| 1984: Library Edition | Novel by George Orwell, cover picture by Google Search result |
[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.
A Safe and Happy New Year to all.
Incredible India from http://incredibleindiacampaign.com
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.
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
DebConf16 Group Photo by Jurie Senekal.
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!At #Debconf? Join the #HetznerSA #Supermariobros challenge and stand a chance to win a case of #Leagueofbeers pic.twitter.com/DpkOj6wmZb HetznerSA Careers (@HetznerCareers) July 2, 2016
LulzBot Mini #3Dprinters were on the scene at @DebConf Open Festival in South Africa. We re powered by @debian! pic.twitter.com/AOBS64ZtiJ LulzBot (@lulzbot3D) July 13, 2016DebConf (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:
@o0karen0o delivering today s #DebConf16 keynote pic.twitter.com/hG1wD5MBhH Michael Banck (@mbanck) July 3, 2016
Great to see Sicelo Mhlongo speaking about issues using @debian in Swaziland #debconf16 pic.twitter.com/U6z7HA8zd5 Neil McGovern (@nmcgovern) July 7, 2016
What happened at #DebConf16 yesterday? Sandstorm Principles talking about the freedom to choose #software #sandbox pic.twitter.com/ltYaw3dAmP Obsidian Systems (@obsidianza) July 5, 2016
All @DebConf end with similar feelings: we re an incredible crowd working together for a incredibly important cause. https://t.co/DYuUWT5eKt Didier Raboud (@OdyX_) July 9, 2016
My congratulations to the #DebConf video team. As usual, they are doing an amazing work at #DebConf16Day Trip We had 3 day trips:
Marcelo Santana (@mgsantana) July 8, 2016
DebConf16 Orga Team.
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
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:
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.
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:
$ ykpersonalize -m86 Firmware version 3.4.3 Touch level 1792 Unconfigured The USB mode will be set to: 0x86 Commit? (y/n) [n]: y $ |
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="1050", ATTRS idProduct =="0116", TAG+="uaccess" |
$ ykpersonalize -2 -ochal-resp -ochal-hmac -ohmac-lt64 -oserial-api-visible ... Commit? (y/n) [n]: y $ |
$ mkdir $HOME/.yubico $ ykpamcfg -2 -v ... Stored initial challenge and expected response in '/home/norbert/.yubico/challenge-123456'. $ |
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 |
$ 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 |
$ 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 |
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 |
$ 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 |
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.
A second Armadillo release 6.700.6 came out in the 6.700 series, and we uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.6.700.6.0 to CRAN and Debian. This followed the usual thorough reverse-dependecy checking of by now 220 packages using.
This release is a little unusual in that it contains both upstream bugfixes in the same series (see below) but also two nice bug fixes from the RcppArmadillo side. Both were squashed by George G. Vega Yon via two focused pull request. The first ensures that we can now use ARMA_64BIT_WORD (provided C++11 is turned on too) allowing for much bigger Armadillo objects. And the second plugs a small leak in the sparse matrix converter I had added a while back. Nice work, all told!
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab.
Changes in this release are as follows:
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.6.700.6.0 (2016-05-05)Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.
- Upgraded to Armadillo 6.700.6 (Catabolic Amalgamator Deluxe)
- fix for handling empty matrices by
kron()- fix for clang warning in advanced matrix constructors
- fix for false deprecated warning in
trunc_log()andtrunc_exp()- fix for gcc-6.1 warning about misleading indentation
- corrected documentation for the
solve()function- Added support for
int64_t(ARMA_64BIT_WORD) when required during compilation time. (PR #90 by George G. Vega Yon, fixing #88)- Fixed bug in
SpMatexporter (PR #91 by George G. Vega Yon, fixing #89 and #72)
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
What happened in the reproducible
builds effort between February 28th and March 5th:
debian/changelog.--clamp-mtime option to Tar on Savannah's bug tracker.
Lunar rebased our experimental dpkg on top of the current master branch. Changes in the test infrastructure are required before uploading a new version to our experimental repository.
