Search Results: "gps"

13 March 2024

Russell Coker: The Shape of Computers

Introduction There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to. This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors. I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests. Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc. Desktop/Laptop PCs When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a add a screen to make a laptop as opposed to the add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop model but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display. The PC as box with connections for keyboard, display, etc has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors. The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2]. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US. I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it s designed for use cases that don t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales. We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn t take off largely because it wasn t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server. The Interesting New Things Watch Like The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as pocket watches for about 10 years. The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80 s? With today s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful? Phone Like Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence. Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as three fold (where three means the number of segments with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes. Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the watch part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that s enough for a lot of phone functionality. The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices. Laptop Like One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5 touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over. The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet. Another interesting thing that s on offer is a laptop with 7 touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu. Useful Hardware for Developing These Things I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap. The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too. The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it s hardware isn t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day. Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well. What We Must Do Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn t get it going. To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets. Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done even today s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable. ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do. Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it s own special apps it s not usable in a I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like ok google type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks. I will write more posts about these thing. Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

9 March 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Three new reproducibility-related academic papers A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month: Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:
Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)

Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time by Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Th o Zimmermann (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France) addresses:
[The] principle of reusability [ ] makes it harder to reproduce projects build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.
The abstract continues with the claim that Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision. (arXiv, full PDF)
Options Matter: Documenting and Fixing Non-Reproducible Builds in Highly-Configurable Systems by Georges Aaron Randrianaina, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Olivier Zendra and Mathieu Acher (Inria centre at Rennes University, France):
This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

User cen posted a query asking How to verify a package by rebuilding it locally on Debian which received a followup from Vagrant Cascadian.

James Addison asked Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian regarding the differences in the testing performed by Debian s GitLab continuous integration (CI) pipeline and the Debian-specific testing performed by the Reproducible Builds project itself, and followed this with a separate but related question regarding misconfigured reprotest configurations.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called `fedora-repro-build` that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects `README` file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions `256`, `257` and `258` to Debian and made the following additional changes:

Use a deterministic name instead of trusting `gpg` s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]

Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter `struct.unpack`-related errors when parsing Python `.pyc` files. (#1064973). [ ]

Don t try and compare `rdb_expected_diff` on non-GNU systems as `%p` formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]

Fix compatibility with `pytest` 8.0. [ ]

Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]

Use the `7zip` package (over `p7zip-full`) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]

Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]

Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]

Make `test_zip` black clean. [ ]

In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the `diff(1)` correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:

Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]

Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update `README.rst` to match. [ ][ ]

Support a new `--vary=build_path.path` option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

Chris Lamb:

Improve the relative sizing of headers. [ ]

Re-order and punch up the introduction and documentation on the `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` page. [ ]

Update `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` documentation re. `datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp`. Thanks, James Addison. [ ]

Add a post about Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024. [ ]

Holger Levsen:

Update the GNU Guix page to include their reproducibility QA page. [ ]

Add Sune Vuorela and Jan-Benedict Glaw to our contributors list. [ ][ ]

Mattia Rizzolo:

Add Sovereign Tech Fund s logo to our sponsors. [ ]

Update our sponsors list. [ ]

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

Debian-related changes:

Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]

Use the 64-bit `amd64` kernel on all `i386` nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]

Add an Erlang package set. [ ]

Other changes:

Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]

Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]

Use `/usr/bin/du --apparent-size` in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]

Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]

Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our `arm64` nodes. [ ]

Only set `/proc/$pid/oom_score_adj` to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]

Add the `opemwrt-target-tegra` and `jtx` task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]

Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:

Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]

Add two new `armhf` architecture build nodes, `virt32z` and `virt64z`, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]

In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the `tegra` target with `mpc85xx` [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate `$TMPDIR` to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed `/tmp` [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Philip Rinn:

`gimagereader` (date)

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`grass` (date-related issue)

`grub2` (filesystem ordering issue)

`latex2html` (drop a non-deterministic log)

`mhvtl` (tar)

`obs` (build-tool issue)

`ollama` (GZip embedding the modification time)

`presenterm` (filesystem-ordering issue)

`qt6-quick3d` (parallelism)

Chris Lamb:

#1064506 filed against `geophar`.

#1064891 filed against `pytest-repeat`.

#1064892 filed against `klepto`.

James Addison:

#1064519 filed against `flask-limiter`.

`python-parsl-doc` (disable dynamic argument evaluation by Sphinx `autodoc` extension)

`python3-pytest-repeat` (remove `entry_points.txt` creation that varied by shell)

`python3-selinux` (remove packaged `direct_url.json` file that embeds build path)

`python3-sepolicy` (remove packaged `direct_url.json` file that embeds build path)

#1064575 filed against `pyswarms`.

#1064638 filed against `python-x2go`.

`snapd` (fix timestamp header in packaged manual-page)

`zzzeeksphinx` (existing RB patch forwarded and merged (with modifications))

Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:

#1063939 filed against `fop`.

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

9 February 2024

Abhijith PA: A new(kind of) phone

I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura . I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended the suport for this device. The maintainer might ve ended this port, I don t blame them. Its a non rewarding work. Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all was minor and I can live with that. Since there is no other official port for redmi 6 pro at the time, I settled on this buggy DotOS nightly build. The phone was doing fine all these(3+) years, but recently the camera started showing greyish dots on some areas to a point that I can t even properly take a photo. The outer body of the phone wasn t original, as it was a refurbished, thus the colors started to peel off and wasn t aesthetically pleasing. Then there is the Location detection issue which took a while to figure out location and battery drains fast. I recently started mapping public transportation routes, and the GPS issue was a problem for me. With all these problems combined, I decided to buy a new phone. But choosing a phone wasn t easy. There are far too many options in the market. However, one thing I was quite sure of was that I wouldn t be buying a brand new phone, but a refurbished one. It is my protest against all these phone manufacturers who have convinced the general public that a mobile phone s lifespan is only 2 years. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of players in the Indian market are not. Now I think about it, I haven t bought any brand new computing device, be it phones or laptops since 2015. All are refurbished devices except for an Orange pi. My Samsung R439 laptop which I already blogged about is still going strong. Back to picking phone. So I began by comparing LineageOS website to an online refurbished store to pick a phone that has an official lineage support then to reddit search for any reported hardware failures Google Pixel phones are well-known in the custom ROM community for ease of installation, good hardware and Android security releases. My above claims are from privacyguides.org and XDA-developers. I was convinced to go with this choice. But I have some one at home who is at the age of throwing things. So I didn t want to risk buying an expensive Pixel phone only to have it end up with a broken screen and edges. Perhaps I will consider buying a Pixel next time. After doing some more research and cross comparison I landed up on Redmi note 9. Codename: merlinx. Based on my previous experience I knew it is going to be a pain to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones and I was prepared for that but this time there was an extra hoop. The phone came with ROM MIUI version 13. A small search on XDA forums and reddit told unless we downgrade to 12 or so it is difficult to unlock bootloader for this device. And performing this wasn t exactly easy as we need tools like SP Flash etc. It took some time, but I ve completed the downgrade process. From there, the rest was cakewalk as everything was perfectly documented in LineageOS wiki. And ta-da, I have a phone running lineageOS. I been using it for some time and honestly I haven t come across any bug in my way of usage. One advice I will give to you if you are going to flash a custom ROM. There are plenty of videos about unlocking bootloader, installing ROMs in Youtube. Please REFRAIN from watching and experimenting it on your phone unless you figured a way to un brick your device first.

1 November 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

sqliteodbc: fix crash (also sent upstream privately)

swh-docs: add FAQs for Add Forge Now (1 2 3)

swh-web: improve forge contact mail (1 2)

devscripts: improve chdist, build-rdeps

duck: add indicator

userdir-ldap: TLS

Debian BTS usertags: fixed usertags for Java, archive admins, ports

Debian QA services: link cruft report

Debian wiki pages: AutoGeneratedFiles, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, Derivatives/Census/Zevenet, Firmware/Open, GPS, IRC, JelmerVernooij, Ports/loong64 (1 2), SSH, Teams (Debbugs/ArchitectureTags, Publicity/ReleasePointAnnouncements (1 2)), thermald

FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

notmuch wiki pages: frontends (1 2)

Issues

Features in lintian, util-linux

Enable feature in xwayland

Missing transitional package in golang-ginkgo

Broken symlinks in dateutils, libimage-magick-perl

Conffile removal needed in samba-common, ddcontrol

Python 3 porting needed for Debian carnivore

Missing git tags in DBD-ODBC

CPAN release needed for DBD-ODBC

SWH listers needed for hgweb, OSDN, Gitee, GitHub Enterprise, klaus, Phorge, Phabricator, Assembla

SWH listing problems for SourceForge (1 2)

Review

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved budgie-desktop cadabra2 education-desktop-cinnamon education-desktop-kde extundelete lfm yt-dlp

rejected freecell-solver-bin (Windows), weboob-qt (chess), task-marathi (random website), stockfish/edict (mobile), libnss3 (random logo), x11vnc (selfie), x11vnc (movie poster), sudoku-solver (Android), fonts-noto-color-emoji (too small)

Administration

Debian IRC: rescue obsolete/unused #debian-wiki channel

Debian servers: rescue data from an old DebConf server

Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SWH, golang-ginkgo, DBD-ODBC, sqliteodbc work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

25 August 2023

Ian Jackson: I cycled to all the villages in alphabetical order

This last weekend I completed a bike rides project I started during the first Covid lockdown in 2020: I ve cycled to every settlement (and radio observatory) within 20km of my house, in alphabetical order. Stir crazy In early 2020, during the first lockdown, I was going a bit stir crazy. Clare said you re going very strange, you have to go out and get some exercise . After a bit of discussion, we came up with this plan: I d visit all the local villages, in alphabetical order. Choosing the radius I decided that I would pick a round number of kilometers, as the crow flies, from my house. 20km seemed about right. 25km would have included Ely, which would have been nice, but it would have added a great many places, all of them quite distant. Software I wrote a short Rust program to process OSM data into a list of places to visit, and their distances and bearings. You can download a tarball of the alphabetical villages scanner. (I haven t published the git history because it has my house s GPS coordinates in it, and because I committed the output files from which that location can be derived.) The Rides I set off on my first ride, to Aldreth, on Sunday the 31st of May 2020. The final ride collected Yelling, on Saturday the 19th of August 2023. I did quite a few rides in June and July 2020 - more than one a week. (I d read the lockdown rules, and although some of the government messaging said you should stay near your house, that wasn t in the legislation. Of course I didn t go into any buildings or anything.) I m not much of a morning person, so I often set off after lunch. For the longer rides I would usually pack a picnic. Almost all of the rides I did just by myself. There were a handful where I had friends along: Dry Drayton, which I collected with Clare, at night. I held my bike up so the light shone at the village sign, so we could take a photo of it. Madingley, Melbourn and Meldreth, which was quite an expedition with my friend Ben. We went out as far as Royston and nearby Barley (both outside my radius and not on my list) mostly just so that my project would have visited Hertfordshire. The Hemingfords, where I had my friend Matthew along, and we had a very nice pub lunch. Girton and Wilburton, where I visited friends. Indeed, I stopped off in Wilburton on one or two other occasions. And, of course, Yelling, for which there were four of us, again with a nice lunch (in Eltisley). I had relatively little mechanical trouble. My worst ride for this was Exning: I got three punctures that day. Luckily the last one was close to home. I often would stop to take lots of photos en-route. My mum in particular appreciated all the pretty pictures. Rules I decided on these rules: I would cycle to each destination, in order, and it would count as collected if I rode both there and back. I allowed collecting multiple villages in the same outing, provided I did them in the right order. (And obviously I was allowed to pass through places out of order, without counting them.) I tried to get a picture of the village sign, where there was one. Failing that, I got a picture of something in the village with the village s name on it. I think the only one I didn t manage this for was Westley Bottom; I had to make do with the word Westley on some railway level crossing equipment. In Barway I had to make do with a planning application, stuck to a pole. I tried not to enter and leave a village by the same road, if possible. Edge cases I had to make some decisions: I decided that I would consider the project complete if I visited everywhere whose centre was within my radius. But the centre of a settlement is rather hard to define. I needed a hard criterion for my OpenStreetMap data mining: a place counted if there was any node, way or relation, with the relevant place tag, any part of which was within my ambit. That included some places that probably oughtn t to have counted, but, fine. I also decided that I wouldn t visit suburbs of Cambridge, separately from Cambridge itself. I don t consider them separate settlements, at least, not if they re conurbated with Cambridge. So that excluded Trumpington, for example. But I decided that Girton and Fen Ditton were (just) separable. Although the place where I consider Girton and Cambridge to nearly touch, is administratively well inside Girton, I chose to look at land use (on the ground, and in OSM data), rather than administrative boundaries. But I did visit both Histon and Impington, and all each of the Shelfords and Stapleford, as separate entries in my list. Mostly because otherwise I d have to decide whether to skip (say) Impington, or Histon. Whereas skipping suburbs of Cambridge in favour of Cambridge itself was an easy decision, and it also got rid of a bunch of what would have been quite short, boring, urban expeditions. I sorted all the Greats and Littles under G and L, rather than (say) Shelford, Great , which seemed like it would be cheating because then I would be able to do Shelford, Great and Shelford, Little in one go. Northstowe turned from mostly a building site into something that was arguably a settlement, during my project. It wasn t included in the output of my original data mining. Of course it s conurbated with Oakington - but happily, Northstowe inserts right before Oakington in the alphabetical list, so I decided to add it, visiting both the old and new in the same day. There are a bunch of other minor edge cases. Some villages have an outlying hamlet. Mostly I included these. There are some individual farms, which I generally didn t count. Some stats I visited 150 villages plus the Lords Bridge radio observatory. The project took 3 years and 3 months to complete. There were 96 rides, totalling about 4900km. So my mean distance was around 51km. The median distance per ride was a little higher, at around 52 km, and the median duration (including stoppages) was about 2h40. The total duration, if you add them all up, including stoppages, was about 275h, giving a mean speed including photo stops, lunches and all, of 18kph. The longest ride was 89.8km, collecting Scotland Farm, Shepreth, and Six Mile Bottom, so riding across the Cam valley. The shortest ride was 7.9km, collecting Cambridge (obviously); and I think that s the only one I did on my Brompton. The rest were all on my trusty Thorn Audax. My fastest ride (ranking by distance divided by time spent in motion) was to collect Haddenham, where I covered 46.3km in 1h39, giving an average speed in motion of 28.0kph. The most I collected in one day was 5 places: West Wickham, West Wratting, Westley Bottom, Westley Waterless, and Weston Colville. That was the day of the Wests. (There s only one East: East Hatley.) Map Here is a pretty picture of all of my tracklogs:

