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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the end of the year approaching fast, I thought putting my year in retrospective via music would be a fun thing to do. Albums In 2022, I added 51 new albums to my collection nearly one a week! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available¹. Browsing through the albums, I can see my tastes really shifted a lot in the last few years. I used to listen to a lot of Hip-Hop, but the recent trends in this genre² really turn me off. In fact, it seems I didn't add a single Hip-Hop album to my collection this year... Metal also continues to dominate the list. Many thanks to Angry Metal Guy for being the best metal reviewing website out there. Concerts 2022 was also a big change for me, as I started going to much more concerts than I previously did. metalfinder has been working great and I'm really happy with it. Here are the concerts I went to in 2022:

• April 26th: Arch Enemy, Unto Others, Behemoth, Napalm Death
• September 16th: NOFX
• November 4th: Aeternam
• November 7th: Jordi Savall & Hesp rion XXI
• November 13th: VOLA
• November 19th: Vulgaires Machins, Anti-Flag
• November 26th: Soen
• December 12h: Oddisee
• December 16th: Jail, B ton Arm , Reckless Upstarts, Union Thugs, La Gachette

I'm looking forward continuing to go to a lot of concerts in 2023!

De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19 edi o do Latinoware - Congresso Latino-americano de Software Livre e Tecnologias Abertas, em Foz do Igua u. Ap s 2 anos acontecendo de forma online devido a pandemia do COVID-19, o evento voltou a ser presencial e sentimos que a comunidade Debian Brasil deveria estar presente. Nossa ltima participa o no Latinoware foi em 2016 A organiza o do Latinoware cedeu para a comunidade Debian Brasil um estande para que pud ssemos ter contato com as pessoas que visitavam a rea aberta de exposi es e assim divulgarmos o projeto Debian. Durante os 3 dias do evento, o estande foi organizado por mim (Paulo Henrique Santana) como Desenvolvedor Debian, e pelo Leonardo Rodrigues como contribuidor Debian. Infelizmente o Daniel Lenharo teve um imprevisto de ltima hora e n o pode ir para Foz do Igua u (sentimos sua falta l !). V rias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente estudantes) que n o conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso grupo e a gente explicava v rios conceitos como o que Software Livre, distribui o GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Tamb m recebemos pessoas da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros pa ses da Am rica Latina que j utilizavam uma distribui o GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que j utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall, do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian Eriberto Mota, e dos Mantenedores Debian Guilherme de Paula Segundo e Paulo Kretcheu. Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Ot vio. Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo. Al m de conversarmos bastante, distribu mos adesivos do Debian que foram produzidos alguns meses atr s com o patroc nio do Debian para serem distribu dos na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos v rias camisetas do Debian produzidas pela comunidade Curitiba Livre. Tamb m tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programa o oficial do Latinoware. Eu fiz as palestras: como tornar um(a) contribuidor(a) do Debian fazendo tradu es e como os SysAdmins de uma empresa global usam Debian . E o Leonardo fez a palestra: vantagens da telefonia Open Source nas empresas . Foto Paulo na palestra. Agradecemos a organiza o do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade Debian e gentilmente ceder os espa os para a nossa participa o, e parabenizamos a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organiza o pelo sucesso desse importante evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023. Agracemos tamb m ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian para a nossa participa o no Latinoware. Vers o em ingl s

De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19 edi o do Latinoware - Congresso Latino-americano de Software Livre e Tecnologias Abertas, em Foz do Igua u. Ap s 2 anos acontecendo de forma online devido a pandemia do COVID-19, o evento voltou a ser presencial e sentimos que a comunidade Debian Brasil deveria estar presente. Nossa ltima participa o no Latinoware foi em 2016 A organiza o do Latinoware cedeu para a comunidade Debian Brasil um estande para que pud ssemos ter contato com as pessoas que visitavam a rea aberta de exposi es e assim divulgarmos o projeto Debian. Durante os 3 dias do evento, o estande foi organizado por mim (Paulo Henrique Santana) como Desenvolvedor Debian, e pelo Leonardo Rodrigues como contribuidor Debian. Infelizmente o Daniel Lenharo teve um imprevisto de ltima hora e n o pode ir para Foz do Igua u (sentimos sua falta l !). V rias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente estudantes) que n o conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso grupo e a gente explicava v rios conceitos como o que Software Livre, distribui o GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Tamb m recebemos pessoas da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros pa ses da Am rica Latina que j utilizavam uma distribui o GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que j utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall, do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian Eriberto Mota, e dos Mantenedores Debian Guilherme de Paula Segundo e Paulo Kretcheu. Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Ot vio. Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo. Al m de conversarmos bastante, distribu mos adesivos do Debian que foram produzidos alguns meses atr s com o patroc nio do Debian para serem distribu dos na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos v rias camisetas do Debian produzidas pela comunidade Curitiba Livre. Tamb m tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programa o oficial do Latinoware. Eu fiz as palestras: como tornar um(a) contribuidor(a) do Debian fazendo tradu es e como os SysAdmins de uma empresa global usam Debian . E o Leonardo fez a palestra: vantagens da telefonia Open Source nas empresas . Foto Paulo na palestra. Agradecemos a organiza o do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade Debian e gentilmente ceder os espa os para a nossa participa o, e parabenizamos a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organiza o pelo sucesso desse importante evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023. Agracemos tamb m ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian para a nossa participa o no Latinoware. Vers o em ingl s

I hope you had a nice Halloween! I've collected together some songs that I've enjoyed over the last couple of years that loosely fit a theme: ambient, instrumental, experimental, industrial, dark, disconcerting, etc. I've prepared a Spotify playlist of most of them, but not all. The list is inline below as well, with many (but not all) tracks linking to Bandcamp, if I could find them there. This is a bit late, sorry. If anyone listens to something here and has any feedback I'd love to hear it. (If you are reading this on an aggregation site, it's possible the embeds won't work. If so, click through to my main site) Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3bEvEguRnf9U1RFrNbv5fk?si=9084cbf78c364ac8; The list, with Bandcamp embeds where possible:

• Miguel A. Ruiz Transparent (spanish ambient, March 2020) Transparent by Miguel A. Ruiz
• Arushi Jain My People Have Deep Roots (ambient, drone, atmospheric, indian) Under the Lilac Sky by arushi jain
• K Den - Love Horses (Ambient, builds up, never quite reaching DnB) Brabuhr Q-ih by Various Artists
• Bivouac The Great Escape (drone, spoken word, ambient, psych, November 2021; not on Spotify) bivouac - S/T by bivouac
• Gazelle Twin & NYX - Throne (ambient, choral, dark, drone, January 2022) Deep England by Gazelle Twin & NYX
• Nurse With Wound Transfiguration 3 (Incorporating Opium Cabaret) (March 2022)
• Eluvium Indoor Swimming At The Space Station (ambient, chill, long, loops, euphoric, March 2022) Indoor Swimming At The Space Station by Eluvium
• Hildur Gu nad ttir The Door
• Delia Derbyshire Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO (November 2021)
• Afterhere, Berenice Scott, Glenn Gregory - Butterfly (from the Vigil TV series, September 2021)
• Wardruna Andvevarljod (2021)
• Christina Vantzou Dvorjacked (March 2021) Colliding Wind by Concentric Records
• Oranssi Pazuzu Ilmestys (January 2022) Ilmestys by Oranssi Pazuzu
• Coil Tiny Golden Books Tiny Golden Books by Coil
• Gazelle Twin & Trash Generation History History by Gazelle Twin & Trash Generation
• Isambard Khroustaliov A Pre-History of Cybernetics (Freak Zone) (Feb 2022) A Pre-History of Cybernetics by Isambard Khroustaliov
• Boards of Canada Dayvan Cowboy (via Lauren Laverne) (Jun 2022) Dayvan Cowboy by Boards of Canada
• Emeka Ogboh No Countefeit (via Jamz Supernova: trancy, african beats) (Sep 2022) No Countefeit by Emeka Ogboh
• Burial Streetlands (dark ambient) (Oct 2022) Streetlands by Burial
• Raison D'etre - Of Dying Relics (dark industrial/ambient) (Oct 2022) Of Dying Relics by Raison D'etre
• Vanishing 55 N, 5 E (Not on Spotify) 55 N, 5 E by Vanishing
• Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow The Alien The Alien by Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow
• Coil Strange Birds Strange Birds by Coil

Some sources

1. Via Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone
2. Via Mary Anne Hobbs
3. Via Lose yourself with
4. Soma FM - Doomed (Halloween Special)

I have just filed a complaint with the CRTC about my phone provider's outrageous fees. This is a copy of the complaint.

