Search Results: "georg"

27 July 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop

Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Copyright: 2013
ISBN: 1-61039-212-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 336
As the United States tries, in fits and starts, to have a meaningful discussion about long-standing police racism, brutality, overreach, corruption, and murder, I've realized that my theoretical understanding of the history of and alternative frameworks for law enforcement is woefully lacking. Starting with a book by a conservative white guy is not the most ideal of approaches, but it's what I already had on hand, and it won't be the last book I read and review on this topic. (Most of my research so far has been in podcast form. I don't review those here, but I can recommend Ezra Klein's interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Butler, and, most strongly, sujatha baliga.) Rise of the Warrior Cop is from 2013 and has had several moments of fame, no doubt helped by Balko's connections to the conservative and libertarian right. One of the frustrating facts of US politics is that critiques of the justice system from the right (and from white men) get more media attention than critiques from the left. That said, it's a generally well-respected book on the factual history of the topic, and police brutality and civil rights are among the points on which I have stopped-clock agreements with US libertarians. This book is very, very libertarian. In my callow youth, I was an ardent libertarian, so I've read a lot of US libertarian literature. It's a genre with its own conventions that become obvious when you read enough of it, and Rise of the Warrior Cop goes through them like a checklist. Use the Roman Republic (never the Roman Empire) as the starting point for any political discussion, check. Analyze the topic in the context of pre-revolutionary America, check. Spend considerable effort on discerning the opinions of the US founders on the topic since their opinions are always relevant to the modern world, check. Locate some point in the past (preferably before 1960) where the political issue was as good as it has ever been, check. Frame all changes since then as an erosion of rights through government overreach, check. Present your solution as a return to a previous era of respect for civil rights, check. Once you start recognizing the genre conventions, their prevalence in libertarian writing is almost comical. The framing chapters therefore leave a bit to be desired, but the meat of the book is a useful resource. Starting with the 1970s and its use as a campaigning tool by Nixon, Balko traces a useful history of the war on drugs. And starting with the 1980s, the number of cites to primary sources and the evidence of Balko's own research increases considerably. If you want to know how US police turned into military cosplayers with body armor, heavy weapons, and armored vehicles, this book provides a lot of context and history. One of the reasons why I view libertarians as allies of convenience on this specific issue is that drug legalization and disgust with the war on drugs have been libertarian issues for decades. Ideologically honest libertarians (and Balko appears to be one) are inherently skeptical of the police, so when the police overreach in an area of libertarian interest, they notice. Balko makes a solid argument, backed up with statistics, specific programs, legislation, and court cases, that the drug war and its accompanying lies about heavily-armed drug dealers and their supposed threat to police officers was the fuel for the growth of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, erosion of legal protections for criminal defendants, and de facto license for the police to ignore the scope and sometimes even the existence of warrants. This book is useful support for the argument that fears for the safety of officers underlying the militarization of police forces are imaginary. One telling point that Balko makes repeatedly and backs with statistical and anecdotal evidence is that the police generally do not use raid tactics on dangerous criminals. On the contrary, aggressive raids are more likely to be used on the least dangerous criminals because they're faster, they're fun for the police (they provide an adrenaline high and let them play with toys), and they're essentially risk-free. If the police believe someone is truly dangerous, they're more likely to use careful surveillance and to conduct a quiet arrest at an unexpected moment. The middle-of-the-night armed break-ins with battering rams, tear gas, and flash-bangs are, tellingly, used against the less dangerous suspects. This is part of Balko's overall argument that police equipment and tactics have become untethered from any realistic threat and have become cultural. He traces an acceleration of that trend to 9/11 and the resulting obsession with terrorism, which further opened the spigot of military hardware and "special forces" training. This became a point of competition between police departments, with small town forces that had never seen a terrorist and had almost no chance of a terrorist incident demanding their own armored vehicles. I've encountered this bizarre terrorism justification personally; one of the reasons my local police department gave in a public hearing for not having a policy against shooting at moving vehicles was "but what if terrorism?" I don't believe there has ever been a local terrorist attack. SWAT in such places didn't involve the special training or dedicated personnel of large city forces; instead, it was a part-time duty for normal police officers, and frequently they were encouraged to practice SWAT tactics by using them at random for some otherwise normal arrest or search. Balko argues that those raids were more exciting than normal police work, leading to a flood of volunteers for that duty and a tendency to use them as much as possible. That in turn normalizes disconnecting police tactics from the underlying crime or situational risk. So far, so good. But despite the information I was able to extract from it, I have mixed feelings about Rise of the Warrior Cop as a whole. At the least, it has substantial limitations. First, I don't trust the historical survey of policing in this book. Libertarian writing makes for bad history. The constraints of the genre require overusing only a few points of reference, treating every opinion of the US founders as holy writ, and tying forward progress to a return to a previous era, all of which interfere with good analysis. Balko also didn't do the research for the historical survey, as is clear from the footnotes. The citations are all to other people's histories, not to primary sources. He's summarizing other people's histories, and you'll almost certainly get better history by finding well-respected historians who cover the same ground. (That said, if you're not familiar with Peel's policing principles, this is a good introduction.) Second, and this too is unfortunately predictable in a libertarian treatment, race rarely appears in this book. If Balko published the same book today, I'm sure he would say more about race, but even in 2013 its absence is strange. I was struck while reading by how many examples of excessive police force were raids on west coast pot farms; yes, I'm sure that was traumatic, but it's not the demographic I would name as the most vulnerable to or affected by police brutality. West coast pot growers are, however, mostly white. I have no idea why Balko made that choice. Perhaps he thought his target audience would be more persuaded by his argument if he focused on white victims. Perhaps he thought it was an easier and less complicated story to tell. Perhaps, like a lot of libertarians, he doesn't believe racism has a significant impact on society because it would be a market failure. Perhaps those were the people who more readily came to mind. But to talk about police militarization, denial of civil rights, and police brutality in the United States without putting race at the center of both the history and the societal effects leaves a gaping hole in the analysis. Given that lack of engagement, I also am dubious of Balko's policy prescriptions. His reform suggestions aren't unreasonable, but they stay firmly in the centrist and incrementalist camp and would benefit white people more than black people. Transparency, accountability, and cultural changes are all fine and good, but the cultural change Balko is focused on is less aggressive arrest tactics, more use of mediation, and better physical fitness. I would not object to those things (well, maybe the last, which seemed odd), but we need to have a discussion about police white supremacist organizations, the prevalence of spousal abuse, and the police tendency to see themselves not as public servants but as embattled warriors who are misunderstood by the naive sheep they are defending. And, of course, you won't find in Rise of the Warrior Cop any thoughtful wrestling with whether there are alternative approaches to community safety, whether punitive rather than restorative justice is effective, or whether crime is a symptom of deeper societal problems we could address but refuse to. The most radical suggestion Balko has is to legalize drugs, which is both the predictable libertarian position and, as we have seen from recent events in the United States, far from the only problem of overcriminalization. I understand why this book is so frequently mentioned on-line, and its author's political views may make it more palatable to some people than a more race-centered or radical perspective. But I don't think this is the best or most useful book on police violence that one could read today. I hope to find a better one in upcoming reviews. Rating: 6 out of 10

21 July 2020

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2020)