Edited 2023-08-25 01:32 BST to correct a slip.

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7 August 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in July 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 408 and rejected 40 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 412. Debian LTS This was my hundred-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded:

[DLA 3505-1] gst-plugins-good1.0 security update for one CVE
[DLA 3503-1] gst-plugins-bad1.0 security update for one CVE
[DLA 3504-1] gst-plugins-base1.0 security update for one CVE
[#1039026] the pu upload of cups was finally accepted
[#1039862] the pu upload of cpdb-libs was finally accepted

I also continued my work on ring and did some work on security-master. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties and took part in the LTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the sixtieth ELTS month.

[ELA-887-1] cups security update in Jessie and Stretch for on CVE
[ELA-898-1]gst-plugins-bad1.0 update in Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
[ELA-899-1]gst-plugins-base1.0 update in Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
[ELA-900-1]gst-plugins-good1.0 update in Jessie and Stretch for one CVE

Finally I found the problem with the openssl package. When starting to work on the package, it built fine without my patches. After applying some patches, the built suddenly failed, so I thought I did something wrong with the patches. At some point I found out that it weren t my patches but a certificate, that was used for testing, expired. It was valid for 10 years and just when I worked on the package it expired. Now I just have to find out how to replace it Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded new upstream version of packages, did a source upload for the transition or uploaded it to fix one or the other issue:

Other stuff This month I did uploads of new packages:

6 July 2023

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 221 and rejected 33 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 221. Yeah, Bookworm was released this month. Thanks a lot to everybody who was involved in doing this. Debian LTS This was my hundred-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded:

[DLA 3440-1] cups security update for one CVE (as the CVE was embargoed, most of the work was done in May but the upload happened in June)
[unstable] upload of cups 2.4.2-4 to fix CVE-2023-32324
[DLA 3461-1] libfastjson security update for one CVE
[DLA 3465-1] minidlna security update for one CVE
[DLA 3476-1] cups security update for one CVE
[unstable] upload of cups 2.4.2-5 to fix CVE-2023-34241
[#1039026] pu-bug for cups to fix CVE-2023-32324 and CVE-2023-34241 in Bookworm; upload was done as well
[#1039040] pu-bug for cups to fix CVE-2023-32324 and CVE-2023-34241 in Bullseye; upload was done as well

I also did some work on security-master to inject missing dependencies for some packages and processed NEW. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties and took part in the LTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty ninth ELTS month.

[ELA-860-1] cups security update in Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
[ELA-872-1] libfastjson security update in Stretch for one CVE
[ELA-887-1]cups security update in Jessie and Stretch for one CVE

I also made some progress with the openssl1.0 update. Last but not least I did some days on frontdesk duties. Debian Astro This month I uploaded some packages to fix one or the other issue:

This month I even uploaded a new package c-munipack, which is more or less the successor of munipack, and can be used for example to analyse light curves of variable stars.
Another new package is virtualgps, where the name says it all. Debian Printing This month I did a security upload of cpdb-libs to fix a CVE in Unstable, Bookworm and Bullseye.
This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Mobcom This month I could upload a new version of:

libsmpp34

Other stuff This month I restarted DOPOM (Debian Orphaned Package Of the Month) and adopted:

Hopefully this will result in a new upload of vdr-plugin-live. I would like to have this package for my personal VDR. I also did an upload of:

force-ip-protocol (to fix a nasty packaging bug)

1 July 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities June 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

thermal_daemon: fix thermal_monitor build, make power group configurable, cleanups

trurl: cleanups

yt-dlp: improve acast extractor

duck: add indicator

dpkg: avoid shell

Debian BTS usertags: fix release/port usertags

Debian QA services: more debugging, update hardcoding (1 2)

Debian package uploads: foxtrotgps, sptag (1 2 3)

Debian wiki pages: BookwormGdalPerl, ChrootOnAndroid, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, DebianOval, DesertIslandTest, DHCP_Server, DissidentTest, Exim, InstallingDebianOn/Olimex/Teres-I, InstructionSelection (1 2), PortsDocs/New, Ports (hurd-amd64, riscv64), ReleasePartyBookworm/Israel/Tel Aviv, SourcesList, StableUpdates, SuitesAndReposExtension, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Publicity/VersionRelease, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList, Webmaster/ReleaseCheckList), ThomasChung

Issues

Crash in binarycontrol.debian.net (sent on IRC)

Build failure in ddcci-dkms

Incorrect description in manpages-ro-dev

Obsolete conffile in gnome-applets-data

Feature in lintian

Review

Spam: reported 29 Debian mailing list posts

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved lsd stockfish x86dis

rejected libselinux1 (photo), stockfish (mobile app), php-bcmath (selfie), chromium-browser/binutils-alpha-linux-gnu (medical photo), weboob-qt (QR code)

Administration

Debian QA services: deploy changes

Debian IRC: updated #debian-live admin list

Debian mentors: investigate reason for missing package

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Initiate discussion about Debian OpenCL ICD virtual packages

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 June 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

gensim: cancel obsolete GitHub jobs

i2c-tools: fix links

notmuch-mutt: fix data loss, encoding

foxtrotgps: gpsd API bump

flower: drop bootstrap/celery branding

pass-otp: fix typos, links, errors, warnings, safety

git-imerge: fix tests, typo, lists of versions, distros

duck: indicators

Debian website: recommend pseudo-header for X-Debbugs-CC

Debian screenshots:

deleted pypy (just website)

Debian QA services: fix crash

Debian BTS: allow multiple X-Debbugs-CC lines, improve docs

Debian BTS usertags: fix some porting, release, DSA usertags

Debian package uploads: sptag

Debian wiki pages: accessibility-devel, Brasil/IRC, Firmware/Updates, InstallingDebianOn/Wandboard, InstructionSelection, PortsDocs/New, Ports/hurd-amd64, Ports/loong64, SIMDEverywhere, Teams/RustPackaging

FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

SIMDe: incorrect macros/definitions/names, GCC warnings

Review

Spam: reported 3 Debian bug reports and 22 Debian mailing list posts

Debian packages: sponsored trurl

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved 3d-ascii-viewer angelfish autokey-gtk convert-pgn crystal-facet-uml deborphan diodon gcc glewlwyd glob2 kdiskmark loook man-db nemo ntpdate ntpsec-ntpdate paperwork-gtk pdftk-java picom python2.7 python3-tk python-tk scite software-properties-gtk stockfish stress-ng sudoku-solver util-linux-extra wmweather x11-apps xchat youtubedl-gui

rejected pypy (website), fonts-atarismall (UI not just font), gtk-theme-config (photo), kamailio (diagram not interface), node-connect (bug report), laditools/debian-installer/weboob-qt (artwork), xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/ubuntustudio-menu (full desktop), freecell-solver-bin (mobile app), vorbis-tools (manual page), veroroute (macOS?), ttf-mscorefonts-installer (better existing screenshot), gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 (random mobile website), chromium-browser (random website), mixer.app (aspirational text?), stockfish/pulseaudio-utils (selfie)

Administration

Debian IRC: set topic on new #debian-sa channel

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SIMDe, gensim, sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

15 February 2023

Valhalla's Things: My experience with a PinePhone

I ve had and used¹ a PinePhone for quite some time now, and a shiny new blog sounds like a good time to do a review of my experience. TL;DL: I love it, but my use cases may not be very typical. While I ve had a mobile phone since an early time (my parents made me carry one for emergencies before it was usual for my peers) I ve never used a typical smartphone (android / iPhone / those other proprietary things) because I can t trust them not to be designed to work against me (data collection, ads, tricking users into micro payments, and other antipatterns of proprietary software design), and bringing them to sanity as most of the people I know do is too much effort for my tastes. Instead, as a phone I keep using an old nokia featurephone² which is reliable, only requires charging once a week, and can easily survive falling from hand height to the ground, even if thrown ³. And then I ve been carrying a variety of other devices to do other computer-like tasks; earlier it was just a laptop, or a netbook, a Pandora (all of which used a dongle to connect to mobile network internet) then I tried a phone with FirefoxOS (it could have been better) and now the PinePhone has taken their place, at least when I m not carrying a laptop anyway. So, the tasks I use the PinePhone for are mostly:

sending and receiving xmpp messages, with no need for notifications (when somebody needs to tell me something where urgency is required, they know to use the other phone, either with a call or an sms);
tethering an internet connection to the laptop;
reading djvu scans of old books while standing in a queue or something;
checking something on the internet when I m not close to a real computer (i.e. one with a keyboard and a big screen);
running a timer while heat-setting fabric paint with an iron (and reading a djvu book at the same time yes, this is a very specific task, but it has happened multiple times already :D );
running a calculator with unit conversions;
running the odd command line program;
taking pictures, especially those that I want to send soon (I often also carry a DSLR camera, but I tend to wait a few days before I download them from the card);
map related things.

3 and 5 work perfectly well, no issues there. 1, 2 and 4 usually work just fine, except for the fact that sometimes while the phone is suspended it forgets about being a phone, and needs to be restarted to turn the modem back on. It s not a big deal while using the phone, I just need to check before I try to use it after a few hours. For 1, I also had to take care to install dino-im from experimental, as up to now the features required to fit the interface in a mobile screen aren t available in the official release, but I believe that this has just been fixed. Somewhat related to 4, I ve also installed kiwix and the dumps of wiktionary and wikivoyage, but I haven t had a chance to travel much, so I m not really using it. For 6 I m quite happy with qalculate, the GUI version of qalc (which is what I use on my laptop), even if it has a few minor interface issues, and 7 of course works as well as it can, given the limitations of a small screen and virtual keyboard. 8 is, let us say, problematic. The camera on the PinePhone is peculiar, only works with a specific software, and even there the quality of the pictures is, well, low-fi, vintagey pictures are a look and that s a specific artistic choice, right? Thanks to the hard work of the megapixels maintainer the quality has improved a lot, and these days it is usable, but there are still limits (no webcam in the browser, no recording of videos). 9 is really bad. A few times I can remember getting a GPS fix. A few times in many months, and now and then I keep trying, to see if a miracle has happened, but usually I only get a vague position from wifi data (which isn t great, when walking through less densely populated areas). I ve seen another PinePhone running gpsd and getting data from an external GPS receiver via bluetooth, and if I really needed it I may seriously consider that solution. Also, the apps available in mobian aren t great either, even when compared to running tangogps on an OpenMoko with pre-downloaded maps (I mean! I don t think my expectations are too high!). I ve heard that PureMaps is quite good as a software, but a bit of a PITA to package for Debian, and I really hope that one day there will be a linux-first mobile device with good GPS hardware, so that people will be encouraged to fix the software side. Thankfully, I don t usually need GPS and navigation software; when I m driving into places I don t know I usually have a human navigator, and when walking into places I can do with just a static map (either printed on paper or on the PinePhone), maybe some pre-calculated route from the OSM website and looking at street names to find out where I am. Overall, for my use cases the PinePhone works just fine and is an useful addition to the things I always carry with me, and I don t feel the pressing need to get an android phone. I don t think it s ready as a daily driver for everybody, but I think that depending on one s needs it s worth asking around (I d recommend doing so on the fediverse with a #PinePhone and #mobian hashtag), as there is a non-zero chance that it may be a good fit for you.

which, if I m not mistaken, is often not implied by the fact of owning it :D
for very low values of feature: it doesn t have any kind of internet access, and there are only 3 games, one of which is snake.
don t ask.