I am traveling to Europe, specifically to Ireland, for a 6 days for a work meeting. I thought I could use my phone there. So I looked at my phone provider's services in Europe, and found the "Fido roaming" services: https://www.fido.ca/mobility/roaming The fees, at the time of writing, at fifteen (15!) dollars PER DAY to get access to my regular phone service (not unlimited!!). If I do not use that "roaming" service, the fees are:

• 2$/min
• 0.75$/text
• 10$/20MB

That is absolutely outrageous. Any random phone plan in Europe will be cheaper than this, by at least one order of magnitude. Just to take any example: https://www.tescomobile.ie/sim-only-plans.aspx Those fine folks offer a one-time, prepaid plan for 15 for 28 days which includes:

• unlimited data
• 1000 minutes
• 500 text messages
• 12GB data elsewhere in Europe

I think it's absolutely scandalous that telecommunications providers in Canada can charge so much money, especially since the most prohibitive fee (the "non-prepaid" plans) are automatically charged if I happen to forget to remove my sim card or put my phone in "airplane mode". As advised, I have called customer service at Fido for advice on how to handle this situation. They have confirmed those are the only plans available for travelers and could not accommodate me otherwise. I have notified them I was in the process of filing this complaint. I believe that Canada has become the technological dunce of the world, and I blame the CRTC for its lack of regulation in that matter. You should not allow those companies to grow into such a cartel that they can do such price-fixing as they wish. I haven't investigated Fido's competitors, but I will bet at least one of my hats that they do not offer better service. I attach a screenshot of the Fido page showing those outrageous fees.

I have no illusions about this having any effect. I thought of filing such a complain after the Rogers outage as well, but felt I had less of a standing there because I wasn't affected that much (e.g. I didn't have a life-threatening situation myself). This, however, was ridiculous and frustrating enough to trigger this outrage. We'll see how it goes...

"We will respond to you within 10 working days."

Response from CRTC They did respond within 10 days. Here is the full response:

Dear Antoine Beaupr : Thank you for contacting us about your mobile telephone international roaming service plan rates concern with Fido Solutions Inc. (Fido). In Canada, mobile telephone service is offered on a competitive basis. Therefore, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is not involved in Fido's terms of service (including international roaming service plan rates), billing and marketing practices, quality of service issues and customer relations. If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to escalate your concern to a manager if you believe the answer you have received from Fido's customer service is not satisfactory. Based on the information that you have provided, this may also appear to be a Competition Bureau matter. The Competition Bureau is responsible for administering and enforcing the Competition Act, and deals with issues such as false or misleading representations, deceptive marketing practices and collusion. You can reach the Competition Bureau by calling 1-800-348-5358 (toll-free), by TTY (for deaf and hard of hearing people) by calling 1-866-694-8389 (toll-free). For more contact information, please visit http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/00157.html When consumers are not satisfied with the service they are offered, we encourage them to compare the products and services of other providers in their area and look for a company that can better match their needs. The following tool helps to show choices of providers in your area: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm Thank you for sharing your concern with us.

In other words, complain with Fido, or change providers. Don't complain to us, we don't manage the telcos, they self-regulate. Great job, CRTC. This is going great. This is exactly why we're one of the most expensive countries on the planet for cell phone service.

Live chat with Fido Interestingly, the day after I received that response from the CRTC, I received this email from Fido, while traveling:

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:10:00 -0400 From: Fido DONOTREPLY@fido.ca To: REDACTED Subject: Courriel d avis d itin rance Fido Roaming Welcome Confirmation Fido Date : 13 septembre 2022
Num ro de compte : [redacted] Bonjour
Antoine Beaupr ! Nous vous crivons pour vous indiquer qu au moins un utilisateur inscrit votre compte s est r cemment connect un r seau en itin rance.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le message texte de bienvenue en itin rance envoy l utilisateur (ou aux utilisateurs), qui contenait les tarifs d itin rance
applicables. Message texte de bienvenue en itin rance Destinataire : REDACTED Date et heure : 2022-09-13 / 10:10:00
Allo, ici Fido : Bienvenue destination! Vous tes inscrit Fido Nomade alors utilisez vos donn es, parlez et textez comme vous le faites la
maison. Depuis le 1 mars 2022 le tarif cette destination pour 15 $/jour (+ taxes) et valide tous les jours jusqu' 23 h 59 HE, peu importe le fuseau
horaire dans lequel vous vous trouvez. Bon voyage! Des questions? Consultez fido.ca/m/itinerance ou composez +15149333436 (sans frais). Besoin d aide?

• PLANIFIEZ UN VOYAGE AVEC Fido NomadeMC
  D couvrez nos options d itin rance et restez en contact l tranger sans vous soucier de votre
  facture.

D tails

• G rez votre compte
  G rez vos produits et services Fido la maison ou sur la route gr ce Mon
  Compte.

D tails Ce courriel est produit automatiquement; veuillez ne pas y r pondre. Ce courriel (et toute pi ce jointe) est confidentiel. Si vous n tes pas le destinataire,
veuillez supprimer le pr sent message et en d truire toute copie. FIDO SOLUTIONS 800, RUE DE LA GAUCHETI RE OUEST
BUREAU 4000 MONTR AL (QU BEC) H5A 1K3
Fido

I found that message utterly confusing (and yes, I can read french). Basically, it says that some user (presumably me!) connected to the network with roaming. I did just disabled airplane mode on my phone to debug a Syncthing bug but had not enabled roaming. So this message seemed to say that I would be charged 15$ (per DAY!) for roaming from now on. Confused, I tried their live chat to try to clarify things, worried I would get charged even more for calling tech support on *611. This is a transcript of the chat:

F: Hi! What are we doing today? Type in your question or choose from the options below: * Track my Equipment Order * View Bill Online * Payment Options * iPhone 14 Pre-Order A: i received a message about roaming while abroad but i did not enable roaming on my phone, will i be charged anyways? F: I think I know what you re asking for. Select the topic that best matches your request or try rephrasing your question. A: no F: Thank you, this will help us to improve! Would you like to chat with a specialist? Chat with a specialist I'll get a specialist to help you with this. It appears that you're not signed in. Your session may have timed out. To save time and identify your account details, please sign in to My Account.