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

12 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Police brutality links

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop
police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.
I was a police chief stopped by my own officer. After Floyd, we need change at all levels.
police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
Hi White People! I want to tell you something about my experience with white progressive backlash
police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?
Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing ...
Morte di Stefano Cucchi - Wikipedia
italy police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
La morte di Stefano Cucchi avvenne a Roma il 22 ottobre 2009 mentre il giovane era sottoposto a custodia cautelare. Le cause della morte e le responsabilit sono oggetto di procedimenti giudiziari che hanno coinvolto da un lato i medici dell'ospedale Pertini,[1][2][3][4] dall'altro continuano a coinvolgere, a vario titolo, pi militari dell Arma dei Carabinieri[5][6]. Il caso ha attirato l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica a seguito della pubblicazione delle foto dell'autopsia, poi riprese da agenzie di stampa, giornali e telegiornali italiani[7]. La vicenda ha ispirato, altres , documentari e lungometraggi cinematografici.[8][9][10]
Morte di Giuseppe Uva - Wikipedia
italy police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
La morte di Giuseppe Uva avvenne il 14 giugno 2008 dopo che, nella notte tra il 13 e il 14 giugno, era stato fermato ubriaco da due carabinieri che lo portarono in caserma, dalla quale venne poi trasferito, per un trattamento sanitario obbligatorio, nell'ospedale di Varese, dove mor la mattina successiva per arresto cardiaco. Secondo la tesi dell'accusa, la morte fu causata dalla costrizione fisica subita durante l'arresto e dalle successive violenze e torture che ha subito in caserma. Il processo contro i due carabinieri che eseguirono l'arresto e contro altri sei agenti di polizia ha assolto gli imputati dalle accuse di omicidio preterintenzionale e sequestro di persona[1][2][3][4]. Alla vicenda dedicato il documentario Viva la sposa di Ascanio Celestini[1][5].
Caso Aldrovandi - Wikipedia
italy police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
Il caso Aldrovandi la vicenda giudiziaria causata dall'uccisione di Federico Aldrovandi, uno studente ferrarese, avvenuta il 25 settembre 2005 a seguito di un controllo di polizia.[1][2][3] I procedimenti giudiziari hanno condannato, il 6 luglio 2009, quattro poliziotti a 3 anni e 6 mesi di reclusione, per "eccesso colposo nell'uso legittimo delle armi";[1][4] il 21 giugno 2012 la Corte di cassazione ha confermato la condanna.[1] All'inchiesta per stabilire la cause della morte ne sono seguite altre per presunti depistaggi e per le querele fra le parti interessate.[1] Il caso stato oggetto di grande attenzione mediatica e ha ispirato un documentario, stato morto un ragazzo.[1][5]
Federico Aldrovandi - Wikipedia
italy police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
Federico Aldrovandi (17 July 1987 in Ferrara 25 September 2005 in Ferrara) was an Italian student, who was killed by four policemen.[1]
Aldrovandi, il film di Vendemmiati gratis on line Articolo21
italy police politics archive.org
2020-07-13
24 Giugno 2020

18 June 2020

Gunnar Wolf: On masters and slaves, whitelists and blacklists...

LWN published today yet another great piece of writing, Loaded terms in free software. I am sorry, the content will not be immediately available to anybody following at home, as LWN is based on a subscription model But a week from now, the article will be open for anybody to read. Or you can ask me (you most likely can find my contact addresses, as they are basically everywhere) for a subscriber link, I will happily provide it. In consonance with the current mood that started with the killing of George Floyd and sparked worldwide revolts against police brutality, racism (mostly related to police and law enforcement forces, but social as well) and the like, the debate that already started some months ago in technical communities has re-sparked: We have many terms that come with long histories attached to them, and we are usually oblivious to their obvious meaning. We? Yes, we, the main users and creators of technology. I never felt using master and slave to refer to different points of a protocol, bus, clock or whatever (do refer to the Wikipedia article for a fuller explanation) had any negative connotations but then again, those terms have never tainted my personal family. That is, I understand I speak from a position of privilege. A similar although less heated issue goes around the blacklist and whitelist terms, or other uses that use white to refer to good, law-abiding citizens, and black to refer to somewhat antisocial uses (i.e. the white hat and black hat hackers). For several years, this debate has been sparking and dying off. Some important changes have been made Particularly, in 2017 the Internet Software Consortium started recommending Primary and Secondary, Python dropped master/slave pairs after a quite thorough and deep review throughout 2018, GitHub changed the default branch from master to main earlier this week. The Internet Engineering Task Force has a draft (that lapsed and thus sadly didn t become an RFC, but still, is archived), Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language that lists suggested alternatives:
There are also many other relationships that can be used as metaphors, Eglash s research calls into question the accuracy of the master-slave metaphor. Fortunately, there are ample alternatives for the master-slave relationship. Several options are suggested here and should be chosen based on the pairing that is most clear in context:
  • Primary-secondary
  • Leader-follower
  • Active-standby
  • Primary-replica
  • Writer-reader
  • Coordinator-worker
  • Parent-helper
I ll add that I think we Spanish-speakers are not fully aware of the issue s importance, because the most common translation I have seen for master/slave is maestro/esclavo: Maestro is the word for teacher (although we do keep our slaves in place). But think whether it sounds any worse if you refer to device pairs, or members of a database high-availability cluster, or whatever as Amo and Esclavo. It does sound much worse I cannot add much of value to this debate. I am just happy issues like this are being recognized and dealt with. If the topic interests you, do refer to the LWN article! Some excrepts: I consider the following to be the core of Jonathan Corbet s writeup:
Recent events, though, have made it clear even to those of us who were happy to not question this view that the story of slavery and the wider racist systems around it is not yet finished. There are many people who are still living in the middle of it, and it is not a nice place to be. We are not so enlightened as we like to think we are. If there is no other lesson from the events of the last few weeks, we should certainly take to heart the point that we need to be listening to the people who have been saying, for many years, that they are still suffering. If there are people who are telling us that terms like slave or blacklist are a hurtful reminder of the inequities that persist in our society, we need to accept that as the truth and act upon it. Etymological discussions on what, say, master really means may be interesting, but they miss the point and are irrelevant to this discussion.
Part of a comment by user yokem_55:
Often, it seems to me that the replacement words are much more descriptive and precise than the old language. Allowlist is far more obviously a list of explicitly authorized entities than whitelist . Mainline has a more obvious meaning of a core stream of development than master . The benefit of moving past this language is more than just changing cultural norms, it s better, more precise communication across the board.
Another spot-on comment, by user alan:
From my perspective as a Black American male, I think that it s nice to see people willing to see and address racism in various spheres. I am concerned that some of these steps will be more performative than substantial. Terminology changes in software so as to be more welcoming is a nice thing. Ensuring that oppressed minorities have access to the tools and resources to help reduce inequity and ensuring equal protection under the laws is better. We ll get there one day I m sure. The current ask is much simpler, its just to stop randomly killing and terrorizing us. Please and thank you.
So Maybe the protests of this year caught special notoriety because the society is reacting after (or during, for many of us) the lockdown. In any case, I hope for their success in changing the planet s culture of oppression.

Comments Tomas Janousek 2020-06-19 10:04:32 +0200 In the blog post On masters and slaves, whitelists and blacklists you claim that GitHub changed the default branch from master to main earlier this week but I don t think that change is in effect yet. When you create a repo, the default branch is still named master . Gunnar Wolf 2020-06-19 11:52:30 -0500 Umh, seems you are right. Well, what can I say? I m reporting only what I have been able to find / read Now, given that said master branch does not carry any Git-specific meaning and is just a commonly used configuration I hope people start picking it up. No, I have not renamed master branches in any of my repos but intend to do so soonish. Tomas Janousek 2020-06-19 20:01:52 +0200 Yeah, don t worry. I just find it sad that so much inaccurate news is spreading from a single CEO tweet, and I wanted to help stop that. I m sure some change will happen eventually, but until it does, we shouldn t speak about it in the past tense. :-)

15 November 2017

Russ Allbery: Review: The Piper's Son

Review: The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta
Series: Francesca #2
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Copyright: 2010
Printing: 2011
ISBN: 0-7636-5458-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 330
Tom Mackee's family has fallen apart. The impetus was the death of his uncle Joe in the London tube terrorist bombings, but that was only the start. He destroyed his chances with the only woman he really loved. His father's drinking got out of control, his mother left with his younger sister to live in a different city, and he refused to go with them and abandon his father. But then, six months later, his father abandoned him anyway. As this novel opens, Tom collapses while performing a music set, high on drugs and no sleep, and wakes up to discover his roommates have been fired from their jobs for stealing, and in turn have thrown him out of their apartment. He's at rock bottom. The one place he can turn for a place to stay is his aunt Georgie, the second (although less frequent) viewpoint character of this book. She was the one who took the trip to the UK to try to find out what happened and retrieve her brother's body, and the one who had to return to Australia with nothing. Her life isn't in much better shape than Tom's. She's kept her job, but she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend but barely talking to him, since he now has a son by another woman he met during their separation. And she's not even remotely over her grief. The whole Finch/Mackee family is, in short, a disaster. But they have a few family relationships left that haven't broken, some underlying basic decency, and some patient and determined friends. I should warn up-front, despite having read this book without knowing this, that this is a sequel to Saving Francesca, set five years later and focusing on secondary characters from the original novel. I've subsequently read that book as well, though, and I don't think reading it first is necessary. This is one of the rare books where being a sequel made it a better stand-alone novel. I never felt a gap of missing story, just a rich and deep background of friendships and previous relationships that felt realistic. People are embedded in networks of relationships even when they feel the most alone, and I really enjoyed seeing that surface in this book. All those patterns from Tom's past didn't feel like information I was missing. They felt like glimpses of what you'd see if you looked into any other person's life. The plot summary above might make The Piper's Son sound like a depressing drama fest, but Marchetta made an excellent writing decision: the worst of this has already happened before the start of the book, and the rest is in the first chapter. This is not at all a book about horrible things happening to people. It's a book about healing. An authentic, prickly, angry healing that doesn't forget and doesn't turn into simple happily-ever-after stories, but does involve a lot of recognition that one has been an ass, and that it's possible to be less of an ass in the future, and maybe some things can be fixed. A plot summary might fool you into thinking that this is a book about a boy and his father, or about dealing with a drunk you still love. It's not. The bright current under this whole story is not father-son bonding. It's female friendships. Marchetta pulls off a beautiful double-story, writing a book that's about Tom, and Georgie, and the layered guilt and tragedy of the Finch/Mackee family, but whose emotional heart is their friends. Francesca, Justine, absent Siobhan. Georgie's friend Lucia. Ned, the cook, and his interactions with Tom's friends. And Tara Finke, also mostly absent, but perfectly written into the story in letters and phone calls. Marchetta never calls unnecessary attention to this, keeping the camera on Tom and Georgie, but the process of reading this book is a dawning realization of just how much work friendship is doing under the surface, how much back-channel conversation is happening off the page, and how much careful and thoughtful and determined work went into providing Tom a floor, a place to get his feet under him, and enough of a shove for him to pull himself together. Pulling that off requires a deft and subtle authorial touch, and I'm in awe at how well it worked. This is a beautifully written novel. Marchetta never belabors an emotional point, sticking with a clear and spare description of actions and thoughts, with just the right sentences scattered here and there to expose the character's emotions. Tom's family is awful at communication, which is much of the reason why they start the book in the situation they're in, but Marchetta somehow manages to write that in a way that didn't just frustrate me or make me want to start banging their heads together. She somehow conveys the extent to which they're trying, even when they're failing, and adds just the right descriptions so that the reader can follow the wordless messages they send each other even when they can't manage to talk directly. I usually find it very hard to connect with people who can only communicate by doing things rather than saying them. It's a high compliment to the author that I felt I understood Tom and his family as well as I did. One bit of warning: while this is not a story of a grand reunion with an alcoholic father where all is forgiven because family, thank heavens, there is an occasional wiggle in that direction. There is also a steady background assumption that one should always try to repair family relationships, and a few tangential notes about the Finches and Mackees that made me think there was a bit more abuse here than anyone involved wants to admit. I don't think the book is trying to make apologies for this, and instead is trying to walk the fine line of talking about realistically messed up families, but I also don't have a strong personal reaction to that type of story. If you have an aversion to "we should all get along because faaaaamily" stories, you may want to skip this book, or at least go in pre-warned. That aside, the biggest challenge I had in reading this book was not breaking into tears. The emotional arc is just about perfect. Tom and Georgie never stay stuck in the same emotional cycle for too long, Marchetta does a wonderful job showing irritating characters from a slightly different angle and having them become much less irritating, and the interactions between Tom, Tara, and Francesca are just perfect. I don't remember reading another book that so beautifully captures that sensation of knowing that you've been a total ass, knowing that you need to stop, but realizing just how much work you're going to have to do, and how hard that work will be, once you own up to how much you fucked up. That point where you keep being an ass for a few moments longer, because stopping is going to hurt so much, but end up stopping anyway because you can't stand yourself any more. And stopping and making amends is hard and hurts badly, and yet somehow isn't quite as bad as you thought it was going to be. This is really great stuff. One final complaint, though: what is it with mainstream fiction and the total lack of denouement? I don't read very much mainstream fiction, but this is the second really good mainstream book I've read (after The Death of Bees) that hits its climax and then unceremoniously dumps the reader on the ground and disappears. Come back here! I wasn't done with these people! I don't need a long happily-ever-after story, but give me at least a handful of pages to be happy with the characters after crying with them for hours! ARGH. But, that aside, the reader does get that climax, and it's note-perfect to the rest of the book. Everyone is still themselves, no one gets suddenly transformed, and yet everything is... better. It's the kind of book you can trust. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

17 October 2017

Russ Allbery: Bundle haul

Confession time: I started making these posts (eons ago) because a close friend did as well, and I enjoyed reading them. But the main reason why I continue is because the primary way I have to keep track of the books I've bought and avoid duplicates is, well, grep on these posts. I should come up with a non-bullshit way of doing this, but time to do more elegant things is in short supply, and, well, it's my blog. So I'm boring all of you who read this in various places with my internal bookkeeping. I do try to at least add a bit of commentary. This one will be more tedious than most since it includes five separate Humble Bundles, which increases the volume a lot. (I just realized I'd forgotten to record those purchases from the past several months.) First, the individual books I bought directly: Ilona Andrews Sweep in Peace (sff)
Ilona Andrews One Fell Sweep (sff)
Steven Brust Vallista (sff)
Nicky Drayden The Prey of Gods (sff)
Meg Elison The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (sff)
Pat Green Night Moves (nonfiction)
Ann Leckie Provenance (sff)
Seanan McGuire Once Broken Faith (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Brightest Fell (sff)
K. Arsenault Rivera The Tiger's Daughter (sff)
Matthew Walker Why We Sleep (nonfiction)
Some new books by favorite authors, a few new releases I heard good things about, and two (Night Moves and Why We Sleep) from references in on-line articles that impressed me. The books from security bundles (this is mostly work reading, assuming I'll get to any of it), including a blockchain bundle: Wil Allsop Unauthorised Access (nonfiction)
Ross Anderson Security Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Anley, et al. The Shellcoder's Handbook (nonfiction)
Conrad Barsky & Chris Wilmer Bitcoin for the Befuddled (nonfiction)
Imran Bashir Mastering Blockchain (nonfiction)
Richard Bejtlich The Practice of Network Security (nonfiction)
Kariappa Bheemaiah The Blockchain Alternative (nonfiction)
Violet Blue Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy (nonfiction)
Richard Caetano Learning Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Nick Cano Game Hacking (nonfiction)
Bruce Dang, et al. Practical Reverse Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Dannen Introducing Ethereum and Solidity (nonfiction)
Daniel Drescher Blockchain Basics (nonfiction)
Chris Eagle The IDA Pro Book, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Nikolay Elenkov Android Security Internals (nonfiction)
Jon Erickson Hacking, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Pedro Franco Understanding Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Christopher Hadnagy Social Engineering (nonfiction)
Peter N.M. Hansteen The Book of PF (nonfiction)
Brian Kelly The Bitcoin Big Bang (nonfiction)
David Kennedy, et al. Metasploit (nonfiction)
Manul Laphroaig (ed.) PoC GTFO (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. The Art of Memory Forensics (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. Malware Analyst's Cookbook (nonfiction)
Michael W. Lucas Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Nikkel Practical Forensic Imaging (nonfiction)
Sean-Philip Oriyano CEHv9 (nonfiction)
Kevin D. Mitnick The Art of Deception (nonfiction)
Narayan Prusty Building Blockchain Projects (nonfiction)
Prypto Bitcoin for Dummies (nonfiction)
Chris Sanders Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Schneier Applied Cryptography (nonfiction)
Adam Shostack Threat Modeling (nonfiction)
Craig Smith The Car Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Dafydd Stuttard & Marcus Pinto The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Albert Szmigielski Bitcoin Essentials (nonfiction)
David Thiel iOS Application Security (nonfiction)
Georgia Weidman Penetration Testing (nonfiction)
Finally, the two SF bundles: Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes Encounter with Tiber (sff)
Poul Anderson Orion Shall Rise (sff)
Greg Bear The Forge of God (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Dawn (sff)
William C. Dietz Steelheart (sff)
J.L. Doty A Choice of Treasons (sff)
Harlan Ellison The City on the Edge of Forever (sff)
Toh Enjoe Self-Reference ENGINE (sff)
David Feintuch Midshipman's Hope (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Icerigger (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Mission to Moulokin (sff)
Alan Dean Foster The Deluge Drivers (sff)
Taiyo Fujii Orbital Cloud (sff)
Hideo Furukawa Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (sff)
Haikasoru (ed.) Saiensu Fikushon 2016 (sff anthology)
Joe Haldeman All My Sins Remembered (sff)
Jyouji Hayashi The Ouroboros Wave (sff)
Sergei Lukyanenko The Genome (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Good Luck, Yukikaze (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Yukikaze (sff)
Sakyo Komatsu Virus (sff)
Miyuki Miyabe The Book of Heroes (sff)
Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls (sff)
Robert Silverberg Across a Billion Years (sff)
Allen Steele Orbital Decay (sff)
Bruce Sterling Schismatrix Plus (sff)
Michael Swanwick Vacuum Flowers (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: Dawn (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 2: Ambition (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 3: Endurance (sff)
Tow Ubukata Mardock Scramble (sff)
Sayuri Ueda The Cage of Zeus (sff)
Sean Williams & Shane Dix Echoes of Earth (sff)
Hiroshi Yamamoto MM9 (sff)
Timothy Zahn Blackcollar (sff)
Phew. Okay, all caught up, and hopefully won't have to dump something like this again in the near future. Also, more books than I have any actual time to read, but what else is new.