30 December 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Non-fiction

In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I'll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut here include Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998) on the role of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) (a personal memoir on relating to how technology is increasingly fragmenting our attention), Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021) (a misleadingly named set of philosophic essays on feminism), Dana Heller et al.'s The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (2005), John Berger's mindbending Ways of Seeing (1972) and Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want (2006).

The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989) Paul Fussell Rather than describe the battles, weapons, geopolitics or big personalities of the two World Wars, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory & Wartime are focused instead on how the two wars have been remembered by their everyday participants. Drawing on the memoirs and memories of soldiers and civilians along with a brief comparison with the actual events that shaped them, Fussell's two books are a compassionate, insightful and moving piece of analysis. Fussell primarily sets himself against the admixture of nostalgia and trauma that obscures the origins and unimaginable experience of participating in these wars; two wars that were, in his view, a "perceptual and rhetorical scandal from which total recovery is unlikely." He takes particular aim at the dishonesty of hindsight:

For the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitised and romanticised almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. [And] in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war [seems] inaccessible.

The author does not engage in any of the customary rose-tinted view of war, yet he remains understanding and compassionate towards those who try to locate a reason within what was quite often senseless barbarism. If anything, his despondency and pessimism about the Second World War (the war that Fussell himself fought in) shines through quite acutely, and this is especially the case in what he chooses to quote from others:

"It was common [ ] throughout the [Okinawa] campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf."

It would take a rather heartless reader to fail to be sobered by this final simile, and an even colder one to view Fussell's citation of such an emotive anecdote to be manipulative. Still, stories and cruel ironies like this one infuse this often-angry book, but it is not without astute and shrewd analysis as well, especially on the many qualitative differences between the two conflicts that simply cannot be captured by facts and figures alone. For example:

A measure of the psychological distance of the Second [World] War from the First is the rarity, in 1914 1918, of drinking and drunkenness poems.

Indeed so. In fact, what makes Fussell's project so compelling and perhaps even unique is that he uses these non-quantitive measures to try and take stock of what happened. After all, this was a war conducted by humans, not the abstract school of statistics. And what is the value of a list of armaments destroyed by such-and-such a regiment when compared with truly consequential insights into both how the war affected, say, the psychology of postwar literature ("Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing."), the specific words adopted by combatants ("It is a truism of military propaganda that monosyllabic enemies are easier to despise than others") as well as the very grammar of interaction:

The Field Service Post Card [in WW1] has the honour of being the first widespread exemplary of that kind of document which uniquely characterises the modern world: the "Form". [And] as the first widely known example of dehumanised, automated communication, the post card popularised a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.

And this wouldn't be a book review without argument-ending observations that:

Indicative of the German wartime conception [of victory] would be Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans for the ultimate reconstruction of Berlin, which made no provision for a library.

Our myths about the two world wars possess an undisputed power, in part because they contain an essential truth the atrocities committed by Germany and its allies were not merely extreme or revolting, but their full dimensions (embodied in the Holocaust and the Holodomor) remain essentially inaccessible within our current ideological framework. Yet the two wars are better understood as an abyss in which we were all dragged into the depths of moral depravity, rather than a battle pitched by the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Fussell is one of the few observers that can truly accept and understand this truth and is still able to speak to us cogently on the topic from the vantage point of experience. The Second World War which looms so large in our contemporary understanding of the modern world (see below) may have been necessary and unavoidable, but Fussell convinces his reader that it was morally complicated "beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest," and that the only way to maintain a na ve belief in the myth that these wars were a Manichaean fight between good and evil is to overlook reality. There are many texts on the two World Wars that can either stir the intellect or move the emotions, but Fussell's two books do both. A uniquely perceptive and intelligent commentary; outstanding.

Longitude (1995) Dava Sobel Since Man first decided to sail the oceans, knowing one's location has always been critical. Yet doing so reliably used to be a serious problem if you didn't know where you were, you are far more likely to die and/or lose your valuable cargo. But whilst finding one's latitude (ie. your north south position) had effectively been solved by the beginning of the 17th century, finding one's (east west) longitude was far from trustworthy in comparison. This book first published in 1995 is therefore something of an anachronism. As in, we readily use the GPS facilities of our phones today without hesitation, so we find it difficult to imagine a reality in which knowing something fundamental like your own location is essentially unthinkable. It became clear in the 18th century, though, that in order to accurately determine one's longitude, what you actually needed was an accurate clock. In Longitude, therefore, we read of the remarkable story of John Harrison and his quest to create a timepiece that would not only keep time during a long sea voyage but would survive the rough ocean conditions as well. Self-educated and a carpenter by trade, Harrison made a number of important breakthroughs in keeping accurate time at sea, and Longitude describes his novel breakthroughs in a way that is both engaging and without talking down to the reader. Still, this book covers much more than that, including the development of accurate longitude going hand-in-hand with advancements in cartography as well as in scientific experiments to determine the speed of light: experiments that led to the formulation of quantum mechanics. It also outlines the work being done by Harrison's competitors. 'Competitors' is indeed the correct word here, as Parliament offered a huge prize to whoever could create such a device, and the ramifications of this tremendous financial incentive are an essential part of this story. For the most part, though, Longitude sticks to the story of Harrison and his evolving obsession with his creating the perfect timepiece. Indeed, one reason that Longitude is so resonant with readers is that many of the tropes of the archetypical 'English inventor' are embedded within Harrison himself. That is to say, here is a self-made man pushing against the establishment of the time, with his groundbreaking ideas being underappreciated in his life, or dishonestly purloined by his intellectual inferiors. At the level of allegory, then, I am minded to interpret this portrait of Harrison as a symbolic distillation of postwar Britain a nation acutely embarrassed by the loss of the Empire that is now repositioning itself as a resourceful but plucky underdog; a country that, with a combination of the brains of boffins and a healthy dose of charisma and PR, can still keep up with the big boys. (It is this same search for postimperial meaning I find in the fiction of John le Carr , and, far more famously, in the James Bond franchise.) All of this is left to the reader, of course, as what makes Longitute singularly compelling is its gentle manner and tone. Indeed, at times it was as if the doyenne of sci-fi Ursula K. LeGuin had a sideline in popular non-fiction. I realise it's a mark of critical distinction to downgrade the importance of popular science in favour of erudite academic texts, but Latitude is ample evidence that so-called 'pop' science need not be patronising or reductive at all.

Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court (1998) Edward Lazarus After the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that ended the Constitutional right to abortion conferred by Roe v Wade, I prioritised a few books in the queue about the judicial branch of the United States. One of these books was Closed Chambers, which attempts to assay, according to its subtitle, "The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court". This book is not merely simply a learned guide to the history and functioning of the Court (although it is completely creditable in this respect); it's actually an 'insider' view of the workings of the institution as Lazurus was a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun during the October term of 1988. Lazarus has therefore combined his experience as a clerk and his personal reflections (along with a substantial body of subsequent research) in order to communicate the collapse in comity between the Justices. Part of this book is therefore a pure history of the Court, detailing its important nineteenth-century judgements (such as Dred Scott which ruled that the Constitution did not consider Blacks to be citizens; and Plessy v. Ferguson which failed to find protection in the Constitution against racial segregation laws), as well as many twentieth-century cases that touch on the rather technical principle of substantive due process. Other layers of Lazurus' book are explicitly opinionated, however, and they capture the author's assessment of the Court's actions in the past and present [1998] day. Given the role in which he served at the Court, particular attention is given by Lazarus to the function of its clerks. These are revealed as being far more than the mere amanuenses they were hitherto believed to be. Indeed, the book is potentially unique in its the claim that the clerks have played a pivotal role in the deliberations, machinations and eventual rulings of the Court. By implication, then, the clerks have plaedy a crucial role in the internal controversies that surround many of the high-profile Supreme Court decisions decisions that, to the outsider at least, are presented as disinterested interpretations of Constitution of the United States. This is of especial importance given that, to Lazarus, "for all the attention we now pay to it, the Court remains shrouded in confusion and misunderstanding." Throughout his book, Lazarus complicates the commonplace view that the Court is divided into two simple right vs. left political factions, and instead documents an ever-evolving series of loosely held but strongly felt series of cabals, quid pro quo exchanges, outright equivocation and pure personal prejudices. (The age and concomitant illnesses of the Justices also appears to have a not insignificant effect on the Court's rulings as well.) In other words, Closed Chambers is not a book that will be read in a typical civics class in America, and the only time the book resorts to the customary breathless rhetoric about the US federal government is in its opening chapter:

The Court itself, a Greek-style temple commanding the crest of Capitol Hill, loomed above them in the dim light of the storm. Set atop a broad marble plaza and thirty-six steps, the Court stands in splendid isolation appropriate to its place at the pinnacle of the national judiciary, one of the three independent and "coequal" branches of American government. Once dubbed the Ivory Tower by architecture critics, the Court has a Corinthian colonnade and massive twenty-foot-high bronze doors that guard the single most powerful judicial institution in the Western world. Lights still shone in several offices to the right of the Court's entrance, and [ ]

Et cetera, et cetera. But, of course, this encomium to the inherent 'nobility' of the Supreme Court is quickly revealed to be a narrative foil, as Lazarus soon razes this dangerously na ve conception to the ground:

[The] institution is [now] broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange of their respective views or, for that matter, a meaningful explication or defense of their own views. It is of Justices who in many important cases resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions as they discard judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results. This is a Court so badly splintered, yet so intent on lawmaking, that shifting 5-4 majorities, or even mere pluralities, rewrite whole swaths of constitutional law on the authority of a single, often idiosyncratic vote. It is also a Court where Justices yield great and excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who in turn use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

Lazurus does not put forward a single, overarching thesis, but in the final chapters, he does suggest a potential future for the Court:

In the short run, the cure for what ails the Court lies solely with the Justices. It is their duty, under the shield of life tenure, to recognize the pathologies affecting their work and to restore the vitality of American constitutionalism. Ultimately, though, the long-term health of the Court depends on our own resolve on whom [we] select to join that institution.

