Search Results: "felix"

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).

12 October 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2023

Welcome to the September 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel . Quoting from the talk description:

You will be introduced to Google s open source build system Bazel, and will learn how it provides fast builds, how correctness and reproducibility is relevant, and how Bazel tries to ensure correctness. But, we will also see where Bazel falls short in ensuring correctness and reproducibility. You will [also] learn about the purely functional package manager Nix and how it approaches correctness and build isolation. And we will see where Bazel has an advantage over Nix when it comes to providing fast feedback during development.
Andreas also shows how you can get the best of both worlds and combine Nix and Bazel, too. A video of the talk is available.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed compatibility with file(1) version 5.45 [ ] and updated some documentation [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian extended support for GNU Guix [ ][ ] and updated the version in that distribution as well. [ ].
Yet another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. If you haven t been before, our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out recently, all of which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so please reach out to the organising team if you are able to help. Also note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit.
On the Reproducible Builds website, Greg Chabala updated the JVM-related documentation to update a link to the BUILDSPEC.md file. [ ] And Fay Stegerman fixed the builds failing because of a YAML syntax error.

Distribution work In Debian, this month: September saw F-Droid add ten new reproducible apps, and one existing app switched to reproducible builds. In addition, two reproducible apps were archived and one was disabled for a current total of 199 apps published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ] In addition, an extensive blog post was posted on f-droid.org titled Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos .

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Disable armhf and i386 builds due to Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Run diffoscope with a lower ionice priority. [ ]
  • Log every build in a simple text file [ ] and create persistent stamp files when running diffoscope to ease debugging [ ].
  • Run schedulers one hour after dinstall again. [ ]
  • Temporarily use diffoscope from the host, and not from a schroot running the tested suite. [ ][ ]
  • Fail the diffoscope distribution test if the diffoscope version cannot be determined. [ ]
  • Fix a spelling error in the email to IRC gateway. [ ]
  • Force (and document) the reconfiguration of all jobs, due to the recent rise of zombies. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deal with a rare condition when killing processes which should not be there. [ ]
  • Install the Debian backports kernel in an attempt to address Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed a call to diffoscope --version (as suggested by Fay Stegerman on our mailing list) [ ], worked on an openQA credential issue [ ] and also made some changes to the machine-readable reproducible metadata, reproducible-tracker.json [ ]. Lastly, Roland Clobus added instructions for manual configuration of the openQA secrets [ ].

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:

8 September 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2023

Welcome to the August 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Rust serialisation library moving to precompiled binaries Bleeping Computer reported that Serde, a popular Rust serialization framework, had decided to ship its serde_derive macro as a precompiled binary. As Ax Sharma writes:
The move has generated a fair amount of push back among developers who worry about its future legal and technical implications, along with a potential for supply chain attacks, should the maintainer account publishing these binaries be compromised.
After intensive discussions, use of the precompiled binary was phased out.

Reproducible builds, the first ten years On August 4th, Holger Levsen gave a talk at BornHack 2023 on the Danish island of Funen titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years which promised to contain:
[ ] an overview about reproducible builds, the past, the presence and the future. How it started with a small [meeting] at DebConf13 (and before), how it grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an executive order of the president of the United States. (HTML slides)
Holger repeated the talk later in the month at Chaos Communication Camp 2023 in Zehdenick, Germany: A video of the talk is available online, as are the HTML slides.

Reproducible Builds Summit Just another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out, which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so do reach out to the organizing team if you are able to help. (Also of note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit, and their schedule has just been published.)

Vagrant Cascadian on the Sustain podcast Vagrant Cascadian was interviewed on the SustainOSS podcast on reproducible builds:
Vagrant walks us through his role in the project where the aim is to ensure identical results in software builds across various machines and times, enhancing software security and creating a seamless developer experience. Discover how this mission, supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy and a broad community, is changing the face of Linux distros, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and F-Droid. They also explore the challenges of managing random elements in software, and Vagrant s vision to make reproducible builds a standard best practice that will ideally become automatic for users. Vagrant shares his work in progress and their commitment to the last mile problem.
The episode is available to listen (or download) from the Sustain podcast website. As it happens, the episode was recorded at FOSSY 2023, and the video of Vagrant s talk from this conference (Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust is now available on Archive.org: It was also announced that Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the Open Source Firmware Conference in October on the topic of Reproducible Builds All The Way Down.

On our mailing list Carles Pina i Estany wrote to our mailing list during August with an interesting question concerning the practical steps to reproduce the hello-traditional package from Debian. The entire thread can be viewed from the archive page, as can Vagrant Cascadian s reply.

Website updates Rahul Bajaj updated our website to add a series of environment variations related to reproducible builds [ ], Russ Cox added the Go programming language to our projects page [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian fixed a number of broken links and typos around the website [ ][ ][ ].