Reiner Herrmann rebased our custom texlive-bin against the latest uploaded version.
printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.GRKERNSEC_RANDSTRUCT which will prevent reproducible builds with the current packaging.
Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Conflicts-Arch. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger)
New package sets have been added for Subgraph OS, which is based on Debian Stretch: packages and build dependencies. (h01ger)
Two new armhf build nodes have been added (thanks Vagrant Cascadian) and integrated in our Jenkins setup with 8 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger)
POT-Creation-Date field in GNU Gettext .mo files. (Reiner Herrmann) Several improvements to the packages metadata have also been made. (h01ger, Ben Finney)
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in rpm, Florian Festi opened a discussion on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list about reproducible builds.
On March 4th, Lunar gave an overview of the general reproducible builds effort at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia.
Most recently, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced plans to found a movement (not a political party) that claims to "democratise" the EU by 2025. Ironically, one of his first steps has been to create a web site directing supporters to Facebook and Twitter. A groundbreaking effort to put citizens back in charge? Or further entangling activism in the false hope of platforms that are run for profit by their Silicon Valley overlords? A Greek tragedy indeed, in the classical sense.
Varoufakis rails against authoritarian establishment figures who don't put the citizens' interests first. Ironically, big data and the cloud are a far bigger threat than Brussels. The privacy and independence of each citizen is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Companies like Facebook are obliged - by law and by contract - to service the needs of their shareholders and advertisers paying to study and influence the poor user. If "Facebook privacy" settings were actually credible, who would want to buy their shares any more?
Facebook is more akin to an activism placebo: people sitting in their armchair clicking to "Like" whales or trees are having hardly any impact at all. Maintaining democracy requires a sufficient number of people to be actively involved, whether it is raising funds for worthwhile causes, scrutinizing the work of our public institutions or even writing blogs like this. Keeping them busy on Facebook and Twitter renders them impotent in the real world (but please feel free to alert your friends with a tweet)
Big data is one of the areas that requires the greatest scrutiny. Many of the professionals working in the field are actually selling out their own friends and neighbours, their own families and even themselves. The general public and the policy makers who claim to represent us are oblivious or reckless about the consequences of this all-you-can-eat feeding frenzy on humanity.
Pretending to be democratic is all part of the illusion. Facebook's recent announcement to deviate from their real-name policy is about as effective as using sunscreen to treat HIV. By subjecting themselves to the laws of Facebook, activists have simply given Facebook more status and power.
Data means power. Those who are accumulating it from us, collecting billions of tiny details about our behavior, every hour of every day, are fortifying a position of great strength with which they can personalize messages to condition anybody, anywhere, to think the way they want us to. Does that sound like the route to democracy?
I would encourage Mr Varoufakis to get up to speed with Free Software and come down to Zurich next week to hear Richard Stallman explain it the day before launching his DiEM25 project in Berlin.
Will the DiEM25 movement invite participation from experts on big data and digital freedom and make these issues a core element of their promised manifesto? Is there any credible way they can achieve their goal of democracy by 2025 without addressing such issues head-on?
Or put that the other way around: what will be left of democracy in 2025 if big data continues to run rampant? Will it be as distant as the gods of Greek mythology?
Still not convinced? Read about Amazon secretly removing George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles while people were reading them, Apple filtering the availability of apps with a pro-Life bias and Facebook using algorithms to identify homosexual users.
#ooni IRC channel. Tor also works fine, and could be a great way
to avoid the global surveillance system described later in this
article.
Nevertheless, it still remains to be seen how the internet is censored
in the "real" Cuban internet, outside of the tourist designated
areas - hopefully future visitors or locals can expand on this using
the tools mentioned above, using the regular internet.
Usual care should be taken when using any workaround tools, mentioned
in this post or not, as different regimes over the world have accused,
detained, tortured and killed sometimes for the mere fact of using or
distributing circumvention tools. For example, a Russian developer
was arrested and detained in 2001 by United States' FBI for
exposing vulnerabilities in the Adobe e-books copy protection
mechanisms. Similarly, people distributing Tor and other tools have
been arrested during the period prior to the revolution in Tunisia.
