Review: The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov

Series:	Galactic Empire #2
Publisher:	Fawcett Crest
Copyright:	1950, 1951
Printing:	June 1972
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	192

The Stars, Like Dust is usually listed as the first book in Asimov's lesser-known Galactic Empire Trilogy since it takes place before Pebble in the Sky. Pebble in the Sky was published first, though, so I count it as the second book. It is very early science fiction with a few mystery overtones. Buying books produces about 5% of the pleasure of reading them while taking much less than 5% of the time. There was a time in my life when I thoroughly enjoyed methodically working through a used book store, list in hand, tracking down cheap copies to fill in holes in series. This means that I own a lot of books that I thought at some point that I would want to read but never got around to, often because, at the time, I was feeling completionist about some series or piece of world-building. From time to time, I get the urge to try to read some of them. Sometimes this is a poor use of my time. The Galactic Empire series is from Asimov's first science fiction period, after the Foundation series but contemporaneous with their collection into novels. They're set long, long before Foundation, but after humans have inhabited numerous star systems and Earth has become something of a backwater. That process is just starting in The Stars, Like Dust: Earth is still somewhere where an upper-class son might be sent for an education, but it has been devastated by nuclear wars and is well on its way to becoming an inward-looking relic on the edge of galactic society. Biron Farrill is the son of the Lord Rancher of Widemos, a wealthy noble whose world is one of those conquered by the Tyranni. In many other SF novels, the Tyranni would be an alien race; here, it's a hierarchical and authoritarian human civilization. The book opens with Biron discovering a radiation bomb planted in his dorm room. Shortly after, he learns that his father had been arrested. One of his fellow students claims to be on Biron's side against the Tyranni and gives him false papers to travel to Rhodia, a wealthy world run by a Tyranni sycophant. Like most books of this era, The Stars, Like Dust is a short novel full of plot twists. Unlike some of its contemporaries, it's not devoid of characterization, but I might have liked it better if it were. Biron behaves like an obnoxious teenager when he's not being an arrogant ass. There is a female character who does a few plot-relevant things and at no point is sexually assaulted, so I'll give Asimov that much, but the gender stereotypes are ironclad and there is an entire subplot focused on what I can only describe as seduction via petty jealousy. The writing... well, let me quote a typical passage:

There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, and perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visiphone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die. Biron didn't want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide.

Needless to say, Biron doesn't die. Even if your tolerance for pulp melodrama is high, 192 small-print pages of this sort of thing is wearying. Like a lot of Asimov plots, The Stars, Like Dust has some of the shape of a mystery novel. Biron, with the aid of some newfound companions on Rhodia, learns of a secret rebellion against the Tyranni and attempts to track down its base to join them. There are false leads, disguised identities, clues that are difficult to interpret, and similar classic mystery trappings, all covered with a patina of early 1950s imaginary science. To me, it felt constructed and artificial in ways that made the strings Asimov was pulling obvious. I don't know if someone who likes mystery construction would feel differently about it. The worst part of the plot thankfully doesn't come up much. We learn early in the story that Biron was on Earth to search for a long-lost document believed to be vital to defeating the Tyranni. The nature of that document is revealed on the final page, so I won't spoil it, but if you try to think of the stupidest possible document someone could have built this plot around, I suspect you will only need one guess. (In Asimov's defense, he blamed Galaxy editor H.L. Gold for persuading him to include this plot, and disavowed it a few years later.) The Stars, Like Dust is one of the worst books I have ever read. The characters are overwrought, the politics are slapdash and build on broad stereotypes, the romantic subplot is dire and plays out mainly via Biron egregiously manipulating his petulant love interest, and the writing is annoying. Sometimes pulp fiction makes up for those common flaws through larger-than-life feats of daring, sweeping visions of future societies, and ever-escalating stakes. There is little to none of that here. Asimov instead provides tedious political maneuvering among a class of elitist bankers and land owners who consider themselves natural leaders. The only places where the power structures of this future government make sense are where Asimov blatantly steals them from either the Roman Empire or the Doge of Venice. The one thing this book has going for it the thing, apart from bloody-minded completionism, that kept me reading is that the technology is hilariously weird in that way that only 1940s and 1950s science fiction can be. The characters have access to communication via some sort of interstellar telepathy (messages coded to a specific person's "brain waves") and can travel between stars through hyperspace jumps, but each jump is manually calculated by referring to the pilot's (paper!) volumes of the Standard Galactic Ephemeris. Communication between ships (via "etheric radio") requires manually aiming a radio beam at the area in space where one thinks the other ship is. It's an unintentionally entertaining combination of technology that now looks absurdly primitive and science that is so advanced and hand-waved that it's obviously made up. I also have to give Asimov some points for using spherical coordinates. It's a small thing, but the coordinate systems in most SF novels and TV shows are obviously not fit for purpose. I spent about a month and a half of this year barely reading, and while some of that is because I finally tackled a few projects I'd been putting off for years, a lot of it was because of this book. It was only 192 pages, and I'm still curious about the glue between Asimov's Foundation and Robot series, both of which I devoured as a teenager. But every time I picked it up to finally finish it and start another book, I made it about ten pages and then couldn't take any more. Learn from my error: don't try this at home, or at least give up if the same thing starts happening to you. Followed by The Currents of Space. Rating: 2 out of 10