13 August 2017

Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Ad-hoc BoF: Debian for the Remote Desktop

On Thursday at DebConf17, all people interested in using this or that Remote Desktop solution on Debian (as a server, as a client, as both) came together for a BoF. Sharing about Usage Scenarios Quite some time we informally shared with one another what technologies and software we use for remote access to Debian machines and what the experiences are. The situation in Debian and on GNU/Linux in general is that many technical approaches exist, all of them have certain features and certain limitations. The composition of features and limitations finally lead the users to choosing one or another technology as his or her favourite solution. The Debian Remote Maintainers Team On the developers' side, Dominik George and I set up a packaging team for Remote Desktop related software in Debian. A packaging team that we invite everyone who is maintaining such software in the widest sense to join: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-remote-team%40lists.alioth... 'DebianRemote' namespace on the Debian Wiki For users of Debian, the group agreed, we need an overview page (on wiki.debian.org) that provides an entry point for Debian on the Remote Desktop. An entry point that provides user information as well as developer information. A skeleton of this wiki page, I have just set up (thanks to Vagrant for taking some notes in Gobby during the BoF): https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRemote However, the page still contains loads of FIXMEs, so the actual work only now really starts. Fill the template with content (and also adapt the template, if needed). Everyone with experience and know-how about Remote Desktop on Debian systems is invited to share knowledge and improve this wiki namespace. (I will, at the earliest, start working on Arctica, X2Go and NX passages end of August, but I'll be also happy to find passages having been written down that I can review by then). Tracking Debian Remote Issues in Debian BTS At the BoF, also the following suggestions came up: The Remote Desktop experience on a GNU/Linux desktop or terminal server can be affected by all graphical applications available. Often it happens, that a change in this or that graphical application results in problems in remote sessions, but not so in local sessions. We agreed on filing and tagging such bugs accordingly. For new bugs, please file such bugs with the following BTS header at the top of your mail and always explain what remote desktop solution is being used when the bug appears: 
Package: file
Version: 1:5.19-2
Severity: important
User: debian-edu@lists.debian.org
Usertags: debian-edu
Conclusion Overall, I was quite happy that the BoF has been attended by so many people and to see that there is quite "a lobby" in Debian. Let's dive into the work and make Debian 10 the first Debian, that mentions the Remote Desktop in its release notes. Let's, in fact, release Debian 10 as the first Debian with the official announcement as an operating system for the Remote Desktop (like the Fedora people did already for Fedora 20).

11 August 2017

Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Story Telling about Debian Edu in Northern Germany

Last Monday, I gave a 20min talk about our little FLOSS school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" at the Debian Conference 17 in Montreal. The talk had video coverage, so may want to peek in, if you couldn't manage to watch the life stream: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/su... I'd like to share some major outcomes (so far) of this talk.
  1. I realized how attached I am to "IT-Zukunft Schule" and how much it means to me that our kids grow up in a world of freedom and choice. Also and esp. when it comes to choosing your daily communication tools and computer working environment
  2. I met Foteini Tsiami and Alkis Georgopoulos from Greece. They work on LTSP and have deployed 1000+ schools in Greece with LTSP + Debian GNU/Linux + MATE Desktop Environment
  3. I met Vagrant Cascadian who is the maintainer of LTSP in Debian and also a major LTSP upstream contributor
  4. I received a lot of fine feedback that was very encouraging to go on with our local work in Schleswig-Holstein
If you have some more time for watching DebConf talks on video, I dearly recommend the talk given by Alkis and Foteini on their Greek FLOSS success story. If you don't have that much time, please skip through the video until you are at 26:15 and enjoy the map that shows how much Debian + LTSP has spread over all of Greece. http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/lt... Unfortunately, the schools in Greece are so much smaller than schools in Germany. Most schools there have between 50 and 300 students. So at the Greek schools, it is possible to have a teacher machine being the server for one computer lab. This teacher / server machine provides the infrastructure for a room full of LTSP fat clients (no hard drive inside) and that's it. For German schools, unfortunately, we need a larger scale setup. German schools often have 800+ students and network services need to be spread over more than one server machine. So, the current approach with one server running LDAP, Kerberos etc. is quite appropriate, but also extendible, possibly on municipality level or on county level. We (from IT-Zukunft Schule) are quite positive that there will be opportunities for introducing FLOSS approaches more on the county level in Schleswig-Holstein in the near future. So stay tuned...

29 July 2017

Antoine Beaupr : My free software activities, July 2017

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my monthly working on Debian LTS. This time I worked on various hairy issues surrounding ca-certificates, unattended-upgrades, apache2 regressions, libmtp, tcpdump and ipsec-tools.

ca-certificates updates I've been working on the removal of the Wosign and StartCom certificates (Debian bug #858539) and, in general, the synchronisation of ca-certificates across suites (Debian bug #867461) since at least last march. I have made an attempt at summarizing the issue which led to a productive discussion and it seems that, in the end, the maintainer will take care of synchronizing information across suites. Guido was right in again raising the question of synchronizing NSS across all suites (Debian bug #824872) which itself raised the other question of how to test reverse dependencies. This brings me back to Debian bug #817286 which, basically proposed the idea of having "proposed updates" for security issues. The problem is while we can upload test packages to stable proposed-updates, we can't do the same in LTS because the suite is closed and we operate only on security packages. This issue came up before in other security upload and we need to think better about how to solve this.

unattended-upgrades Speaking of security upgrades brings me to the question of a bug (Debian bug #867169) that was filed against the wheezy version of unattended-upgrades, which showed that the package simply stopped working since the latest stable release, because wheezy became "oldoldstable". I first suggested using the "codename" but that appears to have been introduced only after wheezy. In the end, I proposed a simple update that would fix the configuration files and uploaded this as DLA-1032-1. This is thankfully fixed in later releases and will not require such hackery when jessie becomes LTS as well.

libmtp Next up is the work on the libmtp vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-9831 and CVE-2017-9832). As I described in my announcement, the work to backport the patch was huge, as upstream basically backported a whole library from the gphoto2 package to fix those issues (and probably many more). The lack of a test suite made it difficult to trust my own work, but given that I had no (negative) feedback, I figured it was okay to simply upload the result and that became DLA-1029-1.

tcpdump I then looked at reproducing CVE-2017-11108, a heap overflow triggered tcpdump would parse specifically STP packets. In Debian bug #867718, I described how to reproduce the issue across all suites and opened an issue upstream, given that the upstream maintainers hadn't responded responded in weeks according to notes in the RedHat Bugzilla issue. I eventually worked on a patch which I shared upstream, but that was rejected as they were already working on it in their embargoed repository. I can explain this confusion and duplication of work with:
  1. the original submitter didn't really contact security@tcpdump.org
  2. he did and they didn't reply, being just too busy
  3. they replied and he didn't relay that information back
I think #2 is most likely: the tcpdump.org folks are probably very busy with tons of reports like this. Still, I should probably have contacted security@tcpdump.org directly before starting my work, even though no harm was done because I didn't divulge issues that were already public. Since then, tcpdump has released 4.9.1 which fixes the issue, but then new CVEs came out that will require more work and probably another release. People looking into this issue must be certain to coordinate with the tcpdump security team before fixing the actual issues.

ipsec-tools Another package that didn't quite have a working solution is the ipsec-tools suite, in which the racoon daemon was vulnerable to a remotely-triggered DOS attack (CVE-2016-10396). I reviewed and fixed the upstream patch which introduced a regression. Unfortunately, there is no test suite or proof of concept to control the results. The reality is that ipsec-tools is really old, and should maybe simply be removed from Debian, in favor of strongswan. Upstream hasn't done a release in years and various distributions have patched up forks of those to keep it alive... I was happy, however, to know that a maintainer will take care of updating the various suites, including LTS, with my improved patch. So this fixes the issue for now, but I would strongly encourage users to switch away from ipsec-tools in the future.

apache2 Finally, I was bitten by the old DLA-841-1 upload I did all the way back in February, as it introduced a regression (Debian bug #858373). It turns out it was possible to segfault Apache workers with a trivial HTTP request, in certain (rather exotic, I might add) configurations (ErrorDocument 400 directive pointing to a cgid script in worker mode). Still, it was a serious regression and I found a part of the nasty long patch we worked on back then that was faulty, and introduced a small fix to correct that. The proposed package unfortunately didn't yield any feedback, and I can only assume it will work okay for people. The result is the DLA-841-2 upload which fixes the regression. I unfortunately didn't have time to work on the remaining CVEs affecting apache2 in LTS at the time of writing.

Triage I also did some miscellaneous triage by filing Debian bug #867477 for poppler in an effort to document better the pending issue. Next up was some minor work on eglibc issues. CVE-2017-8804 has a patch, but it's been disputed. since the main victim of this and the core of the vulnerability (rpcbind) has already been fixed, I am not sure this vulnerability is still a thing in LTS at all. I also looked at CVE-2014-9984, but the code is so different in wheezy that I wonder if LTS is affected at all. Unfortunately, the eglibc gymnastics are a little beyond me and I do not feel confident enough to just push those issues aside for now and let them open for others to look at.

Other free software work And of course, there's my usual monthly volunteer work. My ratio is a little better this time, having reached an about even ratio between paid and volunteer work, whereas this was 60% volunteer work in march.

Announcing ecdysis I recently published ecdysis, a set of template and code samples that I frequently reuse across project. This is probably the least pronounceable project name I have ever chosen, but this is somewhat on purpose. The goal of this project is not collaboration or to become a library: it's just a personal project which I share with the world as a curiosity. To quote the README file:
The name comes from what snakes and other animals do to "create a new snake": they shed their skin. This is not so appropriate for snakes, as it's just a way to rejuvenate their skin, but is especially relevant for anthropods since then "ecdysis" may be associated with a metamorphosis:
Ecdysis is the moulting of the cuticle in many invertebrates of the clade Ecdysozoa. Since the cuticle of these animals typically forms a largely inelastic exoskeleton, it is shed during growth and a new, larger covering is formed. The remnants of the old, empty exoskeleton are called exuviae. Wikipedia
So this project is metamorphosed into others when the documentation templates, code examples and so on are reused elsewhere. For that reason, the license is an unusally liberal (for me) MIT/Expat license. The name also has the nice property of being absolutely unpronounceable, which makes it unlikely to be copied but easy to search online.
It was an interesting exercise to go back into older projects and factor out interesting code. The process is not complete yet, as there are older projects I'm still curious in reviewing. A bunch of that code could also be factored into upstream project and maybe even the Python standard library. In short, this is stuff I keep on forgetting how to do: a proper setup.py config, some fancy argparse extensions and so on. Instead of having to remember where I had written that clever piece of code, I now shove it in the crazy chaotic project where I can find it again in the future.

Beets experiments Since I started using Subsonic (or Libresonic) to manage the music on my phone, album covers are suddenly way more interesting. But my collection so far has had limited album covers: my other media player (gmpc) would download those on the fly on its own and store them in its own database - not on the filesystem. I guess this could be considered to be a limitation of Subsonic, but I actually appreciate the separation of duty here. Garbage in, garbage out: the quality of Subsonic's rendering depends largely on how well setup your library and tags are. It turns out there is an amazing tool called beets to do exactly that kind of stuff. I originally discarded that "media library management system for obsessive-compulsive [OC] music geeks", trying to convince myself i was not an "OC music geek". Turns out I am. Oh well. Thanks to beets, I was able to download album covers for a lot of the albums in my collection. The only covers that are missing now are albums that are not correctly tagged and that beets couldn't automatically fix up. I still need to go through those and fix all those tags, but the first run did an impressive job at getting album covers. Then I got the next crazy idea: after a camping trip where we forgot (again) the lyrics to Georges Brassens, I figured I could start putting some lyrics on my ebook reader. "How hard can that be?" of course, being the start of another crazy project. A pull request and 3 days later, I had something that could turn a beets lyrics database into a Sphinx document which, in turn, can be turned into an ePUB. In the process, I probably got blocked from MusixMatch a hundred times, but it's done. Phew! The resulting e-book is about 8000 pages long, but is still surprisingly responsive. In the process, I also happened to do a partial benchmark of Python's bloom filter libraries. The biggest surprise there was the performance of the set builtin: for small items, it is basically as fast as a bloom filter. Of course, when the item size grows larger, its memory usage explodes, but in this case it turned out to be sufficient and bloom filter completely overkill and confusing. Oh, and thanks to those efforts, I got admitted in the beetbox organization on GitHub! I am not sure what I will do with that newfound power: I was just scratching an itch, really. But hopefully I'll be able to help here and there in the future as well.

Debian package maintenance I did some normal upkeep on a bunch of my packages this month, that were long overdue:
  • uploaded slop 6.3.47-1: major new upstream release
  • uploaded an NMU for maim 5.4.64-1.1: maim was broken by the slop release
  • uploaded pv 1.6.6-1: new upstream release
  • uploaded kedpm 1.0+deb8u1 to jessie (oldstable): one last security fix (Debian bug #860817, CVE-2017-8296) for that derelict password manager
  • uploaded charybdis 3.5.5-1: new minor upstream release, with optional support for mbedtls
  • filed Debian bug #866786 against cryptsetup to make the remote initramfs SSH-based unlocking support multiple devices: thanks to the maintainer, this now works flawlessly in buster and may be backported to stretch
  • expanded on Debian bug #805414 against gdm3 and Debian bug #845938 against pulseaudio, because I had trouble connecting my computer to this new Bluetooth speaker. turns out this is a known issue in Pulseaudio: whereas it releases ALSA devices, it doesn't release Bluetooth devices properly. Documented this more clearly in the wiki page
  • filed Debian bug #866790 regarding old stray Apparmor profiles that were lying around my system after an upgrade, which got me interested in Debian bug #830502 in turn
  • filed Debian bug #868728 against cups regarding a weird behavior I had interacting with a network printer. turns out the other workstation was misconfigured... why are printers still so hard?
  • filed Debian bug #870102 to automate sbuild schroots upgrades
  • after playing around with rash tried to complete the packaging (Debian bug #754972) of percol with this pull request upstream. this ended up to be way too much overhead and I reverted to my old normal history habits.

12 May 2017

Norbert Preining: Gaisi Takeuti, 1926-2017

Two days ago one of the most influential logician of the 20th century has passed away, Gaisi Takeuti ( ). I had the pleasure to meet this excellent man, teacher, writer, thinker several times while he was the president of the Kurt G del Society. I don t want to recall his achievements in mathematical logic, in particular proof theory, because I am not worth to write about such a genius. I want to recall a few personal stories from my own experience. I came into contact with Prof. Takeuti via is famous book Proof Theory, which my then Professor, now colleague and friend Matthias Baaz used for teaching us students proof theory. Together with Shoenfield s Mathematical Logic these two books became the foundation of my whole logic education. Now again in print, back then the Proof Theory was a rare precious. Few prints did remain in the library, and over the years one by one disappeared, until the last copy we had access to was my copy where I had scribbled pages and pages of notes and proofs. Matthias later on used these copies for his lectures, I should have written on the back-side! I remember well my first meeting with Prof. Takeuti: I was on the Conference on Internationalization in 2003 in Tsukuba, long before I moved to Japan. Back then I was just finishing my PhD and without much experience. When I arrived in the hotel, without fail there was a message of Prof. Takeuti inviting me for dinner the following day. We had dinner in a specialty restaurant of his area, together with is lovely wife. I was soo nervous about Japanese manners and stuttered Japanese phrases just to be stopped by Prof. Takeuti pouring himself a glass of sake and telling me: Relax, and forget the rules and fill your own glass when you want to. I am well aware that this liberal attitude didn t extend to Japanese colleagues, where he, descendant from a Samurai family, was at times very, extremely strict. The dinner was decided upon already, not easy since I was still strict vegetarian back than (now I would have enjoyed the dinner much more!), but for the last course we could decide. I remember with a smile how Prof. Takeuti suggested in Japanese various sweets, just to be interrupted by his wife with No Gaisi, no! . I asked what is going on and she explained that he wants to order a Japanese sweet for me I agreed, and that was probably the worst dish I had in Japan. Slippy noodles swimming in a cold broth, to be picked with chopsticks and put into a semi-sweet soja-sauce. I finished it, but it wasn t good. I should have thought twice when Prof. Takeuti s wife ordered a normal fruit salad. Scientifically he was simply a genius and famous for not reading a lot but reinventing everything. One of my research areas, G del logics, was reinvented by him as Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic (for an overview see my talk at the Collegium Logicum 2016: G del Logics a short survey). But I want to recall one of my favorite articles of him: A Conservative Extension of Peano Arithmetic . This was published as part 2 of Volume 17 of Publications of the Mathematical Society of Japan, retypeset pdf is available here, JSTOR page. Therein he develops classical (real and complex) analysis over Peano s arithmetic. He shows that any arithmetical theorem proved in analytic number theory is a theorem in Peano s arithmetic. The proof uses Gentzen s cut elimination theorem, the center piece of modern proof theory. With Georg Kreisel having passed away in 2015, and now Gaisi Takeuti, we loose two of the greatest, if not the greatest minds in logic.

29 January 2017

Dimitri John Ledkov: 2017 is the new 1984

1984: Library EditionNovel by George Orwell, cover picture by Google Search result
I am scared.
I am petrified.
I am confused.
I am sad.
I am furious.
I am angry.

28 days later I shall return from NYC.

I hope.

26 January 2017

John Goerzen: What is happening to America?

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian. Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said: Wow. You re an American, and a Christian, and you re so . normal! This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump. Ouch It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of how could this happen? As I ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed. Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the deplorables won the day that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power. But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can t explain it all. How Trump could happen Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:
[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.
Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:
His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.
Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.

8 January 2017

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2016)

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

2 January 2017

Shirish Agarwal: India Tourism, E-Visa and Hong Kong

A Safe and Happy New Year to all.
Incredible India from http://incredibleindiacampaign.com

Incredible India from http://incredibleindiacampaign.com

While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India
Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.
https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still
Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate
The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).
And port of call
The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .
The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism

21 December 2016

Holger Levsen: 20161221-debian-edu-sprint-in-oslo

What we did at the Debian Edu / Skolelinux gathering in November 2016 in Oslo From November 25 to 27 some people met in the hackerspace bitraf in downtown Oslo. On Saturday and Sunday we met in the morning and hacked and translated all day until we went for dinners in the evening. Despite the short time I think we managed to get a lot done and had good fun, so I'm hoping we'll have another gathering in 2017! Debian Edu / Skolelinux is currently in better shape regarding the upcoming Debian release than we ever have been, which is pretty awesome. Today, on December 21st, all our changes are in Stretch, except for debian-edu-artwork.git, which awaits a desktop-base upload to unstable the only thing missing is being able to install Debian Edu using our profiles from official media releasing Debian Edu Stretch on the same day as Debian Stretch would be a huge success though! These are the notes taken in a pad (thanks riseup!) during the meeting: Phil Hands worked on Knut Yrvin worked on Ingrid Yrvin worked on Ole-Erik Yrvin worked on Wolfgang Schweer worked on Petter Reinholdtsen worked on Dominik George worked on Holger Levsen worked on Mike Gabriel was sick and couldnt come to Oslo and worked at home instead: Thanks to the Debian sprints programm and our sponsors for supporting the travel of Wolfgang, Dominik, Phil and myself! Mike opted out from reimbursement as he couldn't travel due to sickness.

8 November 2016

Jonathan Carter: A few impressions of DebConf 16 in Cape Town

DebConf16 Group Photo

DebConf16 Group Photo by Jurie Senekal.

DebConf16 Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city! DebConf16 Open Festival (5 August) The Open Festival (usually Debian Open Day) turned out pretty good. It was a collection of talks, a job fair, and some demos of what can be done with Debian. I particularly liked Hetzner s stand. I got to show off some 20 year old+ Super Mario skills and they had some fun brain teasers as well. It s really great to see a job stand that s so interactive and I think many companies can learn from them. The demo that probably drew the most attention was from my friend Georg who demoed some LulzBot Mini 3D Printers. They really seem to love Debian which is great! DebConf (6 August to 12 August) If I try to write up all my thoughts and feeling about DC16, I ll never get this post finished. Instead, here as some tweets from DebConf that other have written:


Day Trip We had 3 day trips: Brought to you by
orga

DebConf16 Orga Team.

See you in Montr al! DebConf17 dates: The DC17 sponsorship brochure contains a good deal of information, please share it with anyone who might be interested in sponsoring DebConf! Media

31 October 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in October 2016

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

Debian & Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most GNU/Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

  • Presented a talk entitled "Reproducible Builds" talk at Software Freedom Kosova, in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo.

  • I filed my 2,500th bug in the Debian BTS: #840972: golang-google-appengine: accesses the internet during build.

  • In order to build packages reproducibly, one not only needs identical sources but also some external and sharable definition of the environment used for a particular build, stipulating such things such as the version numbers of the required build-dependencies. It is not currently clear how to handle these .buildinfo files after the archive software has processed them and how to make them available to the world so I started development on a proof-of-concept server to see what issues arise in practice. It is available at buildinfo.debian.net.

  • Chaired an IRC meeting and ran a poll to determine a regular time .

  • Submitted two design proposals to our wiki page.

  • Improvements to our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework:

    • Move regular "Scheduled in..." messages to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel.
    • Use our log_info method instead of manual echo calls.
    • Correct an "all sources packages" "all source packages" typo.
    • Submit .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
    • Create GPG key on nodes for buildinfo.debian.net at deploy time, not "lazily".

My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in our weekly reports. (#75, #76, #77 & #78).

I also submitted 14 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in bio-eagle, cf-python, fastx-toolkit, fpga-icestorm, http-icons, lambda-align, mypy, playitslowly, seabios, stumpwm, sympa, tj3, wims-help & xotcl.
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • Seven days of "frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 647-1 for freeimage correcting an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the XMP image handling functionality.
  • Issued DLA 649-1 for python-django fixing a possible CSRF protection bypass on sites that use Google Analytics.
  • Issued DLA 654-1 for libxfixes preventing an integer overflow when a malicious client sent INT_MAX as a "length".
  • Issued DLA 662-1 for quagga correcting a programming error where two constants were confused that could cause stack overrun in IPv6 routing code.
  • Issued DLA 688-1 for cairo to prevent a DoS attack where a malicious SVG could generate invalid pointers.
Uploads
  • gunicorn:
    • 19.6.0-7 Set supplementary groups when changing uid, add an example systemd .service file to gunicorn-examples, and expand README.Debian to make it clearer what to do now that /etc/gunicorn.d has been removed.
    • 19.6.0-8 Correct previous supplementary groups patch to be compatible with Python 3.
  • redis:
    • 3:3.2.4-2 Ensure that sentinel's configuration actually writes to a pidfile location so that systemd can detect that the daemon has started.
    • 3:3.2.5-1 New upstream release.
  • libfiu:
    • 0.94-8 Fix FTBFS under Bash due to lack of && in debian/rules.
    • 0.94-9 Ensure the build is reproducible by sorting injected modules.
  • aptfs (2:0.8-2) Minor cosmetic changes.

NMUs
  • libxml-dumper-perl (0.81-1.2) Move away from a unsupported debhelper compat level 4.
  • netatalk (2.2.5-1.1) Drop build-dependency on hardening-includes.

QA uploads
  • anon-proxy (00.05.38+20081230-4) Move to a supported debhelper compatibility level 9.
  • ara (1.0.32) Make the build reproducible.
  • binutils-m68hc1x (1:2.18-8) Make the build reproducible & move to a supported debhelper compatibility level.
  • fracplanet (0.4.0-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • libnss-ldap (265-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • python-uniconvertor (1.1.5-3) Fix an "option release requires an argument" FTBFS. (#839375)
  • ripole (0.2.0+20081101.0215-3) Actually include the ripole binary in package. (#839919) & enable hardening flags.
  • twitter-bootstrap (2.0.2+dfsg-10) Fix incorrect copyright formatting when building under Bash. (#824592)
  • zpaq (1.10-3) Make the build reproducible.
Debian FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 147 packages: ace-link, amazon-s2n, avy, basez, bootstrap-vz, bucklespring, camitk, carettah, cf-python, debian-reference, dfcgen-gtk, efivar, entropybroker, fakesleep, gall, game-data-packager, gitano, glare, gnome-panel, gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock, gnome-shell-extension-refreshwifi, gnome-shell-extension-remove-dropdown-arrows, golang-github-gogits-go-gogs-client, golang-github-gucumber-gucumber, golang-github-hlandau-buildinfo, golang-github-hlandau-dexlogconfig, golang-github-hlandau-goutils, golang-github-influxdata-toml, golang-github-jacobsa-crypto, golang-github-kjk-lzma, golang-github-miekg-dns, golang-github-minio-sha256-simd, golang-github-nfnt-resize, golang-github-nicksnyder-go-i18n, golang-github-pointlander-compress, golang-github-pointlander-jetset, golang-github-pointlander-peg, golang-github-rfjakob-eme, golang-github-thecreeper-go-notify, golang-github-twstrike-gotk3adapter, golang-github-unknwon-goconfig, golang-gopkg-dancannon-gorethink.v1, golang-petname, haskell-argon2, haskell-binary-parsers, haskell-bindings-dsl, haskell-deriving-compat, haskell-hackage-security, haskell-hcwiid, haskell-hsopenssl-x509-system, haskell-megaparsec, haskell-mono-traversable-instances, haskell-prim-uniq, haskell-raaz, haskell-readable, haskell-readline, haskell-relational-record, haskell-safe-exceptions, haskell-servant-client, haskell-token-bucket, haskell-zxcvbn-c, irclog2html, ironic-ui, lace, ledger, libdancer2-plugin-passphrase-perl, libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl, libdbix-class-optimisticlocking-perl, libdbix-class-schema-config-perl, libgeo-constants-perl, libgeo-ellipsoids-perl, libgeo-functions-perl, libgeo-inverse-perl, libio-async-loop-mojo-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-assetpack-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-renderfile-perl, libparams-validationcompiler-perl, libspecio-perl, libtest-time-perl, libtest2-plugin-nowarnings-perl, linux, lua-scrypt, mono, mutt-vc-query, neutron, node-ansi-font, node-buffer-equal, node-defaults, node-formatio, node-fs-exists-sync, node-fs.realpath, node-is-buffer, node-jison-lex, node-jju, node-jsonstream, node-kind-of, node-lex-parser, node-lolex, node-loud-rejection, node-random-bytes, node-randombytes, node-regex-not, node-repeat-string, node-samsam, node-set-value, node-source-map-support, node-spdx-correct, node-static-extend, node-test, node-to-object-path, node-type-check, node-typescript, node-unset-value, nutsqlite, opencv, openssl1.0, panoramisk, perl6, pg-rage-terminator, pg8000, plv8, puppet-module-oslo, pymoc, pyramid-jinja2, python-bitbucket-api, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-configshell-fb, python-ewmh, python-gimmik, python-jsbeautifier, python-opcua, python-pyldap, python-s3transfer, python-testing.common.database, python-testing.mysqld, python-testing.postgresql, python-wheezy.template, qspeakers, r-cran-nleqslv, recommonmark, rolo, shim, swift-im, tendermint-go-clist, tongue, uftrace & zaqar-ui.

24 September 2016

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Laptop Mode Tools 1.70

I'm pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.70. This release adds support for AHCI Runtime PM, introduced in Linux 4.6. It also includes many important bug fixes, mostly related to invocation and determination of power states. Changelog: 1.70 - Sat Sep 24 16:51:02 IST 2016
* Deal harder with broken battery states
* On machines with 2+ batteries, determine states from all batteries
* Limit status message logging frequency. Some machines tend to send
ACPI events too often. Thanks Maciej S. Szmigiero
* Try harder to determine power states. As reports have shown, the
power_supply subsystem has had incorrect state reporting on many machines,
for both, BAT and AC.
* Relax conditional events where Laptop Mode Tools should be executed. This
affected for use cases of Laptop being docked and undocked
Thanks Daniel Koch.
* CPU Hotplug settings extended
* Cleanup states for improved Laptop Mode Tools invocation
Thanks: Tomas Janousek
* Align Intel P State default to what the actual driver (intel_pstate.c)
uses
Thanks: George Caswell and Matthew Gabeler-Lee
* Add support for AHCI Runtime PM in module intel-sata-powermgmt
* Many systemd and initscript fixes
* Relax default USB device list. This avoids the long standing issues with
USB devices (mice, keyboard) that mis-behaved during autosuspend Source tarball, Feodra/SUSE RPM Packages available at:
https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools/releases Debian packages will be available soon in Unstable. Homepage: https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools/wiki
Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/laptop-mode-tools

Categories:

Keywords:

Like:

10 July 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2016)

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

6 May 2016

Norbert Preining: Yubikey NEO

Two Factor authentication and general improvement of my security infrastructure was long on my todo list. Some month ago I finally purchased a Yubikey NEO from Yubico and try to consistently use it as second factor, as well as gpg signing/encrypting device. yubikey-neo I am trying to get the best out of my Yubikey NEO by using as many of its functionality, in particular: Smartcard for my GNuPG keys, OTP similar to Google Authenticator and similar, as well as challenge-response for additional login security, as well as all that over NFC to not keep keys/passwords on my mobile phone. While there are loads of guides (see the previous article on GnuPG for some of them), many of them are out-of-date for current distributions and GnuPG etc. So I tried to collect all I could find not the least to have a place to look it up in case I forget it again. The Hardware The Yubikey NEO is a great peace of hardware. I not even remotely understand how they manage that this little beast can do all these things and still work out without mixing things up. As far as I understand (please correct me) it has three independent circuits of communication: On top of these circuit of communication there is a variety of applications to make the most out of your Yubikey: Yubikey mode setup There are several modes, and using the ykpersonalize tool (readily available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and in the Debian package yubikey-personalization) one can program the key to work in a variety of modes. I chose to activate all options by passing in -m86 which stand for OTP/U2F/CCID composite device with MODE_FLAG_EJECT. 
$ ykpersonalize -m86
Firmware version 3.4.3 Touch level 1792 Unconfigured
 
The USB mode will be set to: 0x86
 
Commit? (y/n) [n]: y
$
It is a good idea to unplug and replug the key after this operation. Yubikey udev rules for user access To allow users but root to use the Yubikey, additional udev rules are necessary: 
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="1050", ATTRS idProduct =="0116", TAG+="uaccess"
which I put into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-yubikeys.rules on Debian. After that another unplug and replug should allow normal user to access the key. This can be checked by calling getfacl on the newly created /dev/hidraw? device. Using the HID/Challenge-Response mode (slot 2) If you want to secure your login with an additional second factor, there are several options documented on the Yubico site concerning yubico-pam. Since I cannot be sure to be always online with my laptop, I choose Challenge-Response authentication, and followed one-to-one Yubico s docs Local Authentication Using Challenge Response. Basically it boils down to install libpam-yubico, select mode-challenge-response when asked for configuration. Then one needs to personalizing the key (in particular slot 2) for challenge response with: 
$ ykpersonalize -2 -ochal-resp -ochal-hmac -ohmac-lt64 -oserial-api-visible
...
Commit? (y/n) [n]: y
$
Next we need to save the challenge and expected response to the user s directory: 
$ mkdir $HOME/.yubico
$ ykpamcfg -2 -v
...
Stored initial challenge and expected response in '/home/norbert/.yubico/challenge-123456'.
$
It might be a good idea to try this out, and if it works, activate it also for root. But be careful no key no login Challenge: I am currently searching for a method to replace the second factor of they key optionally with a different authentication method, like a very difficult passphrase. This way I could log in even without my key, but in this case would need the complicated passphrase. From my reading of the pam manuals it seems to be possible, and I am planning to use pam_ssh and a specific login key with a complicated passphrase. I will report back when this is done. YubiOATH (TOTP) Time based One Time Passwords (aka Google Authenticator style) Without any setup whatsoever this worked out of the box. I use the Yubico Authenticator on my Android phone, and the dedicated application for the Linux desktop to create second factors for all kind of applications. Currently I am using it with Google login, Github, DropbBox, and WordPress (via the Two Factor plugin which can also be tweaked to use the NEO key as USB key via the FIDO U2F). Challenge: If I start the Yubico Personalization GUI, I see two free slots so where are the TOTPs computed? That also means that I have one slot free and for now I don t know what to do with it Yubikey OpenGPG applet setup The Yubikeys support OpenPGP, and the applet is pre-installed (afaik), meaning you can directly configure the key and upload your keys. Here I use gpg2 (2.1) as it seems to better support card operations. To not interfere with the current gpg setup I use a temporary gpg home: 
$ mkdir gpgtmp
$ chmod go-rwx gpgtmp
$ gpg2 --homedir gpgtmp --list-keys
gpg: keybox 'gpgtmp/pubring.kbx' created
gpg: gpgtmp/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
Warning: The YubiKey NEO only supports 2048bit keys. If you want 4096bit keys you need to use one of the newer YubiKey 4, which gives you this option, but does not have support for NFC, and thus no way to interact with an Android (or other) mobile phone. Check the correct version of the applet There has been a bug in an older version of the applet, but since 2 years all keys sold should have a correct applet. You can check by: 
$ gpg-connect-agent --homedir gpgtmp --hex "scd apdu 00 f1 00 00" /bye"
gpg-connect-agent: no running gpg-agent - starting '/usr/bin/gpg-agent'
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (5s)
gpg-connect-agent: connection to agent established
D[0000]  01 00 10 90 00                                     .....           
OK
Looking at the output one sees D[0000] 01 00 10 which means applet version 1.0.10, which is the first version fixed. Replace pins of the key The standard pins are 123456 for the user pin, and 12345678 for the admin pin. These need immediate change! Warning: When changing the ping the normal pin must be 6 (at least?) digits, and the admin pin 8 (at least?), other gpg2 cannot use the key anymore. No idea why. 
$ gpg2 --homedir gpgtmp --card-edit
 
Reader ...........: 1050:0116:X:0
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000006036457190000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: Yubico
Serial number ....: 03645719
Name of cardholder: [not set]
Language prefs ...: [not set]
Sex ..............: unspecified
URL of public key : [not set]
Login data .......: [not set]
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: rsa2048 rsa2048 rsa2048
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
 
gpg/card> admin
Admin commands are allowed
 
gpg/card> passwd
gpg: OpenPGP card no. D2760001240102000006036457190000 detected
 
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
 
Your selection? 3
PIN changed.
 
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
 
Your selection? 1
PIN changed.
 
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
 
Your selection? q
 
gpg/card> quit
After this you need to use the new pins for all changes. Setup basic data The key can also save some basic data about yourself, like name, sex, language preferences, login name, and url to obtain the public key. As before start gpg2 and then change these infos in the following way> 
gpg/card> name
Cardholder's surname: Preining
Cardholder's given name: Norbert
 
gpg/card> sex
Sex ((M)ale, (F)emale or space): M
 
gpg/card> lang
Language preferences: de
 
gpg/card> login
Login data (account name): norbert
 
gpg/card> url
URL to retrieve public key: https://www.preining.info/preining-norbert.asc
 
gpg/card> list
 
Reader ...........: 1050:0116:X:0
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000006036457190000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: Yubico
Serial number ....: 03645719
Name of cardholder: Norbert Preining
Language prefs ...: de
Sex ..............: male
URL of public key : https://www.preining.info/preining-norbert.asc
Login data .......: norbert
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: rsa2048 rsa2048 rsa2048
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
 
gpg/card> quit
Move sub keys to Yubikey As laid out in the article on GnuPG subkeys, we are having three subkeys for signing, encryption, and authentication. In reality I will practically only use the signing key, but upload all three keys to the card. In the following I expect that you have a setup more or less similar to the one described in the article linked before. Again, we use GnuPG v2, mostly because it was the version that worked out of the box. In addition, if you are setting up a similar stage like in my GNuPG article with gpg1 keys on the mail server, then you don t want the gpg1 keys being removed. Basically you must have the Yubikey plugged in and call keytocard after selecting each key in turn (and deselecting it afterwards). Warning: There is another bug in the GnuPG applet that was fixed in later versions (but not in 1.0.10), namely that not all keys are accepted. This is a bit a pain. I needed to recreate a subkey to obtain a key that can be loaded onto the Yubikey. Unfortunately, Yubico has also stopped/disabled the ability to update applets (although I have to say their documentation is an incredible rubbish with respect to applets and upgrades ). As before, assume that $MASTERKEY contains the hex id of your master key. 
$ gpg2 --edit-key $MASTERKEY
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.11; Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
 
Secret key is available.
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 2
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb* rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (1) Signature key
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb* rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 2
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 3
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb* rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (2) Encryption key
Your selection? 2
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb* rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 3
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 4
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb* rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb* rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> key 4
 
sec  rsa4096/0x6CACA448860CDC13
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  rsa4096/0xD1D2BD14810F62B3
     created: 2010-09-14  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0xEC00B8DAD32266AA
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: S   
ssb  rsa2048/0xBF361ED434425B4C
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: E   
ssb  rsa2048/0x9C7CA4E294F04D49
     created: 2016-02-07  expires: 2017-02-06  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
[ultimate] (2)  Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>
[ultimate] (3)  Norbert Preining <preining@debian.org>
[ultimate] (4)  Norbert Preining <preining@jaist.ac.jp>
[ultimate] (5)  [jpeg image of size 4185]
 
gpg> save
After that your keys are on the Yubikey (and only there!), and GNuPG will require the PIN (user pin) to sign/encrypt documents. Usage Many things have been said above, but to sum up when and how I am using the YubiKey now: Conclusions With this setup I am now quite content, but not completely. What I still want to do is full disk encryption where I need the Yubikey to boot and again, with an alternative for a very long passphrase. At the end, adding a second factor to the login is not really optimal, and only protects you against quick hacks. If the laptop is actually stolen, only full disc protection helps. Access to the hardware always guarantees that one has access to everything on the disc. Another thing I want to do is re-use the GnuPG key on the Yubikey as ssh key for logging into remote systems. That would mean that I get rid of even more keys on my laptop. But this is still in the work The other open question is what to use the other available slot of the Yubikey for? I thought about some passwords (possible), but I don t feel to happy about having my password issued with the press of a key. But all in all, I like the setup much more than before and not having any GnuPG key on the laptop is a big plus.

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