• Sign in
• I'm not able to sign in

Have any questions specific to your Fido account? To service you faster, please identify yourself by completing the form below. A: Personal info Form submitted F: Thank you! I'll connect you with the next available specialist. Your chat is being transferred to a Live Chat agent. Thanks for your patience. We are here to assist you and we kindly ask that our team members be treated with respect and dignity. Please note that abuse directed towards any Consumer Care Specialist will not be tolerated and will result in the termination of your conversation with us. All of our agents are with other customers at the moment. Your chat is in a priority sequence and someone will be with you as soon as possible. Thanks! Thanks for continuing to hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience. We re getting more Live Chat requests than usual so it s taking longer to answer. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available. Thank you so much for your patience we're sorry for the wait. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as possible. Hi, I'm [REDACTED] from Fido in [REDACTED]. May I have your name please? A: hi i am antoine, nice to meet you sorry to use the live chat, but it's not clear to me i can safely use my phone to call support, because i am in ireland and i'm worried i'll get charged for the call F: Thank You Antoine , I see you waited to speak with me today, thank you for your patience.Apart from having to wait, how are you today? A: i am good thank you

[... delay ...]

A: should i restate my question? F: Yes please what is the concern you have? A: i have received an email from fido saying i someone used my phone for roaming it's in french (which is fine), but that's the gist of it i am traveling to ireland for a week i do not want to use fido's services here... i have set the phon eto airplane mode for most of my time here F: The SMS just says what will be the charges if you used any services. A: but today i have mistakenly turned that off and did not turn on roaming well it's not a SMS, it's an email F: Yes take out the sim and keep it safe.Turun off or On for roaming you cant do it as it is part of plan. A: wat F: if you used any service you will be charged if you not used any service you will not be charged. A: you are saying i need to physically take the SIM out of the phone? i guess i will have a fun conversation with your management once i return from this trip not that i can do that now, given that, you know, i nee dto take the sim out of this phone fun times F: Yes that is better as most of the customer end up using some kind of service and get charged for roaming. A: well that is completely outrageous roaming is off on the phone i shouldn't get charged for roaming, since roaming is off on the phone i also don't get why i cannot be clearly told whether i will be charged or not the message i have received says i will be charged if i use the service and you seem to say i could accidentally do that easily can you tell me if i have indeed used service sthat will incur an extra charge? are incoming text messages free? F: I understand but it is on you if you used some data SMS or voice mail you can get charged as you used some services.And we cant check anything for now you have to wait for next bill. and incoming SMS are free rest all service comes under roaming. That is the reason I suggested take out the sim from phone and keep it safe or always keep the phone or airplane mode. A: okay can you confirm whether or not i can call fido by voice for support? i mean for free F: So use your Fido sim and call on +1-514-925-4590 on this number it will be free from out side Canada from Fido sim. A: that is quite counter-intuitive, but i guess i will trust you on that thank you, i think that will be all F: Perfect, Again, my name is [REDACTED] and it s been my pleasure to help you today. Thank you for being a part of the Fido family and have a great day! A: you too

So, in other words:

1. they can't tell me if I've actually been roaming
2. they can't tell me how much it's going to cost me
3. I should remove the SIM card from my phone (!?) or turn on airplane mode, but the former is safer
4. I can call Fido support, but not on the usual *611, and instead on that long-distance-looking phone number, and yes, that means turning off airplane mode and putting the SIM card in, which contradicts step 3

Also notice how the phone number from the live chat (+1-514-925-4590) is different than the one provided in the email (15149333436). So who knows what would have happened if I would have called the latter. The former is mentioned in their contact page. I guess the next step is to call Fido over the phone and talk to a manager, which is what the CRTC told me to do in the first place... I ended up talking with a manager (another 1h phone call) and they confirmed there is no other package available at Fido for this. At best they can provide me with a credit if I mistakenly use the roaming by accident to refund me, but that's it. The manager also confirmed that I cannot know if I have actually used any data before reading the bill, which is issued on the 15th of every month, but only available... three days later, at which point I'll be back home anyways. Fantastic.

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

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

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

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

• Cell phones, obviously. Due to the impressive infrastructure you pay for each month (many towers in high locations), in areas of cell coverage, you have this ability to connect to so many other phones around the world. With radios like discussed here, your range will likely a few miles.
• Amateur Radio has often been a decade or more ahead of what you see in these easy personal radio devices. You can unquestionably get amateur radio devices with many more features and better performance. However, generally speaking, each person that transmits on an amateur radio band must be licensed. Getting an amateur radio license isn t difficult, but it does involve passing a test and some time studying for the exam. So it isn t something you can count on random friends or family members being able to do. That said, I have resources on Getting Started With Amateur Radio and it s not as hard as you might think! There are also a lot of reasons to use amateur radio if you want to go down that path.
• Satellite messengers such as the Garmin Inreach or Zoleo can send SMS-like messages across anywhere in the globe with a clear view of the sky. They also often have SOS features. While these are useful safety equipment, it can take many minutes for a message to be sent and received it s not like an interactive SMS conversation and there are places where local radios will have better signal. Notably, satellite messengers are almost useless indoors and can have trouble in areas without a clear view of the sky, such as dense forests, valleys, etc.
• My earlier Roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities (distributed/mesh messengers) highlighted a number of other options as well, for text-only communication. For instance:
  • For very short-range service, Briar can form a mesh over Bluetooth from cell phones or over Tor, if Internet access is available.
  • Dedicated short message services Mesh Networks like Meshtastic or Beartooth have no voice capability, but share GPS locations and short text messages over their own local mesh. Generally they need to pair to a cell phone (even if that phone has no cell service) for most functionality.
• Yggdrasil can do something similar over ad-hoc Wifi, but it is a lower-level protocol and you d need some sort of messaging to run atop it.

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

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

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

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

• Their sales and marketing is targeted at businesses rather than consumers
• They use digital encoding of audio, rather than analog FM or AM
• They use FHSS (Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum) rather than a set frequency
• They operate on the 900MHz ISM band, rather than a 460MHz UHF band (or a lower band yet for MURS and CB)
• The DLR series is quite small, smaller than many GMRS radios.

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

• The Motorola DLR1020 and DLR1060 radios. These have no screen; the 1020 has two channels (configurations) while the 1060 supports 6. They are small and compact and great pocketable just work radios.
• The Motorola DTR600 and DTR700 radios. These are larger, with a larger antenna (that should theoretically provide greater range) and have a small color screen. They support more channels and more features (eg, short messages, etc).
• The Motorola Curve (aka DLR110). Compared to the DLR1060, it adds limited WiFi capabilities that are primarily useful in certain business environments. See this thread for more. These features are unlikely to be useful in the environments we re talking about here.

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

Power These radios tend to be powered by:

• NiMH rechargable battery packs
• AA/AAA batteries
• Lithium Ion batteries

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

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

Privacy The privacy picture on these is interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• For basic use, the high quality, good range, reasonable used price, and very small size of the Motorola DLR would make it a good all-arounder. Give one to each person (or kid) for use at the mall or amusement park, take them with you to concerts and festivals, etc.
• Between vehicles, the Motorola DLR/DTR have a clear range advantage over the GMRS radios for vehicles in motion, though the GPS features of the more advanced GMRS radios may be more useful here.
• For wilderness hiking and the like, GMRS radios that have GPS, maps, and NOAA weather radio reception may prove compelling and worth the extra bulk. More flexible power options may also be useful.
• Low-end FRS radios can be found very cheap; around $20-$30 new for the lowest end, though their low power output and questionable charging circuits may limit their utility where it really counts.
• If you just can t move away from cell phones, try the Zoleo app, which can provide some radio-like features.
• A satellite communicator is still good backup safety gear for the wilderness.