Review: Going Infinite, by Michael Lewis

Publisher:	W.W. Norton & Company
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-324-07434-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	255

My first reaction when I heard that Michael Lewis had been embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried working on a book when Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed into bankruptcy after losing billions of dollars of customer deposits was "holy shit, why would you talk to Michael Lewis about your dodgy cryptocurrency company?" Followed immediately by "I have to read this book." This is that book. I wasn't sure how Lewis would approach this topic. His normal (although not exclusive) area of interest is financial systems and crises, and there is lots of room for multiple books about cryptocurrency fiascoes using someone like Bankman-Fried as a pivot. But Going Infinite is not like The Big Short or Lewis's other financial industry books. It's a nearly straight biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, with just enough context for the reader to follow his life. To understand what you're getting in Going Infinite, I think it's important to understand what sort of book Lewis likes to write. Lewis is not exactly a reporter, although he does explain complicated things for a mass audience. He's primarily a storyteller who collects people he finds fascinating. This book was therefore never going to be like, say, Carreyrou's Bad Blood or Isaac's Super Pumped. Lewis's interest is not in a forensic account of how FTX or Alameda Research were structured. His interest is in what makes Sam Bankman-Fried tick, what's going on inside his head. That's not a question Lewis directly answers, though. Instead, he shows you Bankman-Fried as Lewis saw him and was able to reconstruct from interviews and sources and lets you draw your own conclusions. Boy did I ever draw a lot of conclusions, most of which were highly unflattering. However, one conclusion I didn't draw, and had been dubious about even before reading this book, was that Sam Bankman-Fried was some sort of criminal mastermind who intentionally plotted to steal customer money. Lewis clearly doesn't believe this is the case, and with the caveat that my study of the evidence outside of this book has been spotty and intermittent, I think Lewis has the better of the argument. I am utterly fascinated by this, and I'm afraid this review is going to turn into a long summary of my take on the argument, so here's the capsule review before you get bored and wander off: This is a highly entertaining book written by an excellent storyteller. I am also inclined to believe most of it is true, but given that I'm not on the jury, I'm not that invested in whether Lewis is too credulous towards the explanations of the people involved. What I do know is that it's a fantastic yarn with characters who are too wild to put in fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are a few things that everyone involved appears to agree on, and therefore I think we can take as settled. One is that Bankman-Fried, and most of the rest of FTX and Alameda Research, never clearly distinguished between customer money and all of the other money. It's not obvious that their home-grown accounting software (written entirely by one person! who never spoke to other people! in code that no one else could understand!) was even capable of clearly delineating between their piles of money. Another is that FTX and Alameda Research were thoroughly intermingled. There was no official reporting structure and possibly not even a coherent list of employees. The environment was so chaotic that lots of people, including Bankman-Fried, could have stolen millions of dollars without anyone noticing. But it was also so chaotic that they could, and did, literally misplace millions of dollars by accident, or because Bankman-Fried had problems with object permanence. Something that was previously less obvious from news coverage but that comes through very clearly in this book is that Bankman-Fried seriously struggled with normal interpersonal and societal interactions. We know from multiple sources that he was diagnosed with ADHD and depression (Lewis describes it specifically as anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure). The ADHD in Lewis's account is quite severe and does not sound controlled, despite medication; for example, Bankman-Fried routinely played timed video games while he was having important meetings, forgot things the moment he stopped dealing with them, was constantly on his phone or seeking out some other distraction, and often stimmed (by bouncing his leg) to a degree that other people found it distracting. Perhaps more tellingly, Bankman-Fried repeatedly describes himself in diary entries and correspondence to other people (particularly Caroline Ellison, his employee and on-and-off secret girlfriend) as being devoid of empathy and unable to access his own emotions, which Lewis supports with stories from former co-workers. I'm very hesitant to diagnose someone via a book, but, at least in Lewis's account, Bankman-Fried nearly walks down the symptom list of antisocial personality disorder in his own description of himself to other people. (The one exception is around physical violence; there is nothing in this book or in any of the other reporting that I've seen to indicate that Bankman-Fried was violent or physically abusive.) One of the recurrent themes of this book is that Bankman-Fried never saw the point in following rules that didn't make sense to him or worrying about things he thought weren't important, and therefore simply didn't. By about a third of the way into this book, before FTX is even properly started, very little about its eventual downfall will seem that surprising. There was no way that Sam Bankman-Fried was going to be able to run a successful business over time. He was extremely good at probabilistic trading and spotting exploitable market inefficiencies, and extremely bad at essentially every other aspect of living in a society with other people, other than a hit-or-miss ability to charm that worked much better with large audiences than one-on-one. The real question was why anyone would ever entrust this man with millions of dollars