Review: The Fed Unbound, by Lev Menand

Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-7359137-1-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	156

The Fed Unbound is a short non-fiction exploration of US Federal Reserve actions to reducing systemic risk caused by shadow banking. Its particular focus is the role of the Fed from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, including the COVID shock, but it includes a history of what Menand calls the "American Monetary Settlement," the political compromise that gave rise to the Federal Reserve. In Menand's view, a central cause of instability in the US financial system (and, given the influence of the dollar system, the world financial system as well) is shadow banking: institutions that act as banks without being insured like banks or subject to bank regulations. A bank, in this definition, is an organization that takes deposits. I'm simplifying somewhat, but what distinguishes a deposit from a security or an investment is that deposits can be withdrawn at any time, or at least on very short notice. When you want to spend the money in your checking account, you don't have to wait for a three-month maturity period or pay an early withdrawal penalty. You simply withdraw the money, with immediate effect. This property is what makes deposits "money," rather than something that you can (but possibly cannot) sell for money, such as stocks or bonds. Most people are familiar with the basic story of how banks work. Essentially no bank simply takes people's money and puts it in a vault until the person wants it again. If that were the case, you would need to pay the bank to store your money. Instead, a bank takes in deposits and then lends some portion of that money out to others. Those loans, for things like cars or houses or credit card spending, come due over time, with interest. The interest rate the bank charges on the loans is much higher than the rate it has to pay on its deposits, and it pockets the difference. The problem with this model, of course, is that the bank doesn't have your money, so if all the depositors go to the bank at the same time and ask for their money, the bank won't be able to repay them and will collapse. (See, for example, the movie It's a Wonderful Life, or Mary Poppins, or any number of other movies or books.) Retail banks are therefore subject to stringent regulations designed to promote public trust and to ensure that traditional banking is a boring (if still lucrative) business. Banks are also normally insured, which in the US means that if they do experience a run, federal regulators will step in, shut down the bank in an orderly fashion, and ensure every depositor gets their money back (at least up to the insurance limit). Alas, if you thought people would settle for boring work that makes a comfortable profit, you don't know the financial industry. Highly-regulated insured deposits are less lucrative than acting like a bank without all of those restrictions and rules and deposit insurance payments. As Menand relates in his brief history of US banking, financial institutions constantly invent new forms of deposits with similar properties but without all the pesky rules: eurodollars (which have nothing to do with the European currency), commercial paper, repo, and many others. These forms of deposits are primarily used by large institutions like corporations. The details vary, but they tend to be prone to the same fundamental instability as bank deposits: if there's a run on the market, there may not be enough liquidity for everyone to withdraw their money at once. Unlike bank deposits, though, there is no insurance, no federal regulator to step in and make depositors whole, and much less regulation to ensure that runs are unlikely. Instead, there's the Federal Reserve, which has increasingly become the bulwark against liquidity crises among shadow banks. This happened in 2008 during the financial crisis (which Menand argues can be seen as a shadow bank run sparked by losses on mortgage securities), and again at a larger scale in 2020 during the initial COVID crisis. Menand is clear that these interventions from the Federal Reserve were necessary. The alternative would have been an uncontrolled collapse of large sections of the financial system, with unknown consequences. But the Fed was not intended to perform those types of interventions. It has no regulatory authority to reform the underlying financial systems to make them safer, remove executives who failed to maintain sufficient liquidity for a crisis, or (as is standard for all traditional US banks) prohibit combining banking and more speculative investment on the same balance sheet. What the Federal Reserve can do, and did, is function as a buyer of last resort, bailing out shadow banks by purchasing assets with newly-created money. This works, in the sense that it averts the immediate crisis, but it creates other distortions. Most importantly, constant Fed intervention doesn't create an incentive to avoid situations that require that intervention; if anything, it encourages more dangerous risk-taking. The above, plus an all-too-brief history of the politics of US banking, is the meat of this book. It's a useful summary, as far as it goes, and I learned a few new things. But I think The Fed Unbound is confused about its audience. This type of high-level summary and capsule history seems most useful for people without an economics background and who haven't been following macroeconomics closely. But Menand doesn't write for that audience. He assumes definitions of words like "deposits" and "money" that are going to be confusing or even incomprehensible to the lay reader. For example, Menand describes ordinary retail banks as creating money, even saying that a bank loans money by simply incrementing the numbers in a customer's deposit account. This is correct in the technical economic definition of money (fractional reserve banking effectively creates new money), but it's going to sound to someone not well-versed in the terminology as if retail banks can create new dollars out of the ether. That power is, of course, reserved for the Federal Reserve, and indeed is largely the point of its existence. Much of this book relies on a very specific definition of money and money supply that will only be familiar to those with economics training. Similarly, the history of the Federal Reserve is interesting but slight, and at no point does Menand explain clearly how the record-keeping between it and retail banks works, or what the Fed's "balance sheet" means in practice. I realize this book isn't trying to give a detailed description or history of the Federal Reserve system, but the most obvious audience is likely to flounder at the level of detail Menand provides. Perhaps, therefore, this book is aimed at an audience already familiar with macroeconomics? But, if so, I'm not sure it says anything new. I follow macroeconomic policy moderately closely and found most of Menand's observations obvious and not very novel. There were tidbits here and there that I hadn't understood, but my time would probably have been better invested in another book. Menand proposes some reforms, but they mostly consist of "Congress should do its job and not create situations where the Federal Reserve has to act without the right infrastructure and political oversight," and, well, yes. It's hard to disagree with that, and it's also hard to see how it will ever happen. It's far too convenient to outsource such problems to central banking, where they are hidden behind financial mechanics that are incomprehensible to the average voter. This is an important topic, but I don't think this is the book to read about it. If you want a clearer and easier-to-understand role of the Federal Reserve in shadow banking crises, read Crashed instead. If you want to learn more about how retail bank regulation works, and hear a strong case for why the same principles should be applied to shadow banks, see Sheila Bair's Bull by the Horns. I'm still looking for a great history and explainer of the Federal Reserve system as a whole, but that is not this book. Rating: 5 out of 10

Besides several bugfixes, the latest version now supports using higher compression levels and logging to syslog facility. I also finished packaging and official packages are now available,

1.3 billion announced for new Forestry Support Funds to be delivered through new Forestry Programme Premiums for planting trees to be increased by between 46% and 66% and extended to 20 years for farmers #GreensInGovernment The Taoiseach, Miche l Martin TD, Minister of State with responsibility for Forestry, Senator Pippa Hackett, and Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue T.D today announced a proposed investment by the Government of 1.3 billion in Irish forestry. The funding will be for the next national Forestry Programme and represents the largest ever investment by an Irish Government in tree-planting. The programme will now be the subject of state-aid approval by the European Commission. The Taoiseach said: This commitment by the Government to such a substantial financial package reflects the seriousness with which we view the climate change and biodiversity challenges, which affect all of society. Forestry is at the heart of delivering on our sustainability goals and strong support is needed to encourage engagement from all our stakeholders in reaching our objectives. Minister Hackett said: I m delighted to have secured a package of 1.318 billion for forestry. This will support the biggest and best-funded Forestry Programme ever in Ireland. It comes at an appropriate time, given the urgency of taking climate mitigation measures. Planting trees is one of the most effective methods of tackling climate change as well as contributing to improved biodiversity and water quality. One of my main aims is to re-engage farmers in afforestation. I m delighted therefore to be proposing a new 20-year premium term exclusively for farmers, as well as introducing a new small-scale native woodland scheme which will allow farmers to plant up to 1 hectare of native woodland on farmland and along watercourses outside of the forestry licensing process. Minister McConalogue said: Today we commit to providing unprecedented incentives to encourage the planting of trees that can provide a valuable addition to farm income and help to meet national climate and biodiversity objectives. This funding guarantees continued payments to those forest owners who planted under the current scheme and who are still in receipt of premiums. It also offers new and improved financial supports to those who undertake planting and sustainable forest management under the new Programme. We intend to increase premiums for planting trees by between 46% and 66% and to extend the premium period from 15 to 20 years for farmers. "We are approaching a new and exciting period for forestry in Ireland. The new Forestry Programme will drive a new and brighter future for forestry, for farmers and for our climate. The proposed new Forestry Programme is currently out to public consultation as part of the Strategic Environmental Assessment and Appropriate Assessment process. The Programme is the main implementation mechanism for the new Forest Strategy (2023 -2030) which reflects the ambitions contained in the recently published Shared National Vision for Trees, Woods and Forests in Ireland until 2050. The public consultation closes on 29th November, 2022 and any changes which result from this process will be incorporated into the Programme and the Forest Strategy. Minister Hackett commented: The draft Forestry Programme and Forest Strategy are the product of extensive stakeholder consultation and feedback, and both documents are open to public consultation for the next number of weeks. I would strongly encourage all interested parties to engage with the consultation in advance of the Strategy and Programme being finalised. The new Programme is built around the principle of right trees in the right places for the right reasons with the right management. It aims to deliver more diverse forest which will meet multiple societal objectives, economic, social and environmental. Higher grant rates for forest establishment are also proposed with increases of approximately 20% to reflect rising living costs. The new one hectare native tree area scheme will also make it easier for landowners who wish to plant small areas of trees on their farm. The Taoiseach concluded I welcome this milestone and I believe that this funding injection will be an important catalyst in delivering on the ambition outlined in the new Forest Strategy. Our environmental challenges are huge but so is our commitment to overcoming them and this Forestry Programme is key to delivering so many of our priorities. The new Programme will be 100% Exchequer funded and is subject to State Aid approval from the EU Commission. The Department is in contact with the Commission in relation to this approval which is a rigorous process.

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent bookstore, in Montr al. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written with Rebecca Giblin¹. Titled Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, it focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on creative workers. The book is divided in two main parts:

Part one, Culture has been captured (chapters 1 to 11), is a series of case studies that focus on different examples of market failure. The specific sectors analysed are the book market, the news media, the music industry, Hollywood, the mobile apps industry and the online video platforms.
Part two, Braking anticompetitive flywheels (chapters 12 to 19), looks at different solutions to try to fix these failures.

Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book. They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear. That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or enjoy this book :) As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also monopsonies a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked. The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer: there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of monopsonies. In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and oligopsonies, like Amazon² or major music labels. This creates a situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural monopsonies³ are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the existing ones even stronger. Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good) antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are:

Transparency Rights giving creative workers a way to audit the companies that sell their work and make sure they are paid what they are due.
Collective Action
Time Limits on Copyright Contracts making sure creators that sell their copyrights to publishers or labels can get them back after a reasonable period of time.
Radical Interoperability forcing tech giants to make their walled-gardens interoperable.
Minimum Wages for Creative Work enforcing minimum legal rates for workers in certain domains, like what is already done for screenplays in the US by members of the Writers Guild of America.
Collective Ownership

Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic. Chances are I'll reuse some of the expos s in my classes too.

Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, amongst other things. More on her here.
Amazon owns more than 50% of the US physical book retail market and has an even higher market share for ebooks and audiobooks (via Audible). Not only this, but with the decline of the physical book market, audiobooks are an increasingly important source of revenue for authors.
Natural monopolies happen when it does not make economic sense for multiple enterprises to compete in a market. Critical infrastructures, like water supply or electricity, make for good examples of natural monopolies. It simply wouldn't be efficient to have 10 separate electrical cables connecting your house to 10 separate electric grids. In my opinion, such monopolies are acceptable (and even desirable), as long as they are collectively owned, either by the State or by local entities (municipalities, non-profits, etc.).

Before you go on: I've been warned off implementing this in practice on a few counts; namely, the space tradeoff isn't worth it, and it's unlikely to correct meaningful errors. I'm going to leave this post up, but please do take the content with a very large grain of salt!

My initial efforts to build a PHY and Data Link layer from scratch using my own code have been progressing nicely since the initial BPSK based protocol I ve documented under the PACKRAT series. As part of that, I ve been diving deep into FEC, and in particular, LDPC. I won t be able to do an overview of LDPC justice in this post with any luck that ll come in a later post to come as part of the RATPACK series, so some knowledge is assumed. As such this post is less useful for those looking to learn about LDPC, and a bit more targeted to those who enjoy talking and thinking about FEC.

Hey, heads up! - This post contains extremely unvalidated and back of the napkin quality work without any effort to prove this out generally. Hopefully this work can be of help to others, but please double check anything below if you need it for your own work!

While implementing LDPC, I ve gotten an encoder and checker working, enough to use LDPC like a checksum. The next big step is to write a Decoder, which can do error correction. The two popular approaches for the actual correction that I ve seen while reading about LDPC are Belief Propagation, and some class of linear programming that I haven t dug into yet. I m not thrilled at how expensive this all is in software, so while implementing the stack I ve been exploring every shady side ally to try and learn more about how encoders and decoders work, both in theory - and in practice.

Processing an LDPC Message Checking if a message is correct is fairly straightforward with LDPC (as with encoding, I ll note). As a quick refresher given the LDPC H (check) matrix of width N, you can check your message vector (msg) of length N by multipling H and msg, and checking if the output vector is all zero.

 // scheme contains our G (generator) and
 // H (check) matrices.
 scheme :=  G: Matrix ... , H: Matrix ... 
// msg contains our LDPC message (data and
 // check bits).
 msg := Vector ... 
// N is also the length of the encoded
 // msg vector after check bits have been
 // added.
 N := scheme.G.Width
// Now, let's generate our 'check' vector.
 ch := Multiply(scheme.H, msg)

We can now see if the message is correct or not:

 // if the ch vector is all zeros, we know
 // that the message is valid, and we don't
 // need to do anything.
 if ch.IsZero()  
// handle the case where the message
 // is fine as-is.
 return ...
 
// Expensive decode here

This is great for getting a thumbs up / thumbs down on the message being correct, but correcting errors still requires pulling the LDPC matrix values from the g (generator) matrix out, building a bipartite graph, and iteratively reprocessing the bit values, until constraints are satisfied and the message has been corrected. This got me thinking - what is the output vector when it s not all zeros? Since 1 values in the output vector indicates consistency problems in the message bits as they relate to the check bits, I wondered if this could be used to speed up my LDPC decoder. It appears to work, so this post is half an attempt to document this technique before I put it in my hot path, and half a plea for those who do like to talk about FEC to tell me what name this technique actually is.

k-Bit Brute Forcing Given that the output Vector s non-zero bit pattern is set due to the position of errors in the message vector, let s use that fact to build up a table of k-Bit errors that we can index into.

 // for clarity's sake, the Vector
 // type is being used as the lookup
 // key here, even though it may
 // need to be a hash or string in
 // some cases.
 idx := map[Vector]int 
for i := 0; i < N; i++  
// Create a vector of length N
 v := Vector 
v.FlipBit(i)
// Now, let's use the generator matrix to encode
 // the data with checksums, and then use the
 // check matrix on the message to figure out what
 // bit pattern results
 ev := Multiply(scheme.H, Multiply(v, scheme.G))
idx[ev] = i

This can be extended to multiple bits (hence: k-Bits), but I ve only done one here for illustration. Now that we have our idx mapping, we can now go back to the hot path on Checking the incoming message data:

 // if the ch vector is all zeros, we know
 // that the message is valid, and we don't
 // need to do anything.
 if ch.IsZero()  
// handle the case where the message
 // is fine as-is.
 return ...
 
errIdx, ok := idx[ch]
if ok  
msg.FlipBit(errIdx)
// Verify the LDPC message using
 // H again here.
 return ...
 
// Expensive decode here

Since map lookups wind up a heck of a lot faster than message-passing bit state, the hope here is this will short-circuit easy to solve errors for k-Bits, for some value of k that the system memory can tolerate.