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

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

Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Series:	Radiant Emperor #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
Printing:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-62179-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	414

In 1345 in Zhongli village, in fourth year of a drought, lived a man with his son and his daughter, the last surviving of seven children. The son was promised by his father to the Wuhuang Monastery on his twelfth birthday if he survived. According to the fortune-teller, that son, Zhu Chongba, will be so great that he will bring a hundred generations of pride to the family name. When the girl dares ask her fate, the fortune-teller says, simply, "Nothing." Bandits come looking for food and kill their father. Zhu goes catatonic rather than bury his father, so the girl digs a grave, only to find her brother dead inside it with her father. It leaves her furious: he had a great destiny and he gave it up without a fight, choosing to become nothing. At that moment, she decides to seize his fate for her own, to become Zhu so thoroughly that Heaven itself will be fooled. Through sheer determination and force of will, she stays at the gates of Wuhuang Monastery until the monks are impressed enough with her stubbornness that they let her in under Zhu's name. That puts her on a trajectory that will lead her to the Red Turbans and the civil war over the Mandate of Heaven. She Who Became the Sun is historical fiction with some alternate history and a touch of magic. The closest comparison I can think of is Guy Gavriel Kay: a similar touch of magic that is slight enough to have questionable impact on the story, and a similar starting point of history but a story that's not constrained to follow the events of our world. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan doesn't change the names of places and people. It's therefore not difficult to work out the history this story is based on (late Yuan dynasty), although it may not be clear at first what role Zhu will play in that history. The first part of the book focuses on Zhu, her time in the monastery, and her (mostly successful) quest to keep her gender secret. The end of that part introduces the second primary protagonist, the eunuch general Ouyang of the army of the Prince of Henan. Ouyang is Nanren, serving a Mongol prince or, more precisely, his son Esen. On the surface, Ouyang is devoted to Esen and serves capably as his general. What lies beneath that surface is far darker and more complicated. I think how well you like this book will depend on how well you get along with the characters. I thought Zhu was a delight. She spends the first half of the book proving herself to be startlingly competent and unpredictable while outwitting Heaven and pursuing her assumed destiny. A major hinge event at the center of the book could have destroyed her character, but instead makes her even stronger, more relaxed, and more comfortable with herself. Her story's exploration of gender identity only made that better for me, starting with her thinking of herself as a woman pretending to be a man and turning into something more complex and self-chosen (and, despite some sexual encounters, apparently asexual, which is something you still rarely see in fiction). I also appreciated how Parker-Chan varies Zhu's pronouns depending on the perspective of the narrator. That said, Zhu is not a good person. She is fiercely ambitious to the point of being a sociopath, and the path she sees involves a lot of ruthlessness and some cold-blooded murder. This is less of a heroic journey than a revenge saga, where the target of revenge is the entire known world and Zhu is as dangerous as she is competent. If you want your protagonist to be moral, this may not work for you. Zhu's scenes are partly told from her perspective and partly from the perspective of a woman named Ma who is a good person, and who is therefore intermittently horrified. The revenge story worked for me, and as a result I found Ma somewhat irritating. If your tendency is to agree with Ma, you may find Zhu too amoral to root for. Ouyang's parts I just hated, which is fitting because Ouyang loathes himself to a degree that is quite difficult to read. He is obsessed with being a eunuch and therefore not fully male. That internal monologue is disturbing enough that it drowned out the moderately interesting court intrigue that he's a part of. I know some people like reading highly dramatic characters who are walking emotional disaster zones. I am not one of those people; by about three quarters of the way through the book I was hoping someone would kill Ouyang already and put him out of everyone's misery. One of the things I disliked about this book is that, despite the complex gender work with Zhu, gender roles within the story have a modern gloss while still being highly constrained. All of the characters except Zhu (and the monk Xu, who has a relatively minor part but is the most likable character in the book) feel like they're being smothered in oppressive gender expectations. Ouyang has a full-fledged case of toxic masculinity to fuel his self-loathing, which Parker-Chan highlights with some weirdly disturbing uses of BDSM tropes. So, I thought this was a mixed bag, and I suspect reactions will differ. I thoroughly enjoyed Zhu's parts despite her ruthlessness and struggled through Ouyang's parts with a bad taste in my mouth. I thought the pivot Parker-Chan pulls off in the middle of the book with Zhu's self-image and destiny was beautifully done and made me like the character even more, but I wish the conflict between Ma's and Zhu's outlooks hadn't been so central. Because of that, the ending felt more tragic than triumphant, which I think was intentional but which wasn't to my taste. As with Kay's writing, I suspect there will be some questions about whether She Who Became the Sun is truly fantasy. The only obvious fantastic element is the physical manifestation of the Mandate of Heaven, and that has only a minor effect on the plot. And as with Kay, I think this book needed to be fantasy, not for the special effects, but because it needs the space to take fate literally. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan does not use the writing style of epic fantasy, but Zhu's campaign to assume a destiny which is not her own needs to be more than a metaphor for the story to work. I enjoyed this with some caveats. For me, the Zhu portions made up for the Ouyang portions. But although it's clearly the first book of a series, I'm not sure I'll read on. I felt like Zhu's character arc reached a satisfying conclusion, and the sequel seems likely to be full of Ma's misery over ethical conflicts and more Ouyang, neither of which sound appealing. So far as I can tell, the sequel I assume is coming has not yet been announced. Rating: 7 out of 10

WadC the procedural programming environment for generating Doom maps version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC. The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC might want to load up an example program which is potentially very complex and hard to unpick to figure out how it works. If the author could mark certain variables as "tuneable", the UI could provide an easy way for someone to tweak parameters and then see what happened. I had in mind the walls of patch panels and knobs you see with analog synthesizers: tweak this thing over here and see what happens over there. I think this kind of feature would be useful in other, similar programming environments, like OpenSCAD: I don't think they do yet, but I could be wrong. This release of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Kayvan Walker (1983-2022). Kayvan was a childhood friend who committed suicide in March this year. Back in the nineties, Kayvan was responsible for introducing me to Doom in the first place: I used to visit his house on the way home to mine, as it was on the walk back from School. His mum works in IT and always encouraged us into it. Doom was so far ahead, in technical terms, of any other computer game I'd ever seen, and was the closest thing we had to virtual reality: we could create our own worlds. It's in no small part thanks to Kayvan and his Mum that I'm still creating worlds, nearly thirty years later. I owe my career and most of my hobbies to those pivotal moments. Thank you both. Kayvan did a lot more for me than just introduce me to Doom, or computing. He was one of a set of friends that I had every confidence that, no matter what, we would always be friends, through thick and thin. I miss him terribly. Please, if you reading this, are suffering, talk to someone. In the UK you can talk to Samaritans on 116 123.

I have been looking for a good tablet for Debian for well, years. I want thin, light, portable, excellent battery life, and a servicable keyboard. For a while, I tried a Lenovo Chromebook Duet. It meets the hardware requirements, well sort of. The problem is with performance and the OS. I can run Debian inside the ChromeOS Linux environment. That works, actually pretty well. But it is slow. Terribly, terribly, terribly slow. Emacs takes minutes to launch. apt-gets also do. It has barely enough RAM to keep its Chrome foundation happy, let alone a Linux environment also. But basically it is too slow to be servicable. Not just that, but I ran into assorted issues with having it tied to a Google account particularly being unable to login unless I had Internet access after an update. That and my growing concern over Google s privacy practices led me sort of write it off. I have a wonderful System76 Lemur Pro that I m very happy with. Plenty of RAM, a good compromise size between portability and screen size at 14.1 , and so forth. But a 10 goes-anywhere it s not. I spent quite a lot of time looking at thin-and-light convertible laptops of various configurations. Many of them were quite expensive, not as small as I wanted, or had dubious Linux support. To my surprise, I wound up buying a Surface Go 2 from the Microsoft store, along with the Type Cover. They had a pretty good deal on it since the Surface Go 3 is out; the highest-processor model of the Go 2 is roughly similar to the Go 3 in terms of performance. There is an excellent linux-surface project out there that provides very good support for most Surface devices, including the Go 2 and 3. I put Debian on it. I had a fair bit of hassle with EFI, and wound up putting rEFInd on it, which mostly solved those problems. (I did keep a Windows partition, and if it comes up for some reason, the easiest way to get it back to Debian is to use the Windows settings tool to reboot into advanced mode, and then select the appropriate EFI entry to boot from there.) Researching on-screen keyboards, it seemed like Gnome had the most mature. So I wound up with Gnome (my other systems are using KDE with tiling, but I figured I d try Gnome on it.) Almost everything worked without additional tweaking, the one exception being the cameras. The cameras on the Surfaces are a known point of trouble and I didn t bother to go to all the effort to get them working. With 8GB of RAM, I didn t put ZFS on it like I do on other systems. Performance is quite satisfactory, including for Rust development. Battery life runs about 10 hours with light use; less when running a lot of cargo builds, of course. The 1920 1280 screen is nice at 10.5 . Gnome with Wayland does a decent job of adjusting to this hi-res configuration. I took this as my only computer for a trip from the USA to Germany. It was a little small at times; though that was to be expected. It let me take a nicely small bag as a carryon, and being light, it was pleasant to carry around in airports. It served its purpose quite well. One downside is that it can t be powered by a phone charger like my Chromebook Duet can. However, I found a nice slim 65W Anker charger that could charge it and phones simultaneously that did the job well enough (I left the Microsoft charger with the proprietary connector at home). The Surface Go 2 maxes out at a 128GB SSD. That feels a bit constraining, especially since I kept Windows around. However, it also has a micro SD slot, so you can put LUKS and ext4 on that and use it as another filesystem. I popped a micro SD I had lying around into there and that felt a lot better storage-wise. I could also completely zap Windows, but that would leave no way to get firmware updates and I didn t really want to do that. Still, I don t use Windows and that could be an option also. All in all, I m pretty pleased with it. Around $600 for a fully-functional Debian tablet, with a keyboard is pretty nice. I had been hoping for months that the Pinetab would come back into stock, because I d much rather support a Linux hardware vendor, but for now I think the Surface Go series is the most solid option for a Linux tablet.

Review: A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker

Publisher:	Berkley
Copyright:	September 2019
ISBN:	1-9848-0259-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	372

Luce Cannon was touring with a session band when the shutdown began. First came the hotel evacuation in the middle of the night due to bomb threats against every hotel in the state. Then came the stadium bombing just before they were ready to go on stage. Luce and most of the band performed anyway, with a volunteer crew and a shaken crowd. It was, people later decided, the last large stage show in the United States before the congregation laws shut down public gatherings. That was the end of Luce's expected career, and could have been the end of music, or at least public music. But Luce was stubborn and needed the music. Rosemary grew up in the aftermath: living at home with her parents well away from other people, attending school virtually, and then moving seamlessly into a virtual job for Superwally, the corporation that ran essentially everything. A good fix for some last-minute technical problems with StageHoloLive's ticketing system got her an upgraded VR hoodie and complimentary tickets to the first virtual concert she'd ever attended. She found the experience astonishing, prompting her to browse StageHoloLive job openings and then apply for a technical job and, on a whim, an artist recruiter role. That's how Rosemary found herself, quite nerve-wrackingly, traveling out into the unsafe world to look for underground musicians who could become StageHoloLive acts. A Song for a New Day was published in 2019 and had a moment of fame at the beginning of 2020, culminating in the Nebula Award for best novel, because it's about lockdowns, isolation, and the suppression of public performances. There's even a pandemic, although it's not a respiratory disease (it's some variety of smallpox or chicken pox) and is only a minor contributing factor to the lockdowns in this book. The primary impetus is random violence. Unfortunately, the subsequent two years have not been kind to this novel. Reading it in 2022, with the experience of the past two years fresh in my mind, was a frustrating and exasperating experience because the world setting is completely unbelievable. This is not entirely Pinsker's fault; this book was published in 2019, was not intended to be about our pandemic, and therefore could not reasonably predict its consequences. Still, it required significant effort to extract the premise of the book from the contradictory evidence of current affairs and salvage the pieces of it I still enjoyed. First, Pinsker's characters are the most astonishingly incurious and docile group of people I've seen in a recent political SF novel. This extends beyond the protagonists, where it could arguably be part of their characterization, to encompass the entire world (or at least the United States; the rest of the world does not appear in this book at all so far as I can recall). You may be wondering why someone bombs a stadium at the start of the book. If so, you are alone; this is not something anyone else sees any reason to be curious about. Why is random violence spiraling out of control? Is there some coordinated terrorist activity? Is there some social condition that has gotten markedly worse? Race riots? Climate crises? Wars? The only answer this book offers is a completely apathetic shrug. There is a hint at one point that the government may have theories that they're not communicating, but no one cares about that either. That leads to the second bizarre gap: for a book that hinges on political action, formal political structures are weirdly absent. Near the end of the book, one random person says that they have been inspired to run for office, which so far as I can tell is the first mention of elections in the entire book. The "government" passes congregation laws shutting down public gatherings and there are no protests, no arguments, no debate, but also no suppression, no laws against the press or free speech, no attempt to stop that debate. There's no attempt to build consensus for or against the laws, and no noticeable political campaigning. That's because there's no need. So far as one can tell from this story, literally everyone just shrugs and feels sad and vaguely compliant. Police officers exist and enforce laws, but changing those laws or defying them in other than tiny covert ways simply never occurs to anyone. This makes the book read a bit like a fatuous libertarian parody of a docile populace, but this is so obviously not the author's intent that it wouldn't be satisfying to read even as that. To be clear, this is not something that lasts only a few months in an emergency when everyone is still scared. This complete political docility and total incuriosity persists for enough years that Rosemary grows up within that mindset. The triggering event was a stadium bombing followed by an escalating series of random shootings and bombings. (The pandemic in the book only happens after everything is locked down and, apart from adding to Rosemary's agoraphobia and making people inconsistently obsessed with surface cleanliness, plays little role in the novel.) I lived through 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing in the US, other countries have been through more protracted and personally dangerous periods of violence (the Troubles come to mind), and never in human history has any country reacted to a shock of violence (or, for that matter, disease) like the US does in this book. At points it felt like one of those SF novels where the author is telling an apparently normal story and all the characters turn out to be aliens based on spiders or bats. I finally made sense of this by deciding that the author wasn't using sudden shocks like terrorism or pandemics as a model, even though that's what the book postulates. Instead, the model seems to be something implicitly tolerated and worked around: US school shootings, for instance, or the (incorrect but widespread) US belief in a rise of child kidnappings by strangers. The societal reaction here looks less like a public health or counter-terrorism response and more like suburban attitudes towards child-raising, where no child is ever left unattended for safety reasons but we routinely have school shootings no other country has at the same scale. We have been willing to radically (and ineffectually) alter the experience of childhood due to fears of external threat, and that's vaguely and superficially similar to the premise of this novel. What I think Pinsker still misses (and which the pandemic has made glaringly obvious) is the immense momentum of normality and the inability of adults to accept limitations on their own activities for very long. Even with school shootings, kids go to school in person. We now know that parts of society essentially collapse if they don't, and political pressure becomes intolerable. But by using school shootings as the model, I managed to view Pinsker's setup as an unrealistic but still potentially interesting SF extrapolation: a thought experiment that ignores countervailing pressures in order to exaggerate one aspect of society to an extreme. This is half of Pinsker's setup. The other half, which made less of a splash because it didn't have the same accident of timing, is the company Superwally: essentially "what if Amazon bought Walmart, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Disney, and Live Nation." This is a more typical SF extrapolation that left me with a few grumbles about realism, but that I'll accept as a plot device to talk about commercialization, monopolies, and surveillance capitalism. But here again, the complete absence of formal political structures in this book is not credible. Superwally achieves an all-pervasiveness that in other SF novels results in corporations taking over the role of national governments, but it still lobbies the government in much the same way and with about the same effectiveness as Amazon does in our world. I thought this directly undermined some parts of the end of the book. I simply did not believe that Superwally would be as benign and ineffectual as it is shown here. Those are a lot of complaints. I found reading the first half of this book to be an utterly miserable experience and only continued reading out of pure stubbornness and completionism. But the combination of the above-mentioned perspective shift and Pinsker's character focus did partly salvage the book for me. This is not a book about practical political change, even though it makes gestures in that direction. It's primarily a book about people, music, and personal connection, and Pinsker's portrayal of individual and community trust in all its complexity is the one thing the book gets right. Rosemary's character combines a sort of naive arrogance with self-justification in a way that I found very off-putting, but the pivot point of the book is the way in which Luce and her community extends trust to her anyway, as part of staying true to what they believe. The problem that I think Pinsker was trying to write about is atomization, which leads to social fragmentation into small trust networks with vast gulfs between them. Luce and Rosemary are both characters who are willing to bridge those gulfs in their own ways. Pinsker does an excellent job describing the benefits, the hurt, the misunderstandings, the risk, and the awkward process of building those bridges between communities that fundamentally do not understand each other. There's something deep here about the nature of solidarity, and how you need both people like Luce and people like Rosemary to build strong and effective communities. I've kept thinking about that part. It's also helpful for a community to have people who are curious about cause and effect, and who know how a bill becomes a law. It's hard to sum up this book, other than to say that I understand why it won a Nebula but it has deep world-building flaws that have become far more obvious over the past two years. Pinsker tries hard to capture the feeling of live music for both the listener and the performer and partly succeeded even for me, which probably means others will enjoy that part of the book immensely. The portrayal of the difficult dynamics of personal trust was the best part of the book for me, but you may have to build scaffolding and bracing for your world-building disbelief in order to get there. On the whole, I think A Song for a New Day is worth reading, but maybe not right now. If you do read it now, tell yourself at the start that this is absolutely not about the pandemic and that everything political in this book is a hugely simplified straw-man extrapolation, and hopefully you'll find the experience less frustrating than I found it. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher:	New American Library
Copyright:	2016
ISBN:	0-698-18327-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	572

Nine hundred years have passed since the events of Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back. Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade. Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller, reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the city with a blockade. As Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better. Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense, should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens. Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies. Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I recommend the Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading. The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world). I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed, I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book, in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional. Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed; if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis. The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything important, and it's an effective way to build tension. Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see another character's perspective on something that just happened. Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person. Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took the rest of the novel to set up. This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully with some grace towards others in the world. The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee. And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me. I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force for men than I do. Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good. Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave, determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying. Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you will like this as well. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell

Series:	Embers of War #1
Publisher:	Titan Books
Copyright:	February 2018
ISBN:	1-78565-519-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	312

The military leadership of the Outward faction of humanity was meeting on the forest world of Pelapatarn, creating an opportunity for the Conglomeration to win the war at a stroke. Resistance was supposed to be minimal, since the Outward had attempted to keep the conference secret rather than massing forces to protect it. But the Outward resistance was stronger than expected, and Captain Deal's forces would not be able to locate and assassinate the Outward leadership before they could escape. She therefore followed orders from above her and ordered the four incoming Carnivore heavy cruisers to jump past the space battle and bomb the planet. The entire planet. The Carnivores' nuclear and antimatter weaponry reduced the billion-year-old sentient jungle of Pelapatarn to ash. Three years later, Sal Konstanz is a ship captain for the House of Reclamation, a strictly neutral search and rescue force modeled after a long-vanished alien fleet that prioritizes preservation of life above all else. Anyone can join Reclamation, provided that they renounce their previous alliances and devote themselves to the Reclamation cause. Sal and her crew member Alva Clay were Outward. The ship medic was Conglomeration. So was the ship: the Trouble Dog, a sentient AI heavy cruiser built to carry an arsenal of weapons and three hundred crew, and now carrying three humans and a Druff mechanic. More precisely, the Trouble Dog was one of the four Carnivores that destroyed Pelapatarn. Meanwhile, Ona Sudak, a popular war poet, is a passenger on a luxury cruise on the liner Geest van Amsterdam, which is making an unscheduled stop in the star system known as the Gallery. The Gallery is the home of the Objects: seven planets that, ten thousand years earlier, were carved by unknown aliens into immense sculptures for unknown reasons. The Objects appear to be both harmless and mysterious, making them an irresistible tourist attraction for the liner passengers. The Gallery is in disputed space, but no one was expecting serious trouble. They certainly weren't expecting the Geest van Amsterdam to be attacked and brought down on the Object known as the Brain, killing nearly everyone aboard. The Trouble Dog is the closest rescue ship. This book was... fine. It's a perfectly serviceable science fiction novel that didn't stand out for me, which I think says more about the current excellent state of the science fiction field than about this book. When I was a teenager reading Asimov, Niven, and Heinlein, I would have devoured this. It compares favorably to minor Niven or Heinlein (The Integral Trees, for example, or Double Star), but the bar for excellent science fiction is just so much higher now. The best character in this book (and the reason why I read it) is the Trouble Dog. I love science fiction about intelligent space ships, and she did not disappoint. The AI ships in this book are partly made from human and dog neurons, so their viewpoint is mostly human but with some interesting minor variations. And the Trouble Dog would be a great character even if she weren't an intelligent ship: ethical, aggressive, daring, and introspective, with a nuanced relationship with her human crew. Unfortunately, Embers of War has four other viewpoint characters, and Powell chose to write them all in the first person. First person narration depends heavily on a memorable and interesting character because the reader is so thoroughly within their perspective. This works great for the Trouble Dog, and is fine for Nod, the Druff who serves as the ship mechanic. (Nod's perspective is intriguing, short, almost free-verse musings, rather than major story segments.) Sal, the ship captain, is a bit of a default character, but I didn't mind her much. Neither of the other two viewpoint characters are interesting enough to warrant the narrative attention. The Conglomerate agent Ashton Childe has such an uninteresting internal monologue that I would have liked the character better if he'd only been seen through other people's viewpoints, and although Powell needs some way to show Ona Sudak's view of events, I didn't think her thoughts added much to the story. The writing is adequate but a bit clunky: slightly flat descriptions, a bit too predictable at the sentence level, and rarely that memorable. There is a bit of fun world-building of the ancient artifact variety and a couple of decent set pieces (and one rather-too-obvious Matrix homage that I didn't think was as effective as the author did), but most of the story is focused on characters navigating their lives and processing trauma from the war. The story kept me turning the pages with interest, but I also doubt it will surprise anyone who has read much science fiction. I suspect a lot of it is setup for the following two books of the trilogy, and there are plenty of hooks for more stories in this universe. I really wanted a first-person story from the perspective of the Trouble Dog, possibly with some tight third-person interludes showing Ona Sudak's story. What I got instead was entertaining but not memorable enough to stand out in the current rich state of science fiction. I think I'm invested enough in this story to want to read the next book, though, so that's still a recommendation of sorts. Followed by Fleet of Knives. Rating: 6 out of 10

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

Changes

• plac: release cleanup
• bibliogram-docs: update a feed checkbox
• duck: add indicator phrases (1 2 3)
• Debian Planets: remove BlackWeb
• Debian package uploads: purple-discord, python-plac, sptag (1 2 3), mpv-mpris, typer
• Debian wiki pages: AndriusMerkys/PackagingInSeconds, Derivatives/Census/BlackWeb, EmbeddedCopies, Hardening/Goals, InstallingDebianOn, InstallingDebianOn/RaspberryPi, WordPress
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources
• Wikipedia: Personal_Storage_Table

Issues

• Crashes in evince, evolution
• Broken links in oci-python-sdk
• Test failures in smart-open
• Features in Debian package tracker, Debian security tracker, Debian code search, diffoscope
• Binary removal needed for sptag
• Conffile removal needed in privoxy, rpmlint
• Debian package intended for mpv-mpris
• Warnings in tnftp
• Git repo anomalies in plac
• Syntax errors in ceres-solver
• Security issues in a cloud vendor SDK (sent privately)

Review

• Spam: reported 166 Debian mailing list posts
• Patches: reviewed libpst upstream patches
• Debian packages: sponsored nsis, memtest86+
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved changeme cyclograph-gtk3 fnt fontforge fonts-libfinal gimp imgp
  • rejected freecell-solver-bin (not a graphical program), aptitude/chromium-browser (screenshot of screenshots site in mobile browser)

Administration

• libpst: setup GitHub presence, migrate from hg to git, requested details from bug reporters
• plac: cleaned up git repo anomalies
• Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: stardict, node-carto
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

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

Sponsors The purple-discord, python-plac, sptag, smart-open, libpst, memtest86+, oci-python-sdk work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Here s my (twenty-seventh) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 36th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ Just churning through the backlog again this month. Ugh. Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• ruby2.7 (2.7.5-1) - New upstream version fixing 3 new CVEs.

Other $things:

• Mentoring for newcomers.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.

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Ubuntu

This was my 11th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I ve joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ I mostly worked on different things, I guess. I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or will start to list stuff from next year onward, as I was doing before. :D

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Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my twenty-seventh month as a Debian LTS and eighteenth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 40.00 hours for LTS and 60.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(since I had a 3-week vacation, I wanted to wrap things up that were pending and so I worked for 20h more for LTS, which I ll compensate the next month!)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2844-1, fixing CVE-2021-44540 and CVE-2021-44543, for privoxy.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 3.0.26-3+deb9u3.
• Issued DLA 2847-1, fixing CVE-2021-44858, for mediawiki.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1:1.27.7-1+deb9u11.
• Issued DLA 2853-1, fixing CVE-2021-41817 and CVE-2021-41819, for ruby2.3.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.3.3-1+deb9u11.
• Issued DLA 2854-1, fixing CVE-2017-18635, for novnc.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1:0.4+dfsg+1+20131010+gitf68af8af3d-6+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2860-1, fixing CVE-2018-7750 and CVE-2018-1000805, for paramiko.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.0.0-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2862-1, fixing CVE-2018-12020 and CVE-2019-6690, for python-gnupg.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.3.9-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2864-1, fixing CVE-2017-1002201, for ruby-haml.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.0.7-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2871-1, fixing CVE-2021-43818, for lxml.
  For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 3.7.1-1+deb9u5.
• Simultaneously, I ve been working on rolling the samba update. Should happen the next month.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 525-2, fixing CVE-2021-43527, for nss.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2:3.26-1+debu8u15.
• Issued ELA 530-1, for systemd.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 215-17+deb8u14.
• Issued ELA 531-1, fixing CVE-2021-41817 and CVE-2021-41819, for ruby2.1.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.1.5-2+deb8u13.
• Issued ELA 533-1, fixing CVE-2018-12020, for python-gnupg.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 0.3.6-1+deb8u2.
• Issued ELA 536-1, fixing CVE-2021-43818, for lxml.
  For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version Prior to version 4.6.5, the HTML Cleaner in lxml.html lets certain.
• Started working on src:samba for CVE-2020-25717 to CVE-2020-25722 and CVE-2021-23192 for jessie and stretch, both.
  The version difference b/w the suites are a bit too much for the patch(es) to be easily backported. I ve talked to Anton to work something out. \o/
• Found the problem w/ libjdom1-java. Will have to roll the regression upload.
  I ve prepared the patch but needs some testing to be finally rolled out. Same for stretch.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 29-11 to 05-12 and 20-12 to 26-12 for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged ffmpeg, git, gpac, inetutils, mc, modsecurity-crs, node-object-path, php-pear, systemd-cron, node-tar, ruby2.3, gst-plugins-bad0.10, npm, nltk, request-tracker4, ros-ros-comm, mediawiki, ruby2.1, ckeditor, ntfs-3g, tiff, wordpress, and jsoup, udisks2, libgit2, python3.5, python3.4, and openssh.
• Mark CVE-2021-38171/ffmpeg as postponed for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-40330/git as no-dsa for stretch and jessie.
• Mark CVE-2020-19481/gpac as ignored for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-40491/inetutils as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-36370/mc as no-dsa for stretch and jessie.
• Mark CVE-2021-35368/modsecurity-crs as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-23434/node-object-path as end-of-life for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-32610/php-pear as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2017-9525/systemd-cron as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-37701/node-tar as end-of-life for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-37712/node-tar as end-of-life in stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-39201/wordpress as not-affected for jessie.
• Mark CVE-2020-19143/tiff as not-affected for stretch and jessie.
• Mark CVE-2021-38562/request-tracker4 as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-37146/ros-ros-comm as no-dsa for stretch.
• Mark CVE-2021-28965/ruby2.1 as ignored for jessie.
• Mark CVE-2021-37714/jsoup as ignored for jessie.
• Mark CVE-2021-41617/openssh as no-dsa for jessie.
• Auto EOL ed ardour, nltk, request-tracker4, python-scrapy, webkit2gtk, and linux for jessie.
• Attended monthly Debian LTS meeting.
• Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts).
• General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.

Debian LTS Survey I ve spent 5 hours on the LTS survey on the following bits:

• Went through the old content on the previous survey.
• Reviewed the new content - still more work to do.
• Discussed the survey bits in the team meeting.
• Partly reviewing the questions of the survey.
• Walking through the instance to find the doability of the tasks discussed in the meeting.
• Segregating and staging questions. More work to do here.

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Until next time.
:wq for today.