or decide to work for him for longer than two weeks. The answer to those questions changes over the course of this story. Later on, it was timing. Sam Bankman-Fried took the techniques of high frequency trading he learned at Jane Street Capital and applied them to exploiting cryptocurrency markets at precisely the right time in the cryptocurrency bubble. There was far more money than sense, the most ruthless financial players were still too leery to get involved, and a rising tide was lifting all boats, even the ones that were piles of driftwood. When cryptocurrency inevitably collapsed, so did his businesses. In retrospect, that seems inevitable. The early answer, though, was effective altruism. A full discussion of effective altruism is beyond the scope of this review, although Lewis offers a decent introduction in the book. The short version is that a sensible and defensible desire to use stronger standards of evidence in evaluating charitable giving turned into a bizarre navel-gazing exercise in making up statistical risks to hypothetical future people and treating those made-up numbers as if they should be the bedrock of one's personal ethics. One of the people most responsible for this turn is an Oxford philosopher named Will MacAskill. Sam Bankman-Fried was already obsessed with utilitarianism, in part due to his parents' philosophical beliefs, and it was a presentation by Will MacAskill that converted him to the effective altruism variant of extreme utilitarianism. In Lewis's presentation, this was like joining a cult. The impression I came away with feels like something out of a science fiction novel: Bankman-Fried knew there was some serious gap in his thought processes where most people had empathy, was deeply troubled by this, and latched on to effective altruism as the ethical framework to plug into that hole. So much of effective altruism sounds like a con game that it's easy to think the participants are lying, but Lewis clearly believes Bankman-Fried is a true believer. He appeared to be sincerely trying to make money in order to use it to solve existential threats to society, he does not appear to be motivated by money apart from that goal, and he was following through (in bizarre and mostly ineffective ways). I find this particularly believable because effective altruism as a belief system seems designed to fit Bankman-Fried's personality and justify the things he wanted to do anyway. Effective altruism says that empathy is meaningless, emotion is meaningless, and ethical decisions should be made solely on the basis of expected value: how much return (usually in safety) does society get for your investment. Effective altruism says that all the things that Sam Bankman-Fried was bad at were useless and unimportant, so he could stop feeling bad about his apparent lack of normal human morality. The only thing that mattered was the thing that he was exceptionally good at: probabilistic reasoning under uncertainty. And, critically to the foundation of his business career, effective altruism gave him access to investors and a recruiting pool of employees, things he was entirely unsuited to acquiring the normal way. There's a ton more of this book that I haven't touched on, but this review is already quite long, so I'll leave you with one more point. I don't know how true Lewis's portrayal is in all the details. He took the approach of getting very close to most of the major players in this drama and largely believing what they said happened, supplemented by startling access to sources like Bankman-Fried's personal diary and Caroline Ellis's personal diary. (He also seems to have gotten extensive information from the personal psychiatrist of most of the people involved; I'm not sure if there's some reasonable explanation for this, but based solely on the material in this book, it seems to be a shocking breach of medical ethics.) But Lewis is a storyteller more than he's a reporter, and his bias is for telling a great story. It's entirely possible that the events related here are not entirely true, or are skewed in favor of making a better story. It's certainly true that they're not the complete story. But, that said, I think a book like this is a useful counterweight to the human tendency to believe in moral villains. This is, frustratingly, a counterweight extended almost exclusively to higher-class white people like Bankman-Fried. This is infuriating, but that doesn't make it wrong. It means we should extend that analysis to more people. Once FTX collapsed, a lot of people became very invested in the idea that Bankman-Fried was a straightforward embezzler. Either he intended from the start to steal everyone's money or, more likely, he started losing money, panicked, and stole customer money to cover the hole. Lots of people in history have done exactly that, and lots of people involved in cryptocurrency have tenuous attachments to ethics, so this is a believable story. But people are complicated, and there's also truth in the maxim that every villain is the hero of their own story. Lewis is after a less boring story than "the crook stole everyone's money," and that leads to some bias. But sometimes the less boring story is also true. Here's the thing: even if Sam Bankman-Fried never intended to take any money, he clearly did intend to mix customer money with Alameda Research funds. In Lewis's account, he never truly believed in them as separate things. He didn't care about following accounting or reporting rules; he thought they were boring nonsense that got in his way. There is obvious criminal intent here in any reading of the story, so I don't think Lewis's more complex story would let him escape prosecution. He refused to follow the rules, and as a result a lot of people lost a lot of money. I think it's a useful exercise to leave mental space for the possibility that he had far less obvious reasons for those actions than that he was a simple thief, while still enforcing the laws that he quite obviously violated. This book was great. If you like Lewis's style, this was some of the best entertainment I've read in a while. Highly recommended; if you are at all interested in this saga, I think this is a must-read. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Forward, edited by Blake Crouch

