This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Free and open source software and other market failures , a article published in Communications of the ACM

Understanding the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement has, since its beginning, implied crossing many disciplinary boundaries. This article describes FOSS s history, explaining its undeniable success throughout the 1990s, and why the movement today feels in a way as if it were on autopilot, lacking the steam it once had. The author presents several examples of different industries where, as it happened with FOSS in computing, fundamental innovations happened not because the leading companies of each field are attentive to customers needs, but to a certain degree, despite them not even considering those needs, it is typically due to the hubris that comes from being a market leader. Kemp exemplifies his hypothesis by presenting the messy landscape of the commercial, mutually incompatible systems of Unix in the 1980s. Different companies had set out to implement their particular flavor of open Unix computers, but with clear examples of vendor lock-in techniques. He speculates that, if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. He states that the FOSS movement was born out of the utter market failure of the different Unix vendors. The focus of the article shifts then to the FOSS movement itself: 25 years ago, as FOSS systems slowly gained acceptance and then adoption in the serious market and at the center of the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, Linux user groups (LUGs) with tens of thousands of members bloomed throughout the world; knowing this history, why have all but a few of them vanished into oblivion? Kemp suggests that the strength and vitality that LUGs had ultimately reflects the anger that prompted technical users to take the situation into their own hands and fix it; once the software industry was forced to change, the strongly cohesive FOSS movement diluted. The frustrations and anger of [information technology, IT] in 2024, Kamp writes, are entirely different from those of 1991. As an example, the author closes by citing the difficulty of maintaining despite having the resources to do so an aging legacy codebase that needs to continue working year after year.

For many years, I have been using the dlvr.it service to echo my online activity to where more people can follow it. Namely, I write in the following sources:

• My blog (where this content is being posted to) RSS
• Mostly academic publications I send to my university s repository (including conference presentations and the like) RSS
• Videos posted to my YouTube channel (mostly my classes but some other material as well) RSS

Via dlvr.it s services, all those posts are echoed to Gwolfwolf in X (Twitter) and to the Gunnarwolfi page in Facebook. I use neither platform as a human (that is, I never log in there). Anyway, dlvr.it sent me a mail stating they would be soon (as in, the next few weeks) cutting their free tier. And, although I value their services and am thankfulfor their value so far, I am not going to pay for my personal stuff to be reposted to social media. So, this post s mission is twofold:

1. If you follow me via any of those media, you will soon not be following me anymore
2. If you know of any service that would fill the space left by dlvr.it, I will be very grateful. Extra gratefulness points if the option you suggest is able to post to accounts in less-propietary media (i.e. the Fediverse). Please tell me by mail (gwolf@gwolf.org).

Oh! Forgot to mention: Of course, my blog will continue to be appear in Planet Debian, Blograf a, and any decent aggregator that consumes my RSS.

Yay, party!

Yay, crypto! DebCamp has started, and in a couple of days, we will fully be in DebConf24 mode! As most of you know, an important part that binds Debian together is our cryptographic identity assurance, and that is in good measure tightened by the Continuous Key-Signing Parties we hold at DebConfs and other Debian and Free Software gatherings. As I have done during (most of) the past DebConfs, I have prepared a set of pseudo-social maps to help you find where you are in the OpenPGP mesh of our conference. Naturally, Web-of-Trust maps should be user-centered, so find your own at: https://people.debian.org/~gwolf/dc24_ksp/ The list is now final and it will not receive any modifications (I asked for them some days ago); if your name still appears on the list and you don t want to be linked to the DC24 KSP in the future, tell me and I ll remove it from future versions of the list (but it is part of the final DC24 file, as its checksum is already final) Speaking of which! If you are to be a part of the keysigning, get the final DC24 file and, on a device you trust, check its SHA256 by running:

$ sha256sum dc24_fprs.txt
11daadc0e435cb32f734307b091905d4236cdf82e3b84f43cde80ef1816370a5  dc24_fprs.txt

Make sure the resulting number matches the one I m presenting. If it doesn t, ensure your copy of the file is not corrupted (i.e. download again). If it still doess not match, notify me immediately. Does any of the above confuse you? Please come to (or at least, follow the stream for) my session on DebConf opening day, Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction, 10:30 Korean time; I will do my best to explain the details to you. PS- I will soon provide a simple, short PDF that will probably be mass-printed at FrontDesk so that you can easily track your KSP progress.