Does this work? Frankly I have no idea. I ve written a small program and brute forced single-bit errors in all bit positions using random data to start with, and I ve not been able to find any collisions in the 1-bit error set, using the LDPC matrix from `802.3an-2006`. Even if I was to find a collision for a higher-order k-Bit value, I m tempted to continue with this approach, and treat each set of bits in the Vector s bin (like a hash-table), checking the LDPC validity after each bit set in the bin. As long as the collision rate is small enough, it should be possible to correct k-Bits of error faster than the more expensive Belief Propagation approach. That being said, I m not entirely convinced collisions will be very common, but it ll take a bit more time working through the math to say that with any confidence. Have you seen this approach called something official in publications? See an obvious flaw in the system? Send me a tip, please!

In my home lab(s), I have a handful of machines spread around a few points of presence, with mostly residential/commercial cable/DSL uplinks, which means, generally, NAT. This makes monitoring those devices kind of impossible. While I do punch holes for SSH, using jump hosts gets old quick, so I'm considering adding a virtual private network (a "VPN", not a VPN service) so that all machines can be reachable from everywhere. I see three ways this can work:

a home-made Wireguard VPN, deployed with Puppet
a Wireguard VPN overlay, with Tailscale or equivalent
IPv6, native or with tunnels

So which one will it be?

Wireguard Puppet modules As is (unfortunately) typical with Puppet, I found multiple different modules to talk with Wireguard.

module	score	downloads	release	stars	watch	forks	license	docs	contrib	issue	PR	notes
halyard	3.1	1,807	2022-10-14	0	0	0	MIT	no				requires `firewall` and `Configvault_Write` modules?
voxpupuli	5.0	4,201	2022-10-01	2	23	7	AGPLv3	good	1/9	1/4	1/61	optionnally configures `ferm`, uses systemd-networkd, recommends `systemd` module with `manage_systemd` to `true`, purges unknown keys
abaranov	4.7	17,017	2021-08-20	9	3	38	MIT	okay	1/17	4/7	4/28	requires pre-generated private keys
arrnorets	3.1	16,646	2020-12-28	1	2	1	Apache-2	okay	1	0	0	requires pre-generated private keys?

The voxpupuli module seems to be the most promising. The abaranov module is more popular and has more contributors, but it has more open issues and PRs. More critically, the voxpupuli module was written after the abaranov author didn't respond to a PR from the voxpupuli author trying to add more automation (namely private key management). It looks like setting up a wireguard network would be as simple as this on node A:

wireguard::interface   'wg0':
  source_addresses => ['2003:4f8:c17:4cf::1', '149.9.255.4'],
  public_key       => $facts['wireguard_pubkeys']['nodeB'],
  endpoint         => 'nodeB.example.com:53668',
  addresses        => [ 'Address' => '192.168.123.6/30', , 'Address' => 'fe80::beef:1/64' ,],

This configuration come from this pull request I sent to the module to document how to use that fact. Note that the addresses used here are examples that shouldn't be reused and do not confirm to RFC5737 ("IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation", 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3)) or RFC3849 ("IPv6 Address Prefix Reserved for Documentation", 2001:DB8::/32), but that's another story. (To avoid boostrapping problems, the resubmit-facts configuration could be used so that other nodes facts are more immediately available.) One problem with the above approach is that you explicitly need to take care of routing, network topology, and addressing. This can get complicated quickly, especially if you have lots of devices, behind NAT, in multiple locations (which is basically my life at home, unfortunately). Concretely, basic Wireguard only support one peer behind NAT. There are some workarounds for this, but they generally imply a relay server of some sort, or some custom registry, it's kind of a mess. And this is where overlay networks like Tailscale come in.

Tailscale Tailscale is basically designed to deal with this problem. It's not fully opensource, but pretty close, and they have an interesting philosophy behind that. The client is opensource, and there is an opensource version of the server side, called headscale. They have recently (late 2022) hired the main headscale developer while promising to keep supporting it, which is pretty amazing. Tailscale provides an overlay network based on Wireguard, where each peer basically has a peer-to-peer encrypted connexion, with automatic key rotation. They also ship a multitude of applications and features on top of that like file sharing, keyless SSH access, and so on. The authentication layer is based on an existing SSO provider, you don't just register with Tailscale with new account, you login with Google, Microsoft, or GitHub (which, really, is still Microsoft). The Headscale server ships with many features out of that:

Full "base" support of Tailscale's features

Configurable DNS

Split DNS

MagicDNS (each user gets a name)

Node registration

Single-Sign-On (via Open ID Connect)

Pre authenticated key

Taildrop (File Sharing)

Access control lists

Support for multiple IP ranges in the tailnet

Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6)

Routing advertising (including exit nodes)

Ephemeral nodes

Embedded DERP server (AKA NAT-to-NAT traversal)

Neither project (client or server) is in Debian (RFP 972439 for the client, none filed yet for the server), which makes deploying this for my use case rather problematic. Their install instructions are basically a `curl bash` but they also provide packages for various platforms. Their Debian install instructions are surprisingly good, and check most of the third party checklist we're trying to establish. (It's missing a pin.) There's also a Puppet module for tailscale, naturally. What I find a little disturbing with Tailscale is that you not only need to trust Tailscale with authorizing your devices, you also basically delegate that trust also to the SSO provider. So, in my case, GitHub (or anyone who compromises my account there) can penetrate the VPN. A little scary. Tailscale is also kind of an "all or nothing" thing. They have MagicDNS, file transfers, all sorts of things, but those things require you to hook up your resolver with Tailscale. In fact, Tailscale kind of assumes you will use their nameservers, and have suffered great lengths to figure out how to do that. And naturally, here, it doesn't seem to work reliably; my `resolv.conf` somehow gets replaced and the magic resolution of the `ts.net` domain fails. (I wonder why we can't opt in to just publicly resolve the `ts.net` domain. I don't care if someone can enumerate the private IP addreses or machines in use in my VPN, at least I don't care as much as fighting with `resolv.conf` everywhere.) Because I mostly have access to the routers on the networks I'm on, I don't think I'll be using tailscale in the long term. But it's pretty impressive stuff: in the time it took me to even review the Puppet modules to configure Wireguard (which is what I'll probably end up doing), I was up and running with Tailscale (but with a broken DNS, naturally). (And yes, basic Wireguard won't bring me DNS either, but at least I won't have to trust Tailscale's Debian packages, and Tailscale, and Microsoft, and GitHub with this thing.)

IPv6 IPv6 is actually what is supposed to solve this. Not NAT port forwarding crap, just real IPs everywhere. The problem is: even though IPv6 adoption is still growing, it's kind of reaching a plateau at around 40% world-wide, with Canada lagging behind at 34%. It doesn't help that major ISPs in Canada (e.g. Bell Canada, Videotron) don't care at all about IPv6 (e.g. Videotron in beta since 2011). So we can't rely on those companies to do the right thing here. The typical solution here is often to use a tunnel like HE's tunnelbroker.net. It's kind of tricky to configure, but once it's done, it works. You get end-to-end connectivity as long as everyone on the network is on IPv6. And that's really where the problem lies here; the second one of your nodes can't setup such a tunnel, you're kind of stuck and that tool completely breaks down. IPv6 tunnels also don't give you the kind of security a VPN provides as well, naturally. The other downside of a tunnel is you don't really get peer-to-peer connectivity: you go through the tunnel. So you can expect higher latencies and possibly lower bandwidth as well. Also, HE.net doesn't currently charge for this service (and they've been doing this for a long time), but this could change in the future (just like Tailscale, that said). Concretely, the latency difference is rather minimal, Google:

--- ipv6.l.google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,8ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 14, p(90) = 14, max = 15
--- google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,0ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14

In the case of GitHub, latency is actually lower, interestingly:

--- ipv6.github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 134,6ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14
--- github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 293,1ms
RTT[ms]: min = 29, median = 29, p(90) = 29, max = 30

That is because HE.net peers directly with my ISP and Fastly (which is behind GitHub.com's IPv6, apparently?), so it's only 6 hops away. While over IPv4, the ping goes over New York, before landing AWS's Ashburn, Virginia datacenters, for a whopping 13 hops... I managed setup a HE.net tunnel at home, because I also need IPv6 for other reasons (namely debugging at work). My first attempt at setting this up in the office failed, but now that I found the openwrt.org guide, it worked... for a while, and I was able to produce the above, encouraging, mini benchmarks. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, IPv6 just went down again. And the problem with that is that many programs (and especially OpenSSH) do not respect the Happy Eyeballs protocol (RFC 8305), which means various mysterious "hangs" at random times on random applications. It's kind of a terrible user experience, on top of breaking the one thing it's supposed to do, of course, which is to give me transparent access to all the nodes I maintain. Even worse, it would still be a problem for other remote nodes I might setup where I might not have acess to the router to setup the tunnel. It's also not absolutely clear what happens if you setup the same tunnel in two places... Presumably, something is smart enough to distribute only a part of the /48 block selectively, but I don't really feel like going that far, considering how flaky the setup is already.

Future work Those are options that came up after writing this post, and might warrant further examination in the future.

Meshbird, a "distributed private networking" with little information about how it actually works other than "encrypted with strong AES-256"

Nebula, "A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security", written by Slack people to replace IPsec, docs, runs as an overlay for Slack's 50k node network, only packaged in Debian experimental, lagging behind upstream (1.4.0, from May 2021 vs upstream's 1.6.1 from September 2022), requires a central CA, Golang, I'm in "wait and see" mode for now

n2n: "layer two VPN", seems packaged in Debian but inactive

ouroboros: "peer-to-peer packet network prototype", sounds and seems complicated

QuickTUN is interesting because it's just a small wrapper around NaCL, and it's in Debian... but maybe too obscure for my own good

unetd: Wireguard-based full mesh networking from OpenWRT, not in Debian

vpncloud: "high performance peer-to-peer mesh VPN over UDP supporting strong encryption, NAT traversal and a simple configuration", sounds interesting, not in Debian

Yggdrasil: actually a pretty good match for my use case, but I didn't think of it when starting the experiments here; packaged in Debian, with the Golang version planned, Puppet module; major caveat: nodes exposed publicly inside the global mesh unless configured otherwise (firewall suggested), requires port forwards, alpha status

Conclusion Right now, I'm going to deploy Wireguard tunnels with Puppet. It seems like kind of a pain in the back, but it's something I will be able to reuse for work, possibly completely replacing strongswan. I have another Puppet module for IPsec which I was planning to publish, but now I'm thinking I should just abort that and replace everything with Wireguard, assuming we still need VPNs at work in the future. (I have a number of reasons to believe we might not need any in the near future anyways...)

Pune Rains Lemme start with a slightly funny picture that tells as much about Pune, my city as anything else does.

Pune- Leave your attitude behind, we have our own
This and similar tags, puns and whatnot you will find if you are entering Pune from the road highway. You can also find similar similar symbols and Puns all over the city and they are partly sarcasm and ironic and partly the truth. Puneities work from the attitude that they know everything rather than nothing, including yours truly . What is the basis of that or why is there such kind of confidence I have no clue or idea, it is what it is. Approximately 24 hrs. ago, apparently we had a cloudburst. What I came to know later is that we got 100 mm of rain. Sharing from local news site. Much more interesting was a thread made on Reddit where many people half-seriously asked where they can buy a boat. One of the reasons being even if it s October, in fact, we passed middle of October and it s still raining. Even today in the evening, it rained for quite a while. As I had shared in a few blog posts before, June where rains should have started, it didn t, it actually started late July or even August, so something has shifted. The current leadership does not believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change or human activity induced climate change even though that is a reality. I could share many links and even using the term above should give links to various studies. Most of the people who are opposed to it are either misinformed or influenced from the fossil fuel industry. Again, could share many links, but will share just one atm. I have talked to quite a few people about it but nobody has ever been able to give a convincing answer as to why GM had to crush the cars. Let s even take the argument that it was the worst manufactured car in history and there have been quite a few, have the others been crushed? If not, then the reason shared or given by most people sounds hollow. And if you look into it, they had an opportunity that they let go, and now most of them are scrambling and yet most of the legacy auto manufacturers will be out of existence if they don t get back into the game in the next 2-3 years. There have been a bunch of announcements but we are yet to see. The Chinese though have moved far ahead, although one has to remark that they have been doing that for the last decade, so they have a 10-year head start, hardly surprising then. But I need to get back to the subject, another gentleman on Reddit remarked that if you start to use boat, and others start to use boat, then the Govt. will tax it. In fact, somebody had shared the below the other day
Different types of taxes collected by GOI
Many of the taxes that I have shared above are by the Modi Govt. who came on the platform, manifesto that once they come to power they will reduce taxes for the common man, they have reduced taxes but only for the Corporates. For the common man, the taxes have only gone up, both direct tax and indirect tax. Any reference to the Tory party who have also done similar things and have also shared that it is labor who had done large expenditures even though they have been 8 years in power, I am sure for most is purely coincidental. Incidentally, that is the same tack that was taken even by the Republican party. They all like to give tax benefits to the 1% while for the rest is austerity claiming some reason, even if it has been proven to be false.
Corporate Tax Rate, Revenue Loss to Govt.
The figures mentioned above are findings of parliamentary panel so nobody can accuse of anybody having a bias. Also, I probably had shared this but still feel the need to re-share it as people still believe that 2G scam happened even though there are plenty of arguments I can share to prove how it was all a fabricated lie.
Vinod Rai Mafinama in Uttarakhand High Court.

Part 2 of the same Mafinama.
How pathetic Mr. Rai s understanding of economics is can be gauged from the fact that he was made Chairman of IDFC and subsequently had to be thrown out. That whole lie was engineered to throw UPA out and it worked. There are and have been many such coincidences happening over the last 8 years, parallel stories happening in India and UK. This was just yesterday, about a year back Air India was given back to the Tatas, There was controversy about the supposed auctions as only Indigo was the only other party allowed to be at auction but not allowed to buy but more as a spectator as they already have 60% of the Indian civil aviation market. And there was lot of cheering from the Govt. side that finally Air India has been bought home to its true owners, the Tatas. The Tatas too started cheering and sharing how they will take down all the workers, worker unions and everything will be happy glory within a year. In fact, just couple of days back they shared new plans. Btw for the takeover of Air India, they had bought loans from the Banks and they are in the category of too big to fail. As I have shared couple of times before, RBI has not shared any inspection reports of nationalized or private banks after 2013/14. While by law, RBI is supposed to do inspection reports every 3 months and share them in the Public domain. And if you ask any of their supporter, for everything they will say UPA did x or y, which only goes to show morally bankrupt the present Govt. is. Coming back to the topic, before I forget, the idea of sharing their plans is so that they can again borrow money from the banks. But that is not the only story. Just one day back, Smita Prakash, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the present Govt. (she is the boss at Asia News International (ANI)) posted how Air India had treated her sister and other 21 passengers. Basically, they had bought business tickets but the whole cabin was dirty, they complained and they were forced to sit in economy class, not just her cousin sister but the other 21 odd passengers too. Of course Ms Smita became calm as her sister was given free air tickets on Vistara and other goodies. Of course, after that she didn t post anything about the other 21 odd passengers after that. And yes, I understand she is supposed to be a reporter but as can be seen from the twitter thread, there is or was no follow up. Incidentally, she is one of many who has calling others about Revdi culture (freebies to the masses.) but guess that only applies to other people not her or her sister. Again, if there are any coincidences of similar nature in the UK or when Trump was P.M. of the U.S. they are just coincidental .