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	September 2019
ISBN:	1-5420-9206-X
ISBN:	1-5420-4363-8
ISBN:	1-5420-9357-0
ISBN:	1-5420-0434-9
ISBN:	1-5420-4363-8
ISBN:	1-5420-4425-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	300

This is another Amazon collection of short fiction, this time mostly at novelette length. (The longer ones might creep into novella.) As before, each one is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing," with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. (At some point I need to update my page templates so that I can add multiple covers.) N.K. Jemisin's "Emergency Skin" won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, so I wanted to read and review it, but it would be too short for a standalone review. I therefore decided to read the whole collection and review it as an anthology. This was a mistake. Learn from my mistake. The overall theme of the collection is technological advance, rapid change, and the ethical and social question of whether we should slow technology because of social risk. Some of the stories stick to that theme more closely than others. Jemisin's story mostly ignores it, which was probably the right decision. "Ark" by Veronica Roth: A planet-killing asteroid has been on its inexorable way towards Earth for decades. Most of the planet has been evacuated. A small group has stayed behind, cataloging samples and filling two remaining ships with as much biodiversity as they can find with the intent to leave at the last minute. Against that backdrop, two of that team bond over orchids. If you were going "wait, what?" about the successful evacuation of Earth, yeah, me too. No hint is offered as to how this was accomplished. Also, the entirety of humanity abandoned mutual hostility and national borders to cooperate in the face of the incoming disaster, which is, uh, bizarrely optimistic for an otherwise gloomy story. I should be careful about how negative I am about this story because I am sure it will be someone's favorite. I can even write part of the positive review: an elegiac look at loss, choices, and the meaning of a life, a moving look at how people cope with despair. The writing is fine, the story structure works; it's not a bad story. I just found it monumentally depressing, and was not engrossed by the emotionally abused protagonist's unresolved father issues. I can imagine a story around the same facts and plot that I would have liked much better, but all of these people need therapy and better coping mechanisms. I'm also not sure what this had to do with the theme, given that the incoming asteroid is random chance and has nothing to do with technological development. (4) "Summer Frost" by Blake Crouch: The best part of this story is the introductory sequence before the reader knows what's going on, which is full of evocative descriptions. I'm about to spoil what is going on, so if you want to enjoy that untainted by the stupidity of the rest of the plot, skip the rest of this story review. We're going to have a glut of stories about the weird and obsessive form of AI risk invented by the fevered imaginations of the "rationalist" community, aren't we. I don't know why I didn't predict that. It's going to be just as annoying as the glut of cyberpunk novels written by people who don't understand computers. Crouch lost me as soon as the setup is revealed. Even if I believed that a game company would use a deep learning AI still in learning mode to run an NPC (I don't; see Microsoft's Tay for an obvious reason why not), or that such an NPC would spontaneously start testing the boundaries of the game world (this is not how deep learning works), Crouch asks the reader to believe that this AI started as a fully scripted NPC in the prologue with a fixed storyline. In other words, the foundation of the story is that this game company used an AI model capable of becoming a general intelligence for barely more than a cut scene. This is not how anything works. The rest of the story is yet another variation on a science fiction plot so old and threadbare that Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to avoid telling more versions of it. Crouch's contribution is to dress it up in the terminology of the excessively online. (The middle of the story features a detailed discussion of Roko's basilisk; if you recognize that, you know what you're in for.) Asimov would not have had a lesbian protagonist, so points for progress I guess, but the AI becomes more interesting to the protagonist than her wife and kid because of course it does. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but the destination is the bog-standard hard-takeoff general intelligence scenario. One more pet peeve: Authors, stop trying to illustrate the growth of your AI by having it move from broken to fluent English. English grammar is so much easier than self-awareness or the Turing test that we had programs that could critique your grammar decades before we had believable chatbots. It's going to get grammar right long before the content of the words makes any sense. Also, your AI doesn't sound dumber, your AI sounds like someone whose native language doesn't use pronouns and helper verbs the way that English does, and your decision to use that as a marker for intelligence is, uh, maybe something you should think about. (3) "Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin: The protagonist is a heavily-augmented cyborg from a colony of Earth's diaspora. The founders of that colony fled Earth when it became obvious to them that the planet was dying. They have survived in another star system, but they need a specific piece of technology from the dead remnants of Earth. The protagonist has been sent to retrieve it. The twist is that this story is told in the second-person perspective by the protagonist's ride-along AI, created from a consensus model of the rulers of the colony. We never see directly what the protagonist is doing or thinking, only the AI reaction to it. This is exactly the sort of gimmick that works much better in short fiction than at novel length. Jemisin uses it to create tension between the reader and the narrator, and I thoroughly enjoyed the effect. (As shown in the Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin is one of the few writers who can use second-person effectively.) I won't spoil the revelation, but it's barbed and