--- 10.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
163 packets transmitted, 31 received, 80% packet loss, time 162391ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 133.700/2669.535/64188.027/11257.336 ms, pipe 65
killall iodine # stop DNS tunnel
nmcli n off # turn off wifi to change MAC address
macchanger -A wlan0 # change MAC address
nmcli n on # turn wifi back on
sleep 3 # wait for wifi to settle
iodine-client-start # restart DNS tunnel
Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa which, for anyone that cares to research, will
give them a location of about 20 square meters where I was located
when connected (there is only one access point in the whole hotel).
Finally, the central portal also knows my MAC address,
a unique identifier for the computer I am using which also reveals
which brand of computer I am using (Mac, Lenovo, etc). While this
address can be changed, very few people know that, let alone how.
This led me to question whether I would be allowed back in Cuba (or
even allowed out!) after publishing this blog post, as it is obvious
that I can be easily identified based on the time this article was
published, my name and other details. Hopefully the Cuban government
will either not notice or not care, but this can be a tricky
situation, obviously. I have heard that Cuban prisons are not the best
hangout place in Cuba, to say the least...
[1034]anarcat@angela:cuba$ speedtest
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba (152.206.92.146)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by LIME (George Town) [391.78 km]: 317.546 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 1.01 Mbits/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 1.00 Mbits/s
--- koumbit.org ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 120 received, 1,64% packet loss, time 18731,6ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 127,457/156,097/725,211/94,688 ms
--- google.com ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 121 received, 0,82% packet loss, time 19371,4ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 132,517/160,095/724,971/93,273 ms
--- redcta.org.ar ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 120 received, 1,64% packet loss, time 40748,6ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 303,035/339,572/965,092/97,503 ms
--- ccc.de ping statistics ---
122 packets transmitted, 72 received, 40,98% packet loss, time 19560,2ms
rtt min/avg/max/sdev = 244,266/271,670/594,104/61,933 ms
traceroute to koumbit.net (199.58.80.33), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 10.156.41.1 (10.156.41.1) 9.724 ms 9.472 ms 9.405 ms
2 192.168.134.137 (192.168.134.137) 16.089 ms 15.612 ms 15.509 ms
3 172.31.252.113 (172.31.252.113) 15.350 ms 15.805 ms 15.358 ms
4 pos6-0-0-agu-cr-1.mpls.enet.cu (172.31.253.197) 15.286 ms 14.832 ms 14.405 ms
5 172.31.252.29 (172.31.252.29) 13.734 ms 13.685 ms 14.485 ms
6 200.0.16.130 (200.0.16.130) 14.428 ms 11.393 ms 10.977 ms
7 200.0.16.74 (200.0.16.74) 10.738 ms 10.019 ms 10.326 ms
8 ix-11-3-1-0.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net (64.86.33.45) 108.577 ms 108.449 ms
1 10.156.41.1 (10.156.41.1) 9.724 ms 9.472 ms 9.405 ms
2 192.168.134.137 (192.168.134.137) 16.089 ms 15.612 ms 15.509 ms
3 172.31.252.113 (172.31.252.113) 15.350 ms 15.805 ms 15.358 ms
4 pos6-0-0-agu-cr-1.mpls.enet.cu (172.31.253.197) 15.286 ms 14.832 ms 14.405 ms
5 172.31.252.29 (172.31.252.29) 13.734 ms 13.685 ms 14.485 ms
6 200.0.16.130 (200.0.16.130) 14.428 ms 11.393 ms 10.977 ms
7 200.0.16.74 (200.0.16.74) 10.738 ms 10.019 ms 10.326 ms
/24, or 256 IP
addresses) network allocated to ETECSA, the state telco
in Cuba:
inetnum: 200.0.16/24
status: allocated
aut-num: N/A
owner: EMPRESA DE TELECOMUNICACIONES DE CUBA S.A. (IXP CUBA)
ownerid: CU-CUBA-LACNIC
responsible: Rafael L pez Guerra
address: Ave. Independencia y 19 Mayo, s/n,
address: 10600 - La Habana - CH
country: CU
phone: +53 7 574242 []
owner-c: JOQ
tech-c: JOQ
abuse-c: JEM52
inetrev: 200.0.16/24
nserver: NS1.NAP.ETECSA.NET
nsstat: 20160123 AA
nslastaa: 20160123
nserver: NS2.NAP.ETECSA.NET
nsstat: 20160123 AA
nslastaa: 20160123
created: 20030512
changed: 20140610
8 ix-11-3-1-0.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net (64.86.33.45) 108.577 ms 108.449 ms 108.257 ms
traceroute to 192.168.134.138 (192.168.134.138), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.134.138 (192.168.134.138) 6.027 ms 5.698 ms 5.596 ms
$ ip route
default via 10.156.41.1 dev wlan0 proto static metric 1024
10.156.41.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 10.156.41.4
169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000
190.6.81.230 in the hotel.