Back in 1998, Lazurus might have had room for this qualified optimism. But from the vantage point of 2022, it appears that the "resolve" of the United States citizenry was not muscular enough to meet his challenge. After all, Lazurus was writing before Bush v. Gore in 2000, which arrogated to the judicial branch the ability to decide a presidential election; the disillusionment of Barack Obama's failure to nominate a replacement for Scalia; and many other missteps in the Court as well. All of which have now been compounded by the Trump administration's appointment of three Republican-friendly justices to the Court, including hypocritically appointing Justice Barrett a mere 38 days before the 2020 election. And, of course, the leaking and ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, the true extent of which has not been yet. Not of a bit of this is Lazarus' fault, of course, but the Court's recent decisions (as well as the liberal hagiographies of 'RBG') most perforce affect one's reading of the concluding chapters. The other slight defect of Closed Chambers is that, whilst it often implies the importance of the federal and state courts within the judiciary, it only briefly positions the Supreme Court's decisions in relation to what was happening in the House, Senate and White House at the time. This seems to be increasingly relevant as time goes on: after all, it seems fairly clear even to this Brit that relying on an activist Supreme Court to enact progressive laws must be interpreted as a failure of the legislative branch to overcome the perennial problems of the filibuster, culture wars and partisan bickering. Nevertheless, Lazarus' book is in equal parts ambitious, opinionated, scholarly and dare I admit it? wonderfully gossipy. By juxtaposing history, memoir, and analysis, Closed Chambers combines an exacting evaluation of the Court's decisions with a lively portrait of the intellectual and emotional intensity that has grown within the Supreme Court's pseudo-monastic environment all while it struggles with the most impactful legal issues of the day. This book is an excellent and well-written achievement that will likely never be repeated, and a must-read for anyone interested in this ever-increasingly important branch of the US government.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021) Adam Tooze The economic historian Adam Tooze has often been labelled as an unlikely celebrity, but in the fourteen years since the global financial crisis of 2008, a growing audience has been looking for answers about the various failures of the modern economy. Tooze, a professor of history at New York's Columbia University, has written much that is penetrative and thought-provoking on this topic, and as a result, he has generated something of a cult following amongst economists, historians and the online left. I actually read two Tooze books this year. The first, Crashed (2018), catalogues the scale of government intervention required to prop up global finance after the 2008 financial crisis, and it characterises the different ways that countries around the world failed to live up to the situation, such as doing far too little, or taking action far too late. The connections between the high-risk subprime loans, credit default swaps and the resulting liquidity crisis in the US in late 2008 is fairly well known today in part thanks to films such as Adam McKay's 2015 The Big Short and much improved economic literacy in media reportage. But Crashed makes the implicit claim that, whilst the specific and structural origins of the 2008 crisis are worth scrutinising in exacting detail, it is the reaction of states in the months and years after the crash that has been overlooked as a result. After all, this is a reaction that has not only shaped a new economic order, it has created one that does not fit any conventional idea about the way the world 'ought' to be run. Tooze connects the original American banking crisis to the (multiple) European debt crises with a larger crisis of liberalism. Indeed, Tooze somehow manages to cover all these topics and more, weaving in Trump, Brexit and Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the evolving role of China in the post-2008 economic order. Where Crashed focused on the constellation of consequences that followed the events of 2008, Shutdown is a clear and comprehensive account of the way the world responded to the economic impact of Covid-19. The figures are often jaw-dropping: soon after the disease spread around the world, 95% of the world's economies contracted simultaneously, and at one point, the global economy shrunk by approximately 20%. Tooze's keen and sobering analysis of what happened is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came out whilst the pandemic was still unfolding. In fact, this leads quickly to one of the book's few flaws: by being published so quickly, Shutdown prematurely over-praises China's 'zero Covid' policy, and these remarks will make a reader today squirm in their chair. Still, despite the regularity of these references (after all, mentioning China is very useful when one is directly comparing economic figures in early 2021, for examples), these are actually minor blemishes on the book's overall thesis. That is to say, Crashed is not merely a retelling of what happened in such-and-such a country during the pandemic; it offers in effect a prediction about what might be coming next. Whilst the economic responses to Covid averted what could easily have been another Great Depression (and thus showed it had learned some lessons from 2008), it had only done so by truly discarding the economic rule book. The by-product of inverting this set of written and unwritten conventions that have governed the world for the past 50 years, this 'Washington consensus' if you well, has yet to be fully felt. Of course, there are many parallels between these two books by Tooze. Both the liquidity crisis outlined in Crashed and the economic response to Covid in Shutdown exposed the fact that one of the central tenets of the modern economy ie. that financial markets can be trusted to regulate themselves was entirely untrue, and likely was false from the very beginning. And whilst Adam Tooze does not offer a singular piercing insight (conveying a sense of rigorous mastery instead), he may as well be asking whether we're simply going to lurch along from one crisis to the next, relying on the technocrats in power to fix problems when everything blows up again. The answer may very well be yes.

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021) Elizabeth D. Samet Elizabeth D. Samet's Looking for the Good War answers the following question what would be the result if you asked a professor of English to disentangle the complex mythology we have about WW2 in the context of the recent US exit of Afghanistan? Samet's book acts as a twenty-first-century update of a kind to Paul Fussell's two books (reviewed above), as well as a deeper meditation on the idea that each new war is seen through the lens of the previous one. Indeed, like The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Wartime (1989), Samet's book is a perceptive work of demystification, but whilst Fussell seems to have been inspired by his own traumatic war experience, Samet is not only informed by her teaching West Point military cadets but by the physical and ontological wars that have occurred during her own life as well. A more scholarly and dispassionate text is the result of Samet's relative distance from armed combat, but it doesn't mean Looking for the Good War lacks energy or inspiration. Samet shares John Adams' belief that no political project can entirely shed the innate corruptions of power and ambition and so it is crucial to analyse and re-analyse the role of WW2 in contemporary American life. She is surely correct that the Second World War has been universally elevated as a special, 'good' war. Even those with exceptionally giddy minds seem to treat WW2 as hallowed:

It is nevertheless telling that one of the few occasions to which Trump responded with any kind of restraint while he was in office was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

What is the source of this restraint, and what has nurtured its growth in the eight decades since WW2 began? Samet posits several reasons for this, including the fact that almost all of the media about the Second World War is not only suffused with symbolism and nostalgia but, less obviously, it has been made by people who have no experience of the events that they depict. Take Stephen Ambrose, author of Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers miniseries: "I was 10 years old when the war ended," Samet quotes of Ambrose. "I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper." If Looking for the Good War has a primary thesis, then, it is that childhood hero worship is no basis for a system of government, let alone a crusading foreign policy. There is a straight line (to quote this book's subtitle) from the "American Amnesia" that obscures the reality of war to the "Violent Pursuit of Happiness." Samet's book doesn't merely just provide a modern appendix to Fussell's two works, however, as it adds further layers and dimensions he overlooked. For example, Samet provides some excellent insight on the role of Western, gangster and superhero movies, and she is especially good when looking at noir films as a kind of kaleidoscopic response to the Second World War:

Noir is a world ruled by bad decisions but also by bad timing. Chance, which plays such a pivotal role in war, bleeds into this world, too.

Samet rightfully weaves the role of women into the narrative as well. Women in film noir are often celebrated as 'independent' and sassy, correctly reflecting their newly-found independence gained during WW2. But these 'liberated' roles are not exactly a ringing endorsement of this independence: the 'femme fatale' and the 'tart', etc., reflect a kind of conditional freedom permitted to women by a post-War culture which is still wedded to an outmoded honour culture. In effect, far from being novel and subversive, these roles for women actually underwrote the ambient cultural disapproval of women's presence in the workforce. Samet later connects this highly-conditional independence with the liberation of Afghan women, which:

is inarguably one of the more palatable outcomes of our invasion, and the protection of women's rights has been invoked on the right and the left as an argument for staying the course in Afghanistan. How easily consequence is becoming justification. How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as original objective.

Samet has ensured her book has a predominantly US angle as well, for she ends her book with a chapter on the pseudohistorical Lost Cause of the Civil War. The legacy of the Civil War is still visible in the physical phenomena of Confederate statues, but it also exists in deep-rooted racial injustice that has been shrouded in euphemism and other psychological devices for over 150 years. Samet believes that a key part of what drives the American mythology about the Second World War is the way in which it subconsciously cleanses the horrors of brother-on-brother murder that were seen in the Civil War. This is a book that is not only of interest to historians of the Second World War; it is a work for anyone who wishes to understand almost any American historical event, social issue, politician or movie that has appeared since the end of WW2. That is for better or worse everyone on earth.

15 August 2022

John Goerzen: The Joy of Easy Personal Radio: FRS, GMRS, and Motorola DLR/DTR

Most of us carry cell phones with us almost everywhere we go. So much so that we often forget not just the usefulness, but even the joy, of having our own radios. For instance:

When traveling to national parks or other wilderness areas, family and friends can keep in touch even where there is no cell coverage.
It is a lot faster to just push a button and start talking than it is to unlock a phone, open the phone app, select a person, wait for the call to connect, wait for the other person to answer, etc. I m heading back. OK. Boom, 5 seconds, done. A phone user wouldn t have even dialed in that time.
A whole group of people can be on the same channel.
You can often buy a radio for less than the monthly cost of a cell plan.

From my own experience, as a person and a family that enjoys visiting wilderness areas, having radio communication is great. I have also heard from others that they re also very useful on cruise ships (I ve never been on one so I can t attest to that). There is also a sheer satisfaction in not needing anybody else s infrastructure, not paying any sort of monthly fee, and setting up the radios ourselves.

How these services fit in This article is primarily about handheld radios that can be used by anybody. I laid out some of their advantages above. Before continuing, I should point out some of the other services you may consider:

Cell phones, obviously. Due to the impressive infrastructure you pay for each month (many towers in high locations), in areas of cell coverage, you have this ability to connect to so many other phones around the world. With radios like discussed here, your range will likely a few miles.

Amateur Radio has often been a decade or more ahead of what you see in these easy personal radio devices. You can unquestionably get amateur radio devices with many more features and better performance. However, generally speaking, each person that transmits on an amateur radio band must be licensed. Getting an amateur radio license isn t difficult, but it does involve passing a test and some time studying for the exam. So it isn t something you can count on random friends or family members being able to do. That said, I have resources on Getting Started With Amateur Radio and it s not as hard as you might think! There are also a lot of reasons to use amateur radio if you want to go down that path.

Satellite messengers such as the Garmin Inreach or Zoleo can send SMS-like messages across anywhere in the globe with a clear view of the sky. They also often have SOS features. While these are useful safety equipment, it can take many minutes for a message to be sent and received it s not like an interactive SMS conversation and there are places where local radios will have better signal. Notably, satellite messengers are almost useless indoors and can have trouble in areas without a clear view of the sky, such as dense forests, valleys, etc.

My earlier Roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities (distributed/mesh messengers) highlighted a number of other options as well, for text-only communication. For instance:

For very short-range service, Briar can form a mesh over Bluetooth from cell phones or over Tor, if Internet access is available.

Dedicated short message services Mesh Networks like Meshtastic or Beartooth have no voice capability, but share GPS locations and short text messages over their own local mesh. Generally they need to pair to a cell phone (even if that phone has no cell service) for most functionality.

Yggdrasil can do something similar over ad-hoc Wifi, but it is a lower-level protocol and you d need some sort of messaging to run atop it.

This article is primarily about the USA, though these concepts, if not the specific implementation, apply many other areas as well.

The landscape of easy personal radios The oldest personal radio service in the US is Citizens Band (CB). Because it uses a lower frequency band than others, handheld radios are larger, heavier, and less efficient. It is mostly used in vehicles or other installations where size isn t an issue. The FRS/GMRS services mostly share a set of frequencies. The Family Radio Service is unlicensed (you don t have to get a license to use it) and radios are plentiful and cheap. When you get a blister pack or little radios for maybe $50 for a pair or less, they re probably FRS. FRS was expanded by the FCC in 2017, and now most FRS channels can run up to 2 watts of power (with channels 8-14 still limited to 0.5W). FRS radios are pretty much always handheld. GMRS runs on mostly the same frequencies as FRS. GMRS lets you run up to 5W on some channels, up to 50W on others, and operate repeaters. GMRS also permits limited occasional digital data bursts; three manufacturers currently use this to exchange GPS data or text messages. To use GMRS, you must purchase a GMRS license; it costs $35 for a person and their immediate family and is good for 10 years. No exam is required. GMRS radios can transmit on FRS frequencies using the GMRS authorization. The extra power of GMRS gets you extra distance. While only the best handheld GMRS radios can put out 5W of power, some mobile (car) or home radios can put out the full 50W, and use more capable exterior antennas too. There is also the MURS band, which offers very few channels and also very few devices. It is not in wide use, probably for good reason. Finally, some radios use some other unlicensed bands. The Motorola DTR and DLR series I will talk about operate in the 900MHz ISM band. Regulations there limit them to a maximum power of 1W, but as you will see, due to some other optimizations, their range is often quite similar to a 5W GMRS handheld. All of these radios share something in common: your radio can either transmit, or receive, but not both simultaneously. They all have a PTT (push-to-talk) button that you push and hold while you are transmitting, and at all other times, they act as receivers. You ll learn that doubling is a thing where 2 or more people attempt to transmit at the same time. To listeners, the result is often garbled. To the transmitters, they may not even be aware they did it since, after all, they were transmitting. Usually it will be clear pretty quickly as people don t get responses or responses say it was garbled. Only the digital Motorola DLR/DTR series detects and prevents this situation.