biting and vicious and I loved it. Jemisin does deliver the point with a sledgehammer, so be aware of that if you want subtlety in your short fiction, but I prefer the bluntness. (This is part of why I usually don't get along with literary short stories.) The reader of course can't change the direction of the story, but the second-person perspective still provides a hit of vicarious satisfaction. I can see why this won the Hugo; it's worth seeking out. (8) "You Have Arrived at Your Destination" by Amor Towles: Sam and his wife are having a child, and they've decided to provide him with an early boost in life. Vitek is a fertility lab, but more than that, it can do some gene tweaking and adjustment to push a child more towards one personality or another. Sam and his wife have spent hours filling out profiles, and his wife spent hours weeding possible choices down to three. Now, Sam has come to Vitek to pick from the remaining options. Speaking of literary short stories, Towles is the non-SFF writer of this bunch, and it's immediately obvious. The story requires the SFnal premise, but after that this is a character piece. Vitek is an elite, expensive company with a condescending and overly-reductive attitude towards humanity, which is entirely intentional on the author's part. This is the sort of story that gets resolved in an unexpected conversation in a roadside bar, and where most of the conflict happens inside the protagonist's head. I was initially going to complain that Towles does the standard literary thing of leaving off the denouement on the grounds that the reader can figure it out, but when I did a bit of re-reading for this review, I found more of the bones than I had noticed the first time. There's enough subtlety that I had to think for a bit and re-read a passage, but not too much. It's also the most thoughtful treatment of the theme of the collection, the only one that I thought truly wrestled with the weird interactions between technological capability and human foresight. Next to "Emergency Skin," this was the best story of the collection. (7) "The Last Conversation" by Paul Tremblay: A man wakes up in a dark room, in considerable pain, not remembering anything about his life. His only contact with the world at first is a voice: a woman who is helping him recover his strength and his memory. The numbers that head the chapters have significant gaps, representing days left out of the story, as he pieces together what has happened alongside the reader. Tremblay is the horror writer of the collection, so predictably this is the story whose craft I can admire without really liking it. In this case, the horror comes mostly from the pacing of revelation, created by the choice of point of view. (This would be a much different story from the perspective of the woman.) It's well-done, but it has the tendency I've noticed in other horror stories of being a tightly closed system. I see where the connection to the theme is, but it's entirely in the setting, not in the shape of the story. Not my thing, but I can see why it might be someone else's. (5) "Randomize" by Andy Weir: Gah, this was so bad. First, and somewhat expectedly, it's a clunky throwback to a 1950s-style hard SF puzzle story. The writing is atrocious: wooden, awkward, cliched, and full of gratuitous infodumping. The characterization is almost entirely through broad stereotypes; the lone exception is the female character, who at least adds an interesting twist despite being forced to act like an idiot because of the plot. It's a very old-school type of single-twist story, but the ending is completely implausible and falls apart if you breathe on it too hard. Weir is something of a throwback to an earlier era of scientific puzzle stories, though, so maybe one is inclined to give him a break on the writing quality. (I am not; one of the ways in which science fiction has improved is that you can get good scientific puzzles and good writing these days.) But the science is also so bad that I was literally facepalming while reading it. The premise of this story is that quantum computers are commercially available. That will cause a serious problem for Las Vegas casinos, because the generator for keno numbers is vulnerable to quantum algorithms. The solution proposed by the IT person for the casino? A quantum random number generator. (The words "fight quantum with quantum" appear literally in the text if you're wondering how bad the writing is.) You could convince me that an ancient keno system is using a pseudorandom number generator that might be vulnerable to some quantum algorithm and doesn't get reseeded often enough. Fine. And yes, quantum computers can be used to generate high-quality sources of random numbers. But this solution to the problem makes no sense whatsoever. It's like swatting a house fly with a nuclear weapon. Weir says explicitly in the story that all the keno system needs is an external source of high-quality random numbers. The next step is to go to Amazon and buy a hardware random number generator. If you want to splurge, it might cost you $250. Problem solved. Yes, hardware random number generators have various limitations that may cause you problems if you need millions of bits or you need them very quickly, but not for something as dead-simple and with such low entropy requirements as keno numbers! You need a trivial number of bits for each round; even the slowest and most conservative hardware random number generator would be fine. Hell, measure the noise levels on the casino floor. Point a camera at a lava lamp. Or just buy one of the physical ball machines they use for the lottery. This problem is heavily researched, by casinos in particular, and is not significantly changed by the availability of quantum computers, at least for applications such as keno where the generator can be reseeded before each generation. You could maybe argue that this is an excuse for the IT guy to get his hands on a quantum computer, which fits the stereotypes, but that still breaks the story for reasons that would be spoilers. As soon as any other casino thought about this, they'd laugh in the face of the characters. I don't want to make too much of this, since anyone can write one bad story, but this story was dire at every level. I still owe Weir a proper chance at novel length, but I can't say this added to my enthusiasm. (2) Rating: 4 out of 10

