Search Results: "david"

11 April 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
  2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
  3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
  4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
  5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
  6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
  7. Distribution work
  8. Mailing list highlights
  9. Website updates
  10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
  11. diffoscope updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

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

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):
So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.
That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

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

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:
Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF
Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

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

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

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

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

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

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

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
    • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
    • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
    • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
    • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
    • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
    • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
    • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]
In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

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

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
    • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
    • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
    • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
    • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
    • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
    • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
    • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
    • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
    • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
    • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
    • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
    • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
    • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
    • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
    • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
    • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
    • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
    • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
    • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
    • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
    • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
    • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]
Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
    • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
    • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
    • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
    • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
    • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
    • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
    • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
    • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
    • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
    • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
    • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
    • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
    • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
    • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
    • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]
The following changes were also made by:
  • Jan-Benedict Glaw:
    • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
    • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
    • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
    • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]
Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]
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:

28 March 2024

Joey Hess: the vulture in the coal mine

Turns out that VPS provider Vultr's terms of service were quietly changed some time ago to give them a "perpetual, irrevocable" license to use content hosted there in any way, including modifying it and commercializing it "for purposes of providing the Services to you." This is very similar to changes that Github made to their TOS in 2017. Since then, Github has been rebranded as "The world s leading AI-powered developer platform". The language in their TOS now clearly lets them use content stored in Github for training AI. (Probably this is their second line of defense if the current attempt to legitimise copyright laundering via generative AI fails.) Vultr is currently in damage control mode, accusing their concerned customers of spreading "conspiracy theories" (-- founder David Aninowsky) and updating the TOS to remove some of the problem language. Although it still allows them to "make derivative works", so could still allow their AI division to scrape VPS images for training data. Vultr claims this was the legalese version of technical debt, that it only ever applied to posts in a forum (not supported by the actual TOS language) and basically that they and their lawyers are incompetant but not malicious. Maybe they are indeed incompetant. But even if I give them the benefit of the doubt, I expect that many other VPS providers, especially ones targeting non-corporate customers, are watching this closely. If Vultr is not significantly harmed by customers jumping ship, if the latest TOS change is accepted as good enough, then other VPS providers will know that they can try this TOS trick too. If Vultr's AI division does well, others will wonder to what extent it is due to having all this juicy training data. For small self-hosters, this seems like a good time to make sure you're using a VPS provider you can actually trust to not be eyeing your disk image and salivating at the thought of stripmining it for decades of emails. Probably also worth thinking about moving to bare metal hardware, perhaps hosted at home. I wonder if this will finally make it worthwhile to mess around with VPS TPMs?

29 February 2024

Russell Coker: Links February 2024

In 2018 Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post Dude You Broke the Future [1]. It covers AI in both fiction and fact and corporations (the real AIs) and the horrifying things they can do right now. LongNow has an interesting article about the concept of the Magnum Opus [2]. As an aside I ve been working on SE Linux for 22 years. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about the incentives for enshittification of the Internet and how economic issues and regulations shape that [3]. CCC has a lot of great talks, and this talk from the latest CCC about the Triangulation talk on an attak on Kaspersky iPhones is particularly epic [4]. GoodCar is an online sales site for electric cars in Australia [5]. Ulrike wrote an insightful blog post about how the reliance on volunteer work in the FOSS community hurts diversity [6]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about The Internet s Original Sin which is misuse of copyright law [7]. He advocates for using copyright strictly for it s intended purpose and creating other laws for privacy, labor rights, etc. David Brin wrote an interesting article on neoteny and sexual selection in humans [8]. 37C3 has an interesting lecture about software licensing for a circular economy which includes environmental savings from better code [9]. Now they track efficiency in KDE bug reports!
Related posts:
  1. Links January 2024 Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers...
  2. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  3. Links February 2014 The Economist has an interesting and informative article about the...