FRS and GMRS radios As mentioned, the FRS/GMRS radios are generally the most popular, and quite inexpensive. Those that can emit 2W will have pretty decent range; 5W even better (assuming a decent antenna), though the 5W ones will require a GMRS license. For the most part, there isn t much that differentiates one FRS radio from another, or (with a few more exceptions) one GMRS handheld from another. Do not believe the manufacturers claims of 50 mile range or whatever; more on range below. FRS and GMRS radios use FM. GMRS radios are permitted to use a wider bandwidth than FRS radios, but in general, FRS and GMRS users can communicate with each other from any brand of radio to any other brand of radio, assuming they are using basic voice services. Some FRS and GMRS radios can receive the NOAA weather radio. That s nice for wilderness use. Nicer ones can monitor it for alert tones, even when you re tuned to a different channel. The very nicest on this as far as I know, only the Garmin Rino series will receive and process SAME codes to only trigger alerts for your specific location. GMRS (but not FRS) also permits 1-second digital data bursts at periodic intervals. There are now three radio series that take advantage of this: the Garmin Rino, the Motorola T800, and BTech GMRS-PRO. Garmin s radios are among the priciest of GMRS handhelds out there; the top-of-the-line Rino will set you back $650. The cheapest is $350, but does not contain a replaceable battery, which should be an instant rejection of a device like this. So, for $550, you can get the middle-of-the-road Rino. It features a sophisticated GPS system with Garmin trail maps and such, plus a 5W GMRS radio with GPS data sharing and a very limited (13-character) text messaging system. It does have a Bluetooth link to a cell phone, which can provide a link to trail maps and the like, and limited functionality for the radio. The Rino is also large and heavy (due to its large map-capable screen). Many consider it to be somewhat dated technology; for instance, other ways to have offline maps now exist (such as my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, which has those maps on a watch!). It is bulky enough to likely be left at home in many situations. The Motorola T800 doesn t have much to talk about compared to the other two. Both of those platforms are a number of years old. The newest entrant in this space, from budget radio maker Baofeng, is the BTech GMRS-PRO, which came out just a couple of weeks ago. Its screen, though lacking built-in maps, does still have a GPS digital link similar to Garmin s, and can show you a heading and distance to other GMRS-PRO users. It too is a 5W unit, and has a ton of advanced features that are rare in GMRS: ability to pair a Bluetooth headset to it directly (though the Garmin Rino supports Bluetooth, it doesn t support this), ability to use the phone app as a speaker/mic for the radio, longer text messages than the Garmin Rino, etc. The GMRS-PRO sold out within a few days of its announcement, and I am presently waiting for mine to arrive to review. At $140 and with a more modern radio implementation, for people that don t need the trail maps and the like, it makes a compelling alternative to Garmin for outdoor use. Garmin documents when GPS beacons are sent out: generally, when you begin a transmission, or when another radio asks for your position. I couldn t find similar documentation from Motorola or BTech, but I believe FCC regulations mean that the picture would be similar with them. In other words, none of these devices is continuously, automatically, transmitting position updates. However, you can request a position update from another radio. It should be noted that, while voice communication is compatible across FRS/GMRS, data communication is not. Garmin, Motorola, and BTech all have different data protocols that are incompatible with radios from other manufacturers. FRS/GMRS radios often advertise privacy codes. These do nothing to protect your privacy; see more under the privacy section below.

Motorola DLR and DTR series Although they can be used for similar purposes, and I do, these radios are unique from the others in this article in several ways:

Their sales and marketing is targeted at businesses rather than consumers

They use digital encoding of audio, rather than analog FM or AM

They use FHSS (Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum) rather than a set frequency

They operate on the 900MHz ISM band, rather than a 460MHz UHF band (or a lower band yet for MURS and CB)

The DLR series is quite small, smaller than many GMRS radios.

I don t have space to go into a lot of radio theory in this article, but I ll briefly expand on some of this. First, FHSS. A FHSS radio hops from frequency to frequency many times per second, following some preset hopping algorithm that is part of the radio. Although it complicates the radio design, it has some advantages; it tends to allow more users to share a band, and if one particular frequency has a conflict with something else, it will be for a brief fraction of a second and may not even be noticeable. Digital encoding generally increases the quality of the audio, and keeps the quality high even in degraded signal conditions where analog radios would experience static or a quieter voice. However, you also lose that sort of audible feedback that your signal is getting weak. When you get too far away, the digital signal drops off a cliff . Often, either you have a crystal-clear signal or you have no signal at all. Motorola s radios leverage these features to build a unique radio. Not only can you talk to a group, but you can select a particular person to talk to with a private conversation, and so forth. DTR radios can send text messages to each other (but only preset canned ones, not arbitrary ones). Channels are more like configurations; they can include various arbitrary groupings of radios. Deconfliction with other users is established via hopsets rather than frequencies; that is, the algorithm that it uses to hop from frequency to frequency. There is a 4-digit PIN in the DLR radios, and newer DTR radios, that makes privacy very easy to set up and maintain. As far as I am aware, no scanner can monitor DLR/DTR signals. Though they technically aren t encrypted, cracking a DLR/DTR conversation would require cracking Motorola s firmware, and the chances of this happening in your geographical proximity seem vanishingly small. I will write more below on comparing the range of these to GMRS radios, but in a nutshell, it compares well, despite the fact that the 900MHz band restrictions allow Motorola only 1W of power output with these radios. There are three current lines of Motorola DLR/DTR radios:

The Motorola DLR1020 and DLR1060 radios. These have no screen; the 1020 has two channels (configurations) while the 1060 supports 6. They are small and compact and great pocketable just work radios.

The Motorola DTR600 and DTR700 radios. These are larger, with a larger antenna (that should theoretically provide greater range) and have a small color screen. They support more channels and more features (eg, short messages, etc).

The Motorola Curve (aka DLR110). Compared to the DLR1060, it adds limited WiFi capabilities that are primarily useful in certain business environments. See this thread for more. These features are unlikely to be useful in the environments we re talking about here.

These radios are fairly expensive new, but DLRs can be readily found at around $60 on eBay. (DTRs for about $250) They are quite rugged. Be aware when purchasing that some radios sold on eBay may not include a correct battery and charger. (Not necessarily a problem; Motorola batteries are easy to find online, and as with any used battery, the life of a used one may not be great.) For more advanced configuration, the Motorola CPS cable works with both radios (plugs into the charging cradle) and is used with the programming software to configure them in more detail. The older Motorola DTR650, DTR550, and older radios are compatible with the newer DLR and DTR series, if you program the newer ones carefully. The older ones don t support PINs and have a less friendly way of providing privacy, but they do work also. However, for most, I think the newer ones will be friendlier; but if you find a deal on the older ones, hey, why not? This thread on the MyGMRS forums has tons of useful information on the DLR/DTR radios. Check it out for a lot more detail. One interesting feature of these radios is that they are aware if there are conflicting users on the channel, and even if anybody is hearing your transmission. If your transmission is not being heard by at least one radio, you will get an audible (and visual, on the DTR) indication that your transmission failed. One thing that pleasantly surprised me is just how tiny the Motorola DLR is. The whole thing with antenna is like a small candy bar, and thinner. My phone is slightly taller, much wider, and only a little thinner than the Motorola DLR. Seriously, it s more pocketable than most smartphones. The DTR is of a size more commonly associated with radios, though still on the smaller side. Some of the most low-power FRS radios might get down to that size, but to get equivolent range, you need a 5W GMRS unit, which will be much bulkier. Being targeted at business users, the DLR/DTR don t include NOAA weather radio or GPS.

Power These radios tend to be powered by:

NiMH rechargable battery packs

AA/AAA batteries

Lithium Ion batteries

Most of the cheap FRS/GMRS radios have a NiMH rechargable battery pack and a terrible charge controller that will tend to overcharge, and thus prematurely destroy, the NiMH packs. This has long ago happened in my GMRS radios, and now I use Eneloop NiMH AAs in them (charged separately by a proper charger). The BTech, Garmin, and Motorola DLR/DTR radios all use Li-Ion batteries. These have the advantage of being more efficient batteries, though you can t necessarily just swap in AAs in a pinch. Pay attention to your charging options; if you are backpacking, for instance, you may want something that can charge from solar-powered USB or battery banks. The Motorola DLR/DTR radios need to sit in a charging cradle, but the cradle is powered by a Micro USB cable. The BTech GMRS-PRO is charged via USB-C. I don t know about the Garmin Rino or others. Garmin offers an optional AA battery pack for the Rino. BTech doesn t (yet) for the GMRS-PRO, but they do for some other models, and have stated accessories for the GMRS-PRO are coming. I don t have information about the T800. This is not an option for the DLR/DTR.

Meshtastic I ll briefly mention Meshtastic. It uses a low-power LoRa system. It can t handle voice transmissions; only data. On its own, it can transmit and receive automatic GPS updates from other Meshtastic devices, which you can view on its small screen. It forms a mesh, so each node can relay messages for others. It is also the only unit in this roundup that uses true encryption, and its battery lasts about a week more than the a solid day you can expect out of the best of the others here. When paired with a cell phone, Meshtastic can also send and receive short text messages. Meshtastic uses much less power than even the cheapest of the FRS radios discussed here. It can still achieve respectable range because it uses LoRa, which can trade bandwidth for power or range. It can take it a second or two to transmit a 50-character text message. Still, the GMRS or Motorola radios discussed here will have more than double the point-to-point range of a Meshtastic device. And, if you intend to take advantage of the text messaging features, keep in mind that you must now take two electronic devices with you and maintain a charge for them both.

Privacy The privacy picture on these is interesting.

Cell phone privacy Cell phones are difficult for individuals to eavesdrop, but a sophisticated adversary probably could: or an unsophisticated adversary with any manner of malware. Privacy on modern smartphones is a huge area of trouble, and it is safe to say that data brokers and many apps probably know at least your location and contact list, if not also the content of your messages. Though end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal can certainly help. See Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances for more details.

GMRS privacy GMRS radios are unencrypted and public. Anyone in range with another GMRS radio, or a scanner, can listen to your conversations even if you have a privacy code set. The privacy code does not actually protect your privacy; rather, it keeps your radio from playing conversations from others using the same channel, for your convenience. However, note the in range limitation. An eavesdropper would generally need to be within a few miles of you.

Motorola DLR/DTR privacy As touched on above, while these also aren t encrypted, as far as I am aware, no tools exist to eavesdrop on DLR/DTR conversations. Change the PIN away from the default 0000, ideally to something that doesn t end in 0 (to pick a different hopset) and you have pretty decent privacy right there. Decent doesn t mean perfect; it is certainly possible that sophisticated adversaries or state agencies could decode DLR/DTR traffic, since it is unencrypted. As a practical matter, though, the lack of consumer equipment that can decode this makes it be, as I say, pretty decent .

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses strong AES encryption. But as messaging features require a paired phone, the privacy implications of a phone also apply here.

Range I tested my best 5W GMRS radios, as well as a Motorola DTR600 talking to a DLR1060. (I also tried two DLR1060s talking to each other; there was no change in rnage.) I took a radio with me in the car, and had another sitting on my table indoors. Those of you familiar with radios will probably recognize that being in a car and being indoors both attenuate (reduce the strength of) the signal significantly. I drove around in a part of Kansas with gentle rolling hills. Both the GMRS and the DLR/DTR had a range of about 2-3 miles. There were times when each was able to pull out a signal when the other was not. The DLR/DTR series was significantly better while the vehicle was in motion. In weaker signal conditions, the GMRS radios were susceptible to significant picket fencing (static caused by variation in the signal strength when passing things like trees), to the point of being inaudible or losing the signal entirely. The DLR/DTR remained perfectly clear there. I was able to find some spots where, while parked, the GMRS radios had a weak but audible signal but the DLR/DTR had none. However, in all those cases, the distance to GMRS dropping out as well was small. Basically, no radios penetrate the ground, and the valleys were a problem for them all. Differences may play out in other ways in other environments as well: for instance, dense urban environments, heavy woods, indoor buildings, etc. GMRS radios can be used with repeaters, or have a rooftop antenna mounted on a car, both of which could significantly extend range and both of which are rare. The DLR/DTR series are said to be exceptionally good at indoor environments; Motorola rates them for penetrating 20 floors, for instance. Reports on MyGMRS forums state that they are able to cover an entire cruise ship, while the metal and concrete in them poses a big problem for GMRS radios. Different outdoor landscapes may favor one or the other also. Some of the cheapest FRS radios max out at about 0.5W or even less. This is probably only a little better than yelling distance in many cases. A lot of manufacturers obscure transmit power and use outlandish claims of range instead; don t believe those. Find the power output. A 2W FRS transmitter will be more credible range-wise, and the 5W GMRS transmitter as I tested better yet. Note that even GMRS radios are restricted to 0.5W on channels 8-14. The Motorola DLR/DTR radio gets about the same range with 1W as a GMRS radio does with 5W. The lower power output allows the DLR to be much smaller and lighter than a 5W GMRS radio for similar performance.

Overall conclusions Of course, what you use may depend on your needs. I d generally say:

For basic use, the high quality, good range, reasonable used price, and very small size of the Motorola DLR would make it a good all-arounder. Give one to each person (or kid) for use at the mall or amusement park, take them with you to concerts and festivals, etc.

Between vehicles, the Motorola DLR/DTR have a clear range advantage over the GMRS radios for vehicles in motion, though the GPS features of the more advanced GMRS radios may be more useful here.

For wilderness hiking and the like, GMRS radios that have GPS, maps, and NOAA weather radio reception may prove compelling and worth the extra bulk. More flexible power options may also be useful.

