Happy 2024! DAIS have continued their programme of posthumous Coil remasters and re-issues. Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil was remastered by Josh Bonati in 2021 and re-released in 2022 in a dizzying array of different packaging variants. The original releases in 2000 had barely any artwork, and given that void I think Nathaniel Young has done a great job of creating something compelling. A limited number of the original re-issue have special lenticular covers, although these were not sold by any distributors outside the US. I tried to find a copy on my trip to Portland in 2022, to no avail. Last year DAIS followed Constant with Queens Of The Circulating Library, same deal: limited lenticular covers, US only. Both are also available digital-only, e.g. on Bandcamp: Constant , Queens . The original, pre-remastered releases have been freely available on archive.org for a long time: Constant , Queens Both of these releases feel to me that they were made available by the group somewhat as an afterthought, having been produced primarily as part of their live efforts. (I'm speculating freely here, it might not be true). Live takes of some of this material exist in the form of Coil Presents Time Machines, which has not (yet) been reissued. In my opinion this is a really compelling recording. I vividly remember listening to this whilst trying to get an hour's rest in a hotel somewhere on a work trip. It took me to some strange places! I'll leave you from one of my favourite moments from "Colour Sound Oblivion", Coil's video collection of live backdrops. When this was performed live it was also called "Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil", although it's distinct from the material on the LP: also available on archive.org. A version of this Constant made it onto a Russian live bootleg, which is available on Spotify and Bandcamp complete with some John Balance banter: we only do this on religious holidays Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil by Coil

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:

Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=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

After the change, the entire key fits on a single line, neat!

Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=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

Note that I have implemented my own kind of ridiculous Autocrypt support for the Notmuch Emacs 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...

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 5th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This is my largest month so far, in which I worked on completing the Xen and NSS packages updates from last month, but also spent a significant amount of time working on phpMyAdmin and libidn.

Updates to NSS and Xen completed This basically consisted on following up on the reviews from other security people. I basically continued building up on Brian's work and tested the package on a test server at Koumbit, which seems to have survived well the upgrade. The details are in this post to the debian-lts mailing list. As for NSS, the package was mostly complete, but I forgot to ship the tests for some reason, so I added them back. I also wrote the release team to see if it was possible to update NSS to the same version in all suites. Unfortunately, this issue is still pending, but I still hope we can find better ways of managing that package in the long term.

IDN and phpMyAdmin Most of my time this month was spent working on IDN and phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately, it turns out that someone else had worked on the libidn package. This is partly my fault: I forgot to check in the dsa-needed.txt file for assignment before working on the package. But considering how in flux the workflow currently is with the switch between the main security team and the LTS team for the wheezy maintenance, I don't feel too bad. Still, I prepared a package which was a bit more painful than it should have been because of GNUlib. I didn't even know about GNUlib before, oddly enough, and after that experience, I feel that it should just not exist at all anymore. I have filed a bug to remove that dependency at the very least, but I do not clearly see how such a tool is necessary on Debian at this point in time. But phpMyAdmin, no one had worked on that. And I understand why: even though it's a very popular package, there were quite a few outstanding issues (8!) in Wheezy, with 10-15 patches to be ported. Plus, it's ... well, PHP. And old PHP at that, with parts of it with modern autoloader classes, and other with mixed HTML and PHP content, require (and not require_once) and all sorts of nasty things you still find in the PHP universe. I nevertheless managed to produce a new Debian package for wheezy and test it on Koumbit's test servers. Hopefully, that can land into Wheezy soon.

Long term software support I am a little worried that we are, both in Jessie and Wheezy sitting in between stable releases for phpMyAdmin, something that is a recurring issue for a lot of packages in Debian stable or LTS. Sometimes, it just happens that the version that happens to be in Debian testing when it is released as stable is just not a supported release upstream. It's the case for phpMyAdmin in Jessie (4.3, whereas 4.0 and 4.4 are supported) and Wheezy (3.4, although it's unclear how long that was supported upstream). But even if the next Debian stable (Stretch), would pick a stable release upstream, there is actually no phpMyAdmin release that has a support window as long as Debian stable (roughly 3 years), let alone as long as Debian LTS (5 years). This is a similar problem with NSS: upstream is simply not supporting their product in the long term, or at least not in the terms we are used to in the Debian community (ie. only security fixes or regressions). This is, in my opinion, a real concern for the reliability and sustainability of the computing infrastructure we are creating. While some developers are of the opinion that software older than 18 months is too old, here we are shipping hardware and software in space or we have Solaris, which is supported for 16 years! Now that is a serious commitment and something we can rely on. 18 months is really, really, a tiny short time in the history of our civilization. I know computer programmers and engineers like to think of themselves in elitist terms, that they are changing the world every other year. But the truth is that things have not changed much in the last 4 decades where computing has existed, both in terms of security or functionality. Two quotes from my little quotes collection come to mind here:

