope-debian.md xz-utils_5.6.4-1.debian.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz
diffoscope --markdown diffoscope.md xz-utils_5.6.4.orig.tar.xz xz-utils_5.8.0.orig.tar.xz

The Markdown files created above can then be passed to your favorite LLM, along with a prompt such as:

Based on the attached diffoscope output for a new Debian package version compared with the previous one, list all suspicious changes that might have introduced a backdoor, followed by other potential security issues. If there are none, list a short summary of changes as the conclusion.

Reviewing Debian source packages in version control As of today only 93% of all Debian source packages are tracked in git on Debian s GitLab instance at salsa.debian.org. Some key packages such as Coreutils and Bash are not using version control at all, as their maintainers apparently don t see value in using git for Debian packaging, and the Debian Policy does not require it. Thus, the only reliable and consistent way to audit changes in Debian packages is to compare the full versions from the archive as shown above. However, for packages that are hosted on Salsa, one can view the git history to gain additional insight into what exactly changed, when and why. For packages that are using version control, their location can be found in the Git-Vcs header in the debian/control file. For xz-utils the location is salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils. Note that the Debian policy does not state anything about how Salsa should be used, or what git repository layout or development practices to follow. In practice most packages follow the DEP-14 proposal, and use git-buildpackage as the tool for managing changes and pushing and pulling them between upstream and salsa.debian.org. To get the XZ Utils source, run:

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$ gbp clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils.git gbp:info: Cloning from 'https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils.git'

$ gbp clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils.git
gbp:info: Cloning from 'https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xz-utils.git'

At the time of writing this post the git history shows:

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$ git log --graph --oneline * bb787585 (HEAD -> debian/unstable, origin/debian/unstable, origin/HEAD) Prepare 5.8.1-2 * 4b769547 d: Remove the symlinks from -dev package. * a39f3428 Correct the nocheck build profile * 1b806b8d Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1.1 * b1cad34b Prepare 5.8.1-1 * a8646015 Import 5.8.1 * 2808ec2d Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.1' \ * fa1e8796 (origin/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) New upstream version 5.8.1 * a522a226 Bump version and soname for 5.8.1 * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1 * 513cabcf Tests: Call lzma_code() in smaller chunks in fuzz_common.h * 48440e24 Tests: Add a fuzzing target for the multithreaded .xz decoder * 0c80045a liblzma: mt dec: Fix lack of parallelization in single-shot decoding * 81880488 liblzma: mt dec: Don't modify thr->in_size in the worker thread * d5a2ffe4 liblzma: mt dec: Don't free the input buffer too early (CVE-2025-31115) * c0c83596 liblzma: mt dec: Simplify by removing the THR_STOP state * 831b55b9 liblzma: mt dec: Fix a comment * b9d168ee liblzma: Add assertions to lzma_bufcpy() * c8e0a489 DOS: Update Makefile to fix the build * 307c02ed sysdefs.h: Avoid <stdalign.h> even with C11 compilers * 7ce38b31 Update THANKS * 688e51bd Translations: Update the Croatian translation * a6b54dde Prepare 5.8.0-1. * 77d9470f Add 5.8 symbols. * 9268eb66 Import 5.8.0 * 6f85ef4f Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.0' \ \ * afba662b New upstream version 5.8.0 / * 173fb5c6 doc/SHA256SUMS: Add 5.8.0 * db9258e8 Bump version and soname for 5.8.0 * bfb752a3 Add NEWS for 5.8.0 * 6ccbb904 Translations: Run "make -C po update-po" * 891a5f05 Translations: Run po4a/update-po * 4f52e738 Translations: Partially fix overtranslation in Serbian man pages * ff5d9447 liblzma: Count the extra bytes in LZMA/LZMA2 decoder memory usage * 943b012d liblzma: Use SSE2 intrinsics instead of memcpy() in dict_repeat()

$ git log --graph --oneline
* bb787585 (HEAD -> debian/unstable, origin/debian/unstable, origin/HEAD) Prepare 5.8.1-2
* 4b769547 d: Remove the symlinks from -dev package.
* a39f3428 Correct the nocheck build profile
* 1b806b8d Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1.1
* b1cad34b Prepare 5.8.1-1
* a8646015 Import 5.8.1
* 2808ec2d Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.1'
 \
  * fa1e8796 (origin/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) New upstream version 5.8.1
  * a522a226 Bump version and soname for 5.8.1
  * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1
  * 513cabcf Tests: Call lzma_code() in smaller chunks in fuzz_common.h
  * 48440e24 Tests: Add a fuzzing target for the multithreaded .xz decoder
  * 0c80045a liblzma: mt dec: Fix lack of parallelization in single-shot decoding
  * 81880488 liblzma: mt dec: Don't modify thr->in_size in the worker thread
  * d5a2ffe4 liblzma: mt dec: Don't free the input buffer too early (CVE-2025-31115)
  * c0c83596 liblzma: mt dec: Simplify by removing the THR_STOP state
  * 831b55b9 liblzma: mt dec: Fix a comment
  * b9d168ee liblzma: Add assertions to lzma_bufcpy()
  * c8e0a489 DOS: Update Makefile to fix the build
  * 307c02ed sysdefs.h: Avoid <stdalign.h> even with C11 compilers
  * 7ce38b31 Update THANKS
  * 688e51bd Translations: Update the Croatian translation
*   a6b54dde Prepare 5.8.0-1.
*   77d9470f Add 5.8 symbols.
*   9268eb66 Import 5.8.0
*   6f85ef4f Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.0'
 \ \
  *   afba662b New upstream version 5.8.0
   /
  * 173fb5c6 doc/SHA256SUMS: Add 5.8.0
  * db9258e8 Bump version and soname for 5.8.0
  * bfb752a3 Add NEWS for 5.8.0
  * 6ccbb904 Translations: Run "make -C po update-po"
  * 891a5f05 Translations: Run po4a/update-po
  * 4f52e738 Translations: Partially fix overtranslation in Serbian man pages
  * ff5d9447 liblzma: Count the extra bytes in LZMA/LZMA2 decoder memory usage
  * 943b012d liblzma: Use SSE2 intrinsics instead of memcpy() in dict_repeat()

This shows both the changes on the debian/unstable branch as well as the intermediate upstream import branch, and the actual real upstream development branch. See my Debian source packages in git explainer for details of what these branches are used for. To only view changes on the Debian branch, run git log --graph --oneline --first-parent or git log --graph --oneline -- debian. The Debian branch should only have changes inside the debian/ subdirectory, which is easy to check with:

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$ git diff --stat upstream/v5.8 debian/README.source 16 +++ debian/autogen.sh 32 +++++ debian/changelog 949 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ... debian/upstream/signing-key.asc 52 +++++++++ debian/watch 4 + debian/xz-utils.README.Debian 47 ++++++++ debian/xz-utils.docs 6 + debian/xz-utils.install 28 +++++ debian/xz-utils.postinst 19 +++ debian/xz-utils.prerm 10 ++ debian/xzdec.docs 6 + debian/xzdec.install 4 + 33 files changed, 2014 insertions(+)

$ git diff --stat upstream/v5.8
debian/README.source   16 +++
debian/autogen.sh   32 +++++
debian/changelog   949 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
...
debian/upstream/signing-key.asc   52 +++++++++
debian/watch   4 +
debian/xz-utils.README.Debian   47 ++++++++
debian/xz-utils.docs   6 +
debian/xz-utils.install   28 +++++
debian/xz-utils.postinst   19 +++
debian/xz-utils.prerm   10 ++
debian/xzdec.docs   6 +
debian/xzdec.install   4 +
33 files changed, 2014 insertions(+)

All the files outside the debian/ directory originate from upstream, and for example running git blame on them should show only upstream commits:

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$ git blame CMakeLists.txt 22af94128 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-12 17:09:10 +0200 1) # SPDX-License-Identifier: 0BSD 22af94128 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-12 17:09:10 +0200 2) 7e3493d40 (Lasse Collin 2020-02-24 23:38:16 +0200 3) ############### 7e3493d40 (Lasse Collin 2020-02-24 23:38:16 +0200 4) # 426bdc709 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-17 21:45:07 +0200 5) # CMake support for building XZ Utils

$ git blame CMakeLists.txt
22af94128 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-12 17:09:10 +0200 1) # SPDX-License-Identifier: 0BSD
22af94128 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-12 17:09:10 +0200 2)
7e3493d40 (Lasse Collin 2020-02-24 23:38:16 +0200 3) ###############
7e3493d40 (Lasse Collin 2020-02-24 23:38:16 +0200 4) #
426bdc709 (Lasse Collin 2024-02-17 21:45:07 +0200 5) # CMake support for building XZ Utils

If the upstream in question signs commits or tags, they can be verified with e.g.:

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$ git verify-tag v5.6.2 gpg: Signature made Wed 29 May 2024 09:39:42 AM PDT gpg: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620 gpg: issuer "lasse.collin@tukaani.org" gpg: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" [expired] gpg: Note: This key has expired!

$ git verify-tag v5.6.2
gpg: Signature made Wed 29 May 2024 09:39:42 AM PDT
gpg: using RSA key 3690C240CE51B4670D30AD1C38EE757D69184620
gpg: issuer "lasse.collin@tukaani.org"
gpg: Good signature from "Lasse Collin <lasse.collin@tukaani.org>" [expired]
gpg: Note: This key has expired!

The main benefit of reviewing changes in git is the ability to see detailed information about each individual change, instead of just staring at a massive list of changes without any explanations. In this example, to view all the upstream commits since the previous import to Debian, one would view the commit range from afba662b New upstream version 5.8.0 to fa1e8796 New upstream version 5.8.1 with git log --reverse -p afba662b...fa1e8796. However, a far superior way to review changes would be to browse this range using a visual git history viewer, such as gitk. Either way, looking at one code change at a time and reading the git commit message makes the review much easier.

Comparing Debian source packages to git contents As stated in the beginning of the previous section, and worth repeating, there is no guarantee that the contents in the Debian packaging git repository matches what was actually uploaded to Debian. While the tag2upload project in Debian is getting more and more popular, Debian is still far from having any system to enforce that the git repository would be in sync with the Debian archive contents. To detect such differences we can run diff across the Debian source packages downloaded with debsnap earlier (path source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian) and the git repository cloned in the previous section (path xz-utils):

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$ diff -u source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/ xz-utils/debian/ diff -u source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/changelog xz-utils/debian/changelog --- debsnap/source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/changelog 2025-10-03 09:32:16.000000000 -0700 +++ xz-utils/debian/changelog 2025-10-12 12:18:04.623054758 -0700 @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ * Remove the symlinks from -dev, pointing to the lib package. (Closes: #1109354) - -- Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc> Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:32:16 +0200 + -- Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc> Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:36:59 +0200

$ diff -u source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/ xz-utils/debian/
diff -u source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/changelog xz-utils/debian/changelog
--- debsnap/source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian/changelog 2025-10-03 09:32:16.000000000 -0700
+++ xz-utils/debian/changelog 2025-10-12 12:18:04.623054758 -0700
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 * Remove the symlinks from -dev, pointing to the lib package.
 (Closes: #1109354)

- -- Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc> Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:32:16 +0200
+ -- Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc> Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:36:59 +0200

In the case above diff revealed that the timestamp in the changelog in the version uploaded to Debian is different from what was committed to git. This is not malicious, just a mistake by the maintainer who probably didn t run gbp tag immediately after upload, but instead some dch command and ended up with having a different timestamps in the git compared to what was actually uploaded to Debian.