While I was living in Argentina, we (my family) found ourselves checking for weather forecasts almost constantly weather there can be quite unexpected, much more so that here in Mexico. So it took me a bit of tinkering to come up with a couple of simple scripts to show the weather forecast as part of my Waybar setup. I haven t cared to share with anybody, as I believe them to be quite trivial and quite dirty. But today, V ctor was asking for some slightly-related things, so here I go. Please do remember I warned: Dirty. I am using OpenWeather s open API. I had to register to get an APPID, and it allows me for up to 1,000 API calls per day, more than plenty for my uses, even if I am logged in at my desktops at three different computers (not an uncommon situation). Having that, I set up a file named /etc/get_weather/, that currently reads: Then, I have a simple script, /usr/local/bin/get_weather, that fetches the current weather and the forecast, and stores them as /run/weather.json and /run/forecast.json: This script is called by the corresponding systemd service unit, found at /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.service: And it is run every 15 minutes via the following systemd timer unit, /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.timer: (yes, it runs even if I m not logged in, wasting some of my free API calls but within reason) Then, I declare a "custom/weather" module in the desired position of my ~/.config/waybar/waybar.config, and define it as: This script basically morphs a generic weather JSON description into another set of JSON bits that display my weather in the way I prefer to have it displayed as: The end result? Nothing too stunning, but definitively something I find useful and even nicely laid out: Do note that it seems OpenWeather will return the name of the closest available meteorology station with (most?) recent data for my home, I often get Ciudad Universitaria, but sometimes Coyoac n or even San ngel Inn.

I just got one of those utterly funny spam messages And yes, I recognize everybody likes building a name for themselves. But some spammers are downright silly. I just got the following mail: Who cares what Wulfenia is about? It s about you, my stupid Wolf cousin!

My students at LIDSOL (Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre, Free Software Research and Development Lab) at Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM asked me to help them get the needed hardware to set up a mirror for various free software projects. We have some decent servers (not new servers, but mirrors don t require to be top-performance), so A couple of weeks ago, I approached the Debian Project Leader (DPL) and suggested we should buy two 16TBhard drives for this project, as it is the most reasonable cost per byte point I found. He agreed, and I bought the drives. Today we had a lab meeting, and I handed them over the hardware. Of course, they are very happy and thankful with the Debian project In the last couple of weeks, they have already set up an Archlinux mirror (https://archlinux.org/mirrors/fi-b.unam.mx), and now that they have heaps of storage space, plans are underway to set up various other mirrors (of course, a Debian mirror will be among the first).

I received a mail today from Google (noreply-findmydevice@google.com) notifying me that they would unconditionally enable the Find my device functionality I have been repeatedly marking as unwanted in my Android phone. The mail goes on to explain this functionality works even when the device is disconnected, by Bluetooth signals (aha, so turn off Bluetooth will no longer turn off Bluetooth? Hmmm ) Of course, the mail hand-waves that only I can know the location of my device. Google cannot see or use it for other ends . First, should we trust this blanket statement? Second, the fact they don t do it now means they won t ever? Not even if law enforcement requires them to? The devices will be generating this information whether we want it or not, so it s just a matter of opening the required window. Of course, it is a feature many people will appreciate and find useful. And it s not only for finding lost (or stolen) phones, but the mail also mentions tags can be made available to store in your wallet, bike, keys or whatever. But it should be opt-in. As it is, it seems it s not even to opt out of it.