Low-end FRS radios can be found very cheap; around $20-$30 new for the lowest end, though their low power output and questionable charging circuits may limit their utility where it really counts.

If you just can t move away from cell phones, try the Zoleo app, which can provide some radio-like features.

A satellite communicator is still good backup safety gear for the wilderness.

Postscript: A final plug for amateur radio My 10-year-old Kenwood TH-D71A already had features none of these others have. For instance, its support for APRS and ability to act as a digipeater for APRS means that TH-D71As can form an automatic mesh between them, each one repeating new GPS positions or text messages to the others. Traditional APRS doesn t perform well in weak signal situations; however, more modern digital systems like D-Star and DMR also support APRS over more modern codecs and provide all sorts of other advantages as well (though not FHSS). My conclusions above assume a person is not going to go the amateur radio route for whatever reason. If you can get those in your group to get their license the technician is all you need a whole world of excellent options opens to you.

Appendix: The Trisquare eXRS Prior to 2012, a small company named Trisquare made a FHSS radio they called the eXRS that operated on the 900MHz band like Motorola s DLR/DTR does. Trisquare aimed at consumers and their radios were cheaper than the Motorola DLR/DTR. However, that is where the similarities end. Trisquare had an analog voice transmission, even though it used FHSS. Also, there is a problem that can arise with FHSS systems: synchronization. The receiver must hop frequencies in exactly the same order at exactly the same time as the sender. Motorola has clearly done a lot of engineering around this, and I have never encountered a synchronization problem in my DLR/DTR testing, not even once. eXRS, on the other hand, had frequent synchronization problems, which manifested themselves in weak signal conditions and sometimes with doubling. When it would happen, everyone would have to be quiet for a minute or two to give all the radios a chance to timeout and reset to the start of the hop sequence. In addition, the eXRS hardware wasn t great, and was susceptible to hardware failure. There are some that still view eXRS as a legendary device and hoard them. You can still find them used on eBay. When eXRS came out in 2007, it was indeed nice technology for the day, ahead of its time in some ways. I used and loved the eXRS radios back then; powerful GMRS wasn t all that common. But compared to today s technology, eXRS has inferior range to both GMRS and Motorola DLR/DTR (from my recollection, about a third to half of what I get with today s GMRS and DLR/DTR), is prone to finicky synchronization issues when signals are weak, and isn t made very robustly. I therefore don t recommend the eBay eXRS units. Don t assume that the eXRS weaknesses extend to Motorola DLR/DTR. The DLR/DTR radios are done well and don t suffer from the same problems. Note: This article has a long-term home on my website, where it may be updated from time to time.

12 August 2022

Guido G nther: On a road to Prizren with a Free Software Phone

Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren't and there shouldn't be. After two online versions Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren. When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation, and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can't we have that information on the Phone Shell's lockscreen? This was a good opportunity to see if the upcoming plugin infrastructure for the lock screen (initially meant to allow for a plugin to show upcoming events) was flexible enough, so I used some leisure time on the train to poke at this and just before I reached Vienna I was able to use it for the first time. It was the very last check of that ticket, it also was a bit of cheating since I didn't present the ticket on the phone itself but from phosh (the phones graphical shell) running on my laptop but still. PDF barcode on phosh's lockscreen

This was possible since phosh is written in GTK and so I could just leverage evince's EvView. Unfortunately the hotel check in didn't want to see any documents . For the next day I moved the code over to the Librem 5 and (being a bit nervous as the queue to get on the bus was quite long) could happily check into the Flixbus by presenting the barcode to the barcode reader via the Librem 5's lockscreen. When switching to the bus to Prizren I didn't get to use that feature again as we bought the tickets at a counter but we got a nice krem banana after entering the bus - they're not filled with jelly, but krem - a real Kosovo must eat!). Although it was a rather long trip we had frequent breaks and I'd certainly take the same route again. Here's a photo of Prizren taken on the Librem 5 without any additional postprocessing: Prizren

What about seeing the conference schedule on the phone? Confy(a conferences schedule viewer using GTK and libhandy) to the rescue: Confy with Debconf's schedule

Since Debian's confy maintainer was around too, confy saw a bunch of improvements over the conference. For getting around Puremaps(an application to display maps and show routing instructions) was very helpful, here geolocating me in Prizren via GPS:

Puremaps currently isn't packaged in Debian but there's work onging to fix that (I used the flatpak for the moment). We got ourselves sim cards for the local phone network. For some reason mine wouldn't work (other sim cards from the same operator worked in my phone but this one just wouldn't). So we went to the sim card shop and the guy there was perfectly able to operate the Librem 5 without further explanation (including making calls, sending USSD codes to query balance, ). The sim card problem turned out to be a problem on the operator side and after a couple of days they got it working. We had nice, sunny weather about all the time. That made me switch between high contrast mode (to read things in bright sunlight) and normal mode (e.g. in conference rooms) on the phone quite often. Thankfully we have a ambient light sensor in the phone so we can make that automatic. Phosh in HighContrast

See here for a video. Jathan kicked off a DebianOnMobile sprint during the conference where we were able to improve several aspects of mobile support in Debian and on Friday I had the chance to give a talk about the state of Debian on smartphones. pdf-presenter-console is a great tool for this as it can display the current slide together with additional notes. I needed some hacks to make it fit the phone screen but hopefully we figure out a way to have this by default. Debconf talk

I had two great weeks in Prizren. Many thanks to the organizers of Debconf 22 - I really enjoyed the conference.

31 July 2022

Joachim Breitner: The Via Alpina red trail through Slovenia

This July my girlfriend and I hiked the Slovenian part of the Red Trail of the Via Alpina, from the edge of the Julian Alps to Trieste, and I d like to share some observations and tips that we might have found useful before our trip.

Getting there As we traveled with complete camping gear and wanted to stay in our tent, we avoided the high alpine parts of the trail and started just where the trail came down from the Alps and entered the Karst. A great way to get there is to take the night train from Zurich or Munich towards Ljubljana, get off at Jesenice, have breakfast, take the local train to Podbrdo and you can start your tour at 9:15am. From there you can reach the trail at Pedrovo Brdo within 1 h.

Finding the way We did not use any paper maps, and instead relied on the OpenStreetMap data, which is very good, as well as the official(?) GPX tracks on Komoot, which are linked from the official route descriptions. We used OsmAnd. In general, trails are generally very well marked (red circle with white center, and frequent signs), but the signs rarely tell you which way the Via Alpina goes, so the GPS was needed. Sometimes the OpenStreetMap trail and the Komoot trail disagreed on short segments. We sometimes followed one and other times the other.

Variants We diverged from the trail in a few places:

We did not care too much about the horses in Lipica and at least on the map it looked like a longish boringish and sun-exposed detour, so we cut the loop and hiked from Prelo e pri Lokvi up onto the peak of the Veliko Gradi e (which unfortunately is too overgrown to provide a good view).

When we finally reached the top of Mali Kras and had a view across the bay of Trieste, it seemed silly to walk to down to Dolina, and instead we followed the ridge through Socerb, essentially the Alpe Adria Trail.

Not really a variant, but after arriving in Muggia, if one has to go to Trieste, the ferry is a probably nicer way to finish a trek than the bus.

Pitching a tent We used our tent almost every night, only in Idrija we got a room (and a shower ). It was not trivial to find good camp spots, because most of the trail is on hills with slopes, and the flat spots tend to have housed built on them, but certainly possible. Sometimes we hid in the forest, other times we found nice small and freshly mowed meadows within the forest.

Water Since this is Karst land, there is very little in terms of streams or lakes along the way, which is a pity. The Idrijca river right south of Idrija was very tempting to take a plunge. Unfortunately we passed there early in the day and we wanted to cover some ground first, so we refrained. As for drinking water, we used the taps at the bathrooms of the various touristic sites, a few (but rare) public fountains, and finally resorted to just ringing random doorbells and asking for water, which always worked.

Paths A few stages lead you through very pleasant narrow forest paths with a sight, but not all. On some days you find yourself plodding along wide graveled or even paved forest roads, though.

Landscape and sights The view from Nanos is amazing and, with this high peak jutting out over a wide plain, rather unique. It may seem odd that the trail goes up and down that mountain on the same day when it could go around, but it is certainly worth it. The Karst is mostly a cultivated landscape, with lots of forestry. It is very hilly and green, which is pretty, but some might miss some craggedness. It s not the high alps, after all, but at least they are in sight half the time. But the upside is that there are few sights along the way that are worth visiting, in particular the the Franja Partisan Hospital hidden in a very narrow gorge, the Predjama Castle and the kocjan Caves

27 April 2022

Russell Coker: PIN for Login

Windows 10 added a new PIN login method, which is an optional login method instead of an Internet based password through Microsoft or a Domain password through Active Directory. Here is a web page explaining some of the technology (don t watch the YouTube video) [1]. There are three issues here, whether a PIN is any good in concept, whether the specifics of how it works are any good, and whether we can copy any useful ideas for Linux. Is a PIN Any Good? A PIN in concept is a shorter password. I think that less secure methods of screen unlocking (fingerprint, face unlock, and a PIN) can be reasonably used in less hostile environments. For example if you go to the bathroom or to get a drink in a relatively secure environment like a typical home or office you don t need to enter a long password afterwards. Having a short password that works for short time periods of screen locking and a long password for longer times could be a viable option. It could also be an option to allow short passwords when the device is in a certain area (determined by GPS or Wifi connection). Android devices have in the past had options to disable passwords when at home. Is the Windows 10 PIN Any Good? The Windows 10 PIN is based on TPM security which can provide real benefits, but this is more of a failure of Windows local passwords in not using the TPM than a benefit for the PIN. When you login to a Windows 10 system you will be given a choice of PIN or the configured password (local password or AD password). As a general rule providing a user a choice of ways to login is bad for security as an attacker can use whichever option is least secure. The configuration options for Windows 10 allow either group policy in AD or the registry to determine whether PIN login is allowed but doesn t have any control over when the PIN can be used which seems like a major limitation to me. The claim that the PIN is more secure than a password would only make sense if it was a viable option to disable the local password or AD domain password and only use the PIN. That s unreasonably difficult for home users and usually impossible for people on machines with corporate management. Ideas For Linux I think it would be good to have separate options for short term and long term screen locks. This could be implemented by having a screen locking program use two different PAM configurations for unlocking after short term and long term lock periods. Having local passwords based on the TPM might be useful. But if you have the root filesystem encrypted via the TPM using systemd-cryptoenroll it probably doesn t gain you a lot. One benefit of the TPM is limiting the number of incorrect attempts at guessing the password in hardware, the default is allowing 32 wrong attempts and then one every 10 minutes. Trying to do that in software would allow 32 guesses and then a hardware reset which could average at something like 32 guesses per minute instead of 32 guesses per 320 minutes. Maybe something like fail2ban could help with this (a similar algorithm but for password authentication guesses instead of network access). Having a local login method to use when there is no Internet access and network authentication can t work could be useful. But if the local login method is easier then an attacker could disrupt Internet access to force a less secure login method. Is there a good federated authentication system for Linux? Something to provide comparable functionality to AD but with distributed operation as a possibility?

[1] https://tinyurl.com/yygf9ooo

23 January 2022

Antoine Beaupr : Switching from OpenNTPd to Chrony

A friend recently reminded me of the existence of chrony, a "versatile implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP)". The excellent introduction is worth quoting in full:

It can synchronise the system clock with NTP servers, reference clocks (e.g. GPS receiver), and manual input using wristwatch and keyboard. It can also operate as an NTPv4 (RFC 5905) server and peer to provide a time service to other computers in the network. It is designed to perform well in a wide range of conditions, including intermittent network connections, heavily congested networks, changing temperatures (ordinary computer clocks are sensitive to temperature), and systems that do not run continuosly, or run on a virtual machine. Typical accuracy between two machines synchronised over the Internet is within a few milliseconds; on a LAN, accuracy is typically in tens of microseconds. With hardware timestamping, or a hardware reference clock, sub-microsecond accuracy may be possible.

Now that's already great documentation right there. What it is, why it's good, and what to expect from it. I want more. They have a very handy comparison table between chrony, ntp and openntpd.