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - Wirth's law The future is already here it's just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson

Because of course, the response to my claims that computing is not really advancing is "but look! we have supercomputers in our pockets now!" Yes, of course, we do have those fancy phones and they are super-connected, but they are a threat to our fundamental rights and freedom. And those glittering advances always pale in comparison to what could be done if we wouldn't be wasting our time rewriting the same software over and over again on different, often proprietary, platforms, simply because of the megalomaniac fantasies of egoistic programmers. It would be great to build something that lasts, for a while. Software that does not need to be updated every 16 months. You'd think that something as basic as a screensaver release could survive what is basically the range of human infancy. Yet it seems we like to run mindlessly in the minefield of software development, one generation following the other without questioning the underlying assumption of infinite growth that permeates our dying civilization. I have talked about this before of course, but working with the LTS project just unnerves me so bad that I just needed to let out another rant. (For the record, I really have a lot of respect for JWZ and all the work he has done in the free software world. I frequently refer to his "no-bullshit" backup guide and use Xscreensaver daily. But I do think he was wrong in this case: asking Debian to remove Xscreensaver is just too much. The response from the maintainer was exemplary of how to handle such issues in the future. I restarted Xscreensaver after the stable update, and the message is gone, and things are still all fine. Thanks JWZ and Tormod for keeping things rolling.)

Other free software work With that in mind, I obviously didn't stop doing other computing work this month. In fact, I did a lot of work to try to generally fix the internet, that endless and not-quite-gratifying hobby so many of us are destroying our bodies to accomplish.

Build tools I have experimented a bit more with different build tools. I got worried because at some point cowbuilder got orphaned and I figured I could refresh the way I build packages for LTS. I looked into sbuild, but that ended up not bringing much improvements over my current cowbuilder setup (which I really need to document better). I was asked by the new maintainer to open a bug report to make such setups easier by guessing the basepath better, so we'll see how that goes. I did enjoy the simplicity of gitpkg and discovered cowpoke which made it about 2 times faster to build packages because I could use another server to build larger packages. I also found that gitpkg doesn't use -n by default when calling gzip, which makes it harder to reproduce tarballs when they are themselves built reproducibly, which is the case for Github tarballs (really nice of them). So I filed bug #820842 about that. It would be pretty awesome if such buildds would be available for Debian Developers to do their daily tasks. It could simply be a machine that would spin up a chroot with cowbuilder or it could even be a full, temporary VM although that would take way more resources than a simple VM with a cowbuilder setup. In the meantime, I should probably look at whalebuilder as an alternative to cowbuilder. It is a tool that supports building packages within a Docker chroot, which means that packages are built from a clean environment like pbuilder, and using COW optimisations but also without privileges or network access, which is a huge plus especially when you build untrusted packages.

Ikiwiki admonitions I have done some work to implement Moinmoin-like admonitions in Ikiwiki, something I am quite happy about since it's something I was really missing about Moinmoin. Admonitions bring a really nice way to outline certain blocks with varying severity levels and distinct styles. For example:

Admonitions are great!

This was done with a macro, but basically, since Markdown allows more or less arbitrary HTML, this can also be done with the <div> tag. I like that we don't have a new weird markup here. Yet, I still liked the sub-parser feature of MoinMoin, something that can be implemented in Ikiwiki, but it's a little more clunky. Normally, you'd probably do this with the inline macro and subpages, but it's certainly less intuitive that directly inlined content.