Creating syntetic Debian packaging git repositories If no Debian packaging git repository exists, or if it is lagging behind what was uploaded to Debian s archive, one can use git-buildpackage s import-dscs feature to create synthetic git commits based on the files downloaded by debsnap, ensuring the git contents fully matches what was uploaded to the archive. To import a single version there is gbp import-dsc (no s at the end), of which an example invocation would be:

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$ gbp import-dsc --verbose ../source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc Version '5.8.1-2' imported under '/home/otto/debian/xz-utils-2025-09-29'

$ gbp import-dsc --verbose ../source-xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.dsc
Version '5.8.1-2' imported under '/home/otto/debian/xz-utils-2025-09-29'

Example commit history from a repository with commits added with gbp import-dsc:

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$ git log --graph --oneline * 86aed07b (HEAD -> debian/unstable, tag: debian/5.8.1-2, origin/debian/unstable) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-2 * f111d93b (tag: debian/5.8.1-1.1) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1.1 * 1106e19b (tag: debian/5.8.1-1) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1 \ * 08edbe38 (tag: upstream/5.8.1, origin/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) Import Upstream version 5.8.1 \ * a522a226 (tag: v5.8.1) Bump version and soname for 5.8.1 * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1 * 513cabcf Tests: Call lzma_code() in smaller chunks in fuzz_common.h

$ git log --graph --oneline
* 86aed07b (HEAD -> debian/unstable, tag: debian/5.8.1-2, origin/debian/unstable) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-2
* f111d93b (tag: debian/5.8.1-1.1) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1.1
* 1106e19b (tag: debian/5.8.1-1) Import Debian changes 5.8.1-1
 \
  * 08edbe38 (tag: upstream/5.8.1, origin/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) Import Upstream version 5.8.1
   \
    * a522a226 (tag: v5.8.1) Bump version and soname for 5.8.1
    * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1
    * 513cabcf Tests: Call lzma_code() in smaller chunks in fuzz_common.h

An online example repository with only a few missing uploads added using gbp import-dsc can be viewed at salsa.debian.org/otto/xz-utils-2025-09-29/-/network/debian%2Funstable An example repository that was fully crafted using gbp import-dscs can be viewed at salsa.debian.org/otto/xz-utils-gbp-import-dscs-debsnap-generated/-/network/debian%2Flatest. There exists also dgit, which in a similar way creates a synthetic git history to allow viewing the Debian archive contents via git tools. However, its focus is on producing new package versions, so fetching a package with dgit that has not had the history recorded in dgit earlier will only show the latest versions:

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$ dgit clone xz-utils canonical suite name for unstable is sid starting new git history last upload to archive: NO git hash downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz... downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc... downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz... dpkg-source: info: extracting xz-utils in unpacked dpkg-source: info: unpacking xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz dpkg-source: info: unpacking xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz synthesised git commit from .dsc 5.8.1-2 HEAD is now at f9bcaf7 xz-utils (5.8.1-2) unstable; urgency=medium dgit ok: ready for work in xz-utils $ dgit/sid git log --graph --oneline * f9bcaf7 xz-utils (5.8.1-2) unstable; urgency=medium 9 days ago (HEAD -> dgit/sid, dgit/dgit/sid) \ * 11d3a62 Import xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz 9 days ago * 15dcd95 Import xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz 6 months ago

$ dgit clone xz-utils
canonical suite name for unstable is sid
starting new git history
last upload to archive: NO git hash
downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz...
downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz.asc...
downloading http://ftp.debian.org/debian//pool/main/x/xz-utils/xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz...
dpkg-source: info: extracting xz-utils in unpacked
dpkg-source: info: unpacking xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz
dpkg-source: info: unpacking xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz
synthesised git commit from .dsc 5.8.1-2
HEAD is now at f9bcaf7 xz-utils (5.8.1-2) unstable; urgency=medium
dgit ok: ready for work in xz-utils
$ dgit/sid   git log --graph --oneline
* f9bcaf7 xz-utils (5.8.1-2) unstable; urgency=medium 9 days ago (HEAD -> dgit/sid, dgit/dgit/sid)
 \
  * 11d3a62 Import xz-utils_5.8.1-2.debian.tar.xz 9 days ago
* 15dcd95 Import xz-utils_5.8.1.orig.tar.xz 6 months ago

Unlike git-buildpackage managed git repositories, the dgit managed repositories cannot incorporate the upstream git history and are thus less useful for auditing the full software supply-chain in git.

Comparing upstream source packages to git contents Equally important to the note in the beginning of the previous section, one must also keep in mind that the upstream release source packages, often called release tarballs, are not guaranteed to have the exact same contents as the upstream git repository. Projects might strip out test data or extra development files from their release tarballs to avoid shipping unnecessary files to users, or projects might add documentation files or versioning information into the tarball that isn t stored in git. While a small minority, there are also upstreams that don t use git at all, so the plain files in a release tarball is still the lowest common denominator for all open source software projects, and exporting and importing source code needs to interface with it. In the case of XZ, the release tarball has additional version info and also a sizeable amount of pregenerated compiler configuration files. Detecting and comparing differences between git contents and tarballs can of course be done manually by running diff across an unpacked tarball and a checked out git repository. If using git-buildpackage, the difference between the git contents and tarball contents can be made visible directly in the import commit. In this XZ example, consider this git history:

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* b1cad34b Prepare 5.8.1-1 * a8646015 Import 5.8.1 * 2808ec2d Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.1' \ * fa1e8796 (debian/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) New upstream version 5.8.1 * a522a226 (tag: v5.8.1) Bump version and soname for 5.8.1 * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1

* b1cad34b Prepare 5.8.1-1
* a8646015 Import 5.8.1
* 2808ec2d Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/5.8.1'
 \
  * fa1e8796 (debian/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) New upstream version 5.8.1
  * a522a226 (tag: v5.8.1) Bump version and soname for 5.8.1
  * 1c462c2a Add NEWS for 5.8.1

The commit a522a226 was the upstream release commit, which upstream also tagged v5.8.1. The merge commit 2808ec2d applied the new upstream import branch contents on the Debian branch. Between these is the special commit fa1e8796 New upstream version 5.8.1 tagged upstream/v5.8. This commit and tag exists only in the Debian packaging repository, and they show what is the contents imported into Debian. This is generated automatically by git-buildpackage when running git import-orig --uscan for Debian packages with the correct settings in debian/gbp.conf. By viewing this commit one can see exactly how the upstream release tarball differs from the upstream git contents (if at all). In the case of XZ, the difference is substantial, and shown below in full as it is very interesting:

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$ git show --stat fa1e8796 commit fa1e8796dabd91a0f667b9e90f9841825225413a (debian/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8) Author: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc> Date: Thu Apr 3 22:58:39 2025 +0200 New upstream version 5.8.1 .codespellrc 30 - .gitattributes 8 - .github/workflows/ci.yml 163 - .github/workflows/freebsd.yml 32 - .github/workflows/netbsd.yml 32 - .github/workflows/openbsd.yml 35 - .github/workflows/solaris.yml 32 - .github/workflows/windows-ci.yml 124 - .gitignore 113 - ABOUT-NLS 1 + ChangeLog 17392 +++++++++++++++++++++ Makefile.in 1097 +++++++ aclocal.m4 1353 ++++++++ build-aux/ci_build.bash 286 -- build-aux/compile 351 ++ build-aux/config.guess 1815 ++++++++++ build-aux/config.rpath 751 +++++ build-aux/config.sub 2354 +++++++++++++ build-aux/depcomp 792 +++++ build-aux/install-sh 541 +++ build-aux/ltmain.sh 11524 ++++++++++++++++++++++ build-aux/missing 236 ++ build-aux/test-driver 160 + config.h.in 634 ++++ configure 26434 ++++++++++++++++++++++ debug/Makefile.in 756 +++++ doc/SHA256SUMS 236 -- doc/man/txt/lzmainfo.txt 36 + doc/man/txt/xz.txt 1708 ++++++++++ doc/man/txt/xzdec.txt 76 + doc/man/txt/xzdiff.txt 39 + doc/man/txt/xzgrep.txt 70 + doc/man/txt/xzless.txt 36 + doc/man/txt/xzmore.txt 31 + lib/Makefile.in 623 ++++ m4/.gitignore 40 - m4/build-to-host.m4 274 ++ m4/gettext.m4 392 +++ m4/host-cpu-c-abi.m4 529 +++ m4/iconv.m4 324 ++ m4/intlmacosx.m4 71 + m4/lib-ld.m4 170 + m4/lib-link.m4 815 +++++ m4/lib-prefix.m4 334 ++ m4/libtool.m4 8488 +++++++++++++++++++++ m4/ltoptions.m4 467 +++ m4/ltsugar.m4 124 + m4/ltversion.m4 24 + m4/lt~obsolete.m4 99 + m4/nls.m4 33 + m4/po.m4 456 +++ m4/progtest.m4 92 + po/.gitignore 31 - po/Makefile.in.in 517 +++ po/Rules-quot 66 + po/boldquot.sed 21 + po/ca.gmo Bin 0 -> 15587 bytes po/cs.gmo Bin 0 -> 7983 bytes po/da.gmo Bin 0 -> 9040 bytes po/de.gmo Bin 0 -> 29882 bytes po/en@boldquot.header 35 + po/en@quot.header 32 + po/eo.gmo Bin 0 -> 15060 bytes po/es.gmo Bin 0 -> 29228 bytes po/fi.gmo Bin 0 -> 28225 bytes po/fr.gmo Bin 0 -> 10232 bytes

$ git show --stat fa1e8796
commit fa1e8796dabd91a0f667b9e90f9841825225413a
(debian/upstream/v5.8, upstream/v5.8)
Author: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Date: Thu Apr 3 22:58:39 2025 +0200
New upstream version 5.8.1
.codespellrc   30 -
.gitattributes   8 -
.github/workflows/ci.yml   163 -
.github/workflows/freebsd.yml   32 -
.github/workflows/netbsd.yml   32 -
.github/workflows/openbsd.yml   35 -
.github/workflows/solaris.yml   32 -
.github/workflows/windows-ci.yml   124 -
.gitignore   113 -
ABOUT-NLS   1 +
ChangeLog   17392 +++++++++++++++++++++
Makefile.in   1097 +++++++
aclocal.m4   1353 ++++++++
build-aux/ci_build.bash   286 --
build-aux/compile   351 ++
build-aux/config.guess   1815 ++++++++++
build-aux/config.rpath   751 +++++
build-aux/config.sub   2354 +++++++++++++
build-aux/depcomp   792 +++++
build-aux/install-sh   541 +++
build-aux/ltmain.sh   11524 ++++++++++++++++++++++
build-aux/missing   236 ++
build-aux/test-driver   160 +
config.h.in   634 ++++
configure   26434 ++++++++++++++++++++++
debug/Makefile.in   756 +++++
doc/SHA256SUMS   236 --
doc/man/txt/lzmainfo.txt   36 +
doc/man/txt/xz.txt   1708 ++++++++++
doc/man/txt/xzdec.txt   76 +
doc/man/txt/xzdiff.txt   39 +
doc/man/txt/xzgrep.txt   70 +
doc/man/txt/xzless.txt   36 +
doc/man/txt/xzmore.txt   31 +
lib/Makefile.in   623 ++++
m4/.gitignore   40 -
m4/build-to-host.m4   274 ++
m4/gettext.m4   392 +++
m4/host-cpu-c-abi.m4   529 +++
m4/iconv.m4   324 ++
m4/intlmacosx.m4   71 +
m4/lib-ld.m4   170 +
m4/lib-link.m4   815 +++++
m4/lib-prefix.m4   334 ++
m4/libtool.m4   8488 +++++++++++++++++++++
m4/ltoptions.m4   467 +++
m4/ltsugar.m4   124 +
m4/ltversion.m4   24 +
m4/lt~obsolete.m4   99 +
m4/nls.m4   33 +
m4/po.m4   456 +++
m4/progtest.m4   92 +
po/.gitignore   31 -
po/Makefile.in.in   517 +++
po/Rules-quot   66 +
po/boldquot.sed   21 +
po/ca.gmo   Bin 0 -> 15587 bytes
po/cs.gmo   Bin 0 -> 7983 bytes
po/da.gmo   Bin 0 -> 9040 bytes
po/de.gmo   Bin 0 -> 29882 bytes
po/en@boldquot.header   35 +
po/en@quot.header   32 +
po/eo.gmo   Bin 0 -> 15060 bytes
po/es.gmo   Bin 0 -> 29228 bytes
po/fi.gmo   Bin 0 -> 28225 bytes
po/fr.gmo   Bin 0 -> 10232 bytes

To be able to easily inspect exactly what changed in the release tarball compared to git release tag contents, the best tool for the job is Meld, invoked via git difftool --dir-diff fa1e8796^..fa1e8796. To compare changes across the new and old upstream tarball, one would need to compare commits afba662b New upstream version 5.8.0 and fa1e8796 New upstream version 5.8.1 by running git difftool --dir-diff afba662b..fa1e8796. With all the above tips you can now go and try to audit your own favorite package in Debian and see if it is identical with upstream, and if not, how it differs.