My problem with OpenNTPd Following concerns surrounding the security (and complexity) of the venerable ntp program, I have, a long time ago, switched to using openntpd on all my computers. I hadn't thought about it until I recently noticed a lot of noise on one of my servers:

jan 18 10:09:49 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.604366s
jan 18 10:08:18 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.577608s
jan 18 10:05:02 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.574683s
jan 18 10:04:00 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.573240s
jan 18 10:02:26 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.569592s

You read that right, openntpd was constantly rewinding the clock, sometimes in less than two minutes. The above log was taken while doing diagnostics, looking at the last 30 minutes of logs. So, on average, one 1.5 seconds rewind per 6 minutes! That might be due to a dying real time clock (RTC) or some other hardware problem. I know for a fact that the CMOS battery on that computer (curie) died and I wasn't able to replace it (!). So that's partly garbage-in, garbage-out here. But still, I was curious to see how chrony would behave... (Spoiler: much better.) But I also had trouble on another workstation, that one a much more recent machine (angela). First, it seems OpenNTPd would just fail at boot time:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo systemctl status openntpd
  openntpd.service - OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/openntpd.service; enabled; vendor pres>
     Active: inactive (dead) since Sun 2022-01-23 09:54:03 EST; 6h ago
       Docs: man:openntpd(8)
    Process: 3291 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/ntpd -n $DAEMON_OPTS (code=exited, sta>
    Process: 3294 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ntpd $DAEMON_OPTS (code=exited, status=0/>
   Main PID: 3298 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 34ms
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: Starting OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol...
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3291]: configuration OK
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3297]: ntp engine ready
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3297]: ntp: recvfrom: Permission denied
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3294]: Terminating
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: Started OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol.
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: openntpd.service: Succeeded.

After a restart, somehow it worked, but it took a long time to sync the clock. At first, it would just not consider any peer at all:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo ntpctl -s all
0/20 peers valid, clock unsynced
peer
   wt tl st  next  poll          offset       delay      jitter
159.203.8.72 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    6s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
138.197.135.239 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    6s    7s             ---- peer not valid ----
216.197.156.83 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    2s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
142.114.187.107 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
216.6.2.70 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    2s    8s             ---- peer not valid ----
207.34.49.172 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    0s    5s             ---- peer not valid ----
198.27.76.102 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    5s             ---- peer not valid ----
158.69.254.196 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
149.56.121.16 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
162.159.200.123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
206.108.0.131 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    6s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
205.206.70.40 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    8s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2001:678:8::123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2606:4700:f1::1 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    2s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
2607:5300:205:200::1991 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2607:5300:201:3100::345c from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  4    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
209.115.181.110 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
205.206.70.42 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    0s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
68.69.221.61 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    2s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
162.159.200.1 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    4s    7s             ---- peer not valid ----

Then it would accept them, but still wouldn't sync the clock:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo ntpctl -s all
20/20 peers valid, clock unsynced
peer
   wt tl st  next  poll          offset       delay      jitter
159.203.8.72 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  8  2    5s    6s         0.672ms    13.507ms     0.442ms
138.197.135.239 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    4s    8s         1.260ms    13.388ms     0.494ms
216.197.156.83 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  1    3s    5s        -0.390ms    47.641ms     1.537ms
142.114.187.107 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    1s    6s        -0.573ms    15.012ms     1.845ms
216.6.2.70 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    3s    8s        -0.178ms    21.691ms     1.807ms
207.34.49.172 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    4s    8s        -5.742ms    70.040ms     1.656ms
198.27.76.102 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    0s    7s         0.170ms    21.035ms     1.914ms
158.69.254.196 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    5s    8s        -2.626ms    20.862ms     2.032ms
149.56.121.16 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    6s    8s         0.123ms    20.758ms     2.248ms
162.159.200.123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  8  3    4s    5s         2.043ms    14.138ms     1.675ms
206.108.0.131 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  1    0s    7s        -0.027ms    14.189ms     2.206ms
205.206.70.40 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    1s    5s        -1.777ms    53.459ms     1.865ms
2001:678:8::123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  2    1s    8s         0.195ms    14.572ms     2.624ms
2606:4700:f1::1 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    6s    9s         2.068ms    14.102ms     1.767ms
2607:5300:205:200::1991 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  2    4s    9s         0.254ms    21.471ms     2.120ms
2607:5300:201:3100::345c from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  4    5s    9s        -1.706ms    21.030ms     1.849ms
209.115.181.110 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    0s    7s         8.907ms    75.070ms     2.095ms
205.206.70.42 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    6s    9s        -1.729ms    53.823ms     2.193ms
68.69.221.61 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  1    1s    7s        -1.265ms    46.355ms     4.171ms
162.159.200.1 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    4s    8s         1.732ms    35.792ms     2.228ms

It took a solid five minutes to sync the clock, even though the peers were considered valid within a few seconds:

jan 23 15:58:41 angela systemd[1]: Started OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol.
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 142.114.187.107 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 198.27.76.102 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 207.34.49.172 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 209.115.181.110 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 159.203.8.72 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 138.197.135.239 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 162.159.200.123 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2607:5300:201:3100::345c now valid
jan 23 15:59:00 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2606:4700:f1::1 now valid
jan 23 15:59:00 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 158.69.254.196 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 216.6.2.70 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 68.69.221.61 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 205.206.70.40 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 205.206.70.42 now valid
jan 23 15:59:02 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 162.159.200.1 now valid
jan 23 15:59:04 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 216.197.156.83 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 206.108.0.131 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2001:678:8::123 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 149.56.121.16 now valid
jan 23 15:59:07 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2607:5300:205:200::1991 now valid
jan 23 16:03:47 angela ntpd[84086]: clock is now synced

That seems kind of odd. It was also frustrating to have very little information from ntpctl about the state of the daemon. I understand it's designed to be minimal, but it could inform me on his known offset, for example. It does tell me about the offset with the different peers, but not as clearly as one would expect. It's also unclear how it disciplines the RTC at all.

Compared to chrony Now compare with chrony:

jan 23 16:07:16 angela systemd[1]: Starting chrony, an NTP client/server...
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: chronyd version 4.0 starting (+CMDMON +NTP +REFCLOCK +RTC +PRIVDROP +SCFILTER +SIGND +ASYNCDNS +NTS +SECHASH +IPV6 -DEBUG)
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Initial frequency 3.814 ppm
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Using right/UTC timezone to obtain leap second data
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Loaded seccomp filter
jan 23 16:07:16 angela systemd[1]: Started chrony, an NTP client/server.
jan 23 16:07:21 angela chronyd[87765]: Selected source 206.108.0.131 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org)
jan 23 16:07:21 angela chronyd[87765]: System clock TAI offset set to 37 seconds

First, you'll notice there's none of that "clock synced" nonsense, it picks a source, and then... it's just done. Because the clock on this computer is not drifting that much, and openntpd had (presumably) just sync'd it anyways. And indeed, if we look at detailed stats from the powerful chronyc client:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo chronyc tracking
Reference ID    : CE6C0083 (ntp1.torix.ca)
Stratum         : 2
Ref time (UTC)  : Sun Jan 23 21:07:21 2022
System time     : 0.000000311 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset     : +0.000807989 seconds
RMS offset      : 0.000807989 seconds
Frequency       : 3.814 ppm fast
Residual freq   : -24.434 ppm
Skew            : 1000000.000 ppm
Root delay      : 0.013200894 seconds
Root dispersion : 65.357254028 seconds
Update interval : 1.4 seconds
Leap status     : Normal

We see that we are nanoseconds away from NTP time. That was ran very quickly after starting the server (literally in the same second as chrony picked a source), so stats are a bit weird (e.g. the Skew is huge). After a minute or two, it looks more reasonable:

Reference ID    : CE6C0083 (ntp1.torix.ca)
Stratum         : 2
Ref time (UTC)  : Sun Jan 23 21:09:32 2022
System time     : 0.000487002 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset     : -0.000332960 seconds
RMS offset      : 0.000751204 seconds
Frequency       : 3.536 ppm fast
Residual freq   : +0.016 ppm
Skew            : 3.707 ppm
Root delay      : 0.013363549 seconds
Root dispersion : 0.000324015 seconds
Update interval : 65.0 seconds
Leap status     : Normal

Now it's learning how good or bad the RTC clock is ("Frequency"), and is smoothly adjusting the System time to follow the average offset (RMS offset, more or less). You'll also notice the Update interval has risen, and will keep expanding as chrony learns more about the internal clock, so it doesn't need to constantly poll the NTP servers to sync the clock. In the above, we're 487 micro seconds (less than a milisecond!) away from NTP time. (People interested in the explanation of every single one of those fields can read the excellent chronyc manpage. That thing made me want to nerd out on NTP again!) On the machine with the bad clock, chrony also did a 1.5 second adjustment, but just once, at startup:

jan 18 11:54:33 curie chronyd[2148399]: Selected source 206.108.0.133 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org) 
jan 18 11:54:33 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock wrong by -1.606546 seconds 
jan 18 11:54:31 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock was stepped by -1.606546 seconds 
jan 18 11:54:31 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock TAI offset set to 37 seconds

Then it would still struggle to keep the clock in sync, but not as badly as openntpd. Here's the offset a few minutes after that above startup:

System time     : 0.000375352 seconds slow of NTP time

And again a few seconds later:

System time     : 0.001793046 seconds slow of NTP time

I don't currently have access to that machine, and will update this post with the latest status, but so far I've had a very good experience with chrony on that machine, which is a testament to its resilience, and it also just works on my other machines as well.

Extras On top of "just working" (as demonstrated above), I feel that `chrony`'s feature set is so much superior... Here's an excerpt of the extras in chrony, taken from the comparison table:

source frequency tracking

source state restore from file

temperature compensation

ready for next NTP era (year 2036)

replace unreachable / falseticker servers

aware of jitter

RTC drift tracking

RTC trimming

Restore time from file w/o RTC

leap seconds correction, in slew mode

drops root privileges

I even understand some of that stuff. I think. So kudos to the `chrony` folks, I'm switching.

Caveats One thing to keep in mind in the above, however is that it's quite possible chrony does as bad of a job as openntpd on that old machine, and just doesn't tell me about it. For example, here's another log sample from another server (marcos):

jan 23 11:13:25 marcos ntpd[1976694]: adjusting clock frequency by 0.451035 to -16.420273ppm

I get those basically every day, which seems to show that it's at least trying to keep track of the hardware clock. In other words, it's quite possible I have no idea what I'm talking about and you definitely need to take this article with a grain of salt. I'm not an NTP expert. Update: I should also mentioned that I haven't evaluated systemd-timesyncd, for a few reasons:

I have enough things running under systemd
I wasn't aware of it when I started writing this
I couldn't find good documentation on it... later I found the above manpage and of course the Arch Wiki but that is very minimal
therefore I can't tell how it compares with chrony or (open)ntpd, so I don't see an enticing reason to switch

It has a few things going for it though:

it's likely shipped with your distribution already
it drops privileges (possibly like chrony, unclear if it also has seccomp filters)
it's minimalist: it only does SNTP so not the server side
the status command is good enough that you can tell the clock frequency, precision, and so on (especially when compared to openntpd's ntpctl)

So I'm reserving judgement over it, but I'd certainly note that I'm always a little weary in trusting systemd daemons with the network, and would prefer to keep that attack surface to a minimum. Diversity is a good thing, in general, so I'll keep chrony for now. It would certainly nice to see it added to chrony's comparison table.

Switching to chrony Because the default configuration in chrony (at least as shipped in Debian) is sane (good default peers, no open network by default), installing it is as simple as:

apt install chrony

And because it somehow conflicts with openntpd, that also takes care of removing that cruft as well.

Update: Debian defaults So it seems like I managed to write this entire blog post without putting it in relation with the original reason I had to think about this in the first place, which is odd and should be corrected. This conversation came about on an IRC channel that mentioned that the ntp package (and upstream) is in bad shape in Debian. In that discussion, chrony and ntpsec were discussed as possible replacements, but when we had the discussion on chat, I mentioned I was using openntpd, and promptly realized I was actually unhappy with it. A friend suggested chrony, I tried it, and it worked amazingly, I switched, wrote this blog post, end of story. Except today (2022-02-07, two weeks later), I actually read that thread and realized that something happened in Debian I wasn't actually aware of. In bookworm, `systemd-timesyncd` was not only shipped, but it was installed by default, as it was marked as a hard dependency of `systemd`. That was "fixed" in `systemd-247.9-2` (see bug 986651), but only by making the dependency a `Recommends` and marking it as `Priority: important`. So in effect, `systemd-timesyncd` became the default NTP daemon in Debian in bookworm, which I find somewhat surprising. `timesyncd` has many things going for it (as mentioned above), but I do find it a bit annoying that `systemd` is replacing all those utilities in such a way. I also wonder what is going to happen on upgrades. This is all a little frustrating too because there is no good comparison between the other NTP daemons and `timesyncd` anywhere. The chrony comparison table doesn't mention it, and an audit by the Core Infrastructure Initiative from 2017 doesn't mention it either, even though timesyncd was announced in 2014. (Same with this blog post from Facebook.)