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during December 2020 (previous month):

• Reviewed and merged a contribution from Peter Law to my django-cache-toolbox library for Django-based web applications, including explicitly requiring that cached relations are primary keys (#23) and improving the example in the README (#25).

• I took part in an interview with Vladimir Bejdo, an intern at the Software Freedom Conservancy, in order to talk about the Reproducible Builds project, my participation in software freedom, the importance of reproducibility in software development, and to have a brief discussion on the issues facing free software as a whole. The full interview can be found on Conservancy's webpages.

• As part of my duties of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative, I attended its monthly meeting and participated in various licensing and other related discussions occurring on the internet. Unfortunately, I could not attend the parallel meeting for Software in the Public Interest this month.

Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. This month, I:

• Submitted a draft academic paper to IEEE Software. The article (co-written by Stefano Zacchiroli) is aimed a fairly general audience. It first defines the overal problem and then provides insight into the challenges of actually making real-world software reproducible. It then outlines the experiences of the Reproducible Builds project in making large-scale software collections/supply-chains/ecosystems reproducible and concludes by describing the affinity between reproducibility efforts and quality assurance.
• Kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date. [...]
• Submitted 11 patches in Debian to fix specific reproducibility issues in circlator, dvbstreamer, eric, jbbp, knot-resolver, libjs-qunit, mail-expire, osmo-mgw, python-pyramid, pyvows & sayonara.
• Categorised a huge number of packages and issues in the Reproducible Builds 'notes' repository.
• For disorderfs (our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues), I made the following changes:
  • Add support for testing on Salsa's CI system. [...][...][...][...]
  • Added a quick benchmark. [...]
• Drafted, published and publicised our monthly report, as well managed the project's various social media accounts.
• Contributed to a discussion about the recent 'SolarWinds' attack. [...]

• I also made a large number of changes to the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation, including applying a typo fix from Roland Clobus [...], fixed the draft detection logic (#28), added more academic articles to our list [...] and corrected a number of grammar issues [...][...].

I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including releasing version 163:

• New features & bug fixes:
  • Normalise ret to retq in objdump output in order to support multiple versions of GNU binutils. (#976760)
  • Don't show any progress indicators when running zstd. (#226)
  • Correct the grammatical tense in the --debug log output. [...]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Update the debian/copyright file to match the copyright notices in the source tree. (#224)
  • Update various years across the codebase in .py copyright headers. [...]
  • Rewrite the filter routine that post-processes the output from readelf(1). [...]
  • Remove unnecessary PEP 263 encoding header lines; unnecessary after PEP 3120. [...]
  • Use minimal instead of basic as a variable name to match the underlying package name. [...]
  • Use pprint.pformat in the JSON comparator to serialise the differences from jsondiff. [...]

Debian Uploads

• python-django:
  • 2.2.17-2 Fix compatibility with GNU gettext version 0.21. (#978263)
  • 3.1.4-1 New upstream bugfix release.
• redis:
  • 6.2~rc1-1 New upstream RC release.
  • 6.2~rc1-2 Enable systemd support by compiling against the libsystemd-dev package. (#977852)
  • 6.2~rc1-3 Specify --supervised systemd now that we specify Type=notify to prevent service startup failure under systemd.
• mtools (4.0.26-1) New upstream release.

I also sponsored an upload of adminer (4.7.8-2) on behalf of Alexandre Rossi and performed two QA uploads of sendfile (2.1b.20080616-7 and 2.1b.20080616-8) to make the build the build reproducible (#776938) and to fix a number of other unrelated issues. Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project.

• Investigated and triaged: awstats, imagemagick, node-ini, openexr, openssl1.0, p11-kit, pypy, python-py, sqlite3, sympa, etc.
• Frontdesk duties, responding to user/developer questions, reviewing others' packages, participating in mailing list discussions, etc.
• Issued DLA 2477-1 for the Jupyter Notebook interactive notebook system, where a maliciously-crafted link could redirect the browser to a malicious/spoofed website. (CVE-2020-26215)
• Issued DLA 2491-1 and ELA-333-1 to fix two issues in OpenEXR, a set of tools to manipulate OpenEXR image files, often used in the computer-graphics industry for visual effects and animation. (CVE-2020-16588 & CVE-2020-16589)
• Issued DLA 2503-1 as it was discovered that there was an issue in node-ini, an .ini configuration file format parser/serialiser for Node.js, where an application could be exploited by a malicious input file.

You can find out more about the Debian LTS project via the following video:

My parents are less fond than I am of filling every available wall in their house with bookshelves and did a pruning of their books. A lot of them duplicated other things that I had, or didn't sound interesting, but I still ended up with two boxes of books (and now have to decide which of my books to prune, since I'm out of shelf space). Also included is the regular accumulation of new ebook purchases. Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie (nonfiction)
Ilona Andrews Clean Sweep (sff)
Catherine Asaro Charmed Sphere (sff)
Isaac Asimov The Caves of Steel (sff)
Isaac Asimov The Naked Sun (sff)
Marie Brennan Dice Tales (nonfiction)
Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown Wings on My Sleeve (nonfiction)
Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths Algorithms to Live By (nonfiction)
Tom Clancy The Cardinal of the Kremlin (thriller)
Tom Clancy The Hunt for the Red October (thriller)
Tom Clancy Red Storm Rising (thriller)
April Daniels Sovereign (sff)
Tom Flynn Galactic Rapture (sff)
Neil Gaiman American Gods (sff)
Gary J. Hudson They Had to Go Out (nonfiction)
Catherine Ryan Hyde Pay It Forward (mainstream)
John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (mainstream)
John Irving The Cider House Rules (mainstream)
John Irving The Hotel New Hampshire (mainstream)
Lawrence M. Krauss Beyond Star Trek (nonfiction)
Lawrence M. Krauss The Physics of Star Trek (nonfiction)
Ursula K. Le Guin Four Ways to Forgiveness (sff collection)
Ursula K. Le Guin Words Are My Matter (nonfiction)
Richard Matheson Somewhere in Time (sff)
Larry Niven Limits (sff collection)
Larry Niven The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (sff collection)
Larry Niven The Magic Goes Away (sff)
Larry Niven Protector (sff)
Larry Niven World of Ptavvs (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Gripping Hand (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Inferno (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (sff)
Flann O'Brien The Best of Myles (nonfiction)
Jerry Pournelle Exiles to Glory (sff)
Jerry Pournelle The Mercenary (sff)
Jerry Pournelle Prince of Mercenaries (sff)
Jerry Pournelle West of Honor (sff)
Jerry Pournelle (ed.) Codominium: Revolt on War World (sff anthology)
Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling Go Tell the Spartans (sff)
J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (mainstream)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson The Swordswoman (sff)
Stanley Schmidt Aliens and Alien Societies (nonfiction)
Cecilia Tan (ed.) Sextopia (sff anthology)
Lavie Tidhar Central Station (sff)
Catherynne Valente Chicks Dig Gaming (nonfiction)
J.E. Zimmerman Dictionary of Classical Mythology (nonfiction) This is an interesting tour of a lot of stuff I read as a teenager (Asimov, Niven, Clancy, and Pournelle, mostly in combination with Niven but sometimes his solo work). I suspect I will no longer consider many of these books to be very good, and some of them will probably go back into used bookstores after I've re-read them for memory's sake, or when I run low on space again. But all those mass market SF novels were a big part of my teenage years, and a few (like Mote In God's Eye) I definitely want to read again. Also included is a random collection of stuff my parents picked up over the years. I don't know what to expect from a lot of it, which makes it fun to anticipate. Fall vacation is coming up, and with it a large amount of uninterrupted reading time.

Introduction I've written before about using a U2F key with PAM. This post continues the theme and explains how to use a smartcard with GnuPG for storing OpenPGP private keys. Specifically, a Yubikey 4 card, because that's what I have, but any good GnuPG compatible card should work. The Yubikey is both a GnuPG compatible smart card, and a U2F card. The Yubikey 4 can handle keys up to 4096 bits. Older Yubikeys can only handle keys up to 2095 bits. The reason to do this is to make it harder for an attacker to steal your encryption keys. I will assume you don't already have an OpenPGP key, or are willing to generate a new one. I will also assume you run Debian stretch; some of the desktop environment setup details may differ between Debian versions or between Linux distributions. You will need:

• A Yubikey 4 (or other GnuPG compatible smartcard).
• Two USB memory sticks to store master copies of the key you create.
• Either a lot of patience, or a ChaosKey or something else to generate a lot of entropy for the kernel. Entropy is used by GnuPG to create encryption keys.

Terminology Some terminology:

• OpenPGP is a standard of encryption keys.
• GnuPG (also known as GPG or gpg) is an encryption program that supports OpenPGP.
• Encryption key or key pair is a secret and a public key for encryption. Key and key pair are often used as synonyms.
• The secret keys is yours, and only you will have it or be able to you use. The public key is public, anyone can have a copy. The two are linked and you can't create a secret key linked to a public key. (If you can, you will become a famous cryptographer. Like Isaac Newton famous among apple growers.)
• Master key is the important thing to keep track of. In the encryption world, the master key is what identifies you.
• A subkey is a secondary key or key pair for encryption, derived from the master key. Subkeys can be created and revoked almost at will, and there can be any number of them. Subkeys are always associated with a single master key.
• Subkeys can be dedicated for encryption, signing, and authentication. You can have one of each.
• Encryption is the process of taking a file and making it illegible to everyone except the owner of a secret key. When the public key is used to encrypt, only the secret key can decrypt.
• Signing is using a secret key to make a separate file that others can verify using the corresponding public key. This means the signer can "prove" they have the file. For example, you might sign emails to prove they came from you.
• Authentication is the process of proving you're you. Typically, for example, a server will know your public key, and will give a large random number encrypted with your public key. Only you have the corresponding secret key, so only you can send the random number back to the server, and thereby the server knows you're you.

Outline The process outline is:

1. Create a new, signing-only master key with GnuPG.
2. Create three "subkeys", one each for encryption, signing, and authentication. These subkeys are what everyone else uses.
3. Export copies of the master key pair and the subkey pairs and put them in a safe place.
4. Put the subkeys on the Yubikey.
5. GnuPG will automatically use the keys from the card. You have to have the card plugged into a USB port for things to work. If someone steals your laptop, they won't get the private subkeys. Even if they steal your Yubikey, they won't get them (the smartcard is physically designed to prevent that), and can't even use them (because there's PIN codes or passphrases and getting them wrong several times locks up the smartcard).
6. Use gpg-agent as your SSH agent, and the authentication-only subkey on the Yubikey is used as your ssh key.

Configure GnuPG The process in more detail:

• Configure GnuPG with regards to checksum and encryption algorithms. You can use the defaults, but depending on the version of GnuPG you have, they may be weaker than is recommended. These values are from Riseup.net OpenPGP guide, see link at the end. Add the following lines to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:

    personal-digest-preferences SHA512
    cert-digest-algo SHA512
    default-preference-list SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 AES256 AES192 AES CAST5 ZLIB BZIP2 ZIP Uncompressed
    personal-cipher-preferences TWOFISH CAMELLIA256 AES 3DES
    keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
  

Create new keys

• Create new sign-only master key.

$ gpg --full-generate-key
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA and RSA (default)
(2) DSA and Elgamal
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:43:54 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y

GnuPG needs to construct a user ID to identify your key.