16 February 2024

David Bremner: Generating ikiwiki markdown from org

My web pages are (still) in ikiwiki, but lately I have started authoring things like assignments and lectures in org-mode so that I can have some literate programming facilities. There is is org-mode export built-in, but it just exports source blocks as examples (i.e. unhighlighted verbatim). I added a custom exporter to mark up source blocks in a way ikiwiki can understand. Luckily this is not too hard the second time. 
(with-eval-after-load "ox-md"
  (org-export-define-derived-backend 'ik 'md
    :translate-alist '((src-block . ik-src-block))
    :menu-entry '(?m 1 ((?i "ikiwiki" ik-export-to-ikiwiki)))))
(defun ik-normalize-language  (str)
  (cond
   ((string-equal str "plait") "racket")
   ((string-equal str "smol") "racket")
   (t str)))
(defun ik-src-block (src-block contents info)
  "Transcode a SRC-BLOCK element from Org to beamer
         CONTENTS is nil.  INFO is a plist used as a communication
         channel."
  (let* ((body  (org-element-property :value src-block))
         (lang  (ik-normalize-language (org-element-property :language src-block))))
    (format "[[!format <span class="error">Error: unsupported page format &#37;s</span>]]" lang body)))
(defun ik-export-to-ikiwiki
    (&optional async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)
  "Export current buffer as an ikiwiki markdown file.
    See org-md-export-to-markdown for full docs"
  (require 'ox)
  (interactive)
  (let ((file (org-export-output-file-name ".mdwn" subtreep)))
    (org-export-to-file 'ik file
      async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)))

28 January 2024

Russell Coker: Links January 2024

Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers whether humans have evolved to want to control nature [1]. The OMG Elite hacker cable is an interesting device [2]. A Wifi device in a USB cable to allow remote control and monitoring of data transfer, including remote keyboard control and sniffing. Pity that USB-C cables have chips in them so you can t use a spark to remove unwanted chips from modern cables. David Brin s blog post The core goal of tyrants: The Red-Caesar Cult and a restored era of The Great Man has some insightful points about authoritarianism [3]. Ron Garret wrote an interesting argument against Christianity [4], and a follow-up titled Why I Don t Believe in Jesus [5]. He has a link to a well written article about the different theologies of Jesus and Paul [6]. Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an interesting blog post about how they reduced disk space for Ubuntu kernel packages and RAM for the initramfs phase of boot [7]. I hope this gets copied to Debian soon. Joey Hess wrote an interesting blog post about trying to make LLM systems produce bad code if trained on his code without permission [8]. Arstechnica has an interesting summary of research into the security of fingerprint sensors [9]. Not surprising that the products of the 3 vendors that supply almost all PC fingerprint readers are easy to compromise. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about how AI will allow mass spying (as opposed to mass surveillance) [10]. ZDnet has an informative article How to Write Better ChatGPT Prompts in 5 Steps [11]. I sent this to a bunch of my relatives. AbortRetryFail has an interesting article about the Itanic Saga [12]. Erberus sounds interesting, maybe VLIW designs could give a good ration of instructions to power unlike the Itanium which was notorious for being power hungry. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI and Trust [13]. We really need laws controlling these things! David Brin wrote an interesting blog post on the obsession with historical cycles [14].
Related posts:
  1. Links January 2020 C is Not a Low Level Language [1] is an...
  2. Links January 2023 The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior...
  3. Links January 2021 Krebs on Security has an informative article about web notifications...

15 January 2024

Colin Watson: OpenUK New Year s Honours

Apparently I got an honour from OpenUK. There are a bunch of people I know on that list. Chris Lamb and Mark Brown are familiar names from Debian. Colin King and Jonathan Riddell are people I know from past work in Ubuntu. I ve admired David MacIver s work on Hypothesis and Richard Hughes work on firmware updates from afar. And there are a bunch of other excellent projects represented there: OpenStreetMap, Textualize, and my alma mater of Cambridge to name but a few. My friend Stuart Langridge wrote about being on a similar list a few years ago, and I can t do much better than to echo it: in particular he wrote about the way the open source development community is often at best unwelcoming to people who don t look like Stuart and I do. I can t tell a whole lot about demographic distribution just by looking at a list of names, but while these honours still seem to be skewed somewhat male, I m fairly sure they re doing a lot better in terms of gender balance than my home project of Debian is, for one. I hope this is a sign of improvement for the future, and I ll do what I can to pay it forward.