3 January 2022

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in December 2021

FTP master This month I accepted 412 and rejected 44 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 423. Debian LTS This was my ninetieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:

[DLA 2846-1] raptor2 security update for one CVE
[DLA 2845-1] libsamplerate security update for one CVE
[DLA 2859-1] zziplib security update for one CVE
[DLA 2858-1] libzip security update for one CVE
[DLA 2869-1] xorg-server security update for three CVEs
[#1002912] for graphicsmagick in Buster
[debdiff] for sphinxearch/buster to maintainer and sec team
[debdiff] for zziplib/buster to maintainer
[debdiff] for zziplib/bullseye to maintainer
[debdiff] for raptor2/bullseye to maintainer

I also started to work on libarchive Further I worked on packages in NEW on security-master. In order to faster process such packages, I added a notification when work arrived there. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the forty-second ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

ELA-527-1 for libsamplerate
ELA-528-1 for raptor2
ELA-529-1 for ufraw
ELA-532-1 for zziplib
ELA-534-1 for xorg-server

Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Astro Related to my previous article about fun with telescopes I uploaded new versions or did source uploads for:

Besides the indi-stuff I also uploaded

Other stuff I celebrated christmas :-).

1 September 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities August 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

zxing-cpp: use system deps, fix Python tests

git-remote-hg: gitignore

hexedit: add test

libpst: fix header detection

webdl: fix SBS video params

libusbgx: fix alignment

tracegraph: API porting

pyemd: cleanup code, packaging

pytest-rerunfailures: cleanup code, build, packaging

librecaptcha: cleanup Python packaging, links

check-all-the-things: update MIME types, command verbosity (1 2), TODO items (1 2 3)

devscripts: multiple packages for grep-excuses --wipnity

debhelper: typo, cmake ctest argument order

Debian website: sync langs

Debian /updates to -security transition: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Debian release info hardcoding: 1 2

Debian QA services: cleanup

Debian package uploads: libpst, foxtrotgps, sptag (1 2 3), pytest-rerunfailures, git-remote-hg (1 2), librecaptcha

Debian wiki pages: 900000thBugContest, ALSA, AlyssaRosenzweig, BugTriage, DebianDay/2021/India/Online, DebianEdu/Status/Bullseye, FrontPage, Fvwm, HostingControlPanels, InstallingDebianOn (Microsoft/Windows/SubsystemForLinux, Thinkpad/L13 Gen 2/buster), ReleaseParty, SourcesList, Status/Stable, SuitesAndReposExtension, Teams (Apt, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList), ungoogled-chromium

FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Wikipedia: Display_Data_Channel

Issues

Crash in eog

Web request mishandling in fossjobs

AppArmor issues in torbrowser-launcher

Broken links in Debian backports NEW, GMime

Missing link in GMime

Outdated links in crouton, breezy

Broken pages in GNOME Bugzilla archive

Features in debiman (1 2), gokart, debhelper, shellcheck (1 2)

New versions of umatrix, doc8, git-remote-hg

New repo needed for misspelling research

Hardcoded Debian release info updates for debiman (1 2)

Syntax error in freefem++

Adoption needed for veles

Underlinking in libuemf0

Conffile removal needed in wireplumber

Build issues in SPTAG (1 2), plocate, zxing-cpp

Git tag conflict in git-remote-hg

Dependency updates for catfish, education-common, cruft-ng

Cruft deposited by qgis-providers

More binary packages needed in zxing-cpp (1 2)

Malicious Python module on PyPI

Review

Spam: reported 1 sourceware bug report, 2 Debian bug reports and 86 Debian mailing list posts

Debian packages: reviewed iotop-c and approved DM upload

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved aptitude faenza-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-yasis gnome-illustrious-icon-theme gnome-power-manager juffed mm3d mystiq shiki-brave-theme

rejected unetbootin (random web page), tuxmath (photograph not screenshot)

Administration

Debian servers: expand LV, fix debbugs config

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Debian QA services: deploy changes

Communication

Initiate discussion about Debian source tarball choices

Sponsors The pyemd, pytest-rerunfailures, libpst, sptag, librecaptcha work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

30 August 2021

Russell Coker: Links August 2021

Sciencealert has an interesting article on a game to combat misinformation by microdosing people [1]. The game seemed overly simplistic to me, but I guess I m not the target demographic. Research shows it to work. Vice has an interesting and amusing article about mass walkouts of underpaid staff in the US [2]. The way that corporations are fighting an increase in the minimum wage doesn t seem financially beneficial for them. An increase in the minimum wage means small companies have to increase salaries too and the ratio of revenue to payroll is probably worse for small companies. It seems that companies like McDonalds make oppressing their workers a higher priority than making a profit. Interesting article in Vice about how the company Shot Spotter (which determines the locations of gunshots by sound) forges evidence for US police [3]. All convictions based on Shot Spotter evidence should be declared mistrials. BitsNBites has an interesting article on the fundamental flaws of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) [4]. The Daily Dot has a disturbing article anbout the possible future of the QAnon movement [5]. Let s hope they become too busy fighting each other to hurt many innocent people. Ben Taylor wrote an interesting blog post suggesting that Web Assembly should be a default binary target [6]. I don t support that idea but I think that considering it is useful. Web assembly could be used more for non-web things and it would be a better option than Node.js for some things. There are also some interesting corner cases like games, Minecraft was written in Java and there s no reason that Web Assembly couldn t do the same things. Vice has an interesting article about the Phantom encrypted phone service that ran on Blackberry handsets [7]. Australia really needs legislation based on the US RICO law! Vice has an interesting article about an encrypted phone company run by drug dealers [8]. Apparently after making an encrypted phone system for their own use they decided to sell it to others and made millions of dollars. They could have run a successful legal business. Salon has an insightful interview with Michael Petersen about his research on fake news and people who share it because they need chaos [9]. Apparently low status people who are status seeking are a main contributor to this, they share fake news knowingly to spread chaos. A society with less inequality would have less problems with fake news. Salon has another insightful interview with Michael Petersen, about is later research on fake news as an evolutionary strategy [10]. People knowingly share fake news to mobilise their supporters and to signal allegiance to their group. The more bizarre the beliefs are the more strongly they signal allegiance. If an opposing group has a belief then they can show support for their group by having the opposite belief (EG by opposing vaccination if the other political side supports doctors). He also suggests that lying can be a way of establishing dominance, the more honest people are opposed by a lie the more dominant the liar may seem. Vice has an amusing article about how police took over the Encrochat encrypted phone network that was mostly used by criminals [11]. It s amusing to read of criminals getting taken down like this. It s also interesting to note that the authorities messed up by breaking the wipe facility which alerted the criminals that their security was compromised. The investigation could have continued for longer if they hadn t changed the functionality of compromised phones. A later vice article mentioned that the malware installed on Encrochat devices recorded MAC addresses of Wifi access points which was used to locate the phones even though they had the GPS hardware removed. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus about the insufficient necessity of interoperability [12]. The problem if monopolies is not just an inability to interoperate with other services or leave it s losing control over your life. A few cartel participants interoperating will be able to do all the bad things to us tha a single monopolist could do.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/yhrq5887
[2] https://tinyurl.com/yhmog5ex
[3] https://tinyurl.com/ygnmjm9j
[4] https://www.bitsnbites.eu/three-fundamental-flaws-of-simd/
[5] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/ghostezra-telegram-fued-qanon/
[6] https://tinyurl.com/yhvganlc
[7] https://tinyurl.com/yfljnlq5
[8] https://tinyurl.com/yft5qwbc
[9] https://tinyurl.com/yjjnnyfu
[10] https://tinyurl.com/yjxq8c2v
[11] https://tinyurl.com/y7hhrxuz
[12] https://tinyurl.com/yj33txpj

1 August 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

apt-offline: typos

libusbgx: document need for module, gitignore updates, drop autotools cruft

gt: option to disable manual page, fix manual page install path

kms-cmake-utils: packaging cleanup

kurento-module-creator: packaging cleanup

Kurento jsoncpp: packaging cleanup

kms-jsonrpc: packaging cleanup

kms-core: packaging cleanup

purple-discord: cleanup code, build, clean

Debian usertags QA: add single user rename function

Debian UDD FTBFS CGI: fix encoding, show all FTBFS bugs

Debian website: templatise security suite

Debian package uploads: microsoft-authentication-library-for-python, foxtrotgps, purple-discord

Debian wiki config: reorganise footer

Debian wiki pages: DebianIRCChannelGuidelines, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, DebianSoftware, fr/pcmanfm, Hardware/Database, HomepageTemplate, HowtoDebianInAndroid, InstallingDebianOn (ComputerTemplate, Google/PixelbookEve), PrivacyIssues, Teams/Root support

FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

Features in gallery-dl

Typos in moreutils

Apparmor issues in torbrowser-launcher (upstream, Debian)

Renaming needed for kms-*

Obsolete links in libimobiledevice website

Debian testing migration needed for foxtrotgps

Removal from Debian needed for bind, pyfeed, xmlelements, tomcat8

Security issues in a FLOSS project's website (reported privately)

Review

Spam: reported 2 Debian bug reports and 123 Debian mailing list posts

Patches: merged libusbgx/gt pull requests

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved adequate atool barrier breathe-icon-theme darkcold-gtk-theme darkmint-gtk-theme isenkram-cli licensecheck moka-icon-theme nemo-gtkhash rabbitvcs-cli rabbitvcs-gedit rabbitvcs-thunar sunclock suru-icon-theme ubuntu-kylin-software-center

rejected xfce4 (Windows 95 screenshot), thunar-gtkhash (Windows XP screenshot), msmtp-mta (random wallpaper)

Administration

libusbgx/gt: triage issues

Debian packages: triaged bugs for reintroduced packages

Debian servers: debug lists mail issue, debug lists subscription issue

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The microsoft-authentication-library-for-python and purple-discord work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Next.

Search Results: "gps"

13 March 2024

9 March 2024

9 February 2024

1 November 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Administration Debian IRC: rescue obsolete/unused #debian-wiki channel Debian servers: rescue data from an old DebConf server Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SWH, golang-ginkgo, DBD-ODBC, sqliteodbc work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

25 August 2023

7 August 2023

6 July 2023

1 July 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Issues Crash in binarycontrol.debian.net (sent on IRC) Build failure in ddcci-dkms Incorrect description in manpages-ro-dev Obsolete conffile in gnome-applets-data Feature in lintian

Administration Debian QA services: deploy changes Debian IRC: updated #debian-live admin list Debian mentors: investigate reason for missing package Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication Initiate discussion about Debian OpenCL ICD virtual packages Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 June 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Issues SIMDe: incorrect macros/definitions/names, GCC warnings

Administration Debian IRC: set topic on new #debian-sa channel Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SIMDe, gensim, sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

15 February 2023

30 December 2022

15 August 2022

Privacy The privacy picture on these is interesting.

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses strong AES encryption. But as messaging features require a paired phone, the privacy implications of a phone also apply here.

12 August 2022

31 July 2022

Paths A few stages lead you through very pleasant narrow forest paths with a sight, but not all. On some days you find yourself plodding along wide graveled or even paved forest roads, though.

27 April 2022

23 January 2022

3 January 2022

1 September 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Administration Debian servers: expand LV, fix debbugs config Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts Debian QA services: deploy changes

Communication Initiate discussion about Debian source tarball choices

Sponsors The pyemd, pytest-rerunfailures, libpst, sptag, librecaptcha work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

30 August 2021

1 August 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Administration libusbgx/gt: triage issues Debian packages: triaged bugs for reintroduced packages Debian servers: debug lists mail issue, debug lists subscription issue Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The microsoft-authentication-library-for-python and purple-discord work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Administration

Debian IRC: rescue obsolete/unused #debian-wiki channel

Debian servers: rescue data from an old DebConf server

Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Issues

Crash in binarycontrol.debian.net (sent on IRC)

Build failure in ddcci-dkms

Incorrect description in manpages-ro-dev

Obsolete conffile in gnome-applets-data

Feature in lintian

Administration

Debian QA services: deploy changes

Debian IRC: updated #debian-live admin list

Debian mentors: investigate reason for missing package

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Initiate discussion about Debian OpenCL ICD virtual packages

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Issues

SIMDe: incorrect macros/definitions/names, GCC warnings

Administration

Debian IRC: set topic on new #debian-sa channel

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Administration

Debian servers: expand LV, fix debbugs config

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Debian QA services: deploy changes

Communication

Initiate discussion about Debian source tarball choices

Administration

libusbgx/gt: triage issues

Debian packages: triaged bugs for reintroduced packages

Debian servers: debug lists mail issue, debug lists subscription issue

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC