Search Results: "jan"

24 August 2024

Jonathan Dowland: Fediverse and feeds

It's clear that Twitter has been circling the drain for years, but things have been especially bad in recent times. I haven't quit (I have some sympathy with the viewpoint don't cede territory to fascists) but I try to read it much less, and I certainly post much less. Especially at the moment, I really appreciate distractions. Last time I wrote about Mastodon (by which I meant the Fediverse1), I was looking for a new instance to try. I settled on Debian's social instance2. I'm now trying to put any energy I might spend engaging on Twitter, into engaging in the Fediverse instead. (You can follow me via the handle @jon@dow.land, I think, which should repoint to my actual handle, @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social.) There are other potential successors to Twitter: two big ones are Bluesky and Facebook-owned Threads. They are effectively cookie-cutter copies of the Twitter model, and so, we will repeat the same mistakes there. Sadly I see the majority of communities and sub-cultures I follow are migrating to one or the other of these. The Fediverse (or the Mastodon-ish bits of it) should avoid the fate of Twitter. JWZ puts it better and more succinctly than I can. The Fedi experience is, sadly, pretty clunky. So I want to try and write a bit from time to time with tips and tricks that might improve people's experiences. First up, something I discovered only today about Mastodon instances. As JWZ noted, If you are worried about picking the "right" Mastodon instance, don't. Just spin the wheel.. You can spend too much time trying to guess a good answer to this. Better to just get started. At the same time, individual instances are supposed to cater to specific niches. So it could be useful to sample the public posts from an entire instance. For example, to find people to follow, or decide to hop over to that instance yourself. You can't (I think) follow an entire instance from within yours, but, they usually have a public page which shows you the latest traffic. For example, the infosec-themed instance infosec.exchange has one here: https://infosec.exchange/public/local These pages don't provide RSS or Atom feeds3, sadly. I hope that's on the software's roadmap, and hasn't been spurned for ideological reasons. For now at least, OpenRSS provide RSS/Atom feeds for many Mastodon instances. For example, an RSS/Atom feed of the above: https://openrss.org/infosec.exchange/public/local One can add these feeds to your Feed reader and over time get a flavour for the kind of discourse that takes place on given instances. I think the OpenRSS have to manually add Mastodon instances to their service. I tried three instances and only one (infosec.exchange) worked. I'm not sure but I think trying an instance that doesn't work automatically puts it on OpenRSS's backlog.

  1. the Fediverse-versus-Mastodon nomenclature problem is just the the tip of the iceberg, in terms of adoption problems. Mastodon provides a twitter-like service that participates in the Fediverse. But it isn't correct to call the twitter-like service "Mastodon" because other softwares also participate in/provide that service. And it's not correct to call it "Fediverse" because that describes a bigger thing, with e.g. youtube clones also taking part. I'm not sure what the right term should be for "the twitter-like thing". Also, everything I wrote here is probably subtly wrong.
  2. Debian's instance actually runs Pleroma, an alternative to Mastodon. Why should it matter? I think it's healthy for there to be more than one implementation in an open ecosystem. However the experience can be janky, as the features don't perfectly align, some Mastodon features/APIs are not documented/standardised/etc.
  3. I have to remind myself that the concept of RSS/Atom feeds and Feedreaders might need explaining to a modern audience too. Perhaps in another blog post.