Should the XZ backdoor have been detected using these tools? The famous XZ Utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) consisted of two parts: the actual backdoor inside two binary blobs masqueraded as a test files (tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz, tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma), and a small modification in the build scripts (m4/build-to-host.m4) to extract the backdoor and plant it into the built binary. The build script was not tracked in version control, but generated with GNU Autotools at release time and only shipped as additional files in the release tarball. The entire reason for me to write this post was to ponder if a diligent engineer using git-buildpackage best practices could have reasonably spotted this while importing the new upstream release into Debian. The short answer is no . The malicious actor here clearly anticipated all the typical ways anyone might inspect both git commits, and release tarball contents, and masqueraded the changes very well and over a long timespan. First of all, XZ has for legitimate reasons for several carefully crafted .xz files as test data to help catch regressions in the decompression code path. The test files are shipped in the release so users can run the test suite and validate that the binary is built correctly and xz works properly. Debian famously runs massive amounts of testing in its CI and autopkgtest system across tens of thousands of packages to uphold high quality despite frequent upgrades of the build toolchain and while supporting more CPU architectures than any other distro. Test data is useful and should stay. When git-buildpackage is used correctly, the upstream commits are visible in the Debian packaging for easy review, but the commit cf44e4b that introduced the test files does not deviate enough from regular sloppy coding practices to really stand out. It is unfortunately very common for git commit to lack a message body explaining why the change was done, and to not be properly atomic with test code and test data together in the same commit, and for commits to be pushed directly to mainline without using code reviews (the commit was not part of any PR in this case). Only another upstream developer could have spotted that this change is not on par to what the project expects, and that the test code was never added, only test data, and thus that this commit was not just a sloppy one but potentially malicious. Secondly, the fact that a new Autotools file appeared (m4/build-to-host.m4) in the XZ Utils 5.6.0 is not suspicious. This is perfectly normal for Autotools. In fact, starting from XZ Utils version 5.8.1 it is now shipping a m4/build-to-host.m4 file that it actually uses now. Spotting that there is anything fishy is practically impossible by simply reading the code, as Autotools files are full custom m4 syntax interwoven with shell script, and there are plenty of backticks ( ) that spawn subshells and evals that execute variable contents further, which is just normal for Autotools. Russ Cox s XZ post explains how exactly the Autotools code fetched the actual backdoor from the test files and injected it into the build. There is only one tiny thing that maybe a very experienced Autotools user could potentially have noticed: the serial 30 in the version header is way too high. In theory one could also have noticed this Autotools file deviates from what other packages in Debian ship with the same filename, such as e.g. the serial 3, serial 5a or 5b versions. That would however require and an insane amount extra checking work, and is not something we should plan to start doing. A much simpler solution would be to simply strongly recommend all open source projects to stop using Autotools to eventually get rid of it entirely.

Not detectable with reasonable effort While planting backdoors is evil, it is hard not to feel some respect to the level of skill and dedication of the people behind this. I ve been involved in a bunch of security breach investigations during my IT career, and never have I seen anything this well executed. If it hadn t slowed down SSH by ~500 milliseconds and been discovered due to that, it would most likely have stayed undetected for months or years. Hiding backdoors in closed source software is relatively trivial, but hiding backdoors in plain sight in a popular open source project requires some unusual amount of expertise and creativity as shown above.

Is the software supply-chain in Debian easy to audit? While maintaining a Debian package source using git-buildpackage can make the package history a lot easier to inspect, most packages have incomplete configurations in their debian/gbp.conf, and thus their package development histories are not always correctly constructed or uniform and easy to compare. The Debian Policy does not mandate git usage at all, and there are many important packages that are not using git at all. Additionally the Debian Policy also allows for non-maintainers to upload new versions to Debian without committing anything in git even for packages where the original maintainer wanted to use git. Uploads that bypass git unfortunately happen surpisingly often. Because of the situation, I am afraid that we could have multiple similar backdoors lurking that simply haven t been detected yet. More audits, that hopefully also get published openly, would be welcome! More people auditing the contents of the Debian archives would probably also help surface what tools and policies Debian might be missing to make the work easier, and thus help improve the security of Debian s users, and improve trust in Debian.

Is Debian currently missing some software that could help detect similar things? To my knowledge there is currently no system in place as part of Debian s QA or security infrastructure to verify that the upstream source packages in Debian are actually from upstream. I ve come across a lot of packages where the debian/watch or other configs are incorrect and even cases where maintainers have manually created upstream tarballs as it was easier than configuring automation to work. It is obvious that for those packages the source tarball now in Debian is not at all the same as upstream. I am not aware of any malicious cases though (if I was, I would report them of course). I am also aware of packages in the Debian repository that are misconfigured to be of type 1.0 (native) packages, mixing the upstream files and debian/ contents and having patches applied, while they actually should be configured as 3.0 (quilt), and not hide what is the true upstream sources. Debian should extend the QA tools to scan for such things. If I find a sponsor, I might build it myself as my next major contribution to Debian. In addition to better tooling for finding mismatches in the source code, Debian could also have better tooling for tracking in built binaries what their source files were, but solutions like Fraunhofer-AISEC s supply-graph or Sony s ESSTRA are not practical yet. Julien Malka s post about NixOS discusses the role of reproducible builds, which may help in some cases across all distros.

Or, is Debian missing some policies or practices to mitigate this? Perhaps more importantly than more security scanning, the Debian Developer community should switch the general mindset from anyone is free to do anything to valuing having more shared workflows. The ability to audit anything is severely hampered by the fact that there are so many ways to do the same thing, and distinguishing what is a normal deviation from a malicious deviation is too hard, as the normal can basically be almost anything. Also, as there is no documented and recommended default workflow, both those who are old and new to Debian packaging might never learn any one optimal workflow, and end up doing many steps in the packaging process in a way that kind of works, but is actually wrong or unnecessary, causing process deviations that look malicious, but turn out to just be a result of not fully understanding what would have been the right way to do something. In the long run, once individual developers workflows are more aligned, doing code reviews will become a lot easier and smoother as the excess noise of workflow differences diminishes and reviews will feel much more productive to all participants. Debian fostering a culture of code reviews would allow us to slowly move from the current practice of mainly solo packaging work towards true collaboration forming around those code reviews. I have been promoting increased use of Merge Requests in Debian already for some time, for example by proposing DEP-18: Encourage Continuous Integration and Merge Request based Collaboration for Debian packages. If you are involved in Debian development, please give a thumbs up in dep-team/deps!21 if you want me to continue promoting it.

Can we trust open source software? Yes and I would argue that we can only trust open source software. There is no way to audit closed source software, and anyone using e.g. Windows or MacOS just have to trust the vendor s word when they say they have no intentional or accidental backdoors in their software. Or, when the news gets out that the systems of a closed source vendor was compromised, like Crowdstrike some weeks ago, we can t audit anything, and time after time we simply need to take their word when they say they have properly cleaned up their code base. In theory, a vendor could give some kind of contractual or financial guarantee to its customer that there are no preventable security issues, but in practice that never happens. I am not aware of a single case of e.g. Microsoft or Oracle would have paid damages to their customers after a security flaw was found in their software. In theory you could also pay a vendor more to have them focus more effort in security, but since there is no way to verify what they did, or to get compensation when they didn t, any increased fees are likely just pocketed as increased profit. Open source is clearly better overall. You can, if you are an individual with the time and skills, audit every step in the supply-chain, or you could as an organization make investments in open source security improvements and actually verify what changes were made and how security improved. If your organisation is using Debian (or derivatives, such as Ubuntu) and you are interested in sponsoring my work to improve Debian, please reach out.

Debian LTS This was my hundred-thirty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [DLA 4168-2] openafs regression update to fix an incomplete patch in the previous upload.
• [DSA 5998-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
• [DLA 4298-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
• [DLA 4304-1] cjson security update to fix one CVE related to an out-of-bounds memory access.
• [DLA 4307-1] jq security update to fix one CVE related to a heap buffer overflow.
• [DLA 4308-1] corosync security update to fix one CVE related to a stack-based buffer overflow.

An upload of spim was not needed, as the corresponding CVE could be marked as ignored. I also started to work on an open-vm-tools and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the eighty-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [ELA-1512-1] cups security update to fix two CVEs in Buster and Stretch, related to a authentication bypass and a denial of service.
• [ELA-1520-1] jq security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch, related to a heap buffer overflow.
• [ELA-1524-1] corosync security update to fix one CVE in Buster and Stretch, related to a stack-based buffer overflow.
• [ELA-1527-1] mplayer security update to fix ten CVEs in Stretch, distributed all over the code.

The CVEs for open-vm-tools could be marked as not-affeceted as the corresponding plugin was not yet available. I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• ink to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• pnm2ppa to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• rlpr to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.

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

• supernovas to unstable (sponsored upload).
• boinor to unstable.
• einsteinpy to unstable.
• libdfu-ahp to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• openvlbi to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-aagcloudwatcher-ng to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-astrolink4 to unstable to fix cmake4 issue.
• indi-bresserexos2 to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-apogee to unstable to fix cmake4 issue.
• indi-dreamfocuser to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-astromechfox to unstable to fix cmake4 issue.
• indi-avalon to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-armadillo-platypus to unstable to fix cmake4 issue.
• indi-beefocus to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-aok to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-nexdome to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-nightscape to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-fli to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-orion-ssg3 to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-rtklib to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-gpsd to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-gige to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-ffmv to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-gpsnmea to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-maxdomeii to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-gphoto to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-limesdr to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-webcam to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• libahp-gt to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-sx to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• libapogee3 to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• libpktriggercord to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-sheylak to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• libfli to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-talon6 to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-starbook to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-mgen to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• libahp-xc to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• indi-spectracyber to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• astronomical-almanac to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• indi-eqmod to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• indi-pentax to unstable

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

• radlib to unstable, Joachim Zobel prepared a patch for a name collision of a binary.
• pyicloud to unstable.

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

• osmocom-dahdi-linux to unstable.

misc The main topic of this month has been gcc15 and cmake4, so my upload rate was extra high. This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

• readsb to unstable.
• gcal to unstable. This was my first upload of a release where I am upstream as well.
• libcds to unstable to fix a cmake4 issue.
• pkcs11-proxy to unstable to fix cmake4 issue.
• force-ip-protocol to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• httperf to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• otpw to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• rplay to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• uucp to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• spim to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• usb-modeswitch to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• gnucobol3 to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.
• gnucobol4 to unstable to fix a gcc15 issue.

I wonder what MBF will happen next, I guess the /var/lock-issue will be a good candidate. On my fight against outdated RFPs, I closed 30 of them in September. Meanwhile only 3397 are still open, so don t hesitate to help closing one or another. FTP master This month I accepted 294 and rejected 28 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 294.

It's been a while since the last performance check of Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in Cybertec's PGEE distribution - that was in 2016. Of course, the question is still interesting, so I did some benchmarks. Since the difference is really small between running without any extras, with data checksums turned on, and with both encryption and checksums turned on, we need to pick a configuration that will stress-test these features the most. So in the spirit of making PostgreSQL deliberately run slow, I went with only 1MB of shared_buffers with a pgbench workload of scale factor 50. The 770MB of database size will easily fit into RAM. However, having such a small buffer cache setting will cause a lot of cache misses with pages re-read from the OS disk cache, checksums checked, and the page decrypted again. To further increase the effect, I ran pgbench --skip-some-updates so the smaller, in-cache-anyway pgbench tables are not touched. Overall, this yields a pretty consistent buffer cache hit rate of only 82.8%. Here are the PGEE 17.6 tps (transactions per second) numbers averaged over a few 1-minute 3-client pgbench runs for different combinations of data checksums on/off, TDE off, and the various supported key bit lengths:

	no checksums		data checksums
no TDE	2455,6	100,00 %	2449,7	99,76 %
128 bits	2440,9	99,40 %	2443,3	99,50 %
192 bits	2439,6	99,35 %	2446,1	99,61 %
256 bits	2450,3	99,78 %	2443,1	99,49 %

There is a lot of noise in the individual runtimes before averaging, so the numbers must be viewed with some care (192-bit TDE is certainly not faster with checksums than without), but if we dare to interpret these tiny differences, we can conclude the following:

• The cost of enabling data checksums on this bad-cache-ratio workload is about 0.25 %.
• The cost of enabling both TDE encryption and data checksums on this workload is about 0.5%.

Any workload with a better shared_buffers cache hit rate would see a lower penalty of enabling checksums and TDE than that. The post The Cost of TDE and Checksums in PGEE appeared first on CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services & Support.

My trip to pgday.at started Wednesday at the airport in D sseldorf. I was there on time, and the plane started with an estimated flight time of about 90 minutes. About half an hour into the flight, the captain announced that we would be landing in 30 minutes - in D sseldorf, because of some unspecified technical problems. Three hours after the original departure time, the plane made another attempt, and we made it to Vienna.