Review: The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik

Series:	The Scholomance #2
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	0-593-12887-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	388

This is a direct sequel to A Deadly Education, by which I mean it starts in the same minute at which A Deadly Education ends (and let me say how grateful I am for a sequel that doesn't drop days, months, or years between books). You do not want to read this series out of order. This book is also very difficult to review without spoiling either it or the previous book, so please bear with me if I'm elliptical in my ravings. Because The Last Graduate is so good. So good, not only as a piece of writing, but as a combination of two of my favorite tropes in fiction, one of which I can't talk about because of spoilers. I adored this book in a way that is not entirely rational. I will attempt a review below anyway, but if you liked the first book, just stop reading here and go read the second one. It's more of everything I loved in the first book except even better, it did some things I was expecting and some things I didn't expect at all, and it's just so ridiculously good. Just be aware that it has another final-line cliffhanger. The third book is coming in (hopefully) 2022. Novik handles the cliffhanger at the end of the previous book beautifully, which is worth noting because there were so many ways in which it could have gone poorly. One of the best things about this series is Novik's skill at writing El's relationship with her mother, even though her mother has not appeared in the series so far. El argues with her mother's voice in her head, tells stories about her, wonders what her mother would think of her classmates (or in some cases knows exactly what her mother would think of her classmates), and sometimes makes the explicit decision to not be her mother. The relationship has the sort of messy complexity, shared history, and underlying respect that many people experience in life but that I've rarely seen portrayed this well in a fantasy novel. Novik's presentation of that relationship works because El's voice is so strong. Within fifteen minutes of starting The Last Graduate, I was already muttering "I love this book" to myself, mostly because of how much I enjoy El's sarcastic, self-deprecating internal commentary. Novik strikes a balance between self-awareness, snark, humor, and real character growth that rivals Murderbot in its effectiveness of first-person perspective. It carries the story over a few weak points, such as a romance that didn't do much for me. Even when I didn't care about part of the plot, I cared about El's opinion of the plot and what it said about El's growing understanding of how to navigate the world. A Deadly Education was scene and character establishment. El insisted on being herself and following her own morals and social rules, and through that found some allies. The Last Graduate gives El enough breathing space to make more nuanced decisions. This is the part of growing up where one realizes the limitations of one's knee-jerk reactions and innate moral judgment. It's also when it becomes hard to trust success that is entirely outside of one's previous experience. El was not a kid who had friends, so she doesn't know what to do with them now that she has them. She's barely able to convince herself that they are friends. This is one of the two fictional tropes I mentioned, the one that I can talk about (at least briefly) without major spoilers. I have such a soft spot for stubborn, sarcastic, principled characters who refuse to play by the social rules that they think are required to make friends and who then find friends who like them for themselves. The moment when they start realizing this has happened and have no idea how to deal with it or how to be a person who has friends is one I will happily read over and over again. I enjoyed this book from the beginning, but there were two points when it grabbed my heart and I was all in. The first one is a huge spoiler that I can't talk about. The second was this paragraph:

[She] came round to me and put her arm around my waist and said under her breath, "Hey, she can be taught," with a tease in her voice that wobbled a little, and when I looked at her, her eyes were bright and wet, and I put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

You'll know it when you get there. The Last Graduate also gives the characters other than El and Orion more room, which is part of how it handles the chosen one trope. It's been obvious since early in the first book that Orion is a sort of chosen one, and it becomes obvious to the reader that El may be as well. But Novik doesn't let the plot focus only on them; instead, she uses that trope to look at how alliances and collective action happen, and how no one can carry the weight by themselves. As El learns more and gains power, she also becomes less central to the plot resolution and has to learn how to be less self-reliant. This is not a book where one character is trained to save the world. It's a book where she manages to enlist the support of a kick-ass project manager and becomes part of a team. Middle books of a trilogy are notoriously challenging. Often they're travel books: the first book sets up a problem, the second book moves the characters both physically and emotionally into a position to solve the problem, and the third book is the payoff. Travel books often sag. They can feel obligatory but somewhat boring, like a chore on the way to the third-book climax. The Last Graduate is not a travel book; it is, instead, a pivot book, which is my favorite form of trilogy. It's a book that rewrites the problem the first book set up, both resolving it and expanding the scope beyond what the reader had expected. This is immensely satisfying when done well, and Novik does it extremely well. This is not a flawless book. There are some pacing hiccups, there is a romance angle that didn't work for me (although it does arrive at some character insights that I thought were spot on), and although I think Novik is doing something interesting with the trope, there is a lot of chosen one power escalation happening here. It's not the sort of book that I can claim is perfectly written. Instead, it's the sort of book that uses some of my favorite plot elements and emotional beats in such an effective way and with such a memorable character that I do not have it in me to care about any of the flaws. Your mileage may therefore vary, but I would be happy to read books like this until the end of time. As mentioned above, The Last Graduate ends on another cliffhanger. This time I was worried that Novik might have ended the series there, since there's enough of an internal climax that I could imagine some literary fiction (which often seems allergic to endings) would have stopped here. Thankfully, Novik's web site says this is not the case. The next year is going to be a difficult wait. The third book of this series is going to be incredibly difficult to write, and I hope Novik is up to the challenge she's made for herself. But she handled the transition between the first and second book so well, and this book is so good that I have a lot of hope. If the third book is half as good as I'm hoping, this is going to be one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. Followed by an as-yet-untitled third book. Rating: 10 out of 10

I grew up with the Internet and its ethics and politics have always been important in my life. But I have also been involved at other levels, against police brutality, for Food, Not Bombs, worker autonomy, software freedom, etc. For a long time, that all seemed coherent. But the more I look at the modern Internet -- and the mega-corporations that control it -- and the less confidence I have in my original political analysis of the liberating potential of technology. I have come to believe that most of our technological development is harmful to the large majority of the population of the planet, and of course the rest of the biosphere. And now I feel this is not a new problem. This is because the Internet is a neo-colonial device, and has been from the start. Let me explain.

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

In the aftermath of my report of Facebook censoring mentions of the open-source social network Mastodon, there was a lot of conversation about whether or not this was deliberate. That conversation seemed to focus on whether a human speficially added joinmastodon.org to some sort of blacklist. But that s not even relevant. OF COURSE it was deliberate, because of how Facebook tunes its algorithm. Facebook s algorithm is tuned for Facebook s profit. That means it s tuned to maximize the time people spend on the site engagement. In other words, it is tuned to keep your attention on Facebook. Why do you think there is so much junk on Facebook? So much anti-vax, anti-science, conspiracy nonsense from the likes of Breitbart? It s not because their algorithm is incapable of surfacing the good content; we already know it can because they temporarily pivoted it shortly after the last US election. They intentionally undid its efforts to make high-quality news sources more prominent twice. Facebook has said that certain anti-vax disinformation posts violate its policies. It has an extremely cumbersome way to report them, but it can be done and I have. These reports are met with either silence or a response claiming the content didn t violate their guidelines. So what algorithm is it that allows Breitbart to not just be seen but to thrive on the platform, lets anti-vax disinformation survive even a human review, while banning mentions of Mastodon? One that is working exactly as intended. We may think this algorithm is busted. Clearly, Facebook does not. If their goal is to maximize profit by maximizing engagement, the algorithm is working exactly as designed. I don t know if joinmastodon.org was specifically blacklisted by a human. Nor is it relevant. Facebook s choice to tolerate and promote the things that service its greed for engagement and money, even if they are the lowest dregs of the web, is deliberate. It is no accident that Breitbart does better than Mastodon on Facebook. After all, which of these does its algorithm detect keep people engaged on Facebook itself more? Facebook removes the ban You can see all the screenshots of the censorship in my original post. Now, Facebook has reversed course: We also don t know if this reversal was human or algorithmic, but that still is beside the point. The point is, Facebook intentionally chooses to surface and promote those things that drive engagement, regardless of quality. Clearly many have wondered if tens of thousands of people have died unnecessary deaths over COVID as a result. One whistleblower says I have blood on my hands and President Biden said they re killing people before walking back his comments slightly . I m not equipped to verify those statements. But what do they think is going to happen if they prioritize engagement over quality? Rainbows and happiness?