Real name: Lars Wirzenius
Email address: liw@liw.fi
Comment: test key
You selected this USER-ID:
"Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>>"

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
gpg: key 25FB738D6EE435F7 marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: directory '/home/liw/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d' created
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/home/liw/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d/A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7.rev'
public and secret key created and signed.

Note that this key cannot be used for encryption. You may want to use
the command "--edit-key" to generate a subkey for this purpose.
pub rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

• Note that I set a 1-year expiration for they key. The expiration can be extended at any time (if you have the master secret key), but unless you do, the key won't accidentally live longer than the chosen time.
• Review the key:

$ gpg --list-secret-keys
/home/liw/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
----------------------------
sec rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid [ultimate] Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

• You now have the signing-only master key. You should now create three subkeys (keyid is the key identifier shown in the key listing, A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7 above). Use the --expert option to be able to add an authentication-only subkey.

$ gpg --edit-key --expert A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7z
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:44:52 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 6
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:45:22 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 8

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? a

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? s

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Encrypt Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? e

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? q
RSA keys may be btween 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:45:56 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> save

Export secret keys to files, make a backup

• You now have a master key and three subkeys. They are hidden in the ~/.gnupg directory. It is time to "export" the secret keys out from there.

$ gpg --export-secret-key --armor keyid > master.key
$ gpg --export-secret-subkeys --armor keyid > subkeys.key

• You should keep these files safe. You don't want to lose them, and you don't want anyone else to get access to them. I recommend you format two USB memory sticks, format them using full-disk encryption, and copy the exported files to both of them. Then keep them somewhere safe. There's ways of making this part more sophisticated, but that's for another time.
• The next step involves some hoop-jumping. What we want is to have the master secret key NOT on you machine, so we tell GnuPG to remove it. We exported it above, so we won't lose it. However, deleting the master secret key also removes the secret subkeys. But we can import those without importing the master secret key.

$ gpg --delete-secret-key keyid
$ gpg --import subkeys.key

• Now verify that you have the secret subkeys, but not the master key. There should be one line starting with sec# (note the hash mark, which indicates the key isn't available), and three lines starting with ssb (no hash mark).

$ gpg -K
/home/liw/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
----------------------------
sec# rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid [ultimate] Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [S] [expires: 2018-05-29]
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [E] [expires: 2018-05-29]
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [A] [expires: 2018-05-29]


Install subkeys on a Yubikey

• Now insert the Yubikey in a USB slot. We can start transferring the secret subkeys to the Yubikey. If you want, you can set your name and other information, and change PIN codes. There's several types of PIN codes: normal use, unblocking a locked card, and a third PIN code for admin operations. Changing the PIN codes is a good idea, otherwise everyone will just try the default of 123456 (admin 12345678). However, I'm skipping that in the interest of brevity.

$ gpg -card-edit
...

• Actually move the subkeys to the card. Note that this does a move, not a copy, and the subkeys will be removed from your ~/.gnupg (check with gpg -K).

$ gpg --edit-key liw
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb* rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(1) Signature key
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb* rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb* rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(2) Encryption key
Your selection? 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb* rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 3

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb* rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb* rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> save

• If you want to use several Yubikeys, or have a spare one just in case, repeat the previous four steps (starting from importing subkeys back into ~/.gnupg).
• You're now done, as far GnuPG use is concerned. Any time you need to sign, encrypt, or decrypt something, GnuPG will look for your subkeys on the Yubikey, and will tell you to insert it in a USB port if it can't find the key.

Use subkey on Yubikey as your SSH key

• To actually use the authentication-only subkey on the Yubikey for ssh, you need to configure your system to use gpg-agent as the SSH agent. Add the following line to .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

   enable-ssh-support
  

• On a Debian stretch system with GNOME, edit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop to have the following line, to prevent the GNOME ssh agent from starting up:

   Hidden=true
  

• Edit /etc/X11/Xsession.options and remove or comment out the line that says use-ssh-agent. This stops a system-started ssh-agent from being started when the desktop start.
• Create the file ~/.config/autostart/gpg-agent.desktop with the following content:

   [Desktop Entry]
   Type=Application
   Name=gpg-agent
   Comment=gpg-agent
   Exec=/usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon
   OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;MATE;
   X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=PreDisplayServer
   X-GNOME-AutoRestart=false
   X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true
   X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=GNOME
   X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=gnome-keyring
   X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=general
   X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=3.20.0
  

• To test, log out, and back in again, run the following in a terminal:

$ ssh-add -l

The output should contain a line that looks like this:

    4096 SHA256:PDCzyQPpd9tiWsELM8LwaLBsMDMm42J8/eEfezNgnVc cardno:000604626953 (RSA)

• You need to export the authentication-only subkey in the SSH key format. You need this for adding to .ssh/authorized_keys, if nothing else.

$ gpg --export-ssh-key keyid > ssh.pub

• Happy hacking.

See also See also the following links. I've used them to learn enough to write the above.

• Riseup.net's OpenPGP best practices
• bootc's GnuPG / ssh agent setup
• anarcat's Yubikey NEO howto

Edited to fix:

• Output of gpg -K after removing secret master key.