Accessing http://1.1.1.1/ gives you a status page which allows you
to disconnect from the portal. It actually redirects you to
https://192.168.134.138/logout.user. That is also a
self-signed, but different certificate. That
certificate actually reveals the implication of Gemtek which is a
"world-leading provider of Wireless Broadband solutions, offering a
wide range of solutions from residential to business". It is somewhat
unclear if the implication of Gemtek here is deliberate or a
misconfiguration on the part of Cuban officials, especially since the
certificate is self-signed and was issued in 2002. It could be,
however, a trace of the supposed involvement of China in the
development of Cuba's networking systems, although Gemtek is based in
Taiwan, and not in the China mainland.
That IP, in turn, redirects you to the same portal but in a page that
shows you the statistics:
https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/?mac=0024D1717D18&script=logout.user&remain_time=00%3A55%3A52&session_time=00%3A04%3A08&username=151003576287&clientip=10.156.41.21&nasid=Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa&r=ac%2Fpopup
Actualizar redirects you back to the IP address, which
redirects you to the right URL on the portal. The "real" logout is at:
http://192.168.134.138/logout.user?cmd=logout
https://www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu/?&nasid=Wifi_Memories_Jibacoa&nasip=192.168.134.138&clientip=10.156.41.21&mac=EC:55:F9:C5:F2:55&ourl=http%3a%2f%2fgoogle.ca%2f&sslport=443&lang=en-US%2cen%3bq%3d0.8&lanip=10.156.41.1
www.portal-wifi-temas.nauta.cu, 190.6.81.230)192.168.134.138)10.156.41.1)2.4.21 and 2.4.31. Now, to
find out which version of Linux it is running is way more challenging,
and it is possible it is just some custom Linux distribution. Indeed,
the webserver shows up as G4200.GSI.2.22.0155 and the SSH server is
running OpenSSH 3.0.2p1, which is basically prehistoric (2002!)
which corroborates the idea that this is some Gemtek embedded device.
The fact that those devices are running 14 years old software should
be a concern to the people responsible for those networks. There is,
for example, a remote root vulnerability that affects that
specific version of OpenSSH, among
many other vulnerabilities.
15100, the
following digits being 3576 or 4595, presumably depending on the
"batch" that was sent to different hotels, which seems to be batches
of 1000 cards. You can also correlate the UID with the date at which
the card was issued. For example, 15100357XXX cards are all valid
until 19/03/2017, and 151004595XXX cards are all valid until
23/03/2017. Here's the list of UIDs I have seen:
151004595313
151004595974
151003576287
151003576105
151003576097
preferences.js files.
To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today.
Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap.
Packages fixed
The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
bouncycastle,
cairo-dock-plug-ins,
darktable,
gshare,
libgpod,
pafy,
ruby-redis-namespace,
ruby-rouge,
sparkleshare.
The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the documentation generator.Makefile.tmpfs. (h01ger)
200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing!
diffoscope development
Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once.
disorderfs development
Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored.
Documentation update
Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged.
Package reviews
666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week.
151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni.
New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm.
Misc.
Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO.
Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.
The first reproducible world
summit was held in
Athens, Greece, from December 1st-3rd with the support of the
Linux Foundation, the Open Tech Fund, and Google. Faidon Liambotis has been an
amazing help to sort out all local details. People at ImpactHub
Athens have been perfect hosts.
Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy
days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches.
Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the rb-general mailing-list.
What follows focuses mostly on what happened for Debian this previous week. A
more detailed report about the summit will follow soon. You can also read the ones from
Joachim Breitner from
Debian,
Clemens Lang from
MacPorts,
Georg Koppen from
Tor,
Dhiru Kholia from Fedora,
and Ludovic Court s wrote one for Guix and for the GNU project.
Infrastructure
Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what
kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a detailed update
on how .buildinfo
files
should become part of the Debian archive.
Some key changes compared to what we had in mind at DebConf15:
.buildinfo with different environment information can attest to the
same exact binary artifact..buildinfo files can coexist for the same .deb as long as the listed
checksums match the source and binary package in the archive..buildinfo can be signed in-line to certify where a build comes from.metview script.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in grub image generator (#787795).
reproducible.debian.net
An issue with some armhf build nodes was tracked down to a bad interaction between uname26 personality and new glibc (Vagrant Cascadian).
A Debian package was created for koji, the RPM building and tracking system used by Fedora amongst others. It is currently waiting for review in the NEW queue. (Ximin Luo, Marek Marczykowski-G recki)
diffoscope development
diffoscope now has a dedicated mailing list to better accommodate its growing user and developer base.
Going through diffoscope's guts together enabled several new contributors. Baptiste Daroussin, Ed Maste, Clemens Lang, Mike McQuaid, Joachim Breitner all contributed their first patches to improve portability or add new features. Regular contributors Chris Lamb, Reiner Herrmann, and Levente Polyak also submitted improvements.
The next release should support more operating systems, filesystem image comparison via libguestfs, HTML reports with on-demand loading, and parallel processing for the most noticeable improvements.
Package reviews
27 reviews have been removed, 17 added and 14 updated in the previous week.
Chris Lamb and Val Lorentz filed 4 new FTBFS reports.
Misc.
Baptiste Daroussin has started to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in FreeBSD in libpkg and the ports tree.
Thanks Joachim Breitner and h01ger for the pictures.
Over the rainy weekend we watched two movies: Monuments Men (in Japanese it is called Michelangelo Project!) and Interstellar. Both blockbuster movies from the usual American companies, they are light-years away when it comes to quality. The Monuments Men are boring, without a story, without depth, historically inaccurate, a complete failure. Interstellar, although a long movie, keeps you frozen in the seat while being as scientific as possible and starts your brain working heavily.
My personal verdict: 3 rotten eggs (because Rotten Tomatoes are not stinky enough) for the Monuments Men, and 4 stars for Interstellar.
Story
First for the plot of the two movies: The Monuments Men is loosely based on a true story about rescuing pieces of art at the end of the second world war, before the Nazis destroy them or the Russian take them away. A group of art experts is sent into Europe and manages to find several hiding places of art taken by the Nazis.
Interstellar is set in near future where the conditions on the earth are deteriorating to a degree that human life seems to be soon impossible. Some years before the movie plays a group of astronauts were sent through a wormhole into a different galaxy to search for new inhabitable planets. Now it is time to check out these planets, and try to establish colonies there. Cooper, a retired NASA officer and pilot, now working as farmer, and his daughter are guided by some mysterious way to a secret NASA facility. Cooper is drafted for being a pilot on the reconnaissance mission, and leaves earth and our galaxy through the same wormhole. (Not telling more!)
Monuments Men
Looking at the cast of Monuments Men (George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett) one would expect a great movie but from the very first to the very last scene, it is a slowly meandering shallow flow of sticked together scenes without much coherence. Tension is generated only through unrelated events (stepping onto a landmine, patting a horse), but never developed properly. Dialogs are shallow and boring with one exception: When Frank Stokes (George Clooney) meets the one German and inquires general about the art, predicting his future being hanged.
Historically, the movie is as inaccurate as it can be despite Clooney stating that 80 percent of the story is still completely true and accurate, and almost all of the scenes happened . That contrasts starkly with the verdict of Nigel Pollard (Swansea University): There s a kernel of history there, but The Monuments Men plays fast and loose with it in ways that are probably necessary to make the story work as a film, but the viewer ends up with a fairly confused notion of what the organisation was, and what it achieved.
The movie leaves a bitter aftertaste, hailing of American heroism paired with the usual stereotypes (French amour, German retarded, Russian ignorance, etc). Together with the half baked dialogues it feels like a permanent coitus interruptus.
Interstellar
Interstellar cannot serve with a similar cast, but still a few known people (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine!). But I believe this is actually a sign of quality. Well balancing scientific accuracy and the requirements for blockbusters, the movie successfully spans the bridge between complicated science, in particular general gravity, and entertainment. While not going so far to call the move edutainment (like both the old and new Cosmos), it is surprising how much of hard science is packed into this movie. This is mostly thanks to the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acting as scientific consultant for the movie, but also due to the director Christopher Nolan being serious about it and studying relativity at Caltech.
Of course, scientific accuracy has limits nobody knows what happens if one crosses the event horizon of a black hole, and even the existence of wormholes is purely theoretical by now. Still, throughout the movie it follows the two requirements laid out by Kip Thorne: First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter.
I think the biggest compliment was that, despite the length, despite a long day out (see next blog), despite the rather unfamiliar topic, my wife, who is normally not interested in space movies and that kind, didn t fall asleep throughout the movie, and I had to stop several times to explain details of the theory of gravity and astronomy. So in some sense it was perfect edutainment!
The airplane may be the closest thing we have to a time machine. Brian J. Terwilliger
There is something about that moment. Hiking in the mountains near Durango, Colorado, with Laura and the boys, we found a beautiful spot with a view of the valley. We paused to admire, and then
The sound of a steam locomotive whistle from down below, sounding loud all the way up there, then echoing back and forth through the valley. Then the quieter, seemingly more distant sound of the steam engine heading across the valley, chugging and clacking as it goes. More whistles, the sight of smoke and then of the train full of people, looking like a beautiful model train from our vantage point.
I ve heard that sound on a few rare recordings, but never experienced it. I ve been on steam trains a few times, but never spent time in a town where they still run all day, every day. It is a different sort of feeling to spend a week in a place where Jacob and Oliver would jump up several times a day and rush to the nearest window in an attempt to catch sight of the train.
Airplanes really can be a time machine in a sense what a wondrous time to be alive, when things so ancient are within the reach of so many. I have been transported to L beck and felt the uneven 700-year-old stones of the Marienkirche underneath my feet, feeling a connection to the people that walked those floors for centuries. I felt the same in Prague, in St. George s Basilica, built in 1142, and at the Acropolis of Lindos, with its ancient Greek temple ruins. In Kansas, I feel that when in the middle of the Flint Hills rolling green hills underneath the pure blue sky with billowing white clouds, the sounds of crickets, frogs, and cicadas in my ears; the sights and sounds are pretty much as they ve been for tens of thousands of years. And, of course, in Durango, arriving on a plane but seeing the steam train a few minutes later.
It was fitting that we were in Durango with Laura s parents to celebrate their 50th anniversary. As we looked forward to riding the train, we heard their stories of visits to Durango years ago, of their memories of days when steam trains were common. We enjoyed thinking about what our lives would be like should we live long enough to celebrate 50 years of marriage. Perhaps we would still be in good enough health to be able to ride a steam train in Durango, telling about that time when we rode the train, which by then will have been pretty much the same for 183 years. Or perhaps we would take them to our creek, enjoying a meal at the campfire like I ve done since I was a child.
Each time has its unique character. I am grateful for the cameras and airplanes and air conditioning we have today. But I am also thankful for those things that connect us with each other trough time, those rocks that are the same every year, those places that remind us how close we really are to those that came before.
Next.