The Uncosted budget India and the UK have many parallels, it s mind boggling. Before we get into the nitty-gritties, saw something that would be of some interest to the people here.
For those who might not be able to see above, apparently there is place in UK called Tufton Street where there are quite a few organizations that are shadowy and whose finances are not known as to how they are financed. Ms. Truss and quite a few of the people in the cabinet are from the same shadowy organizations. Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, the just-departed chancellor is and was part of the same group. Now even for me it was a new term to learn and understand what is an uncosted budget is. To make it much more easier I share the example using a common person who goes to the bank for a loan

Now M/S X wants a loan of say Rs. 1000/- for whatever reason. He/she/they go to the bank and asks give me a loan of say INR 1000/- The banks asks them to produce a statement of accounts to show what their financial position is. They produce a somewhat half-filled statement of accounts In which all liabilities are shown, but incomes are not. The bank says you already have so much liabilities, how are you gonna pay those, accounts have to be matched otherwise you are not solvent. M/s X adamantly refuses to do any changes citing that they don t need to. At this point, M/s X credit rating goes down and nobody in the market will give them a loan. At the same time, the assets they had held, their value also depreciates because it became known that they can t act responsibly. So whose to say whether or not M/s X has those number of assets and priced them accurately. But the drama doesn t end there, M/s X says this is the responsibility of actually Mr. Z ( cue The Bank of England) as they are my accountant/lawyer etc. M/s Z says as any lawyer/accountant should. This is not under my remit. If the clients either gives incomplete information or false information or whatever then it is their responsibility not mine. And in fact, the Chancellor is supposed to be the one who is given the responsibility of making the budget. The Chancellor is very similar to our Finance Minister. Because the UK has constitutional monarchy, I am guessing the terms are slightly different, otherwise the functionality seems to be the same. For two weeks, there was lot of chaos, lot of pension funds lost quite a bit in the market and in the end Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng was ousted out of the job. Incredibly, the same media and newspapers who had praised Mr. Kwarteng just few weeks back as the best Tory budget, they couldn t wait to bury him. And while I have attempted to simplify what happened, the best explanation of what has happened can be found in an article from the guardian. Speculation is rife in the UK as to who s ruling atm as the new Chancellor has reversed almost all the policies that Ms. Truss had bought and she is now more or less a figurehead. Mr. Hunt, the new chancellor doesn t have anybody behind him. Apparently, the gentleman wanted to throw his hat the ring in the Tory leadership contest that was held about a month back and he couldn t get 20 MP s to support him. Another thing that is different between UK and India is that in UK by law the PM has to answer questions put up to him or her by the opposition leaders. That is the way accountability is measured there. This is known as PMQ s or Prime Minister Questions and Answers. One can just go to YouTube or any streaming service and give Liz Truss and PMQ s and if they are interested of a certain date, give a date and they can see how she answered the questions thrown at her. Unfortunately, all she could do in both times were non-answers. In fact, the Tories seem to be using some of Labor s policies after they had bad-mouthed the same policies. Politics of right-wing both in the UK and the US seems so out of touch with the people whom they are supposed to protect and administer. An article about cyclists which is sort of half-truth, half irony shows how screwed up the policies are of the RW (right-wing). Now they are questions about the pensions triple-lock. Sadly, it is the working class who would suffer the most, most of the rich have already moved their money abroad several years ago. The Financial Times, did share a video about how things have been unfolding

Seems Ms. Truss forgot to add Financial Times in the list of anti-growth coalition she is so fond of. Also, the Tory party seems to want to create more tax havens in the UK and calling them investment zones. Of course, most of the top tax havens are situated around the UK itself. I wouldn t go more into as that would probably require its own article, although most of that information is all in public domain. Fracking I don t really want to take much time as the blog post has become long. There have been many articles written why Fracking is bad and that is why even the Tories had put in their Manifesto that they won t allow Fracking but apparently, today they are trying to reopen Fracking. And again how bad it is and can be found out by the article in Guardian.

Dowry Few days back, had posted about the movie Raksha Bandhan and whatever I felt about it. Sadly, just couple of days back, somebody shared this link. Part of me was shocked and part of me was not. Couple of acquaintances of mine in the past had said the same thing for their daughters. And in such situations you are generally left speechless because you don t know what the right thing to do is. If he has shared it with you being an outsider, how many times he must have told the same to their wife and daughters? And from what little I have gathered in life, many people have justified it on similar lines. And while the protests were there, sadly the book was not removed. Now if nurses are reading such literature, how their thought process might be forming, you can tell :(. And these are the ones whom we call for when we are sick and tired :(. And I have not taken into account how the girls/women themselves might be feeling. There are similar things in another country but probably not the same, nor the same motivations though although feeling helplessness in both would be a common thing. But such statements are not alone. Another gentleman in slightly different context shared this as well

The above is a statement shared in a book recommended for CTET (Central Teacher s Eligibility Test that became mandatory to be taken as the RTE (Right To Education) Act came in.). The statement says People from cold places are white, beautiful, well-built, healthy and wise. And people from hot places are black, irritable and of violent nature. Now while I can agree with one part of the statement that people residing in colder regions are more fair than others but there are loads of other factors that determine fairness or skin color/skin pigmentation. After a bit of search came to know that this and similar articulation have been made in an idea/work called Environmental Determinism . Now if you look at that page, you would realize this was what colonialism is and was all about. The idea that the white man had god-given right to rule over others. Similarly, if you are fair, you can lord over others. Seems simplistic, but yet it has a powerful hold on many people in India. Forget the common man, this thinking is and was applicable to some of our better-known Freedom fighters. Pune s own Bal Gangadhar Tilak The Artic Home to the Vedas. It sort of talks about Aryans and how they invaded India and became settled here. I haven t read or have access to the book so have to rely on third-party sources. The reason I m sharing all this is that the right-wing has been doing this myth-making for sometime now and unless and until you put a light on it, it will continue to perpetuate . For those who have read this blog, do know that India is and has been in casteism from ever. They even took the fair comment and applied it to all Brahmins. According to them, all Brahmins are fair and hence have god-given right to lord over others. What is called the Eton boy s network serves the same in this casteism. The only solution is those idea under limelight and investigate. To take the above, how does one prove that all fair people are wise and peaceful while all people black and brown are violent. If that is so, how does one count for Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson the list is probably endless. And not to forget that when Mahatma Gandhiji did his nonviolent movements either in India or in South Africa, both black and brown people in millions took part. Similar examples of Martin Luther King Jr. I know and read of so many non-violent civl movements that took place in the U.S. For e.g. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So just based on these examples, one can conclude that at least the part about the fair having exclusive rights to being fair and noble is not correct. Now as far as violence goes, while every race, every community has had done violence in the past or been a victim of the same. So no one is and can be blameless, although in light of the above statement, the question can argumentated as to who were the Vikings? Both popular imagination and serious history shares stories about Vikings. The Vikings were somewhat nomadic in nature even though they had permanent settlements but even then they went on raids, raped women, captured both men and women and sold them at slaves. So they are what pirates came to be, but not the kind Hollywood romanticizes about. Europe in itself has been a tale in conflict since time immemorial. It is only after the formation of EU that most of these countries stopped fighting each other From a historical point perspective, it is too new. So even the part of fair being non-violent dies in face of this evidence. I could go on but this is enough on that topic.

Railways and Industrial Action around the World. While I have shared about Railways so many times on this blog, it continues to fascinate me that how people don t understand the first things about Railways. For e.g. Railways is a natural monopoly. What that means is and you can look at all and any type of privatization around the world, you will see it is a monopoly. Unlike the road or Skies, Railways is and would always be limited by infrastructure and the ability to have new infrastructure. Unlike in road or Skies (even they have their limits) you cannot run train services on a whim. At any particular point in time, only a single train could and should occupy a stretch of Railway network. You could have more trains on one line, but then the likelihood of front or rear-end collisions becomes a real possibility. You also need all sorts of good and reliable communications, redundant infrastructure so if one thing fails then you have something in place. The reason being a single train can carry anywhere from 2000 to 5000 passengers or more. While this is true of Indian Railways, Railways around the world would probably have some sort of similar numbers.It is in this light that I share the below videos.
To be more precise, see the fuller video
Now to give context to the recording above, Mike Lynch is the general secretary at RMT. For those who came in late, both UK and the U.S. have been threatened by railway strikes. And the reason for the strikes or threat of strikes is similar. Now from the company perspective, all they care is to invest less and make the most profits that can be given to equity shareholders. At the same time, they have freezed the salaries of railway workers for the last 3 years. While the politicians who were asking the questions, apparently gave themselves raise twice this year. They are asking them to negotiate at 8% while inflation in the UK has been 12.3% and projected to go higher. And it is not only the money. Since the 1980s when UK privatized the Railways, they stopped investing in the infrastructure. And that meant that the UK Railway infrastructure over period of time started getting behind and is even behind say Indian Railways which used to provide most bang for the buck. And Indian Railways is far from ideal. Ironically, most of the operators on UK are nationalized Railways of France, Germany etc. but after the hard Brexit, they too are mulling to cut their operations short, they have too There is also the EU Entry/Exit system that would come next year. Why am I sharing about what is happening in UK Rail, because the Indian Government wants to follow the same thing, and fooling the public into saying we would do it better. What inevitably will happen is that ticket prices go up, people no longer use the service, the number of services go down and eventually they are cancelled. This has happened both in Indian Railways as well as Airlines. In fact, GOI just recently announced a credit scheme just a few days back to help Airlines stay afloat. I was chatting with a friend who had come down to Pune from Chennai and the round-trip cost him INR 15k/- on that single trip alone. We reminisced how a few years ago, 8 years to be precise, we could buy an Air ticket for 2.5k/- just a few days before the trip and did it. I remember doing/experiencing at least a dozen odd trips via air in the years before 2014. My friend used to come to Pune, almost every weekend because he could afford it, now he can t do that. And these are people who are in the above 5-10% of the population. And this is not just in UK, but also in the United States. There is one big difference though, the U.S. is mainly a freight carrier while the UK Railway Operations are mostly passenger based. What was and is interesting that Scotland had to nationalize their services as they realized the Operators cannot or will not function when they were most needed. Most of the public even in the UK seem to want a nationalized rail service, at least their polls say so. So, it would definitely be interesting to see what happens in the UK next year. In the end, I know I promised to share about books, but the above incidents have just been too fascinating to not just share the news but also share what I think about them. Free markets function good where there is competition, for example what is and has been happening in China for EV s but not where you have natural monopolies. In all Railway privatization, you have to handover the area to one person, then they have no motivation. If you have multiple operators, then there would always be haggling as to who will run the train and at what time. In either scenario, it doesn t work and raises prices while not delivering anything better I do take examples from UK because lot of things are India are still the legacy of the British. The whole civil department that was created in 1953 is/was a copy of the British civil department at that time and it is to this day. P.S. Just came to know that the UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng was just sacked as UK Chancellor. I do commend Truss for facing the press even though she might be dumped a week later unlike our PM who hasn t faced a single press conference in the last 8 odd years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTP6ogBqU7of The difference in Indian and UK politics seems to be that the English are now asking questions while here in India, most people are still sleeping without a care in the world. Another thing to note Minidebconf Palakkad is gonna happen 12-13th November 2022. I am probably not gonna go but would request everyone who wants to do something in free software to attend it. I am not sure whether I would be of any use like this and also when I get back, it would be an empty house. But for people young and old, who want to do anything with free/open source software it is a chance not to be missed. Registration of the same closes on 1st of November 2022. All the best, break a leg Just read this, beautifully done.

It's time for another update on Debian's firmware GR. I wrote about the problem back in April and about the vote itself a few days back. Voting closed last night and we have a result! This is unofficial so far - the official result will follow shortly when the Project Secretary sends a signed mail to confirm it. But that's normally just a formality at this point. A Result! The headline result is: Choice 5 / Proposal E won: Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer. I'm happy with this - it's the option that I voted highest, after all. More importantly, however, it's a clear choice of direction, as I was hoping for. Of the 366 Debian Developers who voted, 289 of them voted this option above NOTA and 63 below, so it also meets the 3:1 super-majority requirement for amending a Debian Foundation Document (Constitution section 4.1.3). So, what happens next? We have quite a few things to do now, ideally before the freeze for Debian 12 (bookworm), due January 2023. This list of work items is almost definitely not complete, and Cyril and I are aiming to get together this week and do more detailed planning for the d-i pieces. Off the top of my head I can think of the following:

Update the SC with the new text, update the website.
Check/add support for the non-free-firmware section in various places:

d-i build
debian-cd
debmirror (?)
ftpsync (?)
Any others?

Uploads of firmware packages targeting non-free-firmware.
Extra d-i code to inform users about what firmware blobs have been loaded and the matching non-free-firmware packages. Plus information about the hardware involved. Maybe a new d-i module / udeb for this? Exact details here still TBD. Probably the biggest individual piece of work here.
Tweaks to add the non-free-firmware section in the apt-setup module if desired/needed.
An extra boot option (a debconf variable) to disable loading extra firmware automatically, then exposed as an extra option through the isolinux and GRUB menus. d-i "expert mode" can also be used to tweak this behaviour later, except (obviously) for things like audio firmware that must be loaded early if they're going to be useful at all.
Update the image build scripts to include the n-f-f packages, only build one type of image. I'll do my best to keep config and support around too for images without n-f-f included, to make it easier to still build those for people who still want them.
Matching updates to docs, website, wiki etc.
...

If you think I've missed anything here, please let me and Cyril know - the best place would be the mailing list (debian-boot@lists.debian.org). If you'd like to help implement any of these changes, that would be lovely too!

Inspired by several others (such as Alex Schroeder s post and Szcze uja s prompt), as well as a desire to get this down for my kids, I figure it s time to write a bit about living through the PC and Internet revolution where I did: outside a tiny town in rural Kansas. And, as I ve been back in that same area for the past 15 years, I reflect some on the challenges that continue to play out. Although the stories from the others were primarily about getting online, I want to start by setting some background. Those of you that didn t grow up in the same era as I did probably never realized that a typical business PC setup might cost $10,000 in today s dollars, for instance. So let me start with the background.

Nothing was easy This story begins in the 1980s. Somewhere around my Kindergarten year of school, around 1985, my parents bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (aka CoCo II). It had 64K of RAM and used a TV for display and sound. This got you the computer. It didn t get you any disk drive or anything, no joysticks (required by a number of games). So whenever the system powered down, or it hung and you had to power cycle it a frequent event you d lose whatever you were doing and would have to re-enter the program, literally by typing it in. The floppy drive for the CoCo II cost more than the computer, and it was quite common for people to buy the computer first and then the floppy drive later when they d saved up the money for that. I particularly want to mention that computers then didn t come with a modem. What would be like buying a laptop or a tablet without wifi today. A modem, which I ll talk about in a bit, was another expensive accessory. To cobble together a system in the 80s that was capable of talking to others with persistent storage (floppy, or hard drive), screen, keyboard, and modem would be quite expensive. Adjusted for inflation, if you re talking a PC-style device (a clone of the IBM PC that ran DOS), this would easily be more expensive than the Macbook Pros of today. Few people back in the 80s had a computer at home. And the portion of those that had even the capability to get online in a meaningful way was even smaller. Eventually my parents bought a PC clone with 640K RAM and dual floppy drives. This was primarily used for my mom s work, but I did my best to take it over whenever possible. It ran DOS and, despite its monochrome screen, was generally a more capable machine than the CoCo II. For instance, it supported lowercase. (I m not even kidding; the CoCo II pretty much didn t.) A while later, they purchased a 32MB hard drive for it what luxury! Just getting a machine to work wasn t easy. Say you d bought a PC, and then bought a hard drive, and a modem. You didn t just plug in the hard drive and it would work. You would have to fight it every step of the way. The BIOS and DOS partition tables of the day used a cylinder/head/sector method of addressing the drive, and various parts of that those addresses had too few bits to work with the big drives of the day above 20MB. So you would have to lie to the BIOS and fdisk in various ways, and sort of work out how to do it for each drive. For each peripheral serial port, sound card (in later years), etc., you d have to set jumpers for DMA and IRQs, hoping not to conflict with anything already in the system. Perhaps you can now start to see why USB and PCI were so welcomed.