On the plane I had already met Dirk Krautschick who had the great honor of bringing Slonik (in the form of a big extra bag) to the conference, and we took a taxi to the hotel. On the taxi, the next surprise happened: Hans-J rgen Sch nig unfortunately couldn't make it to the conference, and his talks had to be replaced. I had submitted a talk to the conference, but it was not accepted, and neither queued on the reserve list. But two speakers on the reserve list had cancelled, and another was already giving a talk in parallel to the slot that had to be filled, so Pavlo messaged me if I could hold the talk - well of course I could. Before, I didn't have any specific plans for the evening yet, but suddenly I was a speaker, so I joined the folks going to the speakers dinner at the Wiener Grill Haus two corners from the hotel. It was a very nice evening, chatting with a lot of folks from the PostgreSQL community that I had not seen for a while. Thursday was the conference day. The hotel was a short walk from the venue, the Apothekertrakt in Vienna's Schloss Sch nbrunn. The courtyard was already filled with visitors registering for the conference. Since I originally didn't have a talk scheduled, I had signed up to volunteer for a shift as room host. We got our badge and swag bag, and I changed into the "crew" T-shirt. The opening and sponsor keynotes took place in the main room, the Orangerie. We were over 100 people in the room, but apparently still not enough to really fill it, so the acoustics with some echo made it a bit difficult to understand everything. I hope that part can be improved for next time (which is planned to happen!). I was host for the Maximilian room, where the sponsor sessions were scheduled in the morning. The first talk was by our Peter Hofer, also replacing the absent Hans. He had only joined the company at the beginning of the same week, and was already tasked to give Hans' talk on PostgreSQL as Open Source. Of course he did well.

Next was Tanmay Sinha from Readyset. They are building a system that caches expensive SQL queries and selectively invalidates the cache whenever any data used by these queries changes. Whenever actually fixing the application isn't feasible, that system looks like an interesting alternative to manually maintaining materialized views, or perhaps using pg_ivm. After lunch, I went to Federico Campoli's Mastering Index Performance, but really spent the time polishing the slides for my talk. I had given the original version at pgconf.de in Berlin in May, and the slides were still in German, so I had to do some translating. Luckily, most slides are just git commit messages, so the effort was manageable. The next slot was mine, talking about Modern VACUUM. I started with a recap of MVCC, vacuum and freezing in PostgreSQL, and then showed how over the past years, the system was updated to be more focused (the PostgreSQL 8.4 visibility map tells vacuum which pages to visit), faster (12 made autovacuum run 10 times faster by default), less scary (14 has an emergency mode where freezing switches to maximum speed if it runs out of time; 16 makes freezing create much less WAL) and more performant (17 makes vacuum use much less memory). In summary, there is still room for the DBA to tune some knobs (for example, the default autovacuum_max_workers=3 isn't much), but the vacuum default settings are pretty much okay these days for average workloads. Specific workloads still have a whopping 31 postgresql.conf settings at their disposal just for vacuum.

Right after my talk, there was another vacuum talk: When Autovacuum Met FinOps by Mayuresh Bagayatkar. He added practical advice on tuning the performance in cloud environments. Luckily, our contents did not overlap. After the coffee break, I was again room host, now for Floor Drees and Contributing to Postgres beyond code. She presented the various ways in which PostgreSQL is more than just the code in the Git repository: translators, web site, system administration, conference organizers, speakers, bloggers, advocates. As a member of the PostgreSQL Contributors Committee, I could only approve and we should closer cooperate in the future to make people's contributions to PostgreSQL more visible and give them the recognition they deserve.

That was already the end of the main talks and everyone rushed to the Orangerie for the lightning talks. My highlight was the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Tickets for the conference had included the option to donate for the elephants in Kenya, and the talk presented the trust's work in the elephant orphanage there. After the conference had officially closed, there was a bonus track: the Celebrity DB Deathmatch, aptly presented by Boriss Mejias. PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CloudDB and Oracle were competing for the grace of a developer. MongoDB couldn't stand the JSON workload, CloudDB was dismissed for handing out new invoices all the time, and Oracle had even brought a lawyer to the stage, but then lost control over a literally 10 meter long contract with too much fine print. In the end, PostgreSQL (played by Floor) won the love of the developer (played by our Svitlana Lytvynenko).

The day closed with a gathering at the Brandauer Schlossbr u - just at the other end of the castle ground, but still a 15min walk away. We enjoyed good beer and Kaiserschmarrn. I went back to the hotel a bit before midnight, but some extended that time quite some bit more. On Friday, my flight back was only in the afternoon, so I spent some time in morning in the Technikmuseum just next to the hotel, enjoying some old steam engines and a live demonstration of Tesla coils. This time, the flight actually went to the destination, and I was back in D sseldorf in the late afternoon.

In summary, pgday.at was a very nice event in a classy location. Thanks to the organizers for putting in all the work - and next year, Hans will hopefully be present in person! The post A Trip To Vienna With Surprises appeared first on CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services & Support.

It's Sunday and I'm now sitting in the train from Brest to Paris where I will be changing to Germany, on the way back from the annual Debian conference. A full week of presentations, discussions, talks and socializing is laying behind me and my head is still spinning from the intensity.

Pollito and the gang of DebConf mascots wearing their conference badges (photo: Christoph Berg)

Sunday, July 13th It started last Sunday with traveling to the conference. I got on the Eurostar in Duisburg and we left on time, but even before reaching Cologne, the train was already one hour delayed for external reasons, collecting yet another hour between Aachen and Liege for its own technical problems. "The train driver is working on trying to fix the problem." My original schedule had well over two hours for changing train stations in Paris, but being that late, I missed the connection to Brest in Montparnasse. At least in the end, the total delay was only one hour when finally arriving at the destination. Due to the French julliet quatorze fireworks approaching, buses in Brest were rerouted, but I managed to catch the right bus to the conference venue, already meeting a few Debian people on the way. The conference was hosted at the IMT Atlantique Brest campus, giving the event a nice university touch. I arrived shortly after 10 in the evening and after settling down a bit, got on one of the "magic" buses for transportation to the camping site where half of the attendees where stationed. I shared a mobile home with three other Debianites, where I got a small room for myself. Monday, July 14th Next morning, we took the bus back to the venue with a small breakfast and the opening session where Enrico Zini invited me to come to his and Nicolas Dandrimont's session about Debian community governance and curation, which I gladly did. Many ideas about conflict moderation and community steering were floated around. I hope some of that can be put into effect to make flamewars on the mailing lists less heated and more directed. After that, I attended Olly Betts' "Stemming with Snowball" session, which is the stemmer used also in PostgreSQL. Text search is one of the areas in PostgreSQL that I never really looked closely at, including the integration into the postgresql-common package, so it was nice to get more information about that. In preparation for the conference, a few of us Ham radio operators in Debian had decided to bring some radio gear to DebConf this year in order to perhaps spark more interest for our hobby among the fellow geeks. In the afternoon after the talks, I found a quieter spot just outside of the main hall and set up a shortwave antenna by attaching a 10m mast to one of the park benches there. The 40m band was still pretty much closed, but I could work a few stations from England, just across the channel from Bretagne, answering questions from interested passing-by Debian people between the contacts. Over time, the band opened and more European stations got into the log.

F/DF7CB in Brest (photo: Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras)

Tuesday, July 15th Tuesday started with Helmut Grohne's session about "Reviving (un)schroot". The schroot program has been Debian's standard way of managing build chroots for a long time, but it is more and more being regarded as obsolete with all kinds of newer containerization and virtualization technologies taking over. Since many bits of Debian infrastructure depend on schroot, and its user interface is still very useful, Helmut reimplemented it using Linux namespaces and the "unshare" systemcall. I had already worked with him at the Hamburg Minidebconf to replace the apt.postgresql.org buildd machinery with the new system, but we were not quite there yet (network isolation is nice, but we still sometimes need proper networking), so it was nice to see the effort is still progressing and I will give his new scripts a try when I'm back home. Next, Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson presented Debusine, a new package repository and workflow management system. It looks very promising for anyone running their own repository, so perhaps yet another bit of apt.postgresql.org infrastructure to replace in the future. After that, I went to the Debian LTS BoF session by Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Bastien Roucari s - Debian releases plus LTS is what we are covering with apt.postgresql.org. Then there were bits from the DPL (Debian Project Leader), and a session moderated by Stefano Rivera interesting to me as a member of the Debian Technical Committee on the future structure of the packages required for cross-building in Debian, a topic which had been brought to TC a while ago. I am happy that we could resolve the issue without having to issue a formal TC ruling as the involved parties (kernel, glibc, gcc and the cross-build people) found a promising way forward themselves. DebConf is really a good way to get such issues unstuck. Ten years ago at the 2015 Heidelberg DebConf, Enrico had given a seminal "Semi-serious stand-up comedy" talk, drawing parallels between the Debian Open Source community and the BDSM community - "People doing things consensually together". (Back then, the talk was announced as "probably unsuitable for people of all ages".) With his unique presentation style and witty insights, the session made a lasting impression on everyone attending. Now, ten years later (and he and many in the audience being ten years older), he gave an updated version of it. We are now looking forward to the sequel in 2035. The evening closed with the famous DebConf tradition of the Cheese & Wine party in a old fort next to the coast, just below the conference venue. Even when he's a fellow Debian Developer, Ham and also TC member, I had never met Paul Tagliamonte in person before, but we spent most of the evening together geeking out on all things Debian and Ham radio.

The northern coast of Ushant (photo: Christoph Berg)

Wednesday, July 16th Wednesday already marked the end of the first half of the week, the day of the day trips. I had chosen to go to Ouessant island (Ushant in English) which marks the Western end of French mainland and hosts one of the lighthouses yielding the way into the English channel. The ferry trip included surprisingly big waves which left some participants seasick, but everyone recovered fast. After around one and a half hours we arrived, picked up the bicycles, and spent the rest of the day roaming the island. The weather forecast was originally very cloudy and 18 C, but over noon this turned into sunny and warm, so many got an unplanned sunburn. I enjoyed the trip very much - it made up for not having time visiting the city during the week. After returning, we spent the rest of the evening playing DebConf's standard game, Mao (spoiler alert: don't follow the link if you ever intend to play).

Having a nice day (photo: Christoph Berg)