Shortly before coming back from Argentina, I got news of a very interesting set of little machines, the MilkV Duo. The specs looked really interesting and fun to play with, particularly those of the bigger model, Milk-V DUO S Some of the highlights:

• The SG2000 SoC is a Dual-architecture beast. A hardware switch controls whether the CPU is an ARM or a RISC-V.
  • Not only that: It has a second (albeit lesser) RISC-V core that can run independently. They mention this computer can run simultaneously Linux and FreeRTOS!
• 512MB RAM
• Sweet form factor (4.2 4.2cm)
• Peeking around their Web site, it is one of the most open and well documented computers in their hardware range.
  • Schematics at different levels of detail
  • Datasheet. It s preliminary, and it s written in Mandarin, but the information it contains is quite descriptive and clear.
  • Full specifications (all 710 pages of it!) Again, it has a lot of Mandarin in it, but it conveys a lot of useful information.

Naturally, for close to only US$12 (plus shipping) for the configuration I wanted I bought one, and got it delivered in early May. The little box sat on my desk for close to six weeks until I had time to start tinkering with it I must say I am surprised. Not only the little bugger delivers what it promises, but it is way more mature than what I expected: It can be used right away without much tinkering with! I mean, I have played with it for less than an hour by now, and I ve even managed to get (almost) regular Debian working. Milk-V distributes a simple, 58.9MB compressed Linux image, based on Buildroot, a simple Linux image generator mostly used for embedded applications, as well as its source tree. I thought that would be a good starting point to work on setting up a minimal Debian filesystem, as I did with the CuBox-i4Pro ten years ago, and maybe even to grow towards a more official solution, akin to what we currently have for the Raspberry Pi family Until I discovered what looks like a friendly and very active online community of Milk-V users! I haven t yet engaged in it, but I stumbled across a thread announcing the availability of Debian images for the Milk-V family. And yes, it feels like a very normal Debian system. /etc/apt/sources.list does point to a third-party repository, but it s for only four packages, all related to pinmux controlfor CVITEK chips. It does feel like a completely normal Debian system! It is not as snappy and fast to load as Buildroot, but given Debian s generality, that s completely as expected. Even the wireless network, one of the usual pain points, works just out of the box! The Debian images can be built or downloaded from this Git repository. In case you wonder how is this system booting or what hardware it detects, I captured two boot logs:

• Milk- Duo S booting with Buildroot (24K)
• Milk- Duo S booting with Debian (49K)

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for How computers make books from graphics rendering, search algorithms, and functional programming to indexing and typesetting , a book published in Manning

If we look at the age-old process of creating books, how many different areas can a computer help us with? And how can each of them be used to teach computer science (CS) fundamentals to a nontechnical audience? This is the premise of John Whitington s enticing book and the result is quite amazing. The book immediately drew my attention when looking at the titles available for review. After all, my initiation into computing as a kid was learning the LaTeX typesetting system while my father worked on his first book on scientific language and typography [1]. Whitington picks 11 different technical aspects of book production, from how dots of ink are transferred to a white page and how they are made into controllable, recognizable shapes, all the way to forming beautiful typefaces and the nuances of properly addressing white-space to present aesthetically pleasing paragraphs, building it all into specific formats aimed at different ends. But if we dig beyond just the chapter titles, we will find a very interesting book on CS that, without ever using technical language or notation, presents aspects as varied as anti-aliasing, vector and raster images, character sets such as ASCII and Unicode, an introduction to programming, input methods for different writing systems, efficient encoding (compression) methods, both for text and images, lossless and lossy, and recursion and dithering methods. To my absolute surprise, while the author thankfully spared the reader the syntax usually associated with LISP-related languages, the programming examples clearly stem from the LISP school, presenting solutions based on tail recursion. Of course, it is no match for Donald Knuth s classic book on this same topic [2], but could very well be a primer for readers to approach it. The book is light and easy to read, and keeps a very informal, nontechnical tone throughout. My only complaint relates to reading it in PDF format; the topic of this book, and the care with which the images were provided by the author, warrant high resolution. The included images are not only decorative but an integral part of the book. Maybe this is specific to my review copy, but all of the raster images were in very low resolution. This book is quite different from what readers may usually expect, as it introduces several significant topics in the field. CS professors will enjoy it, of course, but also readers with a humanities background, students new to the field, or even those who are just interested in learning a bit more.