Three Different Worlds There were sort of three different worlds of computing experience in the 80s:

Home users. Initially using a wide variety of software from Apple, Commodore, Tandy/RadioShack, etc., but eventually coming to be mostly dominated by IBM PC clones

Small and mid-sized business users. Some of them had larger minicomputers or small mainframes, but most that I had contact with by the early 90s were standardized on DOS-based PCs. More advanced ones had a network running Netware, most commonly. Networking hardware and software was generally too expensive for home users to use in the early days.

Universities and large institutions. These are the places that had the mainframes, the earliest implementations of TCP/IP, the earliest users of UUCP, and so forth.

The difference between the home computing experience and the large institution experience were vast. Not only in terms of dollars the large institution hardware could easily cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars but also in terms of sheer resources required (large rooms, enormous power circuits, support staff, etc). Nothing was in common between them; not operating systems, not software, not experience. I was never much aware of the third category until the differences started to collapse in the mid-90s, and even then I only was exposed to it once the collapse was well underway. You might say to me, Well, Google certainly isn t running what I m running at home! And, yes of course, it s different. But fundamentally, most large datacenters are running on x86_64 hardware, with Linux as the operating system, and a TCP/IP network. It s a different scale, obviously, but at a fundamental level, the hardware and operating system stack are pretty similar to what you can readily run at home. Back in the 80s and 90s, this wasn t the case. TCP/IP wasn t even available for DOS or Windows until much later, and when it was, it was a clunky beast that was difficult. One of the things Kevin Driscoll highlights in his book called Modem World see my short post about it is that the history of the Internet we usually receive is focused on case 3: the large institutions. In reality, the Internet was and is literally a network of networks. Gateways to and from Internet existed from all three kinds of users for years, and while TCP/IP ultimately won the battle of the internetworking protocol, the other two streams of users also shaped the Internet as we now know it. Like many, I had no access to the large institution networks, but as I ve been reflecting on my experiences, I ve found a new appreciation for the way that those of us that grew up with primarily home PCs shaped the evolution of today s online world also.

An Era of Scarcity I should take a moment to comment about the cost of software back then. A newspaper article from 1985 comments that WordPerfect, then the most powerful word processing program, sold for $495 (or $219 if you could score a mail order discount). That s $1360/$600 in 2022 money. Other popular software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was up there as well. If you were to buy a new PC clone in the mid to late 80s, it would often cost $2000 in 1980s dollars. Now add a printer a low-end dot matrix for $300 or a laser for $1500 or even more. A modem: another $300. So the basic system would be $3600, or $9900 in 2022 dollars. If you wanted a nice printer, you re now pushing well over $10,000 in 2022 dollars. You start to see one barrier here, and also why things like shareware and piracy if it was indeed even recognized as such were common in those days. So you can see, from a home computer setup (TRS-80, Commodore C64, Apple ][, etc) to a business-class PC setup was an order of magnitude increase in cost. From there to the high-end minis/mainframes was another order of magnitude (at least!) increase. Eventually there was price pressure on the higher end and things all got better, which is probably why the non-DOS PCs lasted until the early 90s.

Increasing Capabilities My first exposure to computers in school was in the 4th grade, when I would have been about 9. There was a single Apple ][ machine in that room. I primarily remember playing Oregon Trail on it. The next year, the school added a computer lab. Remember, this is a small rural area, so each graduating class might have about 25 people in it; this lab was shared by everyone in the K-8 building. It was full of some flavor of IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and Netware. There was a dedicated computer teacher too, though I think she was a regular teacher that was given somewhat minimal training on computers. We were going to learn typing that year, but I did so well on the very first typing program that we soon worked out that I could do programming instead. I started going to school early these machines were far more powerful than the XT at home and worked on programming projects there. Eventually my parents bought me a Gateway 486SX/25 with a VGA monitor and hard drive. Wow! This was a whole different world. It may have come with Windows 3.0 or 3.1 on it, but I mainly remember running OS/2 on that machine. More on that below.

Programming That CoCo II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. It came with a large manual, which served as a BASIC tutorial as well. The BASIC interpreter was also the shell, so literally you could not use the computer without at least a bit of BASIC. Once I had access to a DOS machine, it also had a basic interpreter: GW-BASIC. There was a fair bit of software written in BASIC at the time, but most of the more advanced software wasn t. I wondered how these .EXE and .COM programs were written. I could find vague references to DEBUG.EXE, assemblers, and such. But it wasn t until I got a copy of Turbo Pascal that I was able to do that sort of thing myself. Eventually I got Borland C++ and taught myself C as well. A few years later, I wanted to try writing GUI programs for Windows, and bought Watcom C++ much cheaper than the competition, and it could target Windows, DOS (and I think even OS/2). Notice that, aside from BASIC, none of this was free, and none of it was bundled. You couldn t just download a C compiler, or Python interpreter, or whatnot back then. You had to pay for the ability to write any kind of serious code on the computer you already owned.

The Microsoft Domination Microsoft came to dominate the PC landscape, and then even the computing landscape as a whole. IBM very quickly lost control over the hardware side of PCs as Compaq and others made clones, but Microsoft has managed in varying degrees even to this day to keep a stranglehold on the software, and especially the operating system, side. Yes, there was occasional talk of things like DR-DOS, but by and large the dominant platform came to be the PC, and if you had a PC, you ran DOS (and later Windows) from Microsoft. For awhile, it looked like IBM was going to challenge Microsoft on the operating system front; they had OS/2, and when I switched to it sometime around the version 2.1 era in 1993, it was unquestionably more advanced technically than the consumer-grade Windows from Microsoft at the time. It had Internet support baked in, could run most DOS and Windows programs, and had introduced a replacement for the by-then terrible FAT filesystem: HPFS, in 1988. Microsoft wouldn t introduce a better filesystem for its consumer operating systems until Windows XP in 2001, 13 years later. But more on that story later.

Free Software, Shareware, and Commercial Software I ve covered the high cost of software already. Obviously $500 software wasn t going to sell in the home market. So what did we have? Mainly, these things:

Public domain software. It was free to use, and if implemented in BASIC, probably had source code with it too.

Shareware

Commercial software (some of it from small publishers was a lot cheaper than $500)

Let s talk about shareware. The idea with shareware was that a company would release a useful program, sometimes limited. You were encouraged to register , or pay for, it if you liked it and used it. And, regardless of whether you registered it or not, were told please copy! Sometimes shareware was fully functional, and registering it got you nothing more than printed manuals and an easy conscience (guilt trips for not registering weren t necessarily very subtle). Sometimes unregistered shareware would have a nag screen a delay of a few seconds while they told you to register. Sometimes they d be limited in some way; you d get more features if you registered. With games, it was popular to have a trilogy, and release the first episode inevitably ending with a cliffhanger as shareware, and the subsequent episodes would require registration. In any event, a lot of software people used in the 80s and 90s was shareware. Also pirated commercial software, though in the earlier days of computing, I think some people didn t even know the difference. Notice what s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world after all, he worked at MIT and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I m getting ahead of myself. I want to say again: FLOSS never really entered the DOS and Windows 3.x ecosystems. You d see it make a few inroads here and there in later versions of Windows, and moreso now that Microsoft has been sort of forced to accept it, but still, reflect on its legacy. What is the software market like in Windows compared to Linux, even today? Now it is, finally, time to talk about connectivity!

Getting On-Line What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.

The telephone system By the 80s, there was one communication network that already reached into nearly every home in America: the phone system. Virtually every household (note I don t say every person) was uniquely identified by a 10-digit phone number. You could, at least in theory, call up virtually any other phone in the country and be connected in less than a minute. But I ve got to talk about cost. The way things worked in the USA, you paid a monthly fee for a phone line. Included in that monthly fee was unlimited local calling. What is a local call? That was an extremely complex question. Generally it meant, roughly, calling within your city. But of course, as you deal with things like suburbs and cities growing into each other (eg, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex), things got complicated fast. But let s just say for simplicity you could call others in your city. What about calling people not in your city? That was long distance , and you paid often hugely by the minute for it. Long distance rates were difficult to figure out, but were generally most expensive during business hours and cheapest at night or on weekends. Prices eventually started to come down when competition was introduced for long distance carriers, but even then you often were stuck with a single carrier for long distance calls outside your city but within your state. Anyhow, let s just leave it at this: local calls were virtually free, and long distance calls were extremely expensive.

Getting a modem I remember getting a modem that ran at either 1200bps or 2400bps. Either way, quite slow; you could often read even plain text faster than the modem could display it. But what was a modem? A modem hooked up to a computer with a serial cable, and to the phone system. By the time I got one, modems could automatically dial and answer. You would send a command like ATDT5551212 and it would dial 555-1212. Modems had speakers, because often things wouldn t work right, and the telephone system was oriented around speech, so you could hear what was happening. You d hear it wait for dial tone, then dial, then hopefully the remote end would ring, a modem there would answer, you d hear the screeching of a handshake, and eventually your terminal would say `CONNECT 2400`. Now your computer was bridged to the other; anything going out your serial port was encoded as sound by your modem and decoded at the other end, and vice-versa. But what, exactly, was the other end? It might have been another person at their computer. Turn on local echo, and you can see what they did. Maybe you d send files to each other. But in my case, the answer was different: PC Magazine.

PC Magazine and CompuServe Starting around 1986 (so I would have been about 6 years old), I got to read PC Magazine. My dad would bring copies that were being discarded at his office home for me to read, and I think eventually bought me a subscription directly. This was not just a standard magazine; it ran something like 350-400 pages an issue, and came out every other week. This thing was a monster. It had reviews of hardware and software, descriptions of upcoming technologies, pages and pages of ads (that often had some degree of being informative to them). And they had sections on programming. Many issues would talk about BASIC or Pascal programming, and there d be a utility in most issues. What do I mean by a utility in most issues ? Did they include a floppy disk with software? No, of course not. There was a literal program listing printed in the magazine. If you wanted the utility, you had to type it in. And a lot of them were written in assembler, so you had to have an assembler. An assembler, of course, was not free and I didn t have one. Or maybe they wrote it in Microsoft C, and I had Borland C, and (of course) they weren t compatible. Sometimes they would list the program sort of in binary: line after line of a BASIC program, with lines like 64, 193, 253, 0, 53, 0, 87 that you would type in for hours, hopefully correctly. Running the BASIC program would, if you got it correct, emit a .COM file that you could then run. They did have a rudimentary checksum system built in, but it wasn t even a CRC, so something like swapping two numbers you d never notice except when the program would mysteriously hang. Eventually they teamed up with CompuServe to offer a limited slice of CompuServe for the purpose of downloading PC Magazine utilities. This was called PC MagNet. I am foggy on the details, but I believe that for a time you could connect to the limited PC MagNet part of CompuServe for free (after the cost of the long-distance call, that is) rather than paying for CompuServe itself (because, OF COURSE, that also charged you per the minute.) So in the early days, I would get special permission from my parents to place a long distance call, and after some nerve-wracking minutes in which we were aware every minute was racking up charges, I could navigate the menus, download what I wanted, and log off immediately. I still, incidentally, mourn what PC Magazine became. As with computing generally, it followed the mass market. It lost its deep technical chops, cut its programming columns, stopped talking about things like how SCSI worked, and so forth. By the time it stopped printing in 2009, it was no longer a square-bound 400-page beheamoth, but rather looked more like a copy of Newsweek, but with less depth.

Continuing with CompuServe CompuServe was a much larger service than just PC MagNet. Eventually, our family got a subscription. It was still an expensive and scarce resource; I d call it only after hours when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Everyone had a numerical username separated by commas; mine was `71510,1421`. CompuServe had forums, and files. Eventually I would use TapCIS to queue up things I wanted to do offline, to minimize phone usage online. CompuServe eventually added a gateway to the Internet. For the sum of somewhere around $1 a message, you could send or receive an email from someone with an Internet email address! I remember the thrill of one time, as a kid of probably 11 years, sending a message to one of the editors of PC Magazine and getting a kind, if brief, reply back! But inevitably I had

The Godzilla Phone Bill Yes, one month I became lax in tracking my time online. I ran up my parents phone bill. I don t remember how high, but I remember it was hundreds of dollars, a hefty sum at the time. As I watched Jason Scott s BBS Documentary, I realized how common an experience this was. I think this was the end of CompuServe for me for awhile.

Toll-Free Numbers I lived near a town with a population of 500. Not even IN town, but near town. The calling area included another town with a population of maybe 1500, so all told, there were maybe 2000 people total I could talk to with a local call though far fewer numbers, because remember, telephones were allocated by the household. There was, as far as I know, zero modems that were a local call (aside from one that belonged to a friend I met in around 1992). So basically everything was long-distance. But there was a special feature of the telephone network: toll-free numbers. Normally when calling long-distance, you, the caller, paid the bill. But with a toll-free number, beginning with 1-800, the recipient paid the bill. These numbers almost inevitably belonged to corporations that wanted to make it easy for people to call. Sales and ordering lines, for instance. Some of these companies started to set up modems on toll-free numbers. There were few of these, but they existed, so of course I had to try them! One of them was a company called PennyWise that sold office supplies. They had a toll-free line you could call with a modem to order stuff. Yes, online ordering before the web! I loved office supplies. And, because I lived far from a big city, if the local K-Mart didn t have it, I probably couldn t get it. Of course, the interface was entirely text, but you could search for products and place orders with the modem. I had loads of fun exploring the system, and actually ordered things from them and probably actually saved money doing so. With the first order they shipped a monster full-color catalog. That thing must have been 500 pages, like the Sears catalogs of the day. Every item had a part number, which streamlined ordering through the modem.

Inbound FAXes By the 90s, a number of modems became able to send and receive FAXes as well. For those that don t know, a FAX machine was essentially a special modem. It would scan a page and digitally transmit it over the phone system, where it would at least in the early days be printed out in real time (because the machines didn t have the memory to store an entire page as an image). Eventually, PC modems integrated FAX capabilities. There still wasn t anything useful I could do locally, but there were ways I could get other companies to FAX something to me. I remember two of them. One was for US Robotics. They had an on demand FAX system. You d call up a toll-free number, which was an automated IVR system. You could navigate through it and select various documents of interest to you: spec sheets and the like. You d key in your FAX number, hang up, and US Robotics would call YOU and FAX you the documents you wanted. Yes! I was talking to a computer (of a sorts) at no cost to me! The New York Times also ran a service for awhile called TimesFax. Every day, they would FAX out a page or two of summaries of the day s top stories. This was pretty cool in an era in which I had no other way to access anything from the New York Times. I managed to sign up for TimesFax I have no idea how, anymore and for awhile I would get a daily FAX of their top stories. When my family got its first laser printer, I could them even print these FAXes complete with the gothic New York Times masthead. Wow! (OK, so technically I could print it on a dot-matrix printer also, but graphics on a 9-pin dot matrix is a kind of pain that is a whole other article.)

My own phone line Remember how I discussed that phone lines were allocated per household? This was a problem for a lot of reasons:

Anybody that tried to call my family while I was using my modem would get a busy signal (unable to complete the call)

If anybody in the house picked up the phone while I was using it, that would degrade the quality of the ongoing call and either mess up or disconnect the call in progress. In many cases, that could cancel a file transfer (which wasn t necessarily easy or possible to resume), prompting howls of annoyance from me.

Generally we all had to work around each other

So eventually I found various small jobs and used the money I made to pay for my own phone line and my own long distance costs. Eventually I upgraded to a 28.8Kbps US Robotics Courier modem even! Yes, you heard it right: I got a job and a bank account so I could have a phone line and a faster modem. Uh, isn t that why every teenager gets a job? Now my local friend and I could call each other freely at least on my end (I can t remember if he had his own phone line too). We could exchange files using HS/Link, which had the added benefit of allowing split-screen chat even while a file transfer is in progress. I m sure we spent hours chatting to each other keyboard-to-keyboard while sharing files with each other.