Thursday, July 17th The next day started with the traditional "Meet the Technical Committee" session. This year, we trimmed the usual slide deck down to remove the boring boilerplate parts, so after a very short introduction to the work of the committee by our chairman Matthew Vernon, we opened up the discussion with the audience, with seven (out of 8) TC members on stage. I think the format worked very well, with good input from attendees. Next up was "Don't fear the TPM" by Jonathan McDowell. A common misconception in the Free Software community is that the TPM is evil DRM hardware working against the user, but while it could be used in theory that way, the necessary TPM attestations seem to impossible to attain in practice, so that wouldn't happen anyway. Instead, it is a crypto coprocessor present in almost all modern computers that can be used to hold keys, for example to be used for SSH. It will also be interesting to research if we can make use of it for holding the Transparent Data Encryption keys for CYBERTEC's PostgreSQL Enterprise Edition. Aigars Mahinovs then directed everyone in place for the DebConf group picture, and Lucas Nussbaum started a discussion about archive-wide QA tasks in Debian, an area where I did a lot of work in the past and that still interests me. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers followed up with techniques to track archive-wide rebuilding and testing of packages and in turn filing a lot of bugs to track the problems. The evening ended with the conference dinner, again in the fort close by the coast. DebConf is good for meeting new people, and I incidentally ran into another Chris, who happened to be one of the original maintainers of pgaccess, the pre-predecessor of today's pgadmin. I admit still missing this PostgreSQL frontend for its simplicity and ability to easily edit table data, but it disappeared around 2004. Friday, July 18th On Friday, I participated in discussion sessions around contributors.debian.org (PostgreSQL is planning to set up something similar) and the New Member process which I had helped to run and reform a decade or two ago. Agathe Porte (also a Ham radio operator, like so many others at the conference I had no idea of) then shared her work on rust-rewriting the slower parts of Lintian, the Debian package linter. Craig Small talked about "Free as in Bytes", the evolution of the Linux procps free command. Over the time and many kernel versions, the summary numbers printed became better and better, but there will probably never be a version that suits all use cases alike. Later over dinner, Craig (who is also a TC member) and I shared our experiences with these numbers and customers (not) understanding them. He pointed out that for PostgreSQL and looking at used memory in the presence of large shared memory buffers, USS (unique set size) and PSS (proportional set size) should be more realistic numbers than the standard RSS (resident set size) that the top utility is showing by default. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers again joined to lead a session, now on ci.debian.net and autopkgtest, the test driver used for running tests on packages after then have been installed on a system. The PostgreSQL packages are heavily using this to make sure no regressions creep in even after builds have successfully completed and test re-runs are rescheduled periodically. The day ended with Bdale Garbee's electronics team BoF and Paul Tagliamonte and me setting up the radio station in the courtyard, again answering countless questions about ionospheric conditions and operating practice. Saturday, July 19th Saturday was the last conference day. In the first session, Nikos Tsipinakis and Federico Vaga from CERN announced that the LHC will be moving to Debian for the accelerator's frontend computers in their next "long shutdown" maintenance period in the next year. CentOS broke compatibility too often, and Debian trixie together with the extended LTS support will cover the time until the next long shutdown window in 2035, until when the computers should have all been replaced with newer processors covering higher x86_64 baseline versions. The audience was very delighted to hear that Debian is now also being used in this prestige project. Ben Hutchings then presented new Linux kernel features. Particularly interesting for me was the support for atomic writes spanning more than one filesystem block. When configured correctly, this would mean PostgreSQL didn't have to record full-page images in the WAL anymore, increasing throughput and performance. After that, the Debian ftp team discussed ways to improve review of new packages in the archive, and which of their processes could be relaxed with new US laws around Open Source and cryptography algorithms export. Emmanuel Arias led a session on Salsa CI, Debian's Gitlab instance and standard CI pipeline. (I think it's too slow, but the runners are not under their control.) Julian Klode then presented new features in APT, Debian's package manager. I like the new display format (and a tiny bit of that is also from me sending in wishlist bugs). In the last round of sessions this week, I then led the Ham radio BoF with an introduction into the hobby and how Debian can be used. Bdale mentioned that the sBitx family of SDR radios is natively running Debian, so stock packages can be used from the radio's touch display. We also briefly discussed his involvement in ARDC and the possibility to get grants from them for Ham radio projects. Finally, DebConf wrapped up with everyone gathering in the main auditorium and cheering the organizers for making the conference possible and passing Pollito, the DebConf mascot, to the next organizer team.

Pollito on stage (photo: Christoph Berg)

Sunday, July 20th Zoom back to the train: I made it through the Paris metro and I'm now on the Eurostar back to Germany. It has been an intense week with all the conference sessions and meeting all the people I had not seen so long. There are a lot of new ideas to follow up on both for my Debian and PostgreSQL work. Next year's DebConf will take place in Santa Fe, Argentina. I haven't yet decided if I will be going, but I can recommend the experience to everyone! The post The Debian Conference 2025 in Brest appeared first on CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services & Support.

This post is based on presentation given at the Validos annual members meeting on June 25th, 2025.

When I started getting into Linux and open source over 25 years ago, the majority of the software development in this area was done by academics and hobbyists. The number of companies participating in open source has since exploded in parallel with the growth of mobile and cloud software, the majority of which is built on top of open source. For example, Android powers most mobile phones today and is based on Linux. Almost all software used to operate large cloud provider data centers, such as AWS or Google, is either open source or made in-house by the cloud provider. Pretty much all companies, regardless of the industry, have been using open source software at least to some extent for years. However, the degree to which they collaborate with the upstream origins of the software varies. I encourage all companies in a technical industry to start contributing upstream. There are many benefits to having a good relationship with your upstream open source software vendors, both for the short term and especially for the long term. Moreover, with the rollout of CRA in EU in 2025-2027, the law will require software companies to contribute security fixes upstream to the open source projects their products use. To ensure the process is well managed, business-aligned and legally compliant, there are a few do s and don t do s that are important to be aware of.

Maintain your SBOMs For every piece of software, regardless of whether the code was done in-house, from an open source project, or a combination of these, every company needs to produce a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). The SBOMs provide a standardized and interoperable way to track what software and which versions are used where, what software licenses apply, who holds the copyright of which component, which security fixes have been applied and so forth. A catalog of SBOMs, or equivalent, forms the backbone of software supply-chain management in corporations.

Identify your strategic upstream vendors The SBOMs are likely to reveal that for any piece of non-trivial software, there are hundreds or thousands of upstream open source projects in use. Few organizations have resources to contribute to all of their upstreams. If your organization is just starting to organize upstream contribution activities, identify the key projects that have the largest impact on your business and prioritize forming a relationship with them first. Organizations with a mature contribution process will be collaborating with tens or hundreds of upstreams.

Create a written policy with input from business owners, legal and marketing An upstream contribution policy typically covers things such as who decides what can be contributed upstream from a business point of view, what licenses are allowed or to avoid, how to document copyright, how to deal with projects that require signing copyright assignments (e.g. contributor license agreements), other potential legal guidelines to follow. Additionally, the technical steps on how to prepare a contribution should be outlined, including how to internally review and re-review them, who the technical approvers are to ensure high quality and good reputation and so on. The policy does not have to be static or difficult to produce. Start with a small policy and a few trusted senior developers following it, and update its contents as you run into new situations that need internal company alignment. For example, don t require staff to create new GitHub accounts merely for the purpose of doing one open source contribution. Initially, do things with minimal overhead and add requirements to the policy only if they have clear and strong benefits. The purpose of a policy should be to make it obvious and easy for employees to do the right thing, not to add obstacles and stop progress or encourage people to break the policy.

Appoint an internal coordinator and champions Having a written policy on how to contribute upstream will help ensure a consistent process and avoid common pitfalls. However, a written policy alone does not automatically translate into a well-running process. It is highly recommended to appoint at least one internal coordinator who is knowledgeable about how open source communities work, how software licensing and patents work, and is senior enough to have a good sense of what business priorities to optimize for. In small organizations it can be a single person, while larger organizations typically have a full Open Source Programs Office. This coordinator should oversee the contribution process, track all contributions made across the organization, and further optimize the process by working with stakeholders across the business, including legal experts, business owners and CTOs. The marketing and recruiting folks should also be involved, as upstream contributions will have a reputation-building aspect as well, which can be enhanced with systematic tracking and publishing of activities. Additionally, at least in the beginning, the organization should also appoint key staff members as open source champions. Implementing a new process always includes some obstacles and occasional setbacks, which may discourage employees from putting in the extra effort to reap the full long-term benefits for the company. Having named champions will empower them to make the first few contributions themselves, setting a good example and encouraging and mentoring others to contribute upstream as well.

Avoid excessive approvals To maintain a high quality bar, it is always good to have all outgoing submissions reviewed by at least one or two people. Two or three pairs of eyeballs are significantly more likely to catch issues that might slip by someone working alone. The review also slows down the process by a day or two, which gives the author time to sleep on it , which usually helps to ensure the final submission is well-thought-out by the author. Do not require more than one or two reviewers. The marginal utility goes quickly to zero beyond a few reviewers, and at around four or five people the effect becomes negative, as the weight of each approval decreases and the reviewers begin to take less personal responsibility. Having too many people in the loop also makes each feedback round slow and expensive, to the extent that the author will hesitate to make updates and ask for re-reviews due to the costs involved. If the organization experiences setbacks due to mistakes slipping through the review process, do not respond by adding more reviewers, as it will just grind the contribution process to a halt. If there are quality concerns, invest in training for engineers, CI systems and perhaps an internal certification program for those making public upstream code submissions. A typical software engineer is more likely to seriously try to become proficient at their job and put effort into a one-off certification exam and then make multiple high-quality contributions, than it is for a low-skilled engineer to improve and even want to continue doing more upstream contributions if they are burdened by heavy review processes every time they try to submit an upstream contribution.

Don t expect upstream to accept all code contributions Sure, identifying the root cause of and fixing a tricky bug or writing a new feature requires significant effort. While an open source project will certainly appreciate the effort invested, it doesn t mean it will always welcome all contributions with open arms. Occasionally, the project won t agree that the code is correct or the feature is useful, and some contributions are bound to be rejected. You can minimize the chance of experiencing rejections by having a solid internal review process that includes assessing how the upstream community is likely to understand the proposal. Sometimes how things are communicated is more important than how they are coded. Polishing inline comments and git commit messages help ensure high-quality communication, along with a commitment to respond quickly to review feedback and conducting regular follow-ups until a contribution is finalized and accepted.

Start small to grow expertise and reputation In addition to keeping the open source contribution policy lean and nimble, it is also good to start practical contributions with small issues. Don t aim to contribute massive features until you have a track record of being able to make multiple small contributions. Keep in mind that not all open source projects are equal. Each has its own culture, written and unwritten rules, development process, documented requirements (which may be outdated) and more. Starting with a tiny contribution, even just a typo fix, is a good way to validate how code submissions, reviews and approvals work in a particular project. Once you have staff who have successfully landed smaller contributions, you can start planning larger proposals. The exact same proposal might be unsuccessful when proposed by a new person, and successful when proposed by a person who already has a reputation for prior high-quality work.

Embrace all and any publicity you get Some companies have concerns about their employees working in the open. Indeed, every email and code patch an employee submits, and all related discussions become public. This may initially sound scary, but is actually a potential source of good publicity. Employees need to be trained on how to conduct themselves publicly, and the discussions about code should contain only information strictly related to the code, without any references to actual production environments or other sensitive information. In the long run most employees contributing have a positive impact and the company should reap the benefits of positive publicity. If there are quality issues or employee judgment issues, hiding the activity or forcing employees to contribute with pseudonyms is not a proper solution. Instead, the problems should be addressed at the root, and bad behavior addressed rather than tolerated. When people are working publicly, there tends to also be some degree of additional pride involved, which motivates people to try their best. Contributions need to be public for the sponsoring corporation to later be able to claim copyright or licenses. Considering that thousands of companies participate in open source every day, the prevalence of bad publicity is quite low, and the benefits far exceed the risks.

Scratch your own itch When choosing what to contribute, select things that benefit your own company. This is not purely about being selfish - often people working on resolving a problem they suffer from are the same people with the best expertise of what the problem is and what kind of solution is optimal. Also, the issues that are most pressing to your company are more likely to be universally useful to solve than any random bug or feature request in the upstream project s issue tracker.

Remember there are many ways to help upstream While submitting code is often considered the primary way to contribute, please keep in mind there are also other highly impactful ways to contribute. Submitting high-quality bug reports will help developers quickly identify and prioritize issues to fix. Providing good research, benchmarks, statistics or feedback helps guide development and the project make better design decisions. Documentation, translations, organizing events and providing marketing support can help increase adoption and strengthen long-term viability for the project. In some of the largest open source projects there are already far more pending contributions than the core maintainers can process. Therefore, developers who contribute code should also get into the habit of contributing reviews. As Linus law states, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Reviewing other contributors submissions will help improve quality, and also alleviate the pressure on core maintainers who are the only ones providing feedback. Reviewing code submitted by others is also a great learning opportunity for the reviewer. The reviewer does not need to be better than the submitter - any feedback is useful; merely posting review feedback is not the same thing as making an approval decision. Many projects are also happy to accept monetary support and sponsorships. Some offer specific perks in return. By human nature, the largest sponsors always get their voice heard in important decisions, as no open source project wants to take actions that scare away major financial contributors.

Starting is the hardest part Long-term success in open source comes from a positive feedback loop of an ever-increasing number of users and collaborators. As seen in the examples of countless corporations contributing open source, the benefits are concrete, and the process usually runs well after the initial ramp-up and organizational learning phase has passed. In open source ecosystems, contributing upstream should be as natural as paying vendors in any business. If you are using open source and not contributing at all, you likely have latent business risks without realizing it. You don t want to wake up one morning to learn that your top talent left because they were forbidden from participating in open source for the company s benefit, or that you were fined due to CRA violations and mismanagement in sharing security fixes with the correct parties. The faster you start with the process, the less likely those risks will materialize.