References

1. S nchez y G ndara, A.; Magari os Lamas, F.; Wolf, K. B., Manual de lenguaje y tipograf a cient fica en castellano. Trillas, Mexico City, Mexico, 1986, https://www.fis.unam.mx/~bwolf/manual.html
2. Knuth, D. E. Digital typographyCSLI Lecture Notes: CSLI Lecture Notes. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA, 1999, https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/dt.html

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Hacks, leaks and revelations The art of analyzing hacked and leaked data , a book published in No Starch Press

Imagine you ve come across a trove of files documenting a serious deed and you feel the need to blow the whistle. Or maybe you are an investigative journalist and this whistleblower trusts you and wants to give you said data. Or maybe you are a technical person, trusted by said journalist to help them do things right not only to help them avoid being exposed while leaking the information, but also to assist them in analyzing the contents of the dataset. This book will be a great aid for all of the above tasks. The author, Micah Lee, is both a journalist and a computer security engineer. The book is written entirely from his experience handling important datasets, and is organized in a very logical and sound way. Lee organized the 14 chapters in five parts. The first part the most vital to transmitting the book s message, in my opinion begins by talking about the care that must be taken when handling a sensitive dataset: how to store it, how to communicate it to others, sometimes even what to redact (exclude) so the information retains its strength but does not endanger others (or yourself). The first two chapters introduce several tools for encrypting information and keeping communication anonymous, not getting too deep into details and keeping it aimed at a mostly nontechnical audience. Something that really sets this book apart from others like it is that Lee s aim is not only to tell stories about the hacks and leaks he has worked with, or to present the technical details on how he analyzed them, but to teach readers how to do the work. From Part 2 onward the book adopts a tutorial style, teaching the reader numerous tools for obtaining and digging information out of huge and very timely datasets. Lee guides the reader through various data breaches, all of them leaked within the last five years: BlueLeaks, Oath Keepers email dumps, Heritage Foundation, Parler, Epik, and Cadence Health. He guides us through a tutorial on using the command line (mostly targeted at Linux, but considering MacOS and Windows as well), running Docker containers, learning the basics of Python, parsing and filtering structured data, writing small web applications for getting at the right bits of data, and working with structured query language (SQL) databases. The book does an excellent job of fulfilling its very ambitious aims, and this is even more impressive given the wide range of professional profiles it is written for; that being said, I do have a couple critiques. First, the book is ideologically loaded: the datasets all exhibit the alt-right movement that has gained strength in the last decade. Lee takes the reader through many instances of COVID deniers, rioters for Donald Trump during the January 2021 attempted coup, attacks against Black Lives Matter activists, and other extremism research; thus this book could alienate right-wing researchers, who might also be involved in handling important whistleblowing cases. Second, given the breadth of the topic and my 30-plus years of programming experience, I was very interested in the first part of each chapter but less so in the tutorial part. I suppose a journalist reading through the same text might find the sections about the importance of data handling and source protection to be similarly introductory. This is unavoidable, of course, given the nature of this work. However, while Micah Lee is an excellent example of a journalist with the appropriate technical know-how to process the types of material he presents as examples, expecting any one person to become a professional in both fields is asking too much. All in all, this book is excellent. The writing style is informal and easy to read, the examples are engaging, and the analysis is very good. It will certainly teach you something, no matter your background, and it might very well complement your professional skills.

Now that we are back from our six month period in Argentina, we decided to adopt a kitten, to bring more diversity into our lives. Perhaps this little girl will teach us to think outside the box! Yesterday we witnessed a solar eclipse Mexico City was not in the totality range (we reached ~80%), but it was a great experience to go with the kids. A couple dozen thousand people gathered for a massive picnic in las islas, the main area inside our university campus. Afterwards, we went briefly back home, then crossed the city to fetch the little kitten. Of course, the kids were unanimous: Her name is Eclipse.

Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province, Argentina just across the river from Paran , where I have spent almost six beautiful months I will never forget. Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paran are separated by the beautiful and majestic Paran river, which flows from Brazil, marks the Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the litoral region of the country, until it merges with the Uruguay river (you guessed right the river marking the Eastern border of Argentina, first with Brazil and then with Uruguay), and they become the R o de la Plata. This was a short miniDebConf: we were lent the APUL union s building for the weekend (thank you very much!); during Saturday, we had a cycle of talks, and on sunday we had more of a hacklab logic, having some unstructured time to work each on their own projects, and to talk and have a good time together. We were five Debian people attending: santiago debacle eamanu dererk gwolf @debian.org. My main contact to kickstart organization was Mart n Bayo. Mart n was for many years the leader of the Technical Degree on Free Software at Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where I was also a teacher for several years. Together with Leo Mart nez, also a teacher at the tecnicatura, they contacted us with Guillermo and Gabriela, from the APUL non-teaching-staff union of said university. We had the following set of talks (for which there is a promise to get electronic record, as APUL was kind enough to record them! of course, I will push them to our usual conference video archiving service as soon as I get them)

Hour	Title (Spanish)	Title (English)	Presented by
10:00-10:25	Introducci n al Software Libre	Introduction to Free Software	Mart n Bayo
10:30-10:55	Debian y su comunidad	Debian and its community	Emanuel Arias
11:00-11:25	Por qu sigo contribuyendo a Debian despu s de 20 a os?	Why am I still contributing to Debian after 20 years?	Santiago Ruano
11:30-11:55	Mi identidad y el proyecto Debian: Qu es el llavero OpenPGP y por qu ?	My identity and the Debian project: What is the OpenPGP keyring and why?	Gunnar Wolf
12:00-13:00	Explorando las masculinidades en el contexto del Software Libre	Exploring masculinities in the context of Free Software	Gora Ortiz Fuentes - Jos Francisco Ferro
13:00-14:30	Lunch
14:30-14:55	Debian para el d a a d a	Debian for our every day	Leonardo Mart nez
15:00-15:25	Debian en las Raspberry Pi	Debian in the Raspberry Pi	Gunnar Wolf
15:30-15:55	Device Trees	Device Trees	Lisandro Dami n Nicanor Perez Meyer (videoconferencia)
16:00-16:25	Python en Debian	Python in Debian	Emmanuel Arias
16:30-16:55	Debian y XMPP en la medici n de viento para la energ a e lica	Debian and XMPP for wind measuring for eolic energy	Martin Borgert

As it always happens DebConf, miniDebConf and other Debian-related activities are always fun, always productive, always a great opportunity to meet again our decades-long friends. Lets see what comes next!

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Constructed truths truth and knowledge in a post-truth world , a book published in Springer Link

Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their brand s value. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are witnessing what has been termed the post-truth phenomenon. The undeniable freedom that horizontal communication has given us automatically brings with it the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and truth seems to become a group belief. Contrary to my original expectations, the core topic of the book is not about how current-day media brings about post-truth mindsets. Instead it goes into a much deeper philosophical debate: What is truth? Does truth exist by itself, objectively, or is it a social construct? If activists with different political leanings debate a given subject, is it even possible for them to understand the same points for debate, or do they truly experience parallel realities? The author wrote this book clearly prompted by the unprecedented events that took place in 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis forced humanity into isolation and online communication. Donald Trump is explicitly and repeatedly presented throughout the book as an example of an actor that took advantage of the distortions caused by post-truth. The first chapter frames the narrative from the perspective of information flow over the last several decades, on how the emergence of horizontal, uncensored communication free of editorial oversight started empowering the netizens and created a temporary information flow utopia. But soon afterwards, algorithmic gatekeepers started appearing, creating a set of personalized distortions on reality; users started getting news aligned to what they already showed interest in. This led to an increase in polarization and the growth of narrative-framing-specific communities that served as echo chambers for disjoint views on reality. This led to the growth of conspiracy theories and, necessarily, to the science denial and pseudoscience that reached unimaginable peaks during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, when readers decide based on completely subjective criteria whether a scientific theory such as global warming is true or propaganda, or question what most traditional news outlets present as facts, we face the phenomenon known as fake news. Fake news leads to post-truth, a state where it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and serves only a rhetorical function, making rational discourse impossible. Toward the end of the first chapter, the tone of writing quickly turns away from describing developments in the spread of news and facts over the last decades and quickly goes deep into philosophy, into the very thorny subject pursued by said discipline for millennia: How can truth be defined? Can different perspectives bring about different truth values for any given idea? Does truth depend on the observer, on their knowledge of facts, on their moral compass or in their honest opinions? Zoglauer dives into epistemology, following various thinkers ideas on what can be understood as truth: constructivism (whether knowledge and truth values can be learnt by an individual building from their personal experience), objectivity (whether experiences, and thus truth, are universal, or whether they are naturally individual), and whether we can proclaim something to be true when it corresponds to reality. For the final chapter, he dives into the role information and knowledge play in assigning and understanding truth value, as well as the value of second-hand knowledge: Do we really own knowledge because we can look up facts online (even if we carefully check the sources)? Can I, without any medical training, diagnose a sickness and treatment by honestly and carefully looking up its symptoms in medical databases? Wrapping up, while I very much enjoyed reading this book, I must confess it is completely different from what I expected. This book digs much more into the abstract than into information flow in modern society, or the impact on early 2020s politics as its editorial description suggests. At 160 pages, the book is not a heavy read, and Zoglauer s writing style is easy to follow, even across the potentially very deep topics it presents. Its main readership is not necessarily computing practitioners or academics. However, for people trying to better understand epistemology through its expressions in the modern world, it will be a very worthy read.

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for 10 things software developers should learn about learning , a article published in Communications of the ACM

As software developers, we understand the detailed workings of the different components of our computer systems. And probably due to how computers were presented since their appearance as digital brains in the 1940s we sometimes believe we can transpose that knowledge to how our biological brains work, be it as learners or as problem solvers. This article aims at making the reader understand several mechanisms related to how learning and problem solving actually work in our brains. It focuses on helping expert developers convey knowledge to new learners, as well as learners who need to get up to speed and start coding. The article s narrative revolves around software developers, but much of what it presents can be applied to different problem domains. The article takes this mission through ten points, with roughly the same space given to each of them, starting with wrong assumptions many people have about the similarities between computers and our brains. The first section, Human Memory Is Not Made of Bits, explains the brain processes of remembering as a way of strengthening the force of a memory ( reconsolidation ) and the role of activation in related network pathways. The second section, Human Memory Is Composed of One Limited and One Unlimited System, goes on to explain the organization of memories in the brain between long-term memory (functionally limitless, permanent storage) and working memory (storing little amounts of information used for solving a problem at hand). However, the focus soon shifts to how experience in knowledge leads to different ways of using the same concepts, the importance of going from abstract to concrete knowledge applications and back, and the role of skills repetition over time. Toward the end of the article, the focus shifts from the mechanical act of learning to expertise. Section 6, The Internet Has Not Made Learning Obsolete, emphasizes that problem solving is not just putting together the pieces of a puzzle; searching online for solutions to a problem does not activate the neural pathways that would get fired up otherwise. The final sections tackle the differences that expertise brings to play when teaching or training a newcomer: the same tools that help the beginner s productivity as training wheels will often hamper the expert user s as their knowledge has become automated. The article is written with a very informal and easy-to-read tone and vocabulary, and brings forward several issues that might seem like commonsense but do ring bells when it comes to my own experiences both as a software developer and as a teacher. The article closes by suggesting several books that further expand on the issues it brings forward. While I could not identify a single focus or thesis with which to characterize this article, the several points it makes will likely help readers better understand (and bring forward to consciousness) mental processes often taken for granted, and consider often-overlooked aspects when transmitting knowledge to newcomers.

I realize it s a bit late to start publicly organizing this, but better late than never I m happy some Debian people I have directly contacted have already expressed interest. So, lets make this public! For all interested people who are reasonably close to central Argentina, or can be persuaded to come here in a month s time You are all welcome! It seems I managed to convince my good friend Mart n Bayo (some Debian people will remember him, as he was present in DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil) to get some facilities for us to have a nice Debian get-together in Central Argentina.