Technology in Schools By this point in the story, we re in the late 80s and early 90s. I m still using PC-style OSs at home; OS/2 in the later years of this period, DOS or maybe a bit of Windows in the earlier years. I mentioned that they let me work on programming at school starting in 5th grade. It was soon apparent that I knew more about computers than anybody on staff, and I started getting pulled out of class to help teachers or administrators with vexing school problems. This continued until I graduated from high school, incidentally often to my enjoyment, and the annoyance of one particular teacher who, I must say, I was fine with annoying in this way. That s not to say that there was institutional support for what I was doing. It was, after all, a small school. Larger schools might have introduced BASIC or maybe Logo in high school. But I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C by the time I was somewhere around 12 years old. So I wouldn t have had any use for that anyhow. There were programming contests occasionally held in the area. Schools would send teams. My school didn t really send anybody, but I went as an individual. One of them was run by a local college (but for jr. high or high school students. Years later, I met one of the professors that ran it. He remembered me, and that day, better than I did. The programming contest had problems one could solve in BASIC or Logo. I knew nothing about what to expect going into it, but I had lugged my computer and screen along, and asked him, Can I write my solutions in C? He was, apparently, stunned, but said sure, go for it. I took first place that day, leading to some rather confused teams from much larger schools. The Netware network that the school had was, as these generally were, itself isolated. There was no link to the Internet or anything like it. Several schools across three local counties eventually invested in a fiber-optic network linking them together. This built a larger, but still closed, network. Its primary purpose was to allow students to be exposed to a wider variety of classes at high schools. Participating schools had an ITV room , outfitted with cameras and mics. So students at any school could take classes offered over ITV at other schools. For instance, only my school taught German classes, so people at any of those participating schools could take German. It was an early Zoom room. But alongside the TV signal, there was enough bandwidth to run some Netware frames. By about 1995 or so, this let one of the schools purchase some CD-ROM software that was made available on a file server and could be accessed by any participating school. Nice! But Netware was mainly about file and printer sharing; there wasn t even a facility like email, at least not on our deployment.

BBSs My last hop before the Internet was the BBS. A BBS was a computer program, usually ran by a hobbyist like me, on a computer with a modem connected. Callers would call it up, and they d interact with the BBS. Most BBSs had discussion groups like forums and file areas. Some also had games. I, of course, continued to have that most vexing of problems: they were all long-distance. There were some ways to help with that, chiefly QWK and BlueWave. These, somewhat like TapCIS in the CompuServe days, let me download new message posts for reading offline, and queue up my own messages to send later. QWK and BlueWave didn t help with file downloading, though.

BBSs get networked BBSs were an interesting thing. You d call up one, and inevitably somewhere in the file area would be a BBS list. Download the BBS list and you ve suddenly got a list of phone numbers to try calling. All of them were long distance, of course. You d try calling them at random and have a success rate of maybe 20%. The other 80% would be defunct; you might get the dreaded this number is no longer in service or the even more dreaded angry human answering the phone (and of course a modem can t talk to a human, so they d just get silence for probably the nth time that week). The phone company cared nothing about BBSs and recycled their numbers just as fast as any others. To talk to various people, or participate in certain discussion groups, you d have to call specific BBSs. That s annoying enough in the general case, but even more so for someone paying long distance for it all, because it takes a few minutes to establish a connection to a BBS: handshaking, logging in, menu navigation, etc. But BBSs started talking to each other. The earliest successful such effort was FidoNet, and for the duration of the BBS era, it remained by far the largest. FidoNet was analogous to the UUCP that the institutional users had, but ran on the much cheaper PC hardware. Basically, BBSs that participated in FidoNet would relay email, forum posts, and files between themselves overnight. Eventually, as with UUCP, by hopping through this network, messages could reach around the globe, and forums could have worldwide participation asynchronously, long before they could link to each other directly via the Internet. It was almost entirely volunteer-run.

Running my own BBS At age 13, I eventually chose to set up my own BBS. It ran on my single phone line, so of course when I was dialing up something else, nobody could dial up me. Not that this was a huge problem; in my town of 500, I probably had a good 1 or 2 regular callers in the beginning. In the PC era, there was a big difference between a server and a client. Server-class software was expensive and rare. Maybe in later years you had an email client, but an email server would be completely unavailable to you as a home user. But with a BBS, I could effectively run a server. I even ran serial lines in our house so that the BBS could be connected from other rooms! Since I was running OS/2, the BBS didn t tie up the computer; I could continue using it for other things. FidoNet had an Internet email gateway. This one, unlike CompuServe s, was free. Once I had a BBS on FidoNet, you could reach me from the Internet using the FidoNet address. This didn t support attachments, but then email of the day didn t really, either. Various others outside Kansas ran FidoNet distribution points. I believe one of them was mgmtsys; my memory is quite vague, but I think they offered a direct gateway and I would call them to pick up Internet mail via FidoNet protocols, but I m not at all certain of this.

Pros and Cons of the Non-Microsoft World As mentioned, Microsoft was and is the dominant operating system vendor for PCs. But I left that world in 1993, and here, nearly 30 years later, have never really returned. I got an operating system with more technical capabilities than the DOS and Windows of the day, but the tradeoff was a much smaller software ecosystem. OS/2 could run DOS programs, but it ran OS/2 programs a lot better. So if I were to run a BBS, I wanted one that had a native OS/2 version limiting me to a small fraction of available BBS server software. On the other hand, as a fully 32-bit operating system, there started to be OS/2 ports of certain software with a Unix heritage; most notably for me at the time, gcc. At some point, I eventually came across the RMS essays and started to be hooked.

Internet: The Hunt Begins I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?

Learning Link and Gopher ISPs weren t really a thing; the first one in my area (though still a long-distance call) started in, I think, 1994. One service that one of my teachers got me hooked up with was Learning Link. Learning Link was a nationwide collaboration of PBS stations and schools, designed to build on the educational mission of PBS. The nearest Learning Link station was more than a 3-hour drive away but critically, they had a toll-free access number, and my teacher convinced them to let me use it. I connected via a terminal program and a modem, like with most other things. I don t remember much about it, but I do remember a very important thing it had: Gopher. That was my first experience with Gopher. Learning Link was hosted by a Unix derivative (Xenix), but it didn t exactly give everyone a shell. I seem to recall it didn t have open FTP access either. The Gopher client had FTP access at some point; I don t recall for sure if it did then. If it did, then when a Gopher server referred to an FTP server, I could get to it. (I am unclear at this point if I could key in an arbitrary FTP location, or knew how, at that time.) I also had email access there, but I don t recall exactly how; probably Pine. If that s correct, that would have dated my Learning Link access as no earlier than 1992. I think my access time to Learning Link was limited. And, since the only way to get out on the Internet from there was Gopher and Pine, I was somewhat limited in terms of technology as well. I believe that telnet services, for instance, weren t available to me.

Computer labs There was one place that tended to have Internet access: colleges and universities. In 7th grade, I participated in a program that resulted in me being invited to visit Duke University, and in 8th grade, I participated in National History Day, resulting in a trip to visit the University of Maryland. I probably sought out computer labs at both of those. My most distinct memory was finding my way into a computer lab at one of those universities, and it was full of NeXT workstations. I had never seen or used NeXT before, and had no idea how to operate it. I had brought a box of floppy disks, unaware that the DOS disks probably weren t compatible with NeXT. Closer to home, a small college had a computer lab that I could also visit. I would go there in summer or when it wasn t used with my stack of floppies. I remember downloading disk images of FLOSS operating systems: FreeBSD, Slackware, or Debian, at the time. The hash marks from the DOS-based FTP client would creep across the screen as the 1.44MB disk images would slowly download. telnet was also available on those machines, so I could telnet to things like public-access Archie servers and libraries though not Gopher. Still, FTP and telnet access opened up a lot, and I learned quite a bit in those years.

Continuing the Journey At some point, I got a copy of the Whole Internet User s Guide and Catalog, published in 1994. I still have it. If it hadn t already figured it out by then, I certainly became aware from it that Unix was the dominant operating system on the Internet. The examples in Whole Internet covered FTP, telnet, gopher all assuming the user somehow got to a Unix prompt. The web was introduced about 300 pages in; clearly viewed as something that wasn t page 1 material. And it covered the command-line www client before introducing the graphical Mosaic. Even then, though, the book highlighted Mosaic s utility as a front-end for Gopher and FTP, and even the ability to launch telnet sessions by clicking on links. But having a copy of the book didn t equate to having any way to run Mosaic. The machines in the computer lab I mentioned above all ran DOS and were incapable of running a graphical browser. I had no SLIP or PPP (both ways to run Internet traffic over a modem) connectivity at home. In short, the Web was something for the large institutional users at the time.

CD-ROMs As CD-ROMs came out, with their huge (for the day) 650MB capacity, various companies started collecting software that could be downloaded on the Internet and selling it on CD-ROM. The two most popular ones were Walnut Creek CD-ROM and Infomagic. One could buy extensive Shareware and gaming collections, and then even entire Linux and BSD distributions. Although not exactly an Internet service per se, it was a way of bringing what may ordinarily only be accessible to institutional users into the home computer realm.

Free Software Jumps In As I mentioned, by the mid 90s, I had come across RMS s writings about free software most probably his 1992 essay Why Software Should Be Free. (Please note, this is not a commentary on the more recently-revealed issues surrounding RMS, but rather his writings and work as I encountered them in the 90s.) The notion of a Free operating system not just in cost but in openness was incredibly appealing. Not only could I tinker with it to a much greater extent due to having source for everything, but it included so much software that I d otherwise have to pay for. Compilers! Interpreters! Editors! Terminal emulators! And, especially, server software of all sorts. There d be no way I could afford or run Netware, but with a Free Unixy operating system, I could do all that. My interest was obviously piqued. Add to that the fact that I could actually participate and contribute I was about to become hooked on something that I ve stayed hooked on for decades. But then the question was: which Free operating system? Eventually I chose FreeBSD to begin with; that would have been sometime in 1995. I don t recall the exact reasons for that. I remember downloading Slackware install floppies, and probably the fact that Debian wasn t yet at 1.0 scared me off for a time. FreeBSD s fantastic Handbook far better than anything I could find for Linux at the time was no doubt also a factor.

The de Raadt Factor Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? The short answer is Theo de Raadt. Somewhere in this time, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, I asked some questions comparing NetBSD to the other two free BSDs. This was on a NetBSD mailing list, but for some reason Theo saw it and got a flame war going, which CC d me. Now keep in mind that even if NetBSD had a web presence at the time, it would have been minimal, and I would have not all that unusually for the time had no way to access it. I was certainly not aware of the, shall we say, acrimony between Theo and NetBSD. While I had certainly seen an online flamewar before, this took on a different and more disturbing tone; months later, Theo randomly emailed me under the subject SLIME saying that I was, well, SLIME . I seem to recall periodic emails from him thereafter reminding me that he hates me and that he had blocked me. (Disclaimer: I have poor email archives from this period, so the full details are lost to me, but I believe I am accurately conveying these events from over 25 years ago) This was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. I was trying to learn, and while it is possible I didn t understand some aspect or other of netiquette (or Theo s personal hatred of NetBSD) at the time, still that is not a reason to flame a 16-year-old (though he would have had no way to know my age). This didn t leave any kind of scar, but did leave a lasting impression; to this day, I am particularly concerned with how FLOSS projects handle poisonous people. Debian, for instance, has come a long way in this over the years, and even Linus Torvalds has turned over a new leaf. I don t know if Theo has. In any case, I didn t use NetBSD then. I did try it periodically in the years since, but never found it compelling enough to justify a large switch from Debian. I never tried OpenBSD for various reasons, but one of them was that I didn t want to join a community that tolerates behavior such as Theo s from its leader.

Moving to FreeBSD Moving from OS/2 to FreeBSD was final. That is, I didn t have enough hard drive space to keep both. I also didn t have the backup capacity to back up OS/2 completely. My BBS, which ran Virtual BBS (and at some point also AdeptXBBS) was deleted and reincarnated in a different form. My BBS was a member of both FidoNet and VirtualNet; the latter was specific to VBBS, and had to be dropped. I believe I may have also had to drop the FidoNet link for a time. This was the biggest change of computing in my life to that point. The earlier experiences hadn t literally destroyed what came before. OS/2 could still run my DOS programs. Its command shell was quite DOS-like. It ran Windows programs. I was going to throw all that away and leap into the unknown. I wish I had saved a copy of my BBS; I would love to see the messages I exchanged back then, or see its menu screens again. I have little memory of what it looked like. But other than that, I have no regrets. Pursuing Free, Unixy operating systems brought me a lot of enjoyment and a good career. That s not to say it was easy. All the problems of not being in the Microsoft ecosystem were magnified under FreeBSD and Linux. In a day before EDID, monitor timings had to be calculated manually and you risked destroying your monitor if you got them wrong. Word processing and spreadsheet software was pretty much not there for FreeBSD or Linux at the time; I was therefore forced to learn LaTeX and actually appreciated that. Software like PageMaker or CorelDraw was certainly nowhere to be found for those free operating systems either. But I got a ton of new capabilities. I mentioned the BBS didn t shut down, and indeed it didn t. I ran what was surely a supremely unique oddity: a free, dialin Unix shell server in the middle of a small town in Kansas. I m sure I provided things such as pine for email and some help text and maybe even printouts for how to use it. The set of callers slowly grew over the time period, in fact. And then I got UUCP.

Enter UUCP Even throughout all this, there was no local Internet provider and things were still long distance. I had Internet Email access via assorted strange routes, but they were all strange. And, I wanted access to Usenet. In 1995, it happened. The local ISP I mentioned offered UUCP access. Though I couldn t afford the dialup shell (or later, SLIP/PPP) that they offered due to long-distance costs, UUCP s very efficient batched processes looked doable. I believe I established that link when I was 15, so in 1995. I worked to register my domain, `complete.org`, as well. At the time, the process was a bit lengthy and involved downloading a text file form, filling it out in a precise way, sending it to InterNIC, and probably mailing them a check. Well I did that, and in September of 1995, `complete.org` became mine. I set up `sendmail` on my local system, as well as `INN` to handle the limited Usenet newsfeed I requested from the ISP. I even ran Majordomo to host some mailing lists, including some that were surprisingly high-traffic for a few-times-a-day long-distance modem UUCP link! The modem client programs for FreeBSD were somewhat less advanced than for OS/2, but I believe I wound up using Minicom or Seyon to continue to dial out to BBSs and, I believe, continue to use Learning Link. So all the while I was setting up my local BBS, I continued to have access to the text Internet, consisting of chiefly Gopher for me.

Switching to Debian I switched to Debian sometime in 1995 or 1996, and have been using Debian as my primary OS ever since. I continued to offer shell access, but added the WorldVU Atlantis menuing BBS system. This provided a return of a more BBS-like interface (by default; shell was still an uption) as well as some BBS door games such as LoRD and TradeWars 2002, running under DOS emulation. I also continued to run INN, and ran ifgate to allow FidoNet echomail to be presented into INN Usenet-like newsgroups, and netmail to be gated to Unix email. This worked pretty well. The BBS continued to grow in these days, peaking at about two dozen total user accounts, and maybe a dozen regular users.

Dial-up access availability I believe it was in 1996 that dial up PPP access finally became available in my small town. What a thrill! FINALLY! I could now FTP, use Gopher, telnet, and the web all from home. Of course, it was at modem speeds, but still. (Strangely, I have a memory of accessing the Web using WebExplorer from OS/2. I don t know exactly why; it s possible that by this time, I had upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 and was able to reinstall OS/2 on the old 25MHz 486, or maybe something was wrong with the timeline from my memories from 25 years ago above. Or perhaps I made the occasional long-distance call somewhere before I ditched OS/2.) Gopher sites still existed at this point, and I could access them using Netscape Navigator which likely became my standard Gopher client at that point. I don t recall using UMN text-mode gopher client locally at that time, though it s certainly possible I did.

The city Starting when I was 15, I took computer science classes at Wichita State University. The first one was a class in the summer of 1995 on C++. I remember being worried about being good enough for it I was, after all, just after my HS freshman year and had never taken the prerequisite C class. I loved it and got an A! By 1996, I was taking more classes. In 1996 or 1997 I stayed in Wichita during the day due to having more than one class. So, what would I do then but enjoy the computer lab? The CS dept. had two of them: one that had NCD X terminals connected to a pair of SunOS servers, and another one running Windows. I spent most of the time in the Unix lab with the NCDs; I d use Netscape or pine, write code, enjoy the University s fast Internet connection, and so forth. In 1997 I had graduated high school and that summer I moved to Wichita to attend college. As was so often the case, I shut down the BBS at that time. It would be 5 years until I again dealt with Internet at home in a rural community. By the time I moved to my apartment in Wichita, I had stopped using OS/2 entirely. I have no memory of ever having OS/2 there. Along the way, I had bought a Pentium 166, and then the most expensive piece of computing equipment I have ever owned: a DEC Alpha, which, of course, ran Linux.

ISDN I must have used dialup PPP for a time, but I eventually got a job working for the ISP I had used for UUCP, and then PPP. While there, I got a 128Kbps ISDN line installed in my apartment, and they gave me a discount on the service for it. That was around 3x the speed of a modem, and crucially was always on and gave me a public IP. No longer did I have to use UUCP; now I got to host my own things! By at least 1998, I was running a web server on www.complete.org, and I had an FTP server going as well.

Even Bigger Cities In 1999 I moved to Dallas, and there got my first broadband connection: an ADSL link at, I think, 1.5Mbps! Now that was something! But it had some reliability problems. I eventually put together a server and had it hosted at an acquantaince s place who had SDSL in his apartment. Within a couple of years, I had switched to various kinds of proper hosting for it, but that is a whole other article. In Indianapolis, I got a cable modem for the first time, with even tighter speeds but prohibitions on running servers on it. Yuck.

Challenges Being non-Microsoft continued to have challenges. Until the advent of Firefox, a web browser was one of the biggest. While Netscape supported Linux on i386, it didn t support Linux on Alpha. I hobbled along with various attempts at emulators, old versions of Mosaic, and so forth. And, until StarOffice was open-sourced as Open Office, reading Microsoft file formats was also a challenge, though WordPerfect was briefly available for Linux. Over the years, I have become used to the Linux ecosystem. Perhaps I use Gimp instead of Photoshop and digikam instead of well, whatever somebody would use on Windows. But I get ZFS, and containers, and so much that isn t available there. Yes, I know Apple never went away and is a thing, but for most of the time period I discuss in this article, at least after the rise of DOS, it was niche compared to the PC market.

Back to Kansas In 2002, I moved back to Kansas, to a rural home near a different small town in the county next to where I grew up. Over there, it was back to dialup at home, but I had faster access at work. I didn t much care for this, and thus began a 20+-year effort to get broadband in the country. At first, I got a wireless link, which worked well enough in the winter, but had serious problems in the summer when the trees leafed out. Eventually DSL became available locally highly unreliable, but still, it was something. Then I moved back to the community I grew up in, a few miles from where I grew up. Again I got DSL a bit better. But after some years, being at the end of the run of DSL meant I had poor speeds and reliability problems. I eventually switched to various wireless ISPs, which continues to the present day; while people in cities can get Gbps service, I can get, at best, about 50Mbps. Long-distance fees are gone, but the speed disparity remains.

Concluding Reflections I am glad I grew up where I did; the strong community has a lot of advantages I don t have room to discuss here. In a number of very real senses, having no local services made things a lot more difficult than they otherwise would have been. However, perhaps I could say that I also learned a lot through the need to come up with inventive solutions to those challenges. To this day, I think a lot about computing in remote environments: partially because I live in one, and partially because I enjoy visiting places that are remote enough that they have no Internet, phone, or cell service whatsoever. I have written articles like Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances based on my own personal experience. I instinctively think about making protocols robust in the face of various kinds of connectivity failures because I experience various kinds of connectivity failures myself.

(Almost) Everything Lives On In 2002, Gopher turned 10 years old. It had probably been about 9 or 10 years since I had first used Gopher, which was the first way I got on live Internet from my house. It was hard to believe. By that point, I had an always-on Internet link at home and at work. I had my Alpha, and probably also at least PCMCIA Ethernet for a laptop (many laptops had modems by the 90s also). Despite its popularity in the early 90s, less than 10 years after it came on the scene and started to unify the Internet, it was mostly forgotten. And it was at that moment that I decided to try to resurrect it. The University of Minnesota finally released it under an Open Source license. I wrote the first new gopher server in years, pygopherd, and introduced gopher to Debian. Gopher lives on; there are now quite a few Gopher clients and servers out there, newly started post-2002. The Gemini protocol can be thought of as something akin to Gopher 2.0, and it too has a small but blossoming ecosystem. Archie, the old FTP search tool, is dead though. Same for WAIS and a number of the other pre-web search tools. But still, even FTP lives on today. And BBSs? Well, they didn t go away either. Jason Scott s fabulous BBS documentary looks back at the history of the BBS, while Back to the BBS from last year talks about the modern BBS scene. FidoNet somehow is still alive and kicking. UUCP still has its place and has inspired a whole string of successors. Some, like NNCP, are clearly direct descendents of UUCP. Filespooler lives in that ecosystem, and you can even see UUCP concepts in projects as far afield as Syncthing and Meshtastic. Usenet still exists, and you can now run Usenet over NNCP just as I ran Usenet over UUCP back in the day (which you can still do as well). Telnet, of course, has been largely supplanted by ssh, but the concept is more popular now than ever, as Linux has made ssh be available on everything from Raspberry Pi to Android. And I still run a Gopher server, looking pretty much like it did in 2002. This post also has a permanent home on my website, where it may be periodically updated.

Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July 2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911, but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outside actors like Cloudflare which seem to point at an internal BGP failure. Its impact on the economy has yet to be measured, but it probably cost millions of dollars in wasted time and possibly lead to life-threatening situations. Apart from holding Rogers (criminally?) responsible for this, what should be done in the future to avoid such problems? It's not the first time something like this has happened: it happened to Bell Canada as well. The Rogers outage is also strangely similar to the Facebook outage last year, but, to its credit, Facebook did post a fairly detailed explanation only a day later. The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted. The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized. I believe the solution to the problem of large, private, centralised telcos and ISPs is to replace them with smaller, public, decentralised service providers. The only way to ensure that works is to make sure that public money ends up creating infrastructure controlled by the public, which means treating ISPs as a public utility. This has been implemented elsewhere: it works, it's cheaper, and provides better service.

A modest proposal Global wireless services (like phone services) and home internet inevitably grow into monopolies. They are public utilities, just like water, power, railways, and roads. The question of how they should be managed is therefore inherently political, yet people don't seem to question the idea that only the market (i.e. "competition") can solve this problem. I disagree. 10 years ago (in french), I suggested we, in Qu bec, should nationalize large telcos and internet service providers. I no longer believe is a realistic approach: most of those companies have crap copper-based networks (at least for the last mile), yet are worth billions of dollars. It would be prohibitive, and a waste, to buy them out. Back then, I called this idea "R seau-Qu bec", a reference to the already nationalized power company, Hydro-Qu bec. (This idea, incidentally, made it into the plan of a political party.) Now, I think we should instead build our own, public internet. Start setting up municipal internet services, fiber to the home in all cities, progressively. Then interconnect cities with fiber, and build peering agreements with other providers. This also includes a bid on wireless spectrum to start competing with phone providers as well. And while that sounds really ambitious, I think it's possible to take this one step at a time.

Municipal broadband In many parts of the world, municipal broadband is an elegant solution to the problem, with solutions ranging from Stockholm's city-owned fiber network (dark fiber, layer 1) to Utah's UTOPIA network (fiber to the premises, layer 2) and municipal wireless networks like Guifi.net which connects about 40,000 nodes in Catalonia. A good first step would be for cities to start providing broadband services to its residents, directly. Cities normally own sewage and water systems that interconnect most residences and therefore have direct physical access everywhere. In Montr al, in particular, there is an ongoing project to replace a lot of old lead-based plumbing which would give an opportunity to lay down a wired fiber network across the city. This is a wild guess, but I suspect this would be much less expensive than one would think. Some people agree with me and quote this as low as 1000$ per household. There is about 800,000 households in the city of Montr al, so we're talking about a 800 million dollars investment here, to connect every household in Montr al with fiber and incidentally a quarter of the province's population. And this is not an up-front cost: this can be built progressively, with expenses amortized over many years. (We should not, however, connect Montr al first: it's used as an example here because it's a large number of households to connect.) Such a network should be built with a redundant topology. I leave it as an open question whether we should adopt Stockholm's more minimalist approach or provide direct IP connectivity. I would tend to favor the latter, because then you can immediately start to offer the service to households and generate revenues to compensate for the capital expenditures. Given the ridiculous profit margins telcos currently have 8 billion $CAD net income for BCE (2019), 2 billion $CAD for Rogers (2020) I also believe this would actually turn into a profitable revenue stream for the city, the same way Hydro-Qu bec is more and more considered as a revenue stream for the state. (I personally believe that's actually wrong and we should treat those resources as human rights and not money cows, but I digress. The point is: this is not a cost point, it's a revenue.) The other major challenge here is that the city will need competent engineers to drive this project forward. But this is not different from the way other public utilities run: we have electrical engineers at Hydro, sewer and water engineers at the city, this is just another profession. If anything, the computing science sector might be more at fault than the city here in its failure to provide competent and accountable engineers to society... Right now, most of the network in Canada is copper: we are hitting the limits of that technology with DSL, and while cable has some life left to it (DOCSIS 4.0 does 4Gbps), that is nowhere near the capacity of fiber. Take the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee: in 2010, the city-owned ISP EPB finished deploying a fiber network to the entire town and provided gigabit internet to everyone. Now, 12 years later, they are using this same network to provide the mind-boggling speed of 25 gigabit to the home. To give you an idea, Chattanooga is roughly the size and density of Sherbrooke.

Provincial public internet As part of building a municipal network, the question of getting access to "the internet" will immediately come up. Naturally, this will first be solved by using already existing commercial providers to hook up residents to the rest of the global network. But eventually, networks should inter-connect: Montr al should connect with Laval, and then Trois-Rivi res, then Qu bec City. This will require long haul fiber runs, but those links are not actually that expensive, and many of those already exist as a public resource at RISQ and CANARIE, which cross-connects universities and colleges across the province and the country. Those networks might not have the capacity to cover the needs of the entire province right now, but that is a router upgrade away, thanks to the amazing capacity of fiber. There are two crucial mistakes to avoid at this point. First, the network needs to remain decentralised. Long haul links should be IP links with BGP sessions, and each city (or MRC) should have its own independent network, to avoid Rogers-class catastrophic failures. Second, skill needs to remain in-house: RISQ has already made that mistake, to a certain extent, by selling its neutral datacenter. Tellingly, MetroOptic, probably the largest commercial dark fiber provider in the province, now operates the QIX, the second largest "public" internet exchange in Canada. Still, we have a lot of infrastructure we can leverage here. If RISQ or CANARIE cannot be up to the task, Hydro-Qu bec has power lines running into every house in the province, with high voltage power lines running hundreds of kilometers far north. The logistics of long distance maintenance are already solved by that institution. In fact, Hydro already has fiber all over the province, but it is a private network, separate from the internet for security reasons (and that should probably remain so). But this only shows they already have the expertise to lay down fiber: they would just need to lay down a parallel network to the existing one. In that architecture, Hydro would be a "dark fiber" provider.

International public internet None of the above solves the problem for the entire population of Qu bec, which is notoriously dispersed, with an area three times the size of France, but with only an eight of its population (8 million vs 67). More specifically, Canada was originally a french colony, a land violently stolen from native people who have lived here for thousands of years. Some of those people now live in reservations, sometimes far from urban centers (but definitely not always). So the idea of leveraging the Hydro-Qu bec infrastructure doesn't always work to solve this, because while Hydro will happily flood a traditional hunting territory for an electric dam, they don't bother running power lines to the village they forcibly moved, powering it instead with noisy and polluting diesel generators. So before giving me fiber to the home, we should give power (and potable water, for that matter), to those communities first. So we need to discuss international connectivity. (How else could we consider those communities than peer nations anyways?c) Qu bec has virtually zero international links. Even in Montr al, which likes to style itself a major player in gaming, AI, and technology, most peering goes through either Toronto or New York. That's a problem that we must fix, regardless of the other problems stated here. Looking at the submarine cable map, we see very few international links actually landing in Canada. There is the Greenland connect which connects Newfoundland to Iceland through Greenland. There's the EXA which lands in Ireland, the UK and the US, and Google has the Topaz link on the west coast. That's about it, and none of those land anywhere near any major urban center in Qu bec. We should have a cable running from France up to Saint-F licien. There should be a cable from Vancouver to China. Heck, there should be a fiber cable running all the way from the end of the great lakes through Qu bec, then up around the northern passage and back down to British Columbia. Those cables are expensive, and the idea might sound ludicrous, but Russia is actually planning such a project for 2026. The US has cables running all the way up (and around!) Alaska, neatly bypassing all of Canada in the process. We just look ridiculous on that map. (Addendum: I somehow forgot to talk about Teleglobe here was founded as publicly owned company in 1950, growing international phone and (later) data links all over the world. It was privatized by the conservatives in 1984, along with rails and other "crown corporations". So that's one major risk to any effort to make public utilities work properly: some government might be elected and promptly sell it out to its friends for peanuts.)

Wireless networks I know most people will have rolled their eyes so far back their heads have exploded. But I'm not done yet. I want wireless too. And by wireless, I don't mean a bunch of geeks setting up OpenWRT routers on rooftops. I tried that, and while it was fun and educational, it didn't scale. A public networking utility wouldn't be complete without providing cellular phone service. This involves bidding for frequencies at the federal level, and deploying a rather large amount of infrastructure, but it could be a later phase, when the engineers and politicians have proven their worth. At least part of the Rogers fiasco would have been averted if such a decentralized network backend existed. One might even want to argue that a separate institution should be setup to provide phone services, independently from the regular wired networking, if only for reliability. Because remember here: the problem we're trying to solve is not just technical, it's about political boundaries, centralisation, and automation. If everything is ran by this one organisation again, we will have failed. However, I must admit that phone services is where my ideas fall a little short. I can't help but think it's also an accessible goal maybe starting with a virtual operator but it seems slightly less so than the others, especially considering how closed the phone ecosystem is.

Counter points In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

I don't want the state to control my internet One legitimate concern I have about the idea of the state running the internet is the potential it would have to censor or control the content running over the wires. But I don't think there is necessarily a direct relationship between resource ownership and control of content. Sure, China has strong censorship in place, partly implemented through state-controlled businesses. But Russia also has strong censorship in place, based on regulatory tools: they force private service providers to install back-doors in their networks to control content and surveil their users. Besides, the USA have been doing warrantless wiretapping since at least 2003 (and yes, that's 10 years before the Snowden revelations) so a commercial internet is no assurance that we have a free internet. Quite the contrary in fact: if anything, the commercial internet goes hand in hand with the neo-colonial internet, just like businesses did in the "good old colonial days". Large media companies are the primary censors of content here. In Canada, the media cartel requested the first site-blocking order in 2018. The plaintiffs (including Qu becor, Rogers, and Bell Canada) are both content providers and internet service providers, an obvious conflict of interest. Nevertheless, there are some strong arguments against having a centralised, state-owned monopoly on internet service providers. FDN makes a good point on this. But this is not what I am suggesting: at the provincial level, the network would be purely physical, and regional entities (which could include private companies) would peer over that physical network, ensuring decentralization. Delegating the management of that infrastructure to an independent non-profit or cooperative (but owned by the state) would also ensure some level of independence.

Isn't the government incompetent and corrupt? Also known as "private enterprise is better skilled at handling this, the state can't do anything right" I don't think this is a "fait accomplit". If anything, I have found publicly ran utilities to be spectacularly reliable here. I rarely have trouble with sewage, water, or power, and keep in mind I live in a city where we receive about 2 meters of snow a year, which tend to create lots of trouble with power lines. Unless there's a major weather event, power just runs here. I think the same can happen with an internet service provider. But it would certainly need to have higher standards to what we're used to, because frankly Internet is kind of janky.

A single monopoly will be less reliable I actually agree with that, but that is not what I am proposing anyways. Current commercial or non-profit entities will be free to offer their services on top of the public network. And besides, the current "ha! diversity is great" approach is exactly what we have now, and it's not working. The pretense that we can have competition over a single network is what led the US into the ridiculous situation where they also pretend to have competition over the power utility market. This led to massive forest fires in California and major power outages in Texas. It doesn't work.

Wouldn't this create an isolated network? One theory is that this new network would be so hostile to incumbent telcos and ISPs that they would simply refuse to network with the public utility. And while it is true that the telcos currently do also act as a kind of "tier one" provider in some places, I strongly feel this is also a problem that needs to be solved, regardless of ownership of networking infrastructure. Right now, telcos often hold both ends of the stick: they are the gateway to users, the "last mile", but they also provide peering to the larger internet in some locations. In at least one datacenter in downtown Montr al, I've seen traffic go through Bell Canada that was not directly targeted at Bell customers. So in effect, they are in a position of charging twice for the same traffic, and that's not only ridiculous, it should just be plain illegal. And besides, this is not a big problem: there are other providers out there. As bad as the market is in Qu bec, there is still some diversity in Tier one providers that could allow for some exits to the wider network (e.g. yes, Cogent is here too).

What about Google and Facebook? Nationalization of other service providers like Google and Facebook is out of scope of this discussion. That said, I am not sure the state should get into the business of organising the web or providing content services however, but I will point out it already does do some of that through its own websites. It should probably keep itself to this, and also consider providing normal services for people who don't or can't access the internet. (And I would also be ready to argue that Google and Facebook already act as extensions of the state: certainly if Facebook didn't exist, the CIA or the NSA would like to create it at this point. And Google has lucrative business with the US department of defense.)

What does not work So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet. But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

Legal pressure and regulation In 1984 (of all years), the US Department of Justice finally broke up AT&T in half a dozen corporations, after a 10 year legal battle. Yet a decades later, we're back to only three large providers doing essentially what AT&T was doing back then, and those are regional monopolies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (not counting T-Mobile that is from a different breed). So the legal approach really didn't work that well, especially considering the political landscape changed in the US, and the FTC seems perfectly happy to let those major mergers continue. In Canada, we never even pretended we would solve this problem at all: Bell Canada (the literal "father" of AT&T) is in the same situation now. We have either a regional monopoly (e.g. Videotron for cable in Qu bec) or an oligopoly (Bell, Rogers, and Telus controlling more than 90% of the market). Telus does have one competitor in the west of Canada, Shaw, but Rogers has been trying to buy it out. The competition bureau seems to have blocked the merger for now, but it didn't stop other recent mergers like Bell's acquisition one of its main competitors in Qu bec, eBox. Regulation doesn't seem capable of ensuring those profitable corporations provide us with decent pricing, which makes Canada one of the most expensive countries (research) for mobile data on the planet. The recent failure of the CRTC to properly protect smaller providers has even lead to price hikes. Meanwhile the oligopoly is actually agreeing on their own price hikes therefore becoming a real cartel, complete with price fixing and reductions in output. There are actually regulations in Canada supposed to keep the worst of the Rogers outage from happening at all. According to CBC:
Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.
I could personally confirm that my phone couldn't reach 911 services, because all calls would fail: the problem was that towers were still up, so your phone wouldn't fall back to alternative service providers (which could have resolved the issue). I can only speculate as to why Rogers didn't take cell phone towers out of the network to let phones work properly for 911 service, but it seems like a dangerous game to play. Hilariously, the CRTC itself didn't have a reliable phone service due to the service outage:
Please note that our phone lines are affected by the Rogers network outage. Our website is still available: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/
https://mobile.twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041 I wonder if they will file a complaint against Rogers themselves about this. I probably should. It seems the federal government is thinking more of the same medicine will fix the problem and has told companies should "help" each other in an emergency. I doubt this will fix anything, and could actually make things worse if the competitors actually interoperate more, as it could cause multi-provider, cascading failures.

Subsidies The absurd price we pay for data does not actually mean everyone gets high speed internet at home. Large swathes of the Qu bec countryside don't get broadband at all, and it can be difficult or expensive, even in large urban centers like Montr al, to get high speed internet. That is despite having a series of subsidies that all avoided investing in our own infrastructure. We had the "fonds de l'autoroute de l'information", "information highway fund" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) and "branchez les familles", "connecting families" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) which subsidized the development of a copper network. In 2014, more of the same: the federal government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called connecting Canadians to connect 280 000 households to "high speed internet". And now, the federal and provincial governments are proudly announcing that "everyone is now connected to high speed internet", after pouring more than 1.1 billion dollars to connect, guess what, another 380 000 homes, right in time for the provincial election. Of course, technically, the deadline won't actually be met until 2023. Qu bec is a big area to cover, and you can guess what happens next: the telcos threw up their hand and said some areas just can't be connected. (Or they connect their CEO but not the poor folks across the lake.) The story then takes the predictable twist of giving more money out to billionaires, subsidizing now Musk's Starlink system to connect those remote areas. To give a concrete example: a friend who lives about 1000km away from Montr al, 4km from a small, 2500 habitant village, has recently got symmetric 100 mbps fiber at home from Telus, thanks to those subsidies. But I can't get that service in Montr al at all, presumably because Telus and Bell colluded to split that market. Bell doesn't provide me with such a service either: they tell me they have "fiber to my neighborhood", and only offer me a 25/10 mbps ADSL service. (There is Vid otron offering 400mbps, but that's copper cable, again a dead technology, and asymmetric.)

Conclusion Remember Chattanooga? Back in 2010, they funded the development of a fiber network, and now they have deployed a network roughly a thousand times faster than what we have just funded with a billion dollars. In 2010, I was paying Bell Canada 60$/mth for 20mbps and a 125GB cap, and now, I'm still (indirectly) paying Bell for roughly the same speed (25mbps). Back then, Bell was throttling their competitors networks until 2009, when they were forced by the CRTC to stop throttling. Both Bell and Vid otron still explicitly forbid you from running your own servers at home, Vid otron charges prohibitive prices which make it near impossible for resellers to sell uncapped services. Those companies are not spurring innovation: they are blocking it. We have spent all this money for the private sector to build us a private internet, over decades, without any assurance of quality, equity or reliability. And while in some locations, ISPs did deploy fiber to the home, they certainly didn't upgrade their entire network to follow suit, and even less allowed resellers to compete on that network. In 10 years, when 100mbps will be laughable, I bet those service providers will again punt the ball in the public courtyard and tell us they don't have the money to upgrade everyone's equipment. We got screwed. It's time to try something new.

Updates There was a discussion about this article on Hacker News which was surprisingly productive. Trigger warning: Hacker News is kind of right-wing, in case you didn't know. Since this article was written, at least two more major acquisitions happened, just in Qu bec:

Bell acquired Distributel

Qu becor acquired vMedia

In the latter case, vMedia was explicitly saying it couldn't grow because of "lack of access to capital". So basically, we have given those companies a billion dollars, and they are not using that very money to buy out their competition. At least we could have given that money to small players to even out the playing field. But this is not how that works at all. Also, in a bizarre twist, an "analyst" believes the acquisition is likely to help Rogers acquire Shaw. Also, since this article was written, the Washington Post published a review of a book bringing similar ideas: Internet for the People The Fight for Our Digital Future, by Ben Tarnoff, at Verso books. It's short, but even more ambitious than what I am suggesting in this article, arguing that all big tech companies should be broken up and better regulated:
He pulls from Ethan Zuckerman s idea of a web that is plural in purpose that just as pool halls, libraries and churches each have different norms, purposes and designs, so too should different places on the internet. To achieve this, Tarnoff wants governments to pass laws that would make the big platforms unprofitable and, in their place, fund small-scale, local experiments in social media design. Instead of having platforms ruled by engagement-maximizing algorithms, Tarnoff imagines public platforms run by local librarians that include content from public media.
(Links mine: the Washington Post obviously prefers to not link to the real web, and instead doesn't link to Zuckerman's site all and suggests Amazon for the book, in a cynical example.) And in another example of how the private sector has failed us, there was recently a fluke in the AMBER alert system where the entire province was warned about a loose shooter in Saint-Elz ar except the people in the town, because they have spotty cell phone coverage. In other words, millions of people received a strongly toned, "life-threatening", alert for a city sometimes hours away, except the people most vulnerable to the alert. Not missing a beat, the CAQ party is promising more of the same medicine again and giving more money to telcos to fix the problem, suggesting to spend three billion dollars in private infrastructure.

This is just a short note to myself, and to anyone who might run VMs via home-grown scripts (or systemd units). I expect modern VM managers to do this automatically, but for myself, I have just a few hacked together scripts. By default, QEMU (at least as of version 7.0) does not honour/pass discard requests from block devices to the underlying storage. This is a sane default (like lvm s default setting), but with long-lived VMs it can lead to lots of wasted disk space. I keep my VMs on SSDs, which is limited space for me, so savings here are important. Older Debian versions did not trim automatically, but nowadays they do (which is why this is worth enabling for all VMs), so all you need is to pass:

unmap=discard to activate the pass-through.
optionally, detect-zeroes=unmap, but I don t know how useful this is, as in, how often zeroes are written.

And the next trim should save lots of disk space. It doesn t matter much if you use raw or qcow2, both will know to unmap the unused disk, leading to less disk space used. This part seems to me safe security-wise, as long as you trust the host. If you have pass-through to the actual hardware, it will also do proper discard at the SSD level (with the potential security issues leading from that). I m happy with the freed up disk space Note: If you have (like I do) Windows VMs as well, using paravirt block devices, make sure the drive is recent enough. One interesting behaviour from Windows: it looks like the default cluster size is quite high (64K), which with many small files will lead to significant overhead. But, either I misunderstand, or Windows actually knows how to unmap the unused part of a cluster (although it takes a while). So in the end, the backing file for the VM (19G) is smaller than the disk used as reported in Windows (23-24G), but higher than size on disk for all the files (17.2G). Seems legit, and it still boots Most Linux file systems have much smaller block sizes (usually 4K), so this is not a problem for it.

Review: Still Not Safe, by Robert L. Wears & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Copyright:	November 2019
ISBN:	0-19-027128-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	232

Still Not Safe is an examination of the recent politics and history of patient safety in medicine. Its conclusions are summarized by the opening paragraph of the preface:

The American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly said that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The reform movement to make healthcare safer is clearly a great cause, but patient safety efforts are increasingly following Hoffer's path.

Robert Wears was Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida specializing in patient safety. Kathleen Sutcliffe is Professor of Medicine and Business at Johns Hopkins. This book is based on research funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for which both Wears and Sutcliffe were primary investigators. (Wears died in 2017, but the acknowledgments imply that at least early drafts of the book existed by that point and it was indeed co-written.) The anchor of the story of patient safety in Still Not Safe is the 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine entitled To Err is Human, to which the authors attribute an explosion of public scrutiny of medical safety. The headline conclusion of that report, which led nightly news programs after its release, was that 44,000 to 120,000 people died each year in the United States due to medical error. This report prompted government legislation, funding for new safety initiatives, a flurry of follow-on reports, and significant public awareness of medical harm. What it did not produce, in the authors' view, is significant improvements in patient safety. The central topic of this book is an analysis of why patient safety efforts have had so little measurable effect. The authors attribute this to three primary causes: an unwillingness to involve safety experts from outside medicine or absorb safety lessons from other disciplines, an obsession with human error that led to profound misunderstandings of the nature of safety, and the misuse of safety concerns as a means to centralize control of medical practice in the hands of physician-administrators. (The term used by the authors is "managerial, scientific-bureaucratic medicine," which is technically accurate but rather awkward.) Biggest complaint first: This book desperately needed examples, case studies, or something to make these ideas concrete. There are essentially none in 230 pages apart from passing mentions of famous cases of medical error that added to public pressure, and a tantalizing but maddeningly nonspecific discussion of the atypically successful effort to radically improve the safety of anesthesia. Apparently anesthesiologists involved safety experts from outside medicine, avoided a focus on human error, turned safety into an engineering problem, and made concrete improvements that had a hugely positive impact on the number of adverse events for patients. Sounds fascinating! Alas, I'm just as much in the dark about what those improvements were as I was when I started reading this book. Apart from a vague mention of some unspecified improvements to anesthesia machines, there are no concrete descriptions whatsoever. I understand that the authors were probably leery of giving too many specific examples of successful safety initiatives since one of their core points is that safety is a mindset and philosophy rather than a replicable set of actions, and copying the actions of another field without understanding their underlying motivations or context within a larger system is doomed to failure. But you have to give the reader something, or the book starts feeling like a flurry of abstract assertions. Much is made here of the drawbacks of a focus on human error, and the superiority of the safety analysis done in other fields that have moved beyond error-centric analysis (and in some cases have largely discarded the word "error" as inherently unhelpful and ambiguous). That leads naturally to showing an analysis of an adverse incident through an error lens and then through a more nuanced safety lens, making the differences concrete for the reader. It was maddening to me that the authors never did this. This book was recommended to me as part of a discussion about safety and reliability in tech and the need to learn from safety practices in other fields. In that context, I didn't find it useful, although surprisingly that's because the thinking in medicine (at least as presented by these authors) seems behind the current thinking in distributed systems. The idea that human error is not a useful model for approaching reliability is standard in large tech companies, nearly all of which use blameless postmortems for exactly that reason. Tech, similar to medicine, does have a tendency to be insular and not look outside the field for good ideas, but the approach to large-scale reliability in tech seems to have avoided the other traps discussed here. (Security is another matter, but security is also adversarial, which creates different problems that I suspect require different tools.) What I did find fascinating in this book, although not directly applicable to my own work, is the way in which a focus on human error becomes a justification for bureaucratic control and therefore a concentration of power in a managerial layer. If the assumption is that medical harm is primarily caused by humans making avoidable mistakes, and therefore the solution is to prevent humans from making mistakes through better training, discipline, or process, this creates organizations that are divided into those who make the rules and those who follow the rules. The long-term result is a practice of medicine in which a small number of experts decide the correct treatment for a given problem, and then all other practitioners are expected to precisely follow that treatment plan to avoid "errors." (The best distributed systems approaches may avoid this problem, but this failure mode seems nearly universal in technical support organizations.) I was startled by how accurate that portrayal of medicine felt. My assumption prior to reading this book was that the modern experience of medicine as an assembly line with patients as widgets was caused by the pressure for higher "productivity" and thus shorter visit times, combined with (in the US) the distorting effects of our broken medical insurance system. After reading this book, I've added a misguided way of thinking about medical error and risk avoidance to that analysis. One of the authors' points (which, as usual, I wish they'd made more concrete with a case study) is that the same thought process that lets a doctor make a correct diagnosis and find a working treatment is the thought process that may lead to an incorrect diagnosis or treatment. There is not a separable state of "mental error" that can be eliminated. Decision-making processes are more complicated and more integrated than that. If you try to prevent "errors" by eliminating flexibility, you also eliminate vital tools for successfully treating patients. The authors are careful to point out that the prior state of medicine in which each doctor was a force to themselves and there was no role for patient safety as a discipline was also bad for safety. Reverting to the state of medicine before the advent of the scientific-bureaucratic error-avoiding culture is also not a solution. But, rather at odds with other popular books about medicine, the authors are highly critical of safety changes focused on human error prevention, such as mandatory checklists. In their view, this is exactly the sort of attempt to blindly copy the machinery of safety in another field (in this case, air travel) without understanding the underlying purpose and system of which it's a part. I am not qualified to judge the sharp dispute over whether there is solid clinical evidence that checklists are helpful (these authors claim there is not; I know other books make different claims, and I suspect it may depend heavily on how the checklist is used). But I found the authors' argument that one has to design systems holistically for safety, not try to patch in safety later by turning certain tasks into rote processes and humans into machines, to be persuasive. I'm not willing to recommend this book given how devoid it is of concrete examples. I was able to fill in some of that because of prior experience with the literature on site reliability engineering, but a reader who wasn't previously familiar with discussions of safety or reliability may find much of this book too abstract to be comprehensible. But I'm not sorry I read it. I hadn't previously thought about the power dynamics of a focus on error, and I think that will be a valuable observation to keep in mind. Rating: 6 out of 10

Darren Hayes wrote an interesting article about his battle with depression and his journey to accepting being gay [1]. Savage Garden had some great songs, Affirmation is relevant to this topic. Rorodi wrote an interesting article about the biggest crypto lending company being a Ponzi scheme [2]. One thing I find particularly noteworthy is how obviously scammy it is, even to the extent of having an ex porn star as an executive! Celsuis is now in the process of going bankrupt, 7 months after that article was published. Quora has an interesting discussion about different type casts in C++ [3]. C style casts shouldn t be used! MamaMia has an interesting article about Action Faking which means procrastination by doing tasks marginally related to the end goal [3]. This can mean include excessive study about the topic, excessive planning for the work, and work on things that aren t on the critical path first (EG thinking of a name for a project). Apple has a new Lockdown Mode to run an iPhone in a more secure configuration [4]. It would be good if more operating systems had a feature like this. Informative article about energy use of different organs [5]. The highest metabolic rates (in KCal/Kg/day) are for the heart and kidneys. The brain is 3rd on the list and as it s significantly more massive than the heart and kidneys it uses more energy, however this research was done on people who were at rest. Scientific American has an interesting article about brain energy use and exhaustion from mental effort [6]. Apparently it s doing things that aren t fun that cause exhaustion, mental effort that s fun can be refreshing.

Two weeks ago I upgraded chiark from Debian jessie i386 to bullseye amd64, after nearly 30 years running Debian i386. This went really quite well, in fact! Background chiark is my colo - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services. chiark s internal setup is designed to enable my users to do a maximum number of exciting things with a minimum of intervention from me. chiark s OS install dates to 1993, when I installed Debian 0.93R5, the first version of Debian to advertise the ability to be upgraded without reinstalling. I think that makes it one of the oldest Debian installations in existence. Obviously it s had several new hardware platforms too. (There was a prior install of Linux on the initial hardware, remnants of which can maybe still be seen in some obscure corners of chiark s /usr/local.) chiark s install is also at the very high end of the installation complexity, and customisation, scale: reinstalling it completely would be an enormous amount of work. And it s unique. chiark s upgrade history chiark s last major OS upgrade was to jessie (Debian 8, released in April 2015). That was in 2016. Since then we have been relying on Debian s excellent security support posture, and the Debian LTS and more recently Freexian s Debian ELTS projects and some local updates, The use of ELTS - which supports only a subset of packages - was particularly uncomfortable. Additionally, chiark was installed with 32-bit x86 Linux (Debian i386), since that was what was supported and available at the time. But 32-bit is looking very long in the tooth. Why do a skip upgrade So, I wanted to move to the fairly recent stable release - Debian 11 (bullseye), which is just short of a year old. And I wanted to crossgrade (as its called) to 64-bit. In the past, I have found I have had greater success by doing direct upgrades, skipping intermediate releases, rather than by following the officially-supported path of going via every intermediate release. Doing a skip upgrade avoids exposure to any packaging bugs which were present only in intermediate release(s). Debian does usually fix bugs, but Debian has many cautious users, so it is not uncommon for bugs to be found after release, and then not be fixed until the next one. A skip upgrade avoids the need to try to upgrade to already-obsolete releases (which can involve messing about with multiple snapshots from snapshot.debian.org. It is also significantly faster and simpler, which is important not only because it reduces downtime, but also because it removes opportunities (and reduces the time available) for things to go badly. One downside is that sometimes maintainers aggressively remove compatibility measures for older releases. (And compatibililty packages are generally removed quite quickly by even cautious maintainers.) That means that the sysadmin who wants to skip-upgrade needs to do more manual fixing of things that haven t been dealt with automatically. And occasionally one finds compatibility problems that show up only when mixing very old and very new software, that no-one else has seen. Crossgrading Crossgrading is fairly complex and hazardous. It is well supported by the low level tools (eg, dpkg) but the higher-level packaging tools (eg, apt) get very badly confused. Nowadays the system is so complex that downloading things by hand and manually feeding them to dpkg is impractical, other than as a very occasional last resort. The approach, generally, has been to set the system up to want to be the new architecture, run apt in a download-only mode, and do the package installation manually, with some fixing up and retrying, until the system is coherent enough for apt to work. This is the approach I took. (In current releases, there are tools that will help but they are only in recent releases and I wanted to go direct. I also doubted that they would work properly on chiark, since it s so unusual.) Peril and planning Overall, this was a risky strategy to choose. The package dependencies wouldn t necessarily express all of the sequencing needed. But it still seemed that if I could come up with a working recipe, I could do it. I restored most of one of chiark s backups onto a scratch volume on my laptop. With the LVM snapshot tools and chroots. I was able to develop and test a set of scripts that would perform the upgrade. This was a very effective approach: my super-fast laptop, with local caches of the package repositories, was able to do many edit, test, debug cycles. My recipe made heavy use of snapshot.debian.org, to make sure that it wouldn t rot between testing and implementation. When I had a working scheme, I told my users about the planned downtime. I warned everyone it might take even 2 or 3 days. I made sure that my access arrangemnts to the data centre were in place, in case I needed to visit in person. (I have remote serial console and power cycler access.) Reality - the terrible rescue install My first task on taking the service down was the check that the emergency rescue installation worked: chiark has an ancient USB stick in the back, which I can boot to from the BIOS. The idea being that many things that go wrong could be repaired from there. I found that that install was too old to understand chiark s storage arrangements. mdadm tools gave very strange output. So I needed to upgrade it. After some experiments, I rebooted back into the main install, bringing chiark s service back online. I then used the main install of chiark as a kind of meta-rescue-image for the rescue-image. The process of getting the rescue image upgraded (not even to amd64, but just to something not totally ancient) was fraught. Several times I had to rescue it by copying files in from the main install outside. And, the rescue install was on a truly ancient 2G USB stick which was terribly terribly slow, and also very small. I hadn t done any significant planning for this subtask, because it was low-risk: there was little way to break the main install. Due to all these adverse factors, sorting out the rescue image took five hours. If I had known how long it would take, at the beginning, I would have skipped it. 5 hours is more than it would have taken to go to London and fix something in person. Reality - the actual core upgrade I was able to start the actual upgrade in the mid-afternoon. I meticulously checked and executed the steps from my plan. The terrifying scripts which sequenced the critical package updates ran flawlessly. Within an hour or so I had a system which was running bullseye amd64, albeit with many important packages still missing or unconfigured. So I didn t need the rescue image after all, nor to go to the datacentre. Fixing all the things Then I had to deal with all the inevitable fallout from an upgrade. Notable incidents: exim4 has a new tainting system This is to try to help the sysadmin avoid writing unsafe string interpolations. ( Little Bobby Tables. ) This was done by Exim upstream in a great hurry as part of a security response process. The new checks meant that the mail configuration did not work at all. I had to turn off the taint check completely. I m fairly confident that this is correct, because I am hyper-aware of quoting issues and all of my configuration is written to avoid the problems that tainting is supposed to avoid. One particular annoyance is that the approach taken for sqlite lookups makes it totally impossible to use more than one sqlite database. I think the sqlite quoting operator which one uses to interpolate values produces tainted output? I need to investigate this properly. LVM now ignores PVs which are directly contained within LVs by default chiark has LVM-on-RAID-on-LVM. This generally works really well. However, there was one edge case where I ended up without the intermediate RAID layer. The result is LVM-on-LVM. But recent versions of the LVM tools do not look at PVs inside LVs, by default. This is to help you avoid corrupting the state of any VMs you have on your system. I didn t know that at the time, though. All I knew was that LVM was claiming my PV was unusable , and wouldn t explain why. I was about to start on a thorough reading of the 15,000-word essay that is the commentary in the default /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to try to see if anything was relevant, when I received a helpful tipoff on IRC pointing me to the scan_lvs option. I need to file a bug asking for the LVM tools to explain why they have declared a PV unuseable. apache2 s default config no longer read one of my config files I had to do a merge (of my changes vs the maintainers changes) for /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. When doing this merge I failed to notice that the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/httpd.conf was no longer included by default. My merge dropped that line. There were some important things in there, and until I found this the webserver was broken. dpkg --skip-same-version DTWT during a crossgrade (This is not a fix all the things - I found it when developing my upgrade process.) When doing a crossgrade, one often wants to say to dpkg install all these things, but don t reinstall things that have already been done . That s what --skip-same-version is for. However, the logic had not been updated as part of the work to support multiarch, so it was wrong. I prepared a patched version of dpkg, and inserted it in the appropriate point in my prepared crossgrade plan. The patch is now filed as bug #1014476 against dpkg upstream Mailman Mailman is no longer in bullseye. It s only available in the previous release, buster. bullseye has Mailman 3 which is a totally different system - requiring basically, a completely new install and configuration. To even preserve existing archive links (a very important requirement) is decidedly nontrivial. I decided to punt on this whole situation. Currently chiark is running buster s version of Mailman. I will have to deal with this at some point and I m not looking forward to it. Python Of course that Mailman is Python 2. The Python project s extremely badly handled transition includes a recommendation to change the meaning of #!/usr/bin/python from Python 2, to Python 3. But Python 3 is a new language, barely compatible with Python 2 even in the most recent iterations of both, and it is usual to need to coinstall them. Happily Debian have provided the python-is-python2 package to make things work sensibly, albeit with unpleasant imprecations in the package summary description. USENET news Oh my god. INN uses many non-portable data formats, which just depend on your C types. And there are complicated daemons, statically linked libraries which cache on-disk data, and much to go wrong. I had numerous problems with this, and several outages and malfunctions. I may write about that on a future occasion.

(edited 2022-07-20 11:36 +01:00 and 2022-07-30 12:28+01:00 to fix typos)

comments

Here are the slides I presented for a ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup in July 2022, hosted by Altinity. They are about Akvorado, a network flow collector and visualizer, and notably on how it relies on ClickHouse, a column-oriented database.

Slides in PDF format

The meetup was recorded and available on YouTube. Here is the part relevant to my presentation, with subtitles:¹

I got a few questions about how to get information from the higher layers, like HTTP. As my use case for Akvorado was at the network edge, my answers were mostly negative. However, as sFlow is extensible, when collecting flows from Linux servers instead, you could embed additional data and they could be exported as well. I also got a question about doing aggregation in a single table. ClickHouse can aggregate automatically data using TTL. My answer for not doing that is partial. There is another reason: the retention periods of the various tables may overlap. For example, the main table keeps data for 15 days, but even in these 15 days, if I do a query on a 12-hour window, it is faster to use the flows_1m0s aggregated table, unless I request something about ports and IP addresses.

To generate the subtitles, I have used Amazon Transcribe, the speech-to-text solution from Amazon AWS. Unfortunately, there is no en-FR language available, which would have been useful for my ~~terrible~~ accent. While the subtitles were 100% accurate when the host, Robert Hodge from Altinity, was speaking, the success rate on my talk was quite lower. I had to rewrite almost all sentences. However, using speech-to-text is still useful to get the timings, as it is also something requiring a lot of work to do manually.

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding No any major updates on running projects.
Two 1, 2 projects are in the pipeline now.
Tryton project is in a review phase. Gradle projects is still fighting in work. In June, we put aside 2254 EUR to fund Debian projects. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In June, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 14.00h (out of 14.00h assigned).
Andreas R nnquist did 14.50h (out of 14.50h assigned and 10.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 10.50h to the next month).
Anton Gladky did 16.00h (out of 16.00h assigned).
Ben Hutchings did 16.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 16.00h from previous period).
Chris Lamb did 18.00h (out of 18.00h assigned).
Dominik George did 1.83h (out of 6.00h assigned and 18.00h from previous period, thus carrying over 22.17h to the next month).
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.25h (out of 9.25h assigned and 21.00h from previous period).
Enrico Zini did 8.00h (out of 9.50h assigned and 6.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 8.00h to the next month).
Markus Koschany did 30.25h (out of 30.25h assigned).
Ola Lundqvist did nothing (out of 12.00 available hours, thus carrying them over to the next month).
Roberto C. S nchez did 27.50h (out of 11.75h assigned and 18.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month).
Stefano Rivera did 8.00h (out of 30.25h assigned, thus carrying over 20.75h to the next month).
Sylvain Beucler did 30.25h (out of 13.75h assigned and 16.50h from previous period).
Thorsten Alteholz did 30.25h (out of 30.25h assigned).
Utkarsh Gupta did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 30.25 available hours, thus carrying them over to the next month).

Evolution of the situation In June we released 27 DLAs.

This is a special month, where we have two releases (stretch and jessie) as ELTS and NO release as LTS. Buster is still handled by the security team and will probably be given in LTS hands at the beginning of the August. During this month we are updating the infrastructure, documentation and improve our internal processes to switch to a new release.
Many developers have just returned back from Debconf22, hold in Prizren, Kosovo! Many (E)LTS members could meet face-to-face and discuss some technical and social topics! Also LTS BoF took place, where the project was introduced (link to video).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold. We are pleased to welcome Alter Way where their support of Debian is publicly acknowledged at the higher level, see this French quote of Alterway s CEO.

Platinum sponsors:
- TOSHIBA (for 82 months)
- GitHub (for 73 months)
- Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 50 months)
Gold sponsors:
- Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 93 months)
- Linode (for 87 months)
- Babiel GmbH (for 76 months)
- Plat Home (for 76 months)
- University of Oxford (for 32 months)
- Deveryware (for 19 months)
- VyOS Inc (for 14 months)
- EDF SA (for 3 months)
Silver sponsors:
- Domeneshop AS (for 98 months)
- The Positive Internet Company (for 98 months)
- Nantes M tropole (for 92 months)
- Univention GmbH (for 83 months)
- Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 83 months)
- Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 77 months)
- Exonet B.V. (for 67 months)
- Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 61 months)
- CINECA (for 50 months)
- Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 45 months)
- Cloudways Ltd (for 34 months)
- Dinahosting SL (for 32 months)
- Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 26 months)
- Platform.sh (for 26 months)
- Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 20 months)
- sipgate GmbH (for 17 months)
- Tilburg University (for 16 months)
- OVH US LLC (for 15 months)
- GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 7 months)
- Soliton Systems K.K. (for 4 months)
Bronze sponsors:
- Evolix (for 98 months)
- Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 98 months)
- Intevation GmbH (for 95 months)
- Linuxhotel GmbH (for 95 months)
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Getting On-Line What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.

Internet: The Hunt Begins I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?

26 August 2022

Counter points In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

What does not work So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet. But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

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