Maharashtra is a state here in India, which has Mumbai, the financial capital of India, as its capital. maharashtra.gov.in is the official website of the State Government of Maharashtra. We re going to talk about authoritative name servers serving it (and bunch of child zones under maharashtra.gov.in). Here s a simple trace for the main domain:

$ dig +trace maharashtra.gov.in
; <<>> DiG 9.18.33-1~deb12u2-Debian <<>> +trace maharashtra.gov.in
;; global options: +cmd
.            33128    IN    NS    j.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    h.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    l.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    k.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    i.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    g.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    f.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    e.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    b.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    d.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    c.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    m.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    NS    a.root-servers.net.
.            33128    IN    RRSIG    NS 8 0 518400 20250704050000 20250621040000 53148 . pGxGZftwj+6VNTSQtstTKVN95Z7/b5Q8GSjRCXI68GoVYbVai9HNelxs OGIRKL4YmSrsiSsndXuEsBuvL9QvQ+qbybNLkekJUAiicKYNgr3KM3+X 69rsS9KxHgT2T8/oqG8KN8EJLJ8VkuM2PJ2HfSKijtF7ULtgBbERNQ4i u2I/wQ7elOyeF2M76iEOa7UGhgiBHSBqPulsbpnB//WbKL71yyFhWSk0 tiFEPuZM+iLrN2qBsElriF4kkw37uRHq8sSGcCjfBVdkpbb3/Sb3sIgN /zKU17f+hOvuBQTDr5qFIymqGAENA5UZ2RQjikk6+zK5EfBUXNpq1+oo 2y64DQ==
;; Received 525 bytes from 9.9.9.9#53(9.9.9.9) in 3 ms
in.            172800    IN    NS    ns01.trs-dns.com.
in.            172800    IN    NS    ns01.trs-dns.net.
in.            172800    IN    NS    ns10.trs-dns.org.
in.            172800    IN    NS    ns10.trs-dns.info.
in.            86400    IN    DS    48140 8 2 5EE4748C2069B99C98BC39A56881A64AF17CC78711E6297D43AC5A4F 4B5BB6E5
in.            86400    IN    RRSIG    DS 8 1 86400 20250704050000 20250621040000 53148 . jkCotYosapreoKKPvr9zPOEDECYVe9OtJLjkQbFfTin8uYbm/kdWzieW CkN5sabif5IHTFU4FEVOShfu4DFeUolhNav56TPKjGqEGjQ7qCghpqTj dNN4iY2s8BcJ2ujHwhm6HRfdbQRVoKYQ73UUZ+oWSute6lXWHE9+Snk2 1ZCAYPdZ2s1s7NZhrZW2YXVw/nHIcRl/rHqWIQ9sgUlsd6MwmahcAAG+ v15HG9Q48rCG1A2gJlJPbxWpVe0EUEu8LzDsp+ORqy1pHhzgJynrJHJz qMiYU0egv2j7xVPSoQHXjx3PG2rsOLNnqDBYCA+piEXOLsY3d+7c1SZl w9u66g==
;; Received 679 bytes from 199.7.83.42#53(l.root-servers.net) in 3 ms
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns18.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns20.maharashtra.gov.in.
npk19skvsdmju264d4ono0khqf7eafqv.gov.in. 300 IN    NSEC3 1 1 0 - P0KKR4BMBGLJDOKBGBI0KDM39DSM0EA4 NS SOA MX TXT RRSIG DNSKEY NSEC3PARAM
npk19skvsdmju264d4ono0khqf7eafqv.gov.in. 300 IN    RRSIG NSEC3 8 3 300 20250626140337 20250528184339 48544 gov.in. Khcq3n1Jn34HvuBEZExusVqoduEMH6DzqkWHk9dFkM+q0RVBYBHBbW+u LsSnc2/Rqc3HAYutk3EZeS+kXVF07GA/A486dr17Hqf3lHszvG/MNT/s CJfcdrqO0Q8NZ9NQxvAwWo44bCPaECQV+fhznmIaVSgbw7de9xC6RxWG ZFcsPYwYt07yB5neKa99RlVvJXk4GHX3ISxiSfusCNOuEKGy5cMxZg04 4PbYsP0AQNiJWALAduq2aNs80FQdWweLhd2swYuZyfsbk1nSXJQcYbTX aONc0VkYFeEJzTscX8/wNbkJeoLP0r/W2ebahvFExl3NYpb7b2rMwGBY omC/QA==
npk19skvsdmju264d4ono0khqf7eafqv.gov.in. 300 IN    RRSIG NSEC3 13 3 300 20250718144138 20250619135610 22437 gov.in. mbj7td3E6YE7kIhYoSlDTZR047TXY3Z60NY0aBwU7obyg5enBQU9j5nl GUxn9zUiwVUzei7v5GIPxXS7XDpk7g==
6bflkoouitlvj011i2mau7ql5pk61sks.gov.in. 300 IN    NSEC3 1 1 0 - 78S0UO5LI1KV1SVMH1889FHUCNC40U6T TXT RRSIG
6bflkoouitlvj011i2mau7ql5pk61sks.gov.in. 300 IN    RRSIG NSEC3 8 3 300 20250626133905 20250528184339 48544 gov.in. M2yPThQpX0sEf4klooQ06h+rLR3e3Q/BqDTSFogyTIuGwjgm6nwate19 jGmgCeWCYL3w/oxsg1z7SfCvDBCXOObH8ftEBOfLe8/AGHAEkWFSu3e0 s09Ccoz8FJiCfBJbbZK5Vf4HWXtBLfBq+ncGCEE24tCQLXaS5cT85BxZ Zne6Y6u8s/WPgo8jybsvlGnL4QhIPlW5UkHDs7cLLQSwlkZs3dwxyHTn EgjNWClhghGXP9nlvOlnDjUkmacEYeq5ItnCQjYPl4uwh9fBJ9CD/8LV K+Tn3+dgqDBek6+2HRzjGs59NzuHX8J9wVFxP7/nd+fUgaSgz+sST80O vrXlHA==
6bflkoouitlvj011i2mau7ql5pk61sks.gov.in. 300 IN    RRSIG NSEC3 13 3 300 20250718141148 20250619135610 22437 gov.in. raWzWsQnPkXYtr2v1SRH/fk2dEAv/K85NH+06pNUwkxPxQk01nS8eYlq BPQ41b26kikg8mNOgr2ULlBpJHb1OQ==
couldn't get address for 'ns18.maharashtra.gov.in': not found
couldn't get address for 'ns20.maharashtra.gov.in': not found
;; Received 1171 bytes from 2620:171:813:1534:8::1#53(ns10.trs-dns.org) in 0 ms
;; communications error to 10.187.202.24#53: timed out
;; communications error to 10.187.202.24#53: timed out
;; communications error to 10.187.202.24#53: timed out
;; communications error to 10.187.202.28#53: timed out
;; communications error to 10.187.203.201#53: timed out
;; no servers could be reached

Quick takeaways:

• 5 authoritative NS are listed ie:
  • ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
  • ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
  • ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
  • ns18.maharashtra.gov.in.
  • ns20.maharashtra.gov.in.
• No address (no A/AAAA records) could be found for ns18.maharashtra.gov.in and ns20.maharashtra.gov.in. Internet Archive snapshots for bgp.tools at time of writing NS18 and NS20.
• communications error to 10.187.202.24#53: timed out , communications error to 10.187.202.28#53: timed out and communications error to 10.187.203.201#53: timed out is likely due to RFC 1918 records for NS. Ofcourse, they will never respond on public internet.
• Not in trace, but NS10 has private or empty A/AAAA record against it (detailed further down).
• The query resolution failed with no servers could be reached ie we didn t recieved any A/AAAA record for that query.

It s a hit or miss for this DNS query resolution.

Looking at in zone data Let s look at NS added in zone itself (with 9.9.9.9):

$ dig ns maharashtra.gov.in
; <<>> DiG 9.18.33-1~deb12u2-Debian <<>> ns maharashtra.gov.in
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 172
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;maharashtra.gov.in.        IN    NS
;; ANSWER SECTION:
maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    NS    ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    NS    ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    A    10.187.202.24
ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    A    10.187.202.28
;; Query time: 180 msec
;; SERVER: 9.9.9.9#53(9.9.9.9) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sat Jun 21 23:00:49 IST 2025
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 115

Pay special attention to ADDITIONAL SECTION . Running dig ns9.maharashtra.gov.in and dig ns8.maharashtra.gov.in, return RFC 1918 ie these private addresses. This is coming from zone itself, so in zone A records of NS8 and NS9 point to 10.187.202.28 and 10.187.202.24 respectively. Cloudflare s 1.1.1.1 has a slightly different version:

$ dig ns maharashtra.gov.in @1.1.1.1
; <<>> DiG 9.18.33-1~deb12u2-Debian <<>> ns maharashtra.gov.in @1.1.1.1
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 36005
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;maharashtra.gov.in.        IN    NS
;; ANSWER SECTION:
maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    NS    ns8.
maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    NS    ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    300    IN    NS    ns9.
;; Query time: 7 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Jun 22 10:38:30 IST 2025
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 100

Interesting response here for sure :D. The reason for difference between response from 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9 is in the next section.

Looking at parent zone gov.in is the parent zone here. Tucows is operator for gov.in as well as .in ccTLD zone:

$ dig ns gov.in +short
ns01.trs-dns.net.
ns01.trs-dns.com.
ns10.trs-dns.org.
ns10.trs-dns.info.

Let s take a look at what parent zone (NS) hold:

$ dig ns maharashtra.gov.in @ns01.trs-dns.net.
; <<>> DiG 9.18.36 <<>> ns maharashtra.gov.in @ns01.trs-dns.net.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 56535
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 5, ADDITIONAL: 6
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
; COOKIE: f13027aa39632404010000006856fa2a9c97d6bbc973ba4f (good)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;maharashtra.gov.in.        IN    NS
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns18.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    NS    ns20.maharashtra.gov.in.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns20.maharashtra.gov.in. 900    IN    A    52.183.143.210
ns18.maharashtra.gov.in. 900    IN    A    35.154.30.166
ns10.maharashtra.gov.in. 900    IN    A    164.100.128.234
ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    A    103.23.150.89
ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.    900    IN    A    103.23.150.88
;; Query time: 28 msec
;; SERVER: 64.96.2.1#53(ns01.trs-dns.net.) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Jun 22 00:00:02 IST 2025
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 248

The ADDITIONAL SECTION gives a completely different picture (different from in zone NSes). Maybe this was how it was supposed to be, but none of the IPs listed for NS10, NS18 and NS20 are responding to any DNS query. Assuming NS8 as 103.23.150.88 and NS9 as 103.23.150.89, checking SOA on each gives following:

$ dig soa maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.88 +short
ns8.maharashtra.gov.in. postmaster.maharashtra.gov.in. 2013116777 1200 600 1296000 300
$ dig soa maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.89 +short
ns8.maharashtra.gov.in. postmaster.maharashtra.gov.in. 2013116757 1200 600 1296000 300

NS8 (which is marked as primary in SOA) has serial 2013116777 and NS9 is on serial 2013116757, so looks like the sync (IXFR/AXFR) between primary and secondary is broken. That s why NS8 and NS9 are serving different responses, evident from the following:

$ dig ns8.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.88 +short
103.23.150.88
$ dig ns8.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.89 +short
10.187.202.28
$ dig ns9.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.88 +short
103.23.150.89
$ dig ns9.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.89 +short
10.187.202.24
$ dig ns maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.88 +short
ns9.
ns8.
ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
$ dig ns maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.89 +short
ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
$ dig ns10.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.88 +short
10.187.203.201
$ dig ns10.maharashtra.gov.in @103.23.150.89 +short
# No/empty response ^

This is the reason for difference in 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9 responses in previous section.

To summarize:

• Primary and secondary NS aren t in sync. Serials aren t matching, while NS8 and NS9 are responding differently for same queries.
• NSes have A records with private address, not reachable on the internet, so lame servers.
• Incomplete NS address, not even FQDN in some cases.
• Difference between NS delegated in parent zone and NS added in actual zone.
• Name resolution works in very particular order (in my initial trace it failed).

Initially, I thought of citing RFCs, but I don t really think it s even required. 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 are handling (lame servers, this probelm) well, handing out the A record for the main website, so dig maharashtra.gov.in would mostly pass and that was the reason I started this post with +trace to recurse the complete zone to show the problem. For later reference:

$ dig maharashtra.gov.in @8.8.8.8 +short
103.8.188.109

Email to SOA address I have sent the following email to address listed in SOA:

---

Subject - maharashtra.gov.in authoritative DNS servers not reachable Hello, I wanted to highlight the confusing state of maharashtra.gov.in authoritative DNS servers. Parent zone list following as name servers for your DNS zone:

• ns8.maharashtra.gov.in.
• ns18.maharashtra.gov.in.
• ns10.maharashtra.gov.in.
• ns9.maharashtra.gov.in.
• ns20.maharashtra.gov.in.

Out of these, ns18 and ns20 don t have public A/AAAA records and are thus not reachable. ns10 keeps on shuffling between NO A record and 10.187.203.201 (private, not reachable address). ns8 keeps on shuffling between 103.23.150.88 and 10.187.202.28 (private, not reachable address). ns9 keeps on shuffling between 103.23.150.89 and 10.187.202.24 (private, not reachable address). These are leading to long, broken, or no DNS resolution for the website(s). Can you take a look at the problem? Regards, Sahil

---

I ll update here if I get a response. Hopefully, they ll listen and fix their problem.

I find the case of the .UA country code top level domain (ccTLD) interesting simply because of the different name server secondaries they have now. Post Russian invasion, the cyber warfare peaked, and critical infrastructure like getting one side ccTLD down would be big news in anycase. Most (g/cc)TLDs are served by two (and less likely) by three or more providers. Even in those cases, not all authoritative name servers are anycasted. Take, example of .NL ccTLD name servers:

$ dig ns nl +short
ns1.dns.nl.
ns3.dns.nl.
ns4.dns.nl.

ns1.dns.nl is SIDN which also manages their registry. ns3.dns.nl is ReCodeZero/ipcom, another anycast secondary. ns4.dns.nl is CIRA, anycast secondary. That s 3 diverse, anycast networks to serve the .NL ccTLD. .DE has a bit more at name servers at 6 but only 3 seems anycasted. Now let s take a look at .UA. Hostmaster LLC is the registry operator of the .UA ccTLD since 2001.

$ dig soa ua +short
in1.ns.ua. domain-master.cctld.ua. 2025061434 1818 909 3024000 2020

Shows in1.ns.ua as primary nameserver (which can be intentionally deceptive too). I used bgp.tools for checking anycast and dns.coffee for timeline of when secondary nameserver was added. dns.coffee only has data going back till 2011 though. Let s deep dive at who s hosting each of the name servers:

in1.ns.ua by Intuix LLC

• 74.123.224.40
• 2604:ee00:0:101:0:0:0:40
• unicast
• Serving .UA since 13/12/2018.
• Company by Dmitry Kohmanyuk and Igor Sviridov who re administrative and technical contacts for .UA zone as well as the IANA DB.

ho1.ns.ua by Hostmaster LLC

• 195.47.253.1
• 2001:67c:258:0:0:0:0:1
• bgp.tools doesn t mark the prefix as anycast but basis test from various location, this is indeed anycasted (visible in atleast DE, US, UA etc.). Total POPs unknown.
• Serving .UA atleast since 2011.
• The registry themselves.

bg.ns.ua by ClouDNS

• 185.136.96.185 and 185.136.97.185
• 2a06:fb00:1:0:0:0:4:185 and 2a06:fb00:1:0:0:0:2:185
• anycast
• Serving .UA since 01/03/2022.
• atleast 62 PoPs

cz.ns.ua by NIC.cz

• 185.43.134.15
• 2001:148f:fffd:0:0:0:0:15
• anycast
• atleast 11 PoPs.
• Serving .UA since 29/03/2024. NIC.cz adding secondary server blog.
• .CZ operator.

nn.ns.ua by Netnod

• 194.58.197.4
• 2a01:3f1:c001:0:0:0:0:53
• anycast
• atleast 80 PoPs.
• Serving .UA since 01/12/2022.
• Netnod has the distinction of being one of the 13 root server operator (i.root-servers.net) and .SE operator.

pch.ns.ua by PCH

• 204.61.216.12
• 2001:500:14:6012:ad:0:0:1
• anycast
• atleast 328 POPs.
• Serving .UA atleast since 2011.
• With more than 36 years of production anycast DNS experience, two of the root name server operators and more than 172 top-level domain registries using our infrastructure, and more than 120 million resource records in service from https://www.pch.net/services/anycast.

rcz.ns.ua by RcodeZero

• 193.46.128.10
• 2a02:850:ffe0:0:0:0:0:10
• anycast
• Atleast 56 PoPs via 2 different cloud providers.
• Serving .UA since 04/02/2022.
• sister company of nic.at (.AT operator).

Some points to note

• That s 1 unicast and 6 anycast name servers with hundreds of POPs from 7 different organizations.
• Having X number of Point of Presence (POP) doesn t always mean each location is serving the .UA nameserver prefix.
• Number of POPs keeps going up or down based on operational requirements and optimizations.
• Highest concentration of DNS queries for a ccTLD would essentially originate in the country (or larger region) itself. If one of the secondaries doesn t have POP inside UA, the query might very well be served from outside the country, which can affect resolution and may even stop during outages and fiber cuts (which have become common there it seems). - Global POPs do help in faster resolutions for others/outside users though and ofcourse availability.
• Having this much diversity does lessen the chance of the ccTLD going down. Theoretically, the adversary has to bring down 7 different networks/setups before resolution starts failing (post TTLs expiry).

Read more links

• Delegation record for .UA at IANA.
• Panel discussion: Running a top level domain in times of war at CyberChess 2023 with .UA operators post the invasion.
• History of .UA domain on Hostmaster LLCs website.
• .UA ccTLD overview talk presentation at ENOG 2011.
• RIPE NCC s DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON) page for .UA.

Christopher Biggs gave an informative Evrything Open lecture about voice recognition [1]. We need this on Debian phones. Guido wrote an informative blog post about booting a custom Android kernel on a Pixel 3a [2]. Good work in writing this up, but a pity that Google made the process so difficult. Interesting to read about an expert being a victim of a phishing attack [3]. It can happen to anyone, everyone has moments when they aren t concentrating. Interesting advice on how to leak to a journalist [4]. Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about the ways that Trump is deliberately reducing the cyber security of the US government [5]. Brian Krebs wrote an interesting article about the main smishng groups from China [6]. Louis Rossmann (who is known for high quality YouTube videos about computer repair) made an informative video about a scammy Australian company run by a child sex offender [7]. The Helmover was one of the wildest engineering projects of WW2, an over the horizon guided torpedo that could one-shot a battleship [8]. Interesting blog post about DDoSecrets and the utter failure of the company Telemessages which was used by the US government [9]. Jonathan McDowell wrote an interesting blog post about developing a free software competitor to Alexa etc, the listening hardware costs $13US per node [10]. Noema Magazine published an insightful article about Rewilding the Internet, it has some great ideas [11].

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w8NX3AUX4c
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/25gdysxx
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/29mwthwz
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/27t2tztd
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2am7o6qw
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/27p8z6gf
• [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFe5LiACN9k
• [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W2njKMSks
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/ytq84fb3
• [10] https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2025/04/voice-assistant-atom-echo.html
• [11] https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

After careful consideration, I ve decided to embark on a new chapter in my professional journey. I ve left my position at AWS to dedicate at least the next six months to developing open source software and strengthening digital ecosystems. My focus will be on contributing to Linux distributions (primarily Debian) and other critical infrastructure components that our modern society depends on, but which may not receive adequate attention or resources.

The Evolution of Open Source Open source won. Over the 25+ years I ve been involved in the open source movement, I ve witnessed its remarkable evolution. Today, Linux powers billions of devices from tiny embedded systems and Android smartphones to massive cloud datacenters and even space stations. Examine any modern large-scale digital system, and you ll discover it s built upon thousands of open source projects. I feel the priority for the open source movement should no longer be increasing adoption, but rather solving how to best maintain the vast ecosystem of software. This requires building robust institutions and processes to secure proper resourcing and ensure the collaborative development process remains efficient and leads to ever-increasing quality of software.

What is Special About Debian? Debian, established in 1993 by Ian Murdock, stands as one of these institutions that has demonstrated exceptional resilience. There is no single authority, but instead a complex web of various stakeholders, each with their own goals and sources of funding. Every idea needs to be championed at length to a wide audience and implemented through a process of organic evolution. Thanks to this approach, Debian has been consistently delivering production-quality, universally useful software for over three decades. Having been a Debian Developer for more than ten years, I m well-positioned to contribute meaningfully to this community. If your organization relies on Debian or its derivatives such as Ubuntu, and you re interested in funding cyber infrastructure maintenance by sponsoring Debian work, please don t hesitate to reach out. This could include package maintenance and version currency, improving automated upgrade testing, general quality assurance and supply chain security enhancements.

Best way to reach me is by e-mail otto at debian.org. You can also book a 15-minute chat with me for a quick introduction.

Grow or Die My four-year tenure as a Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services was very interesting. I m grateful for my time at AWS and proud of my team s accomplishments, particularly for creating an open source contribution process that got Amazon from zero to the largest external contributor to the MariaDB open source database. During this time, I got to experience and witness a plethora of interesting things. I will surely share some of my key learnings in future blog posts. Unfortunately, the rate of progress in this mammoth 1.5 million employee organization was slowing down, and I didn t feel I learned much new in the last years. This realization, combined with the opportunity cost of not spending enough time on new cutting-edge technology, motivated me to take this leap. Being a full-time open source developer may not be financially the most lucrative idea, but I think it is an excellent way to force myself to truly assess what is important on a global scale and what areas I want to contribute to. Working fully on open source presents a fascinating duality: you re not bound by any external resource or schedule limitations, and can the progress you make is directly proportional to how much energy you decide to invest. Yet, you also depend on collaboration with people you might never meet and who are not financially incentivized to collaborate. This will undoubtedly expose me to all kinds of challenges. But what would be better in fostering holistic personal growth? I know that deep down in my DNA, I am not made to stay cozy or to do easy things. I need momentum. OK, let s get going

Welcome to the third report in 2025 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 increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As usual, however, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible from their binary packages
2. How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor
3. LWN: Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility
4. Python adopts PEP standard for specifying package dependencies
5. OSS Rebuild real-time validation and tooling improvements
6. SimpleX Chat server components now reproducible
7. Three new scholarly papers
8. Distribution roundup
9. An overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions
10. diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism
11. Website updates
12. Reproducibility testing framework
13. Upstream patches

---

Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible from their binary packages Roland Clobus announced on our mailing list this month that all the major desktop variants (ie. Gnome, KDE, etc.) can be reproducibly created for Debian bullseye, bookworm and trixie from their (pre-compiled) binary packages. Building reproducible Debian live images does not require building from reproducible source code, but this is still a remarkable achievement. Some large proportion of the binary packages that comprise these live images can (and were) built reproducibly, but live image generation works at a higher level. (By contrast, full or end-to-end reproducibility of a bootable OS image will, in time, require both the compile-the-packages the build-the-bootable-image stages to be reproducible.) Nevertheless, in response, Roland s announcement generated significant congratulations as well as some discussion regarding the finer points of the terms employed: a full outline of the replies can be found here. The news was also picked up by Linux Weekly News (LWN) as well as to Hacker News.

How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor Julien Malka aka luj published an in-depth blog post this month with the highly-stimulating title How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor for the benefit of all . Starting with an dive into the relevant technical details of the XZ Utils backdoor, Julien s article goes on to describe how we might avoid the xz catastrophe in the future by building software from trusted sources and building trust into untrusted release tarballs by way of comparing sources and leveraging bitwise reproducibility, i.e. applying the practices of Reproducible Builds. The article generated significant discussion on Hacker News as well as on Linux Weekly News (LWN).

LWN: Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility Linux Weekly News (LWN) contributor Joe Brockmeier has published a detailed round-up on how Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility. The article opens by mentioning that although Debian has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade , the Fedora project has now:

progressed far enough that the project is now considering a change proposal for the Fedora 43 development cycle, expected to be released in October, with a goal of making 99% of Fedora s package builds reproducible. So far, reaction to the proposal seems favorable and focused primarily on how to achieve the goal with minimal pain for packagers rather than whether to attempt it.

The Change Proposal itself is worth reading:

Over the last few releases, we [Fedora] changed our build infrastructure to make package builds reproducible. This is enough to reach 90%. The remaining issues need to be fixed in individual packages. After this Change, package builds are expected to be reproducible. Bugs will be filed against packages when an irreproducibility is detected. The goal is to have no fewer than 99% of package builds reproducible.

Further discussion can be found on the Fedora mailing list as well as on Fedora s Discourse instance.

Python adopts PEP standard for specifying package dependencies Python developer Brett Cannon reported on Fosstodon that PEP 751 was recently accepted. This design document has the purpose of describing a file format to record Python dependencies for installation reproducibility . As the abstract of the proposal writes:

This PEP proposes a new file format for specifying dependencies to enable reproducible installation in a Python environment. The format is designed to be human-readable and machine-generated. Installers consuming the file should be able to calculate what to install without the need for dependency resolution at install-time.

The PEP, which itself supersedes PEP 665, mentions that there are at least five well-known solutions to this problem in the community .

OSS Rebuild real-time validation and tooling improvements OSS Rebuild aims to automate rebuilding upstream language packages (e.g. from PyPI, crates.io, npm registries) and publish signed attestations and build definitions for public use. OSS Rebuild is now attempting rebuilds as packages are published, shortening the time to validating rebuilds and publishing attestations. Aman Sharma contributed classifiers and fixes for common sources of non-determinism in JAR packages. Improvements were also made to some of the core tools in the project:

• timewarp for simulating the registry responses from sometime in the past.
• proxy for transparent interception and logging of network activity.
• and stabilize, yet another nondeterminism fixer.

SimpleX Chat server components now reproducible SimpleX Chat is a privacy-oriented decentralised messaging platform that eliminates user identifiers and metadata, offers end-to-end encryption and has a unique approach to decentralised identity. Starting from version 6.3, however, Simplex has implemented reproducible builds for its server components. This advancement allows anyone to verify that the binaries distributed by SimpleX match the source code, improving transparency and trustworthiness.

Three new scholarly papers Aman Sharma of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, Sweden published a paper on Build and Runtime Integrity for Java (PDF). The paper s abstract notes that Software Supply Chain attacks are increasingly threatening the security of software systems and goes on to compare build- and run-time integrity:

Build-time integrity ensures that the software artifact creation process, from source code to compiled binaries, remains untampered. Runtime integrity, on the other hand, guarantees that the executing application loads and runs only trusted code, preventing dynamic injection of malicious components.

Aman s paper explores solutions to safeguard Java applications and proposes some novel techniques to detect malicious code injection. A full PDF of the paper is available.
In addition, Hamed Okhravi and Nathan Burow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory along with Fred B. Schneider of Cornell University published a paper in the most recent edition of IEEE Security & Privacy on Software Bill of Materials as a Proactive Defense:

The recently mandated software bill of materials (SBOM) is intended to help mitigate software supply-chain risk. We discuss extensions that would enable an SBOM to serve as a basis for making trust assessments thus also serving as a proactive defense.

A full PDF of the paper is available.
Lastly, congratulations to Giacomo Benedetti of the University of Genoa for publishing their PhD thesis. Titled Improving Transparency, Trust, and Automation in the Software Supply Chain, Giacomo s thesis:

addresses three critical aspects of the software supply chain to enhance security: transparency, trust, and automation. First, it investigates transparency as a mechanism to empower developers with accurate and complete insights into the software components integrated into their applications. To this end, the thesis introduces SUNSET and PIP-SBOM, leveraging modeling and SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) as foundational tools for transparency and security. Second, it examines software trust, focusing on the effectiveness of reproducible builds in major ecosystems and proposing solutions to bolster their adoption. Finally, it emphasizes the role of automation in modern software management, particularly in ensuring user safety and application reliability. This includes developing a tool for automated security testing of GitHub Actions and analyzing the permission models of prominent platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket.

Distribution roundup In Debian this month:

• kpcyrd released and uploaded debian-repro-status version 0.2.1-1 which fixes an issue related to querying architecture-independent packages. In addition, Holger Levsen identified three issues surrounding outputs to standard output and standard error [ ] as well as a request for summarised [ ] and machine-readable [ ].
• Debian developer Simon Josefsson published two reproducibility-related blog posts this month. The first was on the topic of Reproducible Software Releases which discusses some techniques and gotchas that can be encountered when generating reproducible source packages ie. ensuring that the source code archives that open-source software projects release can be reproduced by others. Simon s second post builds on his earlier experiments with reproducing parts of Trisquel/Debian. Titled On Binary Distribution Rebuilds, it discusses potential methods to bootstrap a binary distribution like Debian from some other bootstrappable environment like Guix.
• Jochen Sprickerhof uploaded sbuild version 0.88.5 with a change relevant to reproducible builds: specifically, the build_as_root_when_needed functionality still supports older versions of dpkg(1). [ ]
• Lastly, 16 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 11 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. One new toolchain issue, tempdir_in_cython_cythonize was identified by Chris Lamb as well.

The IzzyOnDroid Android APK repository reached another milestone in March, crossing the 40% coverage mark specifically, more than 42% of the apps in the repository is now reproducible Thanks to funding by NLnet/Mobifree, the project was also to put more time into their tooling. For instance, developers can now run easily their own verification builder in less than 5 minutes . This currently supports Debian-based systems, but support for RPM-based systems is incoming. Future work in the pipeline, including documentation, guidelines and helpers for debugging.
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build which attempts to reproduce an existing package within a Koji build environment. Although the project s README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary (and there are a non-zero list of other known issues), this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility (see above for more information).
Lastly, in openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work there.

An overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions Fenrisk, a cybersecurity risk-management company, has published a lengthy overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions. Authored by Maxime Rinaudo, the article asks:

[What] would it take to compromise an entire Linux distribution directly through their public infrastructure? Is it possible to perform such a compromise as simple security researchers with no available resources but time?

diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism 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 290, 291, 292 and 293 and 293 to Debian:

• Bug fixes:
  • file(1) version 5.46 now returns XHTML document for .xhtml files such as those found nested within our .epub tests. [ ]
  • Also consider .aar files as APK files, at least for the sake of diffoscope. [ ]
  • Require the new, upcoming, version of file(1) and update our quine-related testcase. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Ensure all calls to our_check_output in the ELF comparator have the potential CalledProcessError exception caught. [ ][ ]
  • Correct an import masking issue. [ ]
  • Add a missing subprocess import. [ ]
  • Reformat openssl.py. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ][ ][ ]

In addition, Ivan Trubach contributed a change to ignore the st_size metadata entry for directories as it is essentially arbitrary and introduces unnecessary or even spurious changes. [ ]

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

• Benedikt Ritter added the Reproducible Builds Gradle Plugin to our Tools page. [ ]
• Chris Lamb added a Meson alternative for generating SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH that calls out to Python to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation. [ ]
• Herv Boutemy updated the JVM documentation to clarify that the target is rebuild attestation. [ ]
• Lastly, Holger Levsen added Julien Malka and Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek to our Involved people [ ][ ] as well as replaced suggestions to follow us on Twitter/X to follow us on Mastodon instead [ ][ ].

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

• reproduce.debian.net-related:
  • Add links to two related bugs about buildinfos.debian.net. [ ]
  • Add an extra sync to the database backup. [ ]
  • Overhaul description of what the service is about. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the documentation to indicate that need to fix syncronisation pipes. [ ][ ]
  • Improve the statistics page by breaking down output by architecture. [ ]
  • Add a copyright statement. [ ]
  • Add a space after the package name so one can search for specific packages more easily. [ ]
  • Add a script to work around/implement a missing feature of debrebuild. [ ]
• Misc:
  • Run debian-repro-status at the end of the chroot-install tests. [ ][ ]
  • Document that we have unused diskspace at Ionos. [ ]

In addition:

• James Addison made a number of changes to the reproduce.debian.net homepage. [ ][ ].
• Jochen Sprickerhof updated the statistics generation to catch No space left on device issues. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo added a better command to stop the builders [ ] and fixed the reStructuredText syntax in the README.infrastructure file. [ ]

And finally, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ].

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:

• Baptiste Daroussin:
  • FreeBSD pkgbase
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • bash
  • cobra
  • cpython
  • deepin-daemon
  • difftastic
  • firefox-esr
  • fritzing
  • gawk
  • kbd
  • libcorrect
  • m4
  • os-autoinst
  • python-nanobind
  • python3-espressomd
  • sad
  • wrk
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1099516 filed against sphinxcontrib-googleanalytics.
  • #1100016 filed against hx.
  • #1100018 filed against yaramod.
  • #1100115 filed against font-manager.
  • #1100977 filed against python-moto.
  • #1101740 filed against jenkins-job-builder.
  • #1101741 filed against isync.
  • #1101742 filed against python-pytest-shell-utilities.
  • #1101743 filed against oss4.
• Fridrich Strba:
  • xmlgraphics-fop
• Jochen Sprickerhof:
  • #1100051 filed against suricata.
• Robin Candau:
  • clifm
  • lidm

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

Review: Cascade Failure, by L.M. Sagas

Series:	Ambit's Run #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2024
ISBN:	1-250-87126-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	407

Cascade Failure is a far-future science fiction adventure with a small helping of cyberpunk vibes. It is the first of a (so far) two-book series, and was the author's first novel. The Ambit is an old and small Guild ship, not much to look at, but it holds a couple of surprises. One is its captain, Eoan, who is an AI with a deep and insatiable curiosity that has driven them and their ship farther and farther out into the Spiral. The other is its surprisingly competent crew: a battle-scarred veteran named Saint who handles the fighting, and a talented engineer named Nash who does literally everything else. The novel opens with them taking on supplies at Aron Outpost. A supposed Guild deserter named Jalsen wanders into the ship looking for work. An AI ship with a found-family crew is normally my catnip, so I wanted to love this book. Alas, I did not. There were parts I liked. Nash is great: snarky, competent, and direct. Eoan is a bit distant and slightly more simplistic of a character than I was expecting, but I appreciated the way Sagas put them firmly in charge of the ship and departed from the conventional AI character presentation. Once the plot starts in earnest (more on that in a moment), we meet Anke, the computer hacker, whose charming anxiety reaction is a complete inability to stop talking and who adds some needed depth to the character interactions. There's plenty of action, a plot that makes at least some sense, and a few moments that almost achieved the emotional payoff the author was attempting. Unfortunately, most of the story focuses on Saint and Jal, and both of them are irritatingly dense cliches. The moment Jal wanders onto the Ambit in the first chapter, the reader is informed that Jal, Saint, and Eoan have a history. The crew of the Ambit spent a year looking for Jal and aren't letting go of him now that they've found him. Jal, on the other hand, clearly blames Saint for something and is not inclined to trust him. Okay, fine, a bit generic of a setup but the writing moved right along and I was curious enough. It then takes a full 180 pages before the reader finds out what the hell is going on with Saint and Jal. Predictably, it's a stupid misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with one conversation in the second chapter. Cascade Failure does not contain a romance (and to the extent that it hints at one, it's a sapphic romance), but I swear Saint and Jal are both the male protagonist from a certain type of stereotypical heterosexual romance novel. They're both the brooding man with the past, who is too hurt to trust anyone and assumes the worst because he's unable to use his words or ask an open question and then listen to the answer. The first half of this book is them being sullen at each other at great length while both of them feel miserable. Jal keeps doing weird and suspicious things to resolve a problem that would have been far more easily resolved by the rest of the crew if he would offer any explanation at all. It's not even suspenseful; we've read about this character enough times to know that he'll turn out to have a heart of gold and everything will be a misunderstanding. I found it tedious. Maybe people who like slow burn romances with this character type will have a less negative reaction. The real plot starts at about the time Saint and Jal finally get their shit sorted out. It turns out to have almost nothing to do with either of them. The environmental control systems of worlds are suddenly failing (hence the book title), and Anke, the late-arriving computer programmer and terraforming specialist, has a rather wild theory about what's happening. This leads to a lot of action, some decent twists, and a plot that felt very cyberpunk to me, although unfortunately it culminates in an absurdly-cliched action climax. This book is an action movie that desperately wants to make you feel all the feels, and it worked about as well as that typically works in action movies for me. Jaded cynicism and an inability to communicate are not the ways to get me to have an emotional reaction to a book, and Jal (once he finally starts talking) is so ridiculously earnest that it's like reading the adventures of a Labrador puppy. There was enough going on that it kept me reading, but not enough for the story to feel satisfying. I needed a twist, some depth, way more Nash and Anke and way less of the men, something. Everyone is going to compare this book to Firefly, but Firefly had better banter, created more complex character interactions due to the larger and more varied crew, and played the cynical mercenary for laughs instead of straight, all of which suited me better. This is not a bad book, particularly once it gets past the halfway point, but it's not that memorable either, at least for me. If you're looking for a space adventure with heavy action hero and military SF vibes that wants to be about Big Feelings but gets there in mostly obvious ways, you could do worse. If you're looking for a found-family starship crew story more like Becky Chambers, I think you'll find this one a bit too shallow and obvious. Not really recommended, although there's nothing that wrong with it and I'm sure other people's experience will differ. Followed by Gravity Lost, which I'm unlikely to read. Rating: 6 out of 10