Software development In diffoscope development this month, versions 247, 248 and 249 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also added documentation for the new specialize_as method and expanding the documentation of the existing specialize as well [ ]. In addition, Fay Stegerman added specialize_as and used it to optimise .smali comparisons when decompiling Android .apk files [ ], Felix Yan and Mattia Rizzolo corrected some typos in code comments [ , ], Greg Chabala merged the RUN commands into single layer in the package s Dockerfile [ ] thus greatly reducing the final image size. Lastly, Roland Clobus updated tool descriptions to mark that the xb-tool has moved package within Debian [ ].
reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian updated the packaging to be compatible with Tox version 4. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1042918 and Holger Levsen uploaded this to change to Debian unstable as version 0.7.26 [ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were added, including Chris Lamb adding a new timestamp_in_documentation_using_sphinx_zzzeeksphinx_theme toolchain issue.
In August, F-Droid added 25 new reproducible apps and saw 2 existing apps switch to reproducible builds, making 191 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Disable Debian live image creation jobs until an OpenQA credential problem has been fixed. [ ]
    • Run our maintenance scripts every 3 hours instead of every 2. [ ]
    • Export data for unstable to the reproducible-tracker.json data file. [ ]
    • Stop varying the build path, we want reproducible builds. [ ]
    • Temporarily stop updating the pbuilder.tgz for Debian unstable due to #1050784. [ ][ ]
    • Correctly document that we are not variying usrmerge. [ ][ ]
    • Mark two armhf nodes (wbq0 and jtx1a) as down; investigation is needed. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Force reconfiguration of all Jenkins jobs, due to the recent rise of zombie processes. [ ]
    • In the node health checks, also try to restart failed ntpsec, postfix and vnstat services. [ ][ ][ ]
  • System health checks:
    • Detect Debian live build failures due to missing credentials. [ ][ ]
    • Ignore specific types of known zombie processes. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the scripts to use a predictable build path that is consistent with the one used on buildd.debian.org. [ ][ ]

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:

1 September 2023

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 249 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 249. This version includes the following changes:
[ FC Stegerman ]
* Add specialize_as() method, and use it to speed up .smali comparison in
  APKs. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!108)
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add documentation for the new specialize_as, and expand the documentation
  of  specialize  too. (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!108)
* Update copyright years.
[ Felix Yan ]
* Correct typos in diffoscope/presenters/utils.py.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

24 May 2023

Jonathan Carter: Debian Reunion MiniDebConf 2022

It wouldn t be inaccurate to say that I ve had a lot on my plate in the last few years, and that I have a *huge* backlog of little tasks to finish. Just last week, I finally got to all my keysigning from DebConf22. This week, I m at MiniDebConf Germany in Hamburg. It s the second time I m here! And it s great already. Last year I drafted a blog entry, but never got around to publishing it. So, in order to mentally tick off yet another thing, here follows a somewhat imperfect (I had to delete a lot of short-hand because I didn t know what it means anymore), but at least published post about my activities from a year ago. This week (well, last year) I attended my first ever in-person MiniDebConf and MiniDebCamp in Hamburg, Germany. The last time I was in Germany was 7 years ago for DebConf15 (or at time of publishing, actually, last year for this same event). My focus for the week was to work on Debian live related stuff. In preparation for the week I tried to fix/close as many Calamares bugs as I could, so before the event I closed: Monday to Friday we worked together on various issues, and the weekend was for talks. On Monday morning, I had a nice discussion with Roland Clobus who has been working on making Debian live images reproducible. He s also been working on testing Debian Live on openqa.debian.net. We re planning on integrating his work so that Debian 12 live images will be reproducible. For automated testing on openqa, it will be ongoing work, one blocker has been that snapshots.debian.org limits connections after a while, so builds on there start failing fast.
On Monday afternoon, I went ahead and uploaded the latest Calamares hotfix (Calamares 3.2.58.1-1) release that fixes a UI issue on the partitioning screen where it could get stuck. On 15:00 we had a stand-up meeting where we introduced ourselves and talked a bit about our plans. It was great to see how many people could benefit from each other being there. For example, someone wanting to learn packaging, another wanting to improve packaging documentation, another wanting help with packaging something written in Rust, another wanting to improve Rust packaging in general and lots of overlap when it comes to reproducible builds! I also helped a few people with some of their packaging issues. On Monday evening, someone in videoteam managed to convince me to put together a loopy loop for this MiniDebConf. There s really wasn t enough time to put together something elaborate, but I put something together based on the previous loopy with some experiments that I ve been working on for the upcoming DC22 loopy, and we can use this loop to do a call for content for the DC22 loop. On Tuesday morning had some chats with urbec and Ilu,Tuesday afternoon talked to MIA team about upcoming removals. Did some admin on debian.ch payments for hosting. On Tuesday evening worked on live image stuff (d-i downloader, download module for dmm). On Wednesday morning I slept a bit late, then had to deal with some DPL admin/legal things. Wednesday afternoon, more chats with people. On Thursday: Talked to a bunch more people about a lot of issues, got loopy in a reasonably shape, edited and published the Group photo!
On Friday: prepared my talk slides, learned about Brave (https://github.com/bbc/brave) It initially looked like a great compositor for DebConf video stuff (and possible replacement for OBS, but it turned out it wasn t really maintained upstream). In the evening we had the Cheese and Wine party, where lots of deliciousness was experienced. On Saturday, I learned from Felix s talk that Tensorflow is now in experimental! (and now in 2023 I checked again and that s still the case, although it hasn t made it s way in unstable yet, hopefully that improves over the trixie cycle) I know most of the people who attended quite well, but it was really nice to also see a bunch of new Debianites that I ve only seen online before and to properly put some faces to names. We also had a bunch of enthusiastic new contributors and we did some key signing.

20 March 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Star Fraction

Review: The Star Fraction, by Ken MacLeod
Series: Fall Revolution #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: 1995
Printing: 2001
ISBN: 1-85723-833-8
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 341
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer who has become amusingly famous for repeatedly winning the libertarian Prometheus Award despite being a (somewhat libertarian-leaning) socialist. The Star Fraction is the first of a loose series of four novels about future solar system politics and was nominated for the Clarke Award (as well as winning the Prometheus). It was MacLeod's first novel. Moh Kohn is a mercenary, part of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence collective. They're available for hire to protect research labs and universities against raids from people such as animal liberationists and anti-AI extremists (or, as Moh calls them, creeps and cranks). As The Star Fraction opens, he and his smart gun are protecting a lab against an attack. Janis Taine is a biologist who is currently testing a memory-enhancing drug on mice. It's her lab that is attacked, although it isn't vandalized the way she expected. Instead, the attackers ruined her experiment by releasing the test drug into the air, contaminating all of the controls. This sets off a sequence of events that results in Moh, Janis, and Jordon Brown, a stock trader for a religious theocracy, on the run from the US/UN and Space Defense. I had forgotten what it was like to read the uncompromising old-school style of science fiction novel that throws you into the world and explains nothing, leaving it to the reader to piece the world together as you go. It's weirdly fun, but I'm either out of practice or this was a particularly challenging example of the genre. MacLeod throws a lot of characters at you quickly, including some that have long and complicated personal histories, and it's not until well into the book that the pieces start to cohere into a narrative. Even once that happens, the relationship between the characters and the plot is unobvious until late in the book, and comes from a surprising direction. Science fiction as a genre is weirdly conservative about political systems. Despite the grand, futuristic ideas and the speculation about strange alien societies, the human governments rarely rise to the sophistication of a modern democracy. There are a lot of empires, oligarchies, and hand-waved libertarian semi-utopias, but not a lot of deep engagement with the speculative variety of government systems humans have proposed. The rare exceptions therefore get a lot of attention from those of us who find political systems fascinating. MacLeod has a reputation for writing political SF in that sense, and The Star Fraction certainly delivers. Moh (despite the name of his collective, which is explained briefly in the book) is a Trotskyist with a family history with the Fourth International that is central to the plot. The setting is a politically fractured Britain full of autonomous zones with wildly different forms of government, theoretically ruled by a restored monarchy. That monarchy is opposed by the Army of the New Republic, which claims to be the legitimate government of the United Kingdom and is considered by everyone else to be terrorists. Hovering in the background is a UN entirely subsumed by the US, playing global policeman over a chaotic world shattered by numerous small-scale wars. This satisfyingly different political world is a major plus for me. The main drawback is that I found the world-building and politics more interesting than the characters. It's not that I disliked them; I found them enjoyably quirky and odd. It's more that so much is happening and there are so many significant characters, all set in an unfamiliar and unexplained world and often divided into short scenes of a few pages, that I had a hard time keeping track of them all. Part of the point of The Star Fraction is digging into their tangled past and connecting it up with the present, but the flashbacks added a confused timeline on top of the other complexity and made it hard for me to get lost in the story. The characters felt a bit too much like puzzle pieces until the very end of the book. The technology is an odd mix with a very 1990s feel. MacLeod is one of the SF authors who can make computers and viruses believable, avoiding the cyberpunk traps, but AI becomes relevant to the plot and the conception of AI here feels oddly retro. (Not MacLeod's fault; it's been nearly 30 years and a lot has changed.) On-line discussion in the book is still based on newsgroups, which added to the nostalgic feel. I did like the eventual explanation for the computing part of the plot, though; I can't say much while avoiding spoilers, but it's one of the more believable explanations for how a technology could spread in a way required for the plot that I've read. I've been planning on reading this series for years but never got around to it. I enjoyed my last try at a MacLeod series well enough to want to keep reading, but not well enough to keep reading immediately, and then other books happened and now it's been 19 years. I feel similarly about The Star Fraction: it's good enough (and in a rare enough subgenre of SF) that I want to keep reading, but not enough to keep reading immediately. We'll see if I manage to get to the next book in a reasonable length of time. Followed by The Stone Canal. Rating: 6 out of 10

29 May 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Kleptopia

Review: Kleptopia, by Tom Burgis
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2020
Printing: September 2021
ISBN: 0-06-323613-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 340
Kleptopia is a nonfiction chronicle of international financial corruption and money laundering told via a focus on the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. The primary characters are a British banker named Nigel Wilkins (at the start of the story, the head of compliance in the London office of the Swiss bank BSI), a group of businessmen from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan called the Trio, and a Kazakh oligarch and later political dissident named Mukhtar Ablyazov, although the story spreads beyond them. It is partly a detailed example of what money laundering looks like in practice: where the money comes from, who has it, what they want to do with it, who they hire to move it, and what countries welcome it. But it is more broadly about the use of politics for financial plunder, and what stories we tell about the results. The title of this book feels a bit like clickbait, and I was worried it would be mostly opinion and policy discussion. It is the exact opposite. Tom Burgis is an investigations correspondent at the Financial Times, and this is a detailed piece of investigative journalism (backed by a hundred pages of notes and detailed attributions). Burgis has a clear viewpoint and expresses it when it seems relevant, but the vast majority of this book is the sort of specific account of people, dates, times, and events that one would expect from a full-length investigative magazine piece, except maintained at book length. Even aside from the subject matter, I love that writing like this exists. It's often best in magazines, newspapers, and on-line articles for timeliness, since book publishing is slow, but some subjects require the length of a book. Burgis is the sort of reporter who travels the world to meet with sources in person, and who, before publication, presents his conclusions to everyone mentioned for their rebuttals (many of which are summarized or quoted in detail in the notes so that the reader can draw their own credibility conclusions). Whether or not one agrees with his specific conclusions or emphasis, we need more of this sort of journalism in the world. I knew essentially nothing about Kazakhstan or its politics before reading this book. I also had not appreciated the degree to which exploitation of natural resources is the original source of the money for international money laundering. In both Kazakhstan and Africa (a secondary setting for this book), people get rich largely because of things dug or pumped out of the ground. That money, predictably, does not go to the people doing the hard work of digging and pumping, who work in appalling conditions and are put down with violence if they try to force change. (In one chapter, Burgis tells the harrowing and nightmarish story of Roza Tuletayeva, a striker at the oil field in Zhanaozen.) It's gathered up by the already rich and politically connected, who gained control of former state facilities during the post-Soviet collapse and then maintained their power with violence and corruption. And once they have money, they try to convert it into holdings in European banks, London real estate, and western corporations. The primary thing I will remember from this book is the degree to which oligarchs rely on being able to move between two systems. They make their money in unstable or authoritarian countries with high degrees of political corruption and violence, and are adept at navigating that world (although sometimes it turns on them; more on that in a moment). But they don't want to leave their money in that world. Someone else could betray them, undermine them, or gain the ear of the local dictator. They rely instead on western countries with strong property rights, stable financial institutions, and vast legal systems devoted to protecting the wealth of people who are already rich. In essence, they play both rule sets against each other: make money through techniques that would be illegal in London, and then move their money to London so that the British government and legal system will protect it against others who are trying to do the same. What they get out of this is obvious. What London gets out of it is another theme of this book: it's a way for a lot of people to share the wealth without doing any of the crimes. Money laundering is a very lossy activity. Lots of money falls out of the cart along the way, where it is happily scooped up by bankers, lawyers, accountants, public relations consultants, and the rest of the vast machinery of theoretically legitimate business. Everyone wins, except the people the money is being stolen from in the first place. (And the planet; Burgis doesn't talk much about the environment, but I found the image of one-way extraction of irreplaceable natural resources haunting and disturbing.) Donald Trump does make an appearance here, although not as significant of one as I was expecting given the prominent appearance of Trump crony Felix Sater. Trump is part of the machinery that allows oligarch money to become legally-protected business investment, but it's also clear from Burgis's telling that he is (at least among the money flows Burgis is focused on) a second-tier player with delusions of grandeur. He's more notable for his political acumen and ability to craft media stories than his money-laundering skills. The story-telling is a third theme of this book. The electorate of the societies into which oligarchs try to move their money aren't fond of crime, mob activity, political corruption, or authoritarian exploitation of workers. If public opinion turns sufficiently strongly against specific oligarchs, the normally friendly mechanisms of law and business regulation may have to take action. The primary defense of laundered money is hiding its origins sufficiently that it's too hard to investigate or explain to a jury, but there are limits to how completely the money can hide given that oligarchs still want to spend it. They need to tell a story about how they are modernizing businessmen, aghast at the lingering poor conditions of their home countries but working earnestly to slowly improve them. And they need to defend those stories against people who might try to draw a clearer link between them and criminal activity. The competing stories between dissident oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov and the Kazakh government led by Nursultan Nazarbayev are a centerpiece of this book. Ablyazov is in some sense a hero of the story, someone who attempted to expose the corruption of Nazerbayev's government and was jailed by Nazerbayev for corruption in retaliation. But Burgis makes clear the tricky fact that Ablyazov likely is guilty of at least some (and possibly a lot) of the money laundering of which he was accused. It's a great illustration of the perils of simple good or bad labels when trying to understand this world from the outside. All of these men are playing similar games, and all of them are trying to tell stories where they are heroes and their opponents are corrupt thieves. And yet, there is not a moral equivalency. Ablyazov is not a good person, but what Nazerbayev attempted to do to his family is appalling, far worse than anything Ablyazov did, and the stories about Ablyazov that have prevailed to date in British courts are not an attempt to reach the truth. The major complaint that I have about Kleptopia is that this is a highly complex story with a large number of characters, but Burgis doesn't tell it in chronological order. He jumps forward and backward in time to introduce new angles of the story, and I'm not sure that was the right structural choice. Maybe a more linear story would have been even more confusing, but I got lost in the chronology at several points. Be prepared to put in some work as a reader in keeping the timeline straight. I also have to warn that this is not in any way a hopeful book. Burgis introduces Nigel Wilkins and his quixotic quest to expose the money laundering activities of European banks early in the book. In a novel that would set up a happy ending in which Wilkins brings down the edifice, or at least substantial portions of it. We do not live in a novel, sadly. Kleptopia is not purely depressing, but by and large the bad guys win. This is not a history of corruption that we've exposed and overcome. It's a chronicle of a problem that is getting worse, and that the US and British governments are failing to address. Burgis's publishers successfully defended a libel suit in British courts brought by the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, the primary corporate entity of the Trio who are the primary villains of this book. I obviously haven't done my own independent research, but after reading this book, including the thorough notes, this looks to me like the type of libel suit that should serve as an advertisement for its target. I can't say I enjoyed reading this, particularly at the end when the arc becomes clear. Understanding how little governments and institutions care about stopping money laundering is not a pleasant experience. But it's an important book, well and vividly told (except for the chronology), and grounded in solid investigative journalism. Recommended; I'm glad I read it. Rating: 7 out of 10

21 April 2022

Bits from Debian: Debian Project Leader election 2022, Jonathan Carter re-elected

The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for third time. Congratulations! The new term for the project leader starts on 2022-04-21. 354 of 1,023 Developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2022 page. Many thanks to Felix Lechner, Jonathan Carter and Hideki Yamane for their campaigns, and to our Developers for voting.

5 September 2021

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2021

Welcome to the latest report from the Reproducible Builds project. In this post, we round up the important things that happened in the world of reproducible builds in August 2021. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.
There were a large number of talks related to reproducible builds at DebConf21 this year, the 21st annual conference of the Debian Linux distribution (full schedule):
PackagingCon (@PackagingCon) is new conference for developers of package management software as well as their related communities and stakeholders. The virtual event, which is scheduled to take place on the 9th and 10th November 2021, has a mission is to bring different ecosystems together: from Python s pip to Rust s cargo to Julia s Pkg, from Debian apt over Nix to conda and mamba, and from vcpkg to Spack we hope to have many different approaches to package management at the conference . A number of people from reproducible builds community are planning on attending this new conference, and some may even present. Tickets start at $20 USD.
As reported in our May report, the president of the United States signed an executive order outlining policies aimed to improve the cybersecurity in the US. The executive order comes after a number of highly-publicised security problems such as a ransomware attack that affected an oil pipeline between Texas and New York and the SolarWinds hack that affected a large number of US federal agencies. As a followup this month, however, a detailed fact sheet was released announcing a number large-scale initiatives and that will undoubtedly be related to software supply chain security and, as a result, reproducible builds.
Lastly, We ran another productive meeting on IRC in August (original announcement) which ran for just short of two hours. A full set of notes from the meeting is available.

Software development kpcyrd announced an interesting new project this month called I probably didn t backdoor this which is an attempt to be:
a practical attempt at shipping a program and having reasonably solid evidence there s probably no backdoor. All source code is annotated and there are instructions explaining how to use reproducible builds to rebuild the artifacts distributed in this repository from source. The idea is shifting the burden of proof from you need to prove there s a backdoor to we need to prove there s probably no backdoor . This repository is less about code (we re going to try to keep code at a minimum actually) and instead contains technical writing that explains why these controls are effective and how to verify them. You are very welcome to adopt the techniques used here in your projects. ( )
As the project s README goes on the mention: the techniques used to rebuild the binary artifacts are only possible because the builds for this project are reproducible . This was also announced on our mailing list this month in a thread titled i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this: Reproducible Builds for upstreams. kpcyrd also wrote a detailed blog post about the problems surrounding Linux distributions (such as Alpine and Arch Linux) that distribute compiled Python bytecode in the form of .pyc files generated during the build process.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including releasing version 180), version 181) and version 182) as well as the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for extracting the signing block from Android APKs. [ ]
    • If we specify a suffix for a temporary file or directory within the code, ensure it starts with an underscore (ie. _ ) to make the generated filenames more human-readable. [ ]
    • Don t include short GCC lines that differ on a single prefix byte either. These are distracting, not very useful and are simply the strings(1) command s idea of the build ID, which is displayed elsewhere in the diff. [ ][ ]
    • Don t include specific .debug-like lines in the ELF-related output, as it is invariably a duplicate of the debug ID that exists better in the readelf(1) differences for this file. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Add a special case to SquashFS image extraction to not fail if we aren t the superuser. [ ]
    • Only use java -jar /path/to/apksigner.jar if we have an apksigner.jar as newer versions of apksigner in Debian use a shell wrapper script which will be rejected if passed directly to the JVM. [ ]
    • Reduce the maximum line length for calculating Wagner-Fischer, improving the speed of output generation a lot. [ ]
    • Don t require apksigner in order to compare .apk files using apktool. [ ]
    • Update calls (and tests) for the new version of odt2txt. [ ]
  • Output improvements:
    • Mention in the output if the apksigner tool is missing. [ ]
    • Profile diffoscope.diff.linediff and specialize. [ ][ ]
  • Logging improvements:
    • Format debug-level messages related to ELF sections using the diffoscope.utils.format_class. [ ]
    • Print the size of generated reports in the logs (if possible). [ ]
    • Include profiling information in --debug output if --profile is not set. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS Python dictionary. [ ]
    • We can pass -f to apktool to avoid creating a strangely-named subdirectory. [ ]
    • Drop an unused File import. [ ]
    • Update the supported & minimum version of Black. [ ]
    • We don t use the logging variable in a specific place, so alias it to an underscore (ie. _ ) instead. [ ]
    • Update some various copyright years. [ ]
    • Clarify a comment. [ ]
  • Test improvements:
    • Update a test to check specific contents of SquashFS listings, otherwise it fails depending on the test systems user ID to username passwd(5) mapping. [ ]
    • Assign seen and expected values to local variables to improve contextual information in failed tests. [ ]
    • Don t print an orphan newline when the source code formatting test passes. [ ]

In addition Santiago Torres Arias added support for Squashfs version 4.5 [ ] and Felix C. Stegerman suggested a number of small improvements to the output of the new APK signing block [ ]. Lastly, Chris Lamb uploaded python-libarchive-c version 3.1-1 to Debian experimental for the new 3.x branch python-libarchive-c is used by diffoscope.

Distribution work In Debian, 68 reviews of packages were added, 33 were updated and 10 were removed this month, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types have been identified too: nondeterministic_ordering_in_todo_items_collected_by_doxygen and kodi_package_captures_build_path_in_source_filename_hash. kpcyrd published another monthly report on their work on reproducible builds within the Alpine and Arch Linux distributions, specifically mentioning rebuilderd, one of the components powering reproducible.archlinux.org. The report also touches on binary transparency, an important component for supply chain security. The @GuixHPC account on Twitter posted an infographic on what fraction of GNU Guix packages are bit-for-bit reproducible: Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report for openSUSE.

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: Elsewhere, it was discovered that when supporting various new language features and APIs for Android apps, the resulting APK files that are generated now vary wildly from build to build (example diffoscope output). Happily, it appears that a patch has been committed to the relevant source tree. This was also discussed on our mailing list this month in a thread titled Android desugaring and reproducible builds started by Marcus Hoffmann.

Website and documentation There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:
  • Felix C. Stegerman:
    • Update the website self-build process to not use the buster-backports suite now that Debian Bullseye is the stable release. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add a new page documenting various package rebuilder solutions. [ ]
    • Add some historical talks and slides from DebConf20. [ ][ ]
    • Various improvements to the history page. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Rename the Comparison protocol documentation category to Verification . [ ]
    • Update links to F-Droid documentation. [ ]
  • Ian Muchina:
    • Increase the font size of titles and de-emphasize event details on the talk page. [ ]
    • Rename the README file to README.md to improve the user experience when browsing the Git repository in a web browser. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Drop a position:fixed CSS statement that is negatively affecting with some width settings. [ ]
    • Fix the sizing of the elements inside the side navigation bar. [ ]
    • Show gold level sponsors and above in the sidebar. [ ]
    • Updated the documentation within reprotest to mention how ldconfig conflicts with the kernel variation. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Added a ticket number for the issue with the live Cinnamon image and diffoscope. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Debian-related changes:
      • Make a large number of changes to support the new Debian bookworm release, including adding it to the dashboard [ ], start scheduling tests [ ], adding suitable Apache redirects [ ] etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
      • Make the first build use LANG=C.UTF-8 to match the official Debian build servers. [ ]
      • Only test Debian Live images once a week. [ ]
      • Upgrade all nodes to use Debian Bullseye [ ] [ ]
      • Update README documentation for the Debian Bullseye release. [ ]
    • Other changes:
      • Only include rsync output if the $DEBUG variable is enabled. [ ]
      • Don t try to install mock, a tool used to build Fedora packages some time ago. [ ]
      • Drop an unused function. [ ]
      • Various documentation improvements. [ ][ ]
      • Improve the node health check to detect zombie jobs. [ ]
  • Jessica Clarke (FreeBSD-related changes):
    • Update the location and branch name for the main FreeBSD Git repository. [ ]
    • Correctly ignore the source tarball when comparing build results. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated version number from the documentation. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Block F-Droid jobs from running whilst the setup is running. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the rsync job related to Debian Live images. [ ]
    • Pass BUILD_TAG and BUILD_URL environment for the Debian Live jobs. [ ]
    • Refactor the master_wrapper script to use a Bash array for the parameters. [ ]
    • Prefer YAML s safe_load() function over the unsafe variant. [ ]
    • Use the correct variable in the Apache config to match possible existing files on disk. [ ]
    • Stop issuing HTTP 301 redirects for things that not actually permanent. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
    • Increase the diffoscope timeout from 120 to 240 minutes; the Cinnamon image should now be able to finish. [ ]
    • Use the new snapshot service. [ ]
    • Make a number of improvements to artifact handling, such as moving the artifacts to the Jenkins host [ ] and correctly cleaning them up at the right time. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Where possible, link to the Jenkins build URL that created the artifacts. [ ][ ]
    • Only allow only one job to run at the same time. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Temporarily disable armhf nodes for DebConf21. [ ][ ]

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

3 September 2021

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 183 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 183. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add support for extracting Android signing blocks.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#246)
* Format debug messages for elf sections using our
  diffoscope.utils.format_class utility.
* Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS dict in diffoscope.external_tools.
[ Felix C. Stegerman ]
* Clarify output around APK Signing Blocks and remove an accidental duplicate
  "0x" prefix.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

11 August 2021

Bits from Debian: Debian User Forums changes and updates.

DebianUserForums Several issues were brought before the Debian Community team regarding responsiveness, tone, and needed software updates to forums.debian.net. The question was asked, who s in charge? Over the course of the discussion several Debian Developers volunteered to help by providing a presence on the forums from Debian and to assist with the necessary changes to keep the service up and running. We are happy to announce the following changes to the (NEW!) forums.debian.net, which have and should address most of the prior concerns with accountability, tone, use, and reliability: Debian Developers: Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls), Felix Lechner (lechner), and Donald Norwood (donald) have been added to the forum's Server and Administration teams. The server instance is now running directly within Debian's infrastructure. The forum software and back-end have been updated to the most recent versions where applicable. DNS resolves for both IPv4 and IPv6. SSL/HTTPS are enabled. (It s 2021!) New Captcha and Anti-spam systems are in place to thwart spammers, bots, and to make it easier for humans to register. New Administrators and Moderation staff were added to provide additional coverage across the hours and to combine years of experience with forum operation and Debian usage. New viewing styles are available for users to choose from, some of which are ideal for mobile/tablet viewing. We inadvertently fixed the time issue that the prior forum had of running 11 minutes fast. :) We have clarified staff roles and staff visibility. Responsiveness to users on the forums has increased. Email addresses for mods/admins have been updated and checked for validity, it has seen direct use and response. The guidelines for forum use by users and staff have been updated. The Debian COC has been made into a Global Announcement as an accompanyist to the newly updated guidelines to give the moderators/administrators an additional rule-set for unruly or unbecoming behavior. Some of the discussion areas have been renamed and refocused, along with the movement of multiple threads to make indexing and searching of the forums easier. Many (New!) features and extensions have been added to the forum for ease of use and modernization, such as a user thanks system and thread hover previews. There are some server administrative tasks that were upgraded as well which don't belong on a public list, but we are backing up regularly and secure. :) We have a few minor details here and there to attend to and the work is ongoing. Many Thanks and Appreciation to the Debian System Administrators (DSA) and Ganneff who took the time to coordinate and assist with the instance, DNS, and network and server administration minutiae, our helpful DPL Jonathan Carter, many thanks to the current and prior forum moderators and administrators: Mez, sunrat, 4D696B65, arochester, and cds60601 for helping with the modifications and transition, and to the forum users who participated in lots of the tweaking. All in all this was a large community task and everyone did a significant part. Thank you!

23 July 2021

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2021)

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!

27 June 2021

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Writing QA Scripts for Debian Teams

Since I joined the Debian Python Team, I have had a lot of fun working on different QA issues. Although I'm still a Perl illiterate1, I've for example contributed to a few Lintian tags. There are multiple ways to make mass QA changes to team-managed packages. Projects like the Debian Janitor are more than fantastic: they make for a robust, thorough and automated way to fix QA issues in the archive and I don't have enough good words to describe the amazing work of Jelmer Vernooij on the toolsuite the Janitor uses. But with robustness comes complexity. The Janitor is currently based on 10 different subtools (silver-platter, ognibuild, lintian-brush, ...) and if you want to use it to fix a bug, you first need to make sure there's a Lintian tag that flags the issue you're working on. Then you need to write a lintian-brush fixer to fix said issue. Sadly, sometimes writing a new Lintian tag to flag a trivial changes is not the appropriate course of action and only creates clutter. All this to say until now, I was a missing a "quick and somewhat dirty2" way to make simple one-off changes to a bunch of packages. 200 lines of Python later, I'm happy to report I have a simple way to replace the old Clojure Team email in d/control by the new one for all of our packages. Even better, although this script doesn't aim to be a versatile tool like the Janitor is, most of the functions can be reused for other similar one-off scripts. Many thanks to Felix Lechner showing me the very handy Lintian Query JSON interface!

  1. I don't really enjoy coding in Perl, but it makes up so much of the current Debian infrastructure that I wish I did. I keep telling myself I should buy an "Introduction to Perl" book...
  2. A quick and dirty way to make those changes would've been to write a shell script, but one of my 2021 resolution is to use Python for all my scripting needs.

22 April 2021

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.2.0: Now with docs/

drat user A new release of drat arrived on CRAN today. This is the first release in a few months (with the last release in July of last year) and it (finally) makes the leap to supporting docs/ in the main branch as we are all so tired of the gh-pages branch. We also have new vignettes, new (and very shiny) documentation and refreshed vignettes! drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. See below for a few custom reference examples. Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Or as we may now add: stay away from semi-random universes snapshots too. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for two-plus decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by (now) six vignettes and just works. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.2.0 (2021-04-21)
  • A documentation website for the package was added at https://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/ (Dirk)
  • The continuous integration was switched to using r-ci (Dirk)
  • The docs/ directory of the main repository branch can now be used instead of gh-pages branch (Dirk in #112)
  • A new repository https://github.com/drat-base/drat can now be used to fork an initial drat repository (Dirk)
  • A new vignette Drat Step-by-Step was added (Roman Hornung and Dirk in #117 fixing #115 and #113)
  • The test suite was refactored for docs/ use (Felix Ernst in #118)
  • The minimum R version is now R (>= 3.6) (Dirk fixing #119)
  • The vignettes were switched to minidown (Dirk fixing #116)
  • A new test file was added to ensure NEWS.Rd is always at the current release version.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. 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.

8 April 2021

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2021

FTP master Things never turn out the way you expect, so this month I was only able to accept 38 packages and rejected none. Due to the freeze, the overall number of packages that got accepted was 88. Debian LTS This was my eighty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 30h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of: I also prepared debdiffs for unstable and/or buster for leptonlib and libebml, which for one reason or another did not result in an upload yet. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the thirty-third ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Other stuff On my neverending golang challenge I uploaded (or sponsored for thola dependencies):
golang-github-tombuildsstuff-giovanni, golang-github-apparentlymart-go-userdirs, golang-github-apparentlymart-go-shquot, golang-github-likexian-gokit, olang-gopkg-mail.v2, golang-gopkg-redis.v5, golang-github-facette-natsort, golang-github-opentracing-contrib-go-grpc, golang-github-felixge-fgprof, golang-ithub-gogo-status, golang-github-leanovate-gopter, golang-github-opentracing-basictracer-go, golang-github-lightstep-lightstep-tracer-common, golang-github-o-sourcemap-sourcemap, golang-github-igm-pubsub, golang-github-igm-sockjs-go, golang-github-centrifugal-protocol, golang-github-mna-redisc, golang-github-fzambia-eagle, golang-github-centrifugal-centrifuge, golang-github-chromedp-sysutil, golang-github-client9-misspell, golang-github-knq-snaker, cdproto-gen, golang-github-mattermost-xml-roundtrip-validator, golang-github-crewjam-saml, ssllabs-scan, golang-uber-automaxprocs, golang-uber-goleak, golang-github-k0kubun-go-ansi, golang-github-schollz-progressbar, golang-github-komkom-toml, golang-github-labstack-echo, golang-github-inexio-go-monitoringplugin

7 February 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2020

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:
The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high
It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:
Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.
Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:
Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:
The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?
It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:
"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."
Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:
We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?
New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:
A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.
Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

16 November 2020

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2020)

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!

24 July 2020

Evgeni Golov: Building documentation for Ansible Collections using antsibull

In my recent post about building and publishing documentation for Ansible Collections, I've mentioned that the Ansible Community is currently in the process of making their build tools available as a separate project called antsibull instead of keeping them in the hacking directory of ansible.git. I've also said that I couldn't get the documentation to build with antsibull-docs as it wouldn't support collections yet. Thankfully, Felix Fontein, one of the maintainers of antsibull, pointed out that I was wrong and later versions of antsibull actually have partial collections support. So I went ahead and tried it again. And what should I say? Two bug reports by me and four patches by Felix Fontain later I can use antsibull-docs to generate the Foreman Ansible Modules documentation! Let's see what's needed instead of the ugly hack in detail. We obviously don't need to clone ansible.git anymore and install its requirements manually. Instead we can just install antsibull (0.17.0 contains all the above patches). We also need Ansible (or ansible-base) 2.10 or never, which currently only exists as a pre-release. 2.10 is the first version that has an ansible-doc that can list contents of a collection, which antsibull-docs requires to work properly. The current implementation of collections documentation in antsibull-docs requires the collection to be installed as in "Ansible can find it". We had the same requirement before to find the documentation fragments and can just re-use the installation we do for various other build tasks in build/collection and point at it using the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS environment variable or the collections_paths setting in ansible.cfg1. After that, it's only a matter of passing --use-current to make it pick up installed collections instead of trying to fetch and parse them itself. Given the main goal of antisibull-docs collection is to build documentation for multiple collections at once, it defaults to place the generated files into <dest-dir>/collections/<namespace>/<collection>. However, we only build documentation for one collection and thus pass --squash-hierarchy to avoid this longish path and make it generate documentation directly in <dest-dir>. Thanks to Felix for implementing this feature for us! And that's it! We can generate our documentation with a single line now!
antsibull-docs collection --use-current --squash-hierarchy --dest-dir ./build/plugin_docs theforeman.foreman
The PR to switch to antsibull is open for review and I hope to get merged in soon! Oh and you know what's cool? The documentation is now also available as a preview on ansible.com!

  1. Yes, the paths version of that setting is deprecated in 2.10, but as we support older Ansible versions, we still use it.

18 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.8: Minor test fix

drat user A new version of drat arrived on CRAN today. This is a follow-up release to 0.1.7 from a week ago. It contains a quick follow-up by Felix Ernst to correct on of the tests which misbehaved under the old release of R still being tested at CRAN. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. As your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.8 (2020-07-18)
  • The archive pruning test code was corrected for r-oldrel (Felix Ernst in #105 fixing #104).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

12 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.7: New functionality

drat user A new version of drat arrived on CRAN yesterday. Once again, this release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who extended some work from the previous release, and added support for repository updates (outside of package insertion) and more. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. As your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.7 (2020-07-10)
  • Functions insertPackages, archivePackages and prunePackages are now vectorised (Patrick Schratz and Felix Ernst in #93, #100).
  • The new functionality is supported by unit tests (Felix Ernst in #93, and #102 fixing #101).
  • Added new function updateRepo (Felix Ernst in #95, #97).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

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