12 January 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RDieHarder 0.2.6 on CRAN: Maintenance

An new version 0.2.6 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself along with other contributors) is now on CRAN (and to the day year after the previous release). This release contains changes to printf format strings to avoid new warnings on Windows. No functional changes have been made. Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at the most recent diff to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

1 January 2024

Russ Allbery: 2023 Book Reading in Review

In 2023, I finished and reviewed 53 books, continuing a trend of year-over-year increases and of reading the most books since 2012 (the last year I averaged five books a month). Reviewing continued to be uneven, with a significant slump in the summer and smaller slumps in February and November, and a big clump of reviews finished in October in addition to my normal year-end reading and reviewing vacation. The unevenness this year was mostly due to finishing books and not writing reviews immediately. Reviews are much harder to write when the finished books are piling up, so one goal for 2024 is to not let that happen again. I enter the new year with one book finished and not yet reviewed, after reading a book about every day and a half during my December vacation. I read two all-time favorite books this year. The first was Emily Tesh's debut novel Some Desperate Glory, which is one of the best space opera novels I have ever read. I cannot improve on Shelley Parker-Chan's blurb for this book: "Fierce and heartbreakingly humane, this book is for everyone who loved Ender's Game, but Ender's Game didn't love them back." This is not hard science fiction but it is fantastic character fiction. It was exactly what I needed in the middle of a year in which I was fighting a "burn everything down" mood. The second was Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, the 29th Discworld and 6th Watch novel. Throughout my Discworld read-through, Pratchett felt like he was on the cusp of a truly stand-out novel, one where all the pieces fit and the book becomes something more than the sum of its parts. This was that book. It's a book about ethics and revolutions and governance, but also about how your perception of yourself changes as you get older. It does all of the normal Pratchett things, just... better. While I would love to point new Discworld readers at it, I think you do have to read at least the Watch novels that came before it for it to carry its proper emotional heft. This was overall a solid year for fiction reading. I read another 15 novels I rated 8 out of 10, and 12 that I rated 7 out of 10. The largest contributor to that was my Discworld read-through, which was reliably entertaining throughout the year. The run of Discworld books between The Fifth Elephant (read late last year) and Wintersmith (my last of this year) was the best run of Discworld novels so far. One additional book I'll call out as particularly worth reading is Thud!, the Watch novel after Night Watch and another excellent entry. I read two stand-out non-fiction books this year. The first was Oliver Darkshire's delightful memoir about life as a rare book seller, Once Upon a Tome. One of the things I will miss about Twitter is the regularity with which I stumbled across fascinating people and then got to read their books. I'm off Twitter permanently now because the platform is designed to make me incoherently angry and I need less of that in my life, but it was very good at finding delightfully quirky books like this one. My other favorite non-fiction book of the year was Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm still bemused at the negative reviews that this got from people who were upset that Lewis didn't turn the story into a black-and-white morality play. Bankman-Fried's actions were clearly criminal; that's not in dispute. Human motivations can be complex in ways that are irrelevant to the law, and I thought this attempt to understand that complexity by a top-notch storyteller was worthy of attention. Also worth a mention is Tony Judt's Postwar, the first book I reviewed in 2023. A sprawling history of post-World-War-II Europe will never have the sheer readability of shorter, punchier books, but this was the most informative book that I read in 2023. 2024 should see the conclusion of my Discworld read-through, after which I may return to re-reading Mercedes Lackey or David Eddings, both of which I paused to make time for Terry Pratchett. I also have another re-read similar to my Chronicles of Narnia reviews that I've been thinking about for a while. Perhaps I will start that next year; perhaps it will wait for 2025. Apart from that, my intention as always is to read steadily, write reviews as close to when I finished the book as possible, and make reading time for my huge existing backlog despite the constant allure of new releases. Here's to a new year full of more new-to-me books and occasional old favorites. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

31 December 2023

Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2023

This post should have marked the beginning of my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies I read and watched in 2023. However, due to coming down with a nasty bout of flu recently and other sundry commitments, I wasn't able to undertake writing the necessary four or five blog posts In lieu of this, however, I will simply present my (unordered and unadorned) highlights for now. Do get in touch if this (or any of my previous posts) have spurred you into picking something up yourself

Books

Peter Watts: Blindsight (2006) Reymer Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (2006) Joanne McNeil: Lurking: How a Person Became a User (2020) J. L. Carr: A Month in the Country (1980) Hilary Mantel: A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (2023) Adam Higginbotham: Midnight in Chernobyl (2019) Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008) Peter Apps: Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen (2021) Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City (2003)

Films Recent releases

Unenjoyable experiences included Alejandro G mez Monteverde's Sound of Freedom (2023), Alex Garland's Men (2022) and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022).
Older releases (Films released before 2022, and not including rewatches from previous years.) Distinctly unenjoyable watches included Ocean's Eleven (1960), El Topo (1970), L olo (1992), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Bulworth (1998) and and The Big Red One (1980).