Where? We will meet at APUL Asociaci n de Personal no-docente de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, in downtown Santa Fe, Argentina.

When? Saturday, 2024.03.09. It is quite likely we can get some spaces for continuing over Sunday if there is demand.

What are we planning? We have little time for planning but we want to have a space for Debian-related outreach (so, please think about a topic or two you d like to share with general free software-interested, not too technical, audience). Please tell me by mail (gwolf@debian.org) about any ideas you might have. We also want to have a general hacklab-style area to hang out, work a bit in our projects, and spend a good time together.

Logistics I have briefly commented about this with our dear and always mighty DPL, and Debian will support Debian-related people interested in attending; please check personally with me for specifics on how to handle this case by case. My intention is to cover costs for travel, accomodation (one or two nights) and food for whoever is interested in coming over.

More information As I don t want to direct people to keep an eye on my blog post for updates, I ll copy this information (and keep it updated!) at the Debian Wiki / DebianEvents / ar / 2024 / MiniDebConf / Santa Fe please refer to that page!

Contact

• By IRC: #debian-latam on OFTC
• By email: debian-dug-latinoamerica@lists.debian.org

Codes of Conduct DebConf and Debian Code of Conduct apply. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct.

Registration Registration is free, but needed. See the separate Registration page.

Talks Please, send your proposal to gwolf@debian.org

Probably a trait of my family s origins as migrants from East Europe, probably part of the collective trauma of jews throughout the world or probably because that s just who I turned out to be, I hold in high regard the preservation of memory of my family s photos, movies and such items. And it s a trait shared by many people in my familiar group. Shortly after my grandmother died 24 years ago, my mother did a large, loving work of digitalization and restoration of my grandparent s photos. Sadly, the higher resolution copies of said photos is lost but she took the work of not just scanning the photos, but assembling them in presentations, telling a story, introducing my older relatives, many of them missing 40 or more years before my birth. But said presentations were built using Flash. Right, not my choice of tool, and I told her back in the day but given I wasn t around to do the work in what I d chosen (a standards-abiding format, naturally), and given my graphic design skills are nonexistant Several years ago, when Adobe pulled the plug on the Flash format, we realized they would no longer be accessible. I managed to get the photos out of the preentations, but lost the narration, that is a great part of the work. Three days ago, however, I read a post on https://www.osnews.com that made me jump to action: https://www.osnews.com/story/138350/ruffle-an-open-source-flash-player-emulator/. Ruffle is an open source Flash Player emulator, written in Rust and compiled to WASM. Even though several OSnews readers report it to be buggy to play some Flash games they long for, it worked just fine for a simple slideshow presentator. So I managed to bring it back to life! Yes, I d like to make a better index page, but that will come later I am now happy and proud to share with you:

Acariciando la ausencia: Familia Iszaevich Fajerstein, 1900 2000 (which would be roughly translated as Caressing the absence: Iszaevich Fajerstein family, 1900-2000).

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for A deep learning technique for intrusion detection system using a recurrent neural networks based framework , a article published in Computer Communications

So let s assume you already know and understand that artificial intelligence s main building blocks are perceptrons, that is, mathematical models of neurons. And you know that, while a single perceptron is too limited to get interesting information from, very interesting structures neural networks can be built with them. You also understand that neural networks can be trained with large datasets, and you can get them to become quite efficient and accurate classifiers for data comparable to your dataset. Finally, you are interested in applying this knowledge to defensive network security, particularly in choosing the right recurrent neural network (RNN) framework to create an intrusion detection system (IDS). Are you still with me? Good! This paper might be right for you! The paper builds on a robust and well-written introduction and related work sections to arrive at explaining in detail what characterizes a RNN, the focus of this work, among other configurations also known as neural networks, and why they are particularly suited for machine learning (ML) tasks. RNNs must be trained for each problem domain, and publicly available datasets are commonly used for such tasks. The authors present two labeled datasets representing normal and hostile network data, identified according to different criteria: NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15. They proceed to show a framework to analyze and compare different RNNs and run them against said datasets, segmented for separate training and validation phases, compare results, and finally select the best available model for the task measuring both training speed as well as classification accuracy. The paper is quite heavy due to both its domain-specific terminology many acronyms are used throughout the text and its use of mathematical notation, both to explain specific properties of each of the RNN types and for explaining the preprocessing carried out for feature normalization and selection. This is partly what led me to start the first paragraph by assuming that we, as readers, already understand a large body of material if we are to fully follow the text. The paper does begin by explaining its core technologies, but quickly ramps up and might get too technical for nonexpert readers. It is undeniably an interesting and valuable read, showing the state of the art in IDS and ML-assisted technologies. It does not detail any specific technology applying its findings, but we will probably find the information conveyed here soon enough in industry publications.

Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in ACM s Computing Reviews, and have even been honored as a Featured Reviewer. Given I have long enjoyed reading friends reviews of their reading material (particularly, hats off to the very active Russ Allbery, who both beats all of my frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and readability than I can aim for!), I decided to explicitly share my reviews via this blog, as the audience is somewhat congruent; I will also link here some reviews that were not approved for publication, clearly marking them so. I will probably work on wrangling my Jekyll site to display an (auto-)updated page and RSS feed for the reviews. In the meantime, the reviews I have published are:

• 2022.06.15 A world without E-mail (Cal Newport)
• 2022.08.08 Can AI learn to forget? (Samuel Greentard)
• 2023.01.10 Learn enough developer tools to be dangerous: Command line, text editor and Git version control essentials (Michael Hartl)
• 2023.01.12 Phishing and communication channels: A guide to identifying and mitigating phishing attacks (Gunikhan Sonowal)
• 2023.03.14 Jerusalem Online: Critical cartography for the digital age (Valentina Carraro)
• 2023.04.25 Language, gender and videogames: Using corpora to analyse the representation of gender in fantasy videogames (Frazer Heritage)
• 2023.06.23 Democratizing domain-specific computing (Chi Y., Qiao W., Sohrabizadeh A., Wang J., Cong J.)
• 2023.09.03 A free press, if you can keep it: What natural language processing reveals about freedom of the press in Hong Kong (Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, Arya D. McCarthy, James A. Scharf)
• 2023.11.08 Humble AI (Brian Knowles, Jason D Cruz, John T. Richards, Kush R. Varshney)
• 2023.11.21 The stuff games are made of (Pippin Barr)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
• For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
• Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
• Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
• Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
• Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
• Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
• Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
• Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
• Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
• Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
• Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

15 years, "la ni a bonita", if you ask many of my fellow argentinians, is the amount of time I haven't been present in any Debian-related face to face activity. It was already time to fix that. Thanks to Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Gunnar Wolf that proded me to come I finally attended the Mini DebConf Uruguay in Montevideo. I took the opportunity to do my first trip by ferry, which is currently one of the best options to get from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, in my case through Colonia. Living ~700km at the south west of Buenos Aires city the trip was long, it included a 10 hours bus, a ferry and yet another bus... but of course, it was worth it. In Buenos Aires' port I met Emmanuel eamanu Arias, a fellow Argentinian Debian Developer from La Rioja, so I had the pleasure to travel with him. To be honest Gunnar already did a wonderful blog post with many pictures, I should have taken more. I had the opportunity to talk about device trees, and even look at Gunnar's machine one in order to find why a Display Port port was not working on a kernel but did in another. At the same time I also had time to start packaging qt6-grpc. Sadly I was there just one entire day, as I arrived on Thursday afternoon and had to leave on Saturday after lunch, but we did have a lot of quality Debian time. I'll repeat here what Gunnar already wrote:

We had a long, important conversation about an important discussion that we are about to present on debian-vote@lists.debian.org.

Stay tuned on that, I think this is something we should all get involved. All in all I already miss hacking with people on the same room. Meetings for us mean a lot of distance to be traveled (well, I live far away of almost everything), but I really should try to this more often. Certainly more than just once every 15 years :-)