Ereader I got a new e-reader! I was hesitant between the Kobo Aura H20 and the Kobo Glo HD, which were the ones available at Bestbuy. So I bought both and figured I would return the other. That was a painful decision! In the end, both machines are pretty nice:

• Aura H2O
  • Pros:
    • waterproof
    • larger screen (makes it easier to see web pages and better for the eyes)
    • naturally drawn to it
  • Cons:
    • heavier
    • larger (fits in outside pocket though)
    • port cover finicky
    • more expensive (180$) - prices may go down in future
• Aura Glo HD
  • Pros
    • smaller (fits in inside pocket of both coats)
    • better resolution in theory (can't notice in practice)
    • cheaper (100$)
    • may be less common on the future (larger models more common? just a guess)
  • Cons
    • no SD card
    • smaller screen
    • power button in the middle

... but in the end, I ended up settling down on the Glo, mostly for the price. Heck, I saved around 100$, so for that amount, I could have gotten two machines so that if one breaks I would still have the other. I have ordered a cover for it on Deal Extreme about two weeks ago, and it still hasn't arrived. I suspect it's going to take a few more months to get there, by which point I may have changed e-reader again. Note that both e-readers needed an update to calibre, so I started working on a calibre backport (#818309) which I will complete soon. So anyways, I looked into better ways of transferring articles from the web to the e-reader, something which I do quite a bit to avoid spending too much time on the computer. Since the bookmark manager I use (Bookie) is pretty much dead, I started looking at other alternatives. And partly inspired by Framasoft's choice of Wallabag for their bookmarking service (Framabag), I started to look into that software, especially since my friend who currently runs the Bookie instance is thinking of switching to Wallabag as well. It seems the simplest way to browse articles remotely through a standard protocol is by implementing OPDS support in Wallabag. OPDS is a standard developed in part by the Internet Archive and it allows for browsing book collections and downloading them. Articles and bookmarks would then be presented as individual books that would be accessible from any OPDS-compatible device. Unfortunately, the Kobo e-readers don't support OPDS out of the box: you need to setup some OPDS-compatible reader like Koreader. And that I found nearly impossible to do: I was able to setup KSM (the "start menu", not to be confused with that KSM), but not Koreader in KSM. Besides, I do not want a separate OS running here on the tablet: I just want to start Koreader every once in a while. KSM just starts another system when you reboot the e-reader, something which is not really convenient on the Kobo. Basically, I just want to add Koreader as a tile in the home screen on the e-reader. I found the documentation on that topic to be sparse and hard to follow. It is often dispersed across multiple forum threads and involves uploading random binaries, often proprietary, to the e-reader. It had been a long time since I was asked to "register my software" frenetically, and I hadn't missed that one bit. So I decided to stay away from this until that solution and its documentation matures a bit.

Streaming re-established I have worked a bit on my home radio stream. I simply turned the Liquidsoap stream back online, and did a few tweaks to the documentation that I had built back then. All that experimenting led me to do two NMUs. One was for gmpc-plugins to fix a FTBFS (bug #807735) and to properly kill the shout streamer when completing the playback (bug #820908). The other was to fix the ezstream manpage (bug #573928), a patch that had been sitting there for 5 years! This was to try to find an easy way to stream random audio (say from a microphone) to the Icecast server, something which is surprisingly difficult, consider how basic that functionality is. I was surprised to see that Darkice just completely fails to start (bug #821040) and I had to fallback to the simplest ices2 software to stream the audio. I am still having issues with Liquidsoap: it's really unstable! As a server, I would expect it to keep running for days if not years. Unfortunately, there's always something that makes it crash. I had assertion failed (bug #821112) and I keep seeing it crash after 2-3 days fairly reliably, a bug I reported 3 years ago and that is still not fixed (bug #727307). Switching back the stream to Vorbis (because I was having problems with the commandline mp3 players and ogg123 is much more lightweight) created another set of problems too, this time with the phone. It seems that Android cannot stream Vorbis at all, something that is even worse in Cyanogenmod... I also had to tweak my MPD config to make the Android client be able to load the larger playlists (see dmix buffer is full).

Android apps So I have also done quite a bit of work again on my phone. I finally was told how to access from Termux from adb shell which is pretty cool because now I can start a screen on my phone and then, when I'm tired of tapping to type, I can just reconnect to it when I plug in a USB cable on my laptop. I sent a pull request to fix the documentation regarding that. I also tried to see how my SMS and Signal situation could be improved. Right now, I have two different apps to do SMS on my phone: I use both Signal and the VoIP.ms SMS client, because I do not have a contract or SIM card in my phone. Both work well independently, but it's somewhat annoying to have to switch between the two. (In fact, I feel that Signal itself has an issue with how it depends on the network to send encrypted messages: I often have to "ping" people in clear text (and therefore in the other app) so that they connect to their data plan to fetch my "secure" signal messages...) Anyways, I figured it would be nice if at least there would be a SMS fallback in Signal that would allow me to send regular text messages from signal through Voip.MS. That was dismissed really fast. Moxie even closed the conversation completely, something I had never experienced before, and doesn't feel exactly pleasant. The Voip.MS side was of course not impressed and basically shrugged it off because Signal was not receptive. I also tried to clear up the Libresignal confusion: there are 3 different projects named "Libresignal", and I am not sure I figured out the right thing, even though the issue is now closed and there's a FAQ that is supposed to make all that clear. Nevertheless, I opened two distinct feature requests to try to steer the conversation into a more productive direction: GCM-less calls and GCM support. But I'm not sure neither will go anywhere. In the meantime, I am using the official signal client, which I downloaded using gplaycli and which I keep up to date with Aptoide. Even though the reliability of that site is definitely questionable, it seems that once you have a trusted version, it is safe to upgrade, regardless of the source because there is a trust path between you and the developer. I also filed a few issues with varying levels of success/response from the community:

• Green address feature requests: pin change and pin confirmation
• AntennaPod icons are reversed, but apparently, I'm the one that's backwards, go figure
• Asked for NYC support in the excellent Transportr app, it seems that's not going to happen until I find the space to run the Android dev environment...

Random background radiation And then there's of course the monthly background noise of all the projects I happened to not only stumble on, but also file bugs or patches against:

• neomutt credits improvements: Neomutt is an amazing effort to converge all the Mutt third party patches in a common tree
• request to improve acme comparison: acme is an interesting go client for Let's Encrypt
• a small set of issues and patches for borg, mostly documentation:
  • borg diff with files
  • mention jessie-backports in install docs
  • mention openbsd and OpenSUSE in install docs
• finally filed a bug report in debian about symlink support in ncdu
• internationalization SNAFUs:
  • gitweb should default to utf8 instead of latin1
  • Apache's AddCharset config should state more clearly which documentation to read
• classic "my printer is not working" never ending story: printing fails by default with "cannot open printer description file"
• small fixes to the tuptime project, which i mentionned before
• last nit-picking: znc homepage errors

When the programming language Python came out while it seemed like an interesting idea, I didn t really see the point. I already know Perl, PHP and C (plus a few others) why learn another language? So until recently, I didn t Recent frustrations with PHP and how loose it is with things like variables made me have another look at Python and what it could do for me. As just learning a language by itself it pretty boring I decided to write some small programs in the language and used the framework Turbogears to do it. First of all, learning the basics of python from perl or PHP is dead simple. The idea of what a language looks like is not too different between these three so it was a snap to write simple stuff in python. So, what does yet-another language give me?

• Variables must be defined before being used, but assigning them defines them too. This is a nice compromise between PHP where you can check undefined variables and C where it all must be defined first, or else.
• try and except. For code that might fail, use try and then catch the error in except. We ve all been guilty of using the @ symbol in PHP to supress stupid error messages, this does it correctly.
• No PHP extract() or compact(). Actually just no extract function is good enough. That function is pure evil.
• Sqlalchemy A proper you look after the database and ill play with objects database extraction layer thingamy. I don t want to play with databases just let me write code and thats what sqlalchemy does well.
• Testing Turbogears uses nosetests which does functional and unit testing. I do get some annoying artifacts based upon testing but generally its all good.
• Python has help() everywhere and pydoc on the command line. Not sure what variable foo can do? Just type help(foo) or even stick it in your script.
• paster! You can run a development site off the command-line using a simple sqlite database. Don t like it, dump the DB and reinstall it with one command.

It s not one-way though, there have been some challenges. Quite likely these are more my deficiencies than the languages.

• Error messages take up a whole screen and often make it difficult to isolate. It s not quite 10-screens-full ala Eiffel but sometimes the error messages tell you something is going wrong, but not what. Mess up your object versus database table references and you get something rather obscure.
• When is an integer not an integer? The answer is, sometimes. Sometimes they work, sometimes they break. It s probably more to do with what pysnmp is doing with them.
• Documentation some is great, some is downright misleading. It comes down to the writer of the documentation for modules. At least it doesn t have well get round to it like some functions in PHP on their website. Documents that say you can directly iterate dictionaries were another dead-end I wandered down. If you are stuck here, add a .items() at the end of it.
• Deployment. It s not just a matter of taring the files up and sticking them into /var/www/sitename and you re done. There are probably good reasons why, but its just annoying.

Despite the minor problems, python really does give you much much more than PHP and some more than Perl. For me and what I am intending on writing it is worth learning yet another language.

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• Python vs. Perl vs. C++ Python is Better (strombergers.com)