29 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Afterward

Review: The Afterward, by E.K. Johnston
Publisher: Dutton Books
Copyright: February 2019
Printing: 2020
ISBN: 0-7352-3190-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 339
The Afterward is a standalone young adult high fantasy with a substantial romance component. The title is not misspelled. Sir Erris and her six companions, matching the number of the new gods, were successful in their quest for the godsgem. They defeated the Old God and destroyed Him forever, freeing King Dorrenta from his ensorcellment, and returned in triumph to Cadrium to live happily ever after. Or so the story goes. Sir Erris and three of the companions are knights. Another companion is the best mage in the kingdom. Kalanthe Ironheart, who distracted the Old God at a critical moment and allowed Sir Erris to strike, is only an apprentice due to her age, but surely will become a great knight. And then there is Olsa Rhetsdaughter, the lowborn thief, now somewhat mockingly called Thief of the Realm for all the good that does her. The reward was enough for her to buy her freedom from the Thief's Court. It was not enough to pay for food after that, or enough for her to change her profession, and the Thief's Court no longer has any incentive to give her easy (or survivable) assignments. Kalanthe is in a considerably better position, but she still needs a good marriage. Her reward paid off half of her debt, which broadens her options, but she's still a debt-knight, liable for the full cost of her training once she reaches the age of nineteen. She's mostly made her peace with the decisions she made given her family's modest means, but marriages of that type are usually for heirs, and Kalanthe is not looking forward to bearing a child. Or, for that matter, sleeping with a man. Olsa and Kalanthe fell in love during the Quest. Given Kalanthe's debt and the way it must be paid, and her iron-willed determination to keep vows, neither of them expected their relationship to survive the end of the Quest. Both of them wish that it had. The hook is that this novel picks up after the epic fantasy quest is over and everyone went home. This is not an entirely correct synopsis; chapters of The Afterward alternate between "After" and "Before" (and one chapter delightfully titled "More or less the exact moment of"), and by the end of the book we get much of the story of the Quest. It's not told from the perspective of the lead heroes, though; it's told by following Kalanthe and Olsa, who would be firmly relegated to supporting characters in a typical high fantasy. And it's largely told through the lens of their romance. This is not the best fantasy novel I've read, but I had a fun time with it. I am now curious about the intended audience and marketing, though. It was published by a YA imprint, and both the ages of the main characters and the general theme of late teenagers trying to chart a course in an adult world match that niche. But it's also clearly intended for readers who have read enough epic fantasy quests that they will both be amused by the homage and not care that the story elides a lot of the typical details. Anyone who read David Eddings at an impressionable age will enjoy the way Johnston pokes gentle fun at The Belgariad (this book is dedicated to David and Leigh Eddings), but surely the typical reader of YA fantasy these days isn't also reading Eddings. I'm therefore not quite sure who this book was for, but apparently that group included me. Johnston thankfully is not on board with the less savory parts of Eddings's writing, as you might have guessed from the sapphic romance. There is no obnoxious gender essentialism here, although there do appear to be gender roles that I never quite figured out. Knights are referred to as sir, but all of the knights in this story are women. Men still seem to run a lot of things (kingdoms, estates, mage colleges), but apart from the mage, everyone on the Quest was female, and there seems to be an expectation that women go out into the world and have adventures while men stay home. I'm not sure if there was an underlying system that escaped me, or if Johnston just mixed things up for the hell of it. (If the latter, I approve.) This book does suffer a bit from addressing some current-day representation issues without managing to fold them naturally into the story or setting. One of the Quest knights is transgender, something that's revealed in a awkward couple of paragraphs and then never mentioned again. Two of the characters have a painfully earnest conversation about the word "bisexual," complete with a strained attempt at in-universe etymology. Racial diversity (Olsa is black, and Kalanthe is also not white) seemed to be handled a bit better, although I am not the reader to notice if the discussions of hair maintenance were similarly awkward. This is way better than no representation and default-white characters, to be clear, but it felt a bit shoehorned in at times and could have used some more polish. These are quibbles, though. Olsa was the heart of the book for me, and is exactly the sort of character I like to read about. Kalanthe is pure stubborn paladin, but I liked her more and more as the story continued. She provides a good counterbalance to Olsa's natural chaos. I do wish Olsa had more opportunities to show her own competence (she's not a very good thief, she's just the thief that Sir Erris happened to know), but the climax of the story was satisfying. My main grumble is that I badly wanted to dwell on the happily-ever-after for at least another chapter, ideally two. Johnston was done with the story before I was. The writing was serviceable but not great and there are some bits that I don't think would stand up to a strong poke, but the characters carried the story for me. Recommended if you'd like some sapphic romance and lightweight class analysis complicating your Eddings-style quest fantasy. Rating: 7 out of 10

27 December 2023

David Bremner: Added a derived backend for org export

See web-stacker for the background. yantar92 on #org-mode pointed out that a derived backend would be a cleaner solution. I had initially thought it was too complicated, but I have to agree the example in the org-mode documentation does pretty much what I need. This new approach has the big advantage that the generation of URLs happens at export time, so it's not possible for the displayed program code and the version encoded in the URL to get out of sync. 
;; derived backend to customize src block handling
(defun my-beamer-src-block (src-block contents info)
  "Transcode a SRC-BLOCK element from Org to beamer
         CONTENTS is nil.  INFO is a plist used as a communication
         channel."
  (let ((attr (org-export-read-attribute :attr_latex src-block :stacker)))
    (concat
     (when (or (not attr) (string= attr "both"))
       (org-export-with-backend 'beamer src-block contents info))
     (when attr
       (let* ((body  (org-element-property :value src-block))
              (table '(? ?\n ?: ?/ ?? ?# ?[ ?] ?@ ?! ?$ ?& ??
                         ?( ?) ?* ?+ ?, ?= ?%))
              (slug (org-link-encode body table))
              (simplified (replace-regexp-in-string "[%]20" "+" slug nil 'literal)))
         (format "\n\\stackerlink %s " simplified))))))
(defun my-beamer-export-to-latex
    (&optional async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)
  "Export current buffer as a (my)Beamer presentation (tex).
    See org-beamer-export-to-latex for full docs"
  (interactive)
  (let ((file (org-export-output-file-name ".tex" subtreep)))
    (org-export-to-file 'my-beamer file
      async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)))
(defun my-beamer-export-to-pdf
    (&optional async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist)
  "Export current buffer as a (my)Beamer presentation (PDF).
  See org-beamer-export-to-pdf for full docs."
  (interactive)
  (let ((file (org-export-output-file-name ".tex" subtreep)))
    (org-export-to-file 'my-beamer file
      async subtreep visible-only body-only ext-plist
      #'org-latex-compile)))
(with-eval-after-load "ox-beamer"
  (org-export-define-derived-backend 'my-beamer 'beamer
    :translate-alist '((src-block . my-beamer-src-block))
    :menu-entry '(?l 1 ((?m "my beamer .tex" my-beamer-export-to-latex)
                        (?M "my beamer .pdf" my-beamer-export-to-pdf)))))
An example of using this in an org-document would as below. The first source code block generates only a link in the output while the last adds a generated link to the normal highlighted source code. 
* Stuff
** Frame
#+attr_latex: :stacker t
#+NAME: last
#+BEGIN_SRC stacker :eval no
  (f)
#+END_SRC
#+name: smol-example
#+BEGIN_SRC stacker :noweb yes
  (defvar x 1)
  (deffun (f)
    (let ([y 2])
      (deffun (h)
        (+ x y))
      (h)))
  <<last>>
#+END_SRC
** Another Frame 
#+ATTR_LATEX: :stacker both
#+begin_src smol :noweb yes
  <<smol-example>>
#+end_src

David Bremner: Generating links to a web IDE from org-beamer

The Emacs part is superceded by a cleaner approach I the upcoming term I want to use KC Lu's web based stacker tool. The key point is that it takes (small) programs encoded as part of the url. Yesterday I spent some time integrating it into my existing org-beamer workflow. In my init.el I have 
(defun org-babel-execute:stacker (body params)
  (let* ((table '(? ?\n ?: ?/ ?? ?# ?[ ?] ?@ ?! ?$ ?& ??
                    ?( ?) ?* ?+ ?, ?= ?%))
         (slug (org-link-encode body table))
         (simplified (replace-regexp-in-string "[%]20" "+" slug nil 'literal)))
    (format "\\stackerlink %s " simplified)))
This means that when I "execute" the block below with C-c C-c, it updates the link, which is then embedded in the slides. 
#+begin_src stacker :results value latex :exports both
  (deffun (f x)
    (let ([y 2])
      (+ x y)))
  (f 7)
#+end_src
#+RESULTS:
#+begin_export latex
\stackerlink %28deffun+%28f+x%29%0A++%28let+%28%5By+2%5D%29%0A++++%28%2B+x+y%29%29%29%0A%28f+7%29 
#+end_export
The \stackerlink macro is probably fancier than needed. One could just use \href from hyperref.sty, but I wanted to match the appearence of other links in my documents (buttons in the margins). This is based on a now lost answer from stackoverflow.com; I think it wasn't this one, but you get the main idea: use \hyper@normalise. 
\makeatletter
% define \stacker@base appropriately
\DeclareRobustCommand* \stackerlink \hyper@normalise\stackerlink@ 
\def\stackerlink@#1 %
  \begin tikzpicture [overlay]%
    \coordinate (here) at (0,0);%
    \draw (current page.south west  - here)%
    node[xshift=2ex,yshift=3.5ex,fill=magenta,inner sep=1pt]%
     \hyper@linkurl \tiny\textcolor white stacker \stacker@base?program=#1 ; %
  \end tikzpicture 
\makeatother

21 December 2023

Russell Coker: Links December 2023

David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the latest round of UFO delusion [1]. There aren t a heap of scientists secretly working on UFOs. David Brin wrote an informative and insightful blog post about rich doomsday preppers who want to destroy democracy [2]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how ChatGPT helps people write letters and how that decreases the value of the letter [3]. What can we do to show that letters mean something? Hand deliver them? Pay someone to hand deliver them? Cory concentrates on legal letters and petitions but this can apply to other things too. David Brin wrote an informative blog post about billionaires prepping for disaster and causing the disaster [4]. David Brin wrote an insightful Wired article about ways of dealing with potential rogue AIs [5]. David Brin has an interesting take on government funded science [6]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI Risks which is worth reading [7]. Ximion wrote a great blog post about how tp use AppStream metadata to indicate what type of hardware/environment is required to use an app [8]. This is great for the recent use of Debian on phones and can provide real benefits for more traditional uses (like all those servers that accidentally got LibreOffice etc installed). Also for Convergence it will be good to have the app launcher take note of this, when your phone isn t connected to a dock there s no point offering to launch apps that require a full desktop screen. Russ Albery wrote an interesting summary of the book Going Infinite about the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX fiasco [9]. That summary really makes Sam sound Autistic. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article Microincentives and Enshittification explaining why Google search has to suck [10]. Charles Stross posted the text of a lecture he gave titles We re Sorry We Created the Torment Nexus [11] about sci-fi ideas that shouldn t be implemented. The Daily WTF has many stories of corporate computer stupidity, but The White Appliphant is one of the most epic [12]. The Verge has an informative article on new laws in the US and the EU to give a right to repair and how this explains the sudden change to 7 year support for Pixel phones [13].
Related posts:
  1. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  2. Links December 2022 Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with...
  3. Links May 2023 Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an interesting blog post about their work...

8 December 2023

Jonathan Dowland: The scourge of Electron, the nostalgia of Pidgin

For reasons I won't go into right now, I've spent some of this year working on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 260. Despite it being relatively underpowered, I love almost everything about it. Unfortunately the model I bought has 8G RAM which turned out to be more limiting than I thought it would be. You can do incredible things with 8G of RAM: incredible, wondrous things. And most of my work, whether that's wrangling containers, hacking on OpenJDK, or complex Haskell projects, are manageable. Where it falls down is driving the modern scourge: Electron, and by proxy, lots of modern IM tools: Slack (urgh), Discord (where one of my main IRC social communities moved to), WhatsApp Web1 and even Signal Desktop. For that reason, I've (temporarily) looked at alternatives, and I was pleasantly surprised to find serviceable plugins for Pidgin, the stalwart Instant Messenger multiplexer. I originally used Pidgin (then called Gaim) back in the last century, at the time to talk to ICQ, MSN Messenger and AIM (all but ICQ2 long dead). It truly is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Discord from within Pidgin Discord from within Pidgin
The plugins are3: Pidgin with all of these plugins loaded runs perfectly well and consumes fractions of the RAM that each of those Electron apps did prior. A side-effect of moving these into Pidgin (in particular Discord) is a refocussing of the content. Fewer distractions around the text. The lack of auto-link embedding, and other such things, make it a cleaner, purer experience. This made me think of the Discord community I am in (I'm really only active in one). It used to be an IRC channel of people that I met through a mutual friend. Said friend recently departed Discord, due to the signal to noise ratio being too poor, and the incessant nudge to click on links, engage, engage, engage. I wonder if the experience mediated by Pidgin would be more tolerable to them?
What my hexchat looks like What my hexchat looks like
I'm still active in one IRC channel (and inactive in many more). I could consider moving IRC into Pidgin as well. At the moment, my IRC client of choice is hexchat, which (like Pidgin) is still using GTK2 for the UI. There's something perversely pleasant about that.
  1. if you go to the trouble of trying to run it as an application distinct from your web browser.
  2. I'm still somewhat surprised ICQ is still going. I might try and recover my old ID.
  3. There may or may not be similar plugins for Slack, but as I (am forced to) use that for corporate stuff, I'm steering clear of them.

3 November 2023

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Big fixes for Snaps! Debian and KDE neon updates.

KDE Snap Marble
A big thank you goes to my parents this week for contributing to my survival fund. With that I was able to make a big push on fixing some outstanding issues on some of our snaps.
KDE neon: No major blowups this week. Worked out issues with kmail-account-wizard thanks to David R! This is now in the hands of upstream ( porting not complete ) Worked on more orange -> green packaging fixes. Debian: Fixed bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1054713 in squashfuse Thanks for stopping by. Please help fund my efforts! <noscript><a href="https://liberapay.com/sgmoore/donate"><img alt="Donate using Liberapay" src="https://liberapay.com/assets/widgets/donate.svg" /></a></noscript> Donate https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

1 October 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities September 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 2 Debian bug reports
  • Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
  • Debian screenshots:
    • approved fzf lame lsd termshark vifm
    • rejected orthanc (private data), gpr/orthanc (Windows), qrencode (random QR codes), weboob-qt (chess website)

Administration
  • Debian IRC: fix #debian-pkg-security topic/metadata
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

27 September 2023

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2023)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

25 August 2023

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 anos online no Brasil

Em 2023 o tradicional Debian Day est sendo celebrado de forma especial, afinal no dia 16 de agostoo Debian completou 30 anos! Para comemorar este marco especial na vida do Debian, a comunidade Debian Brasil organizou uma semana de palestras online de 14 a 18 de agosto. O evento foi chamado de Debian 30 anos. Foram realizadas 2 palestras por noite, das 19h s 22h, transmitidas pelo canal Debian Brasil no YouTube totalizando 10 palestras. As grava es j est o dispon veis tamb m no canal Debian Brasil no Peertube. Nas 10 atividades tivemos as participa es de 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contribuidores(as). A audi ncia ao vivo variou bastante, e o pico foi na palestra sobre preseed com o Eriberto Mota quando tivemos 47 pessoas assistindo. Obrigado a todos(as) participantes pela contribui o que voc s deram para o sucesso do nosso evento. Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil

In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event. Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

24 August 2023

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 years at IF Sul de Minas, Pouso Alegre - Brazil

by Thiago Pezzo, Debian contributor, pt_BR localization team This year's Debian Day was a pretty special one, we are celebrating 30 years! Giving the importance of this event, the Brazilian community planned a very special week. Instead of only local gatherings, we had a week of online talks streamed via Debian Brazil's youtube channel (soon the recordings will be uploaded to our team's peertube instance). Nonetheless the local celebrations happened around the country and one was organized in Pouso Alegre, MG, Brazil, at the Instituto Federal de Educa o, Ci ncia e Tecnologia do Sul de Minas Gerais (IFSULDEMINAS - Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of the South of Minas Gerais). The Institute, as many of its counterparts in Brazil, specializes in professional and technological curricula to high school and undergraduate levels. All public, free and quality education! The event happened on the afternoon of August 16th at the Pouso Alegre campus. Some 30 students from the High School Computer Technician class attended the presentation about the Debian Project and the Free Software movement in general. Everyone had a great time! And afterwards we had some spare time to chat. I would like to thank all people who helped us: Here goes our group photo: Presentation at IFSULDEMINAS Pouso Alegre campus

Next.