11 August 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: My Austrian Visa Refusal Story

Vienna - the capital of Austria - is one of the most visited cities in the world, popular for its rich history, gardens, and cafes, along with well-known artists like Beethoven, Mozart, G del, and Freud. It has also been consistently ranked as the most livable city in the world. For these reasons, I was elated when my friend Snehal invited me last year to visit Vienna for a few days. We included Christmas and New Year s Eve in my itinerary due to the city s popular Christmas markets and lively events. The festive season also ensured that Snehal had some days off for sightseeing. Indians require a visa to visit Austria. Since the travel dates were near, I rushed to book an appointment online with VFS Global in Delhi, and quickly arranged the required documents. However, at VFS, I found out that I had applied in the wrong appointment category (tourist), which depends on the purpose of the visit, and that my travel dates do not allow enough time for visa authorities to make a decision. Apparently, even if you plan to stay only for a part of the trip with the host, you need to apply under the category Visiting Friends and Family . Thus, I had to book another appointment under this category, and took the opportunity to shift my travel dates to allow at least 15 business days for the visa application to be processed, removing Christmas and New Year s Eve from my itinerary. The process went smoothly, and my visa application was submitted by VFS. For reference, here s a list of documents I submitted - The following charges were collected from me.
Service Description Amount (Indian Rupees)
Cash Handling Charge - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) 0
VFS Fee - India - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) 1,820
VISA Fee - India - SAC Code: 7,280
Convenience Fee - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) 182
Courier Service - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) 728
Courier Assurance - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) 182
Total 10,192
I later learned that the courier charges (728 INR) and the courier assurance charges (182 INR) mentioned above were optional. However, VFS didn t ask whether I wanted to include them. When the emabssy is done processing your application, it will send your passport back to VFS, from where you can either collect it yourself or get it couriered back home, which requires you to pay courier charges. However, courier assurance charges do not add any value as VFS cannot assure anything about courier and I suggest you get them removed. My visa application was submitted on the 21st of December 2023. A few days later, on the 29th of December 2023, I received an email from the Austrian embassy asking me to submit an additional document -
Subject: AUSTRIAN VISA APPLICATION - AMENDMENT REQUEST: Ravi Dwivedi VIS 4331 Dear Applicant, On 22.12.2023 your application for Visa C was registered at the Embassy. You are requested to kindly send the scanned copies of the following documents via email to the Embassy or submit the documents at the nearest VFS centre, for further processing of your application:
  • Kindly submit Electronic letter of guarantee EVE- Elektronische Verpflichtungserkl rung obtained from the Fremdenpolizeibeh rde of the sponsor s district in Austria. Once your host company/inviting company has obtained the EVE, please share the reference number (starting from DEL_____) received from the authorities, with the Embassy.
Kindly Note: It is in your own interest to fulfil the requirements as indicated above and submit the missing documents within 14 days of the receipt of this email. Otherwise a decision will be taken based on the documentation available. Sie werden in Ihrem Interesse ersucht, die gekennzeichneten M ngel so schnell wie m glich zu beheben bzw. fehlende Unterlagen umgehend nachzureichen, um die weitere Bearbeitung des Antrages zu erm glichen. Sollten Sie innerhalb 14 Tagen die gekennzeichneten M ngel nicht beheben bzw. die fehlenden Unterlagen nicht nachreichen, wird ber den vorliegenden Antrag ohne diese Unterlagen bzw. M ngelbehebung entschieden. Austrian Embassy New Delhi R.J/ Consular Section +91 11 2419 2700 EP-13, Chandragupta Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110 021, India bmeia.gv.at/botschaft/new-delhi facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhihttp://www.facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhi twitter.com/MFA_Austriahttp://www.twitter.com/MFA_Austria [refocus1][Signatur_V+30]https://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/european-foreign-policy/foreign-trade/refocus-austria/[Logo_AT_IN_22px]
I misunderstood the required document (the EVE) to be a scanned copy of the letter of guarantee form signed by Snehal, and responded by attaching it. Upon researching, Snehal determined that the document is an electronic letter of guarantee, and is supposed to be obtained at a local police station in Vienna. He visited a police station the next day and had a hard time conversing due to the language barrier (German is the common language in Austria, whereas Snehal speaks English). That day was a weekend, so he took an appointment for Monday, but in the meantime the embassy had finished processing my visa. My visa was denied, and the refusal letter stated:
The Austrian embassy in Delhi examined your application; the visa has been refused. The decision is based on the following reason(s):
  • The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay was not reliable.
  • There are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory of the Member States before the expiry of the visa.
Other remarks: You have been given an amendment request, which you have failed to fulfil, or have only fulfilled inadequately, within the deadline set. You are a first-time traveller. The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident. The return from Schengen territory does therefore not seem to be certain.
I could have reapplied after obtaining the EVE, but I didn t because I found the following line
The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident.
offensive for someone who was born and raised in India, got the impression that the absence of electronic guarantee letter was not the only reason behind the refusal, had already wasted 12,000 INR on this application, and my friend s stay in Austria was uncertain after January. In fact, my friend soon returned to India. To summarize -
  1. If you are visiting a host, then the category of appointment at VFS must be Visiting Friends and Family rather than Tourist .
  2. VFS charged me for courier assurance, which is an optional service. Make sure to get these removed from your bill.
  3. Neither my travel agent nor the VFS application center mentioned the EVE.
  4. While the required documents list from the VFS website does mention it in point 6, it leads to a dead link.
  5. Snehal informed me that a mere two months ago, his wife s visa was approved without an EVE. This hints at inconsistency in processing of applications, even those under identical categories.
Such incidents are a waste of time and money for applicants, and an embarrassment to VFS and the Austrian visa authorities. I suggest that the Austrian visa authorities fix that URL, and provide instructions for hosts to obtain the EVE. Credits to Snehal and Contrapunctus for editing, Badri for proofreading.

30 July 2024

Russell Coker: Links July 2024

Interesting Scientific American article about the way that language shapes thought processes and how it was demonstrated in eye tracking experiments with people who have Aboriginal languages as their first language [1]. David Brin wrote an interesting article Do We Really Want Immortality [2]. I disagree with his conclusions about the politics though. Better manufacturing technology should allow decreasing the retirement age while funding schools well. Scientific American has a surprising article about the differences between Chimp and Bonobo parenting [3]. I d never have expected Chimp moms to be protective. Sam Varghese wrote an insightful and informative article about the corruption in Indian politics and the attempts to silence Australian journalist Avani Dias [4]. WorksInProgress has an insightful article about the world s first around the world solo yacht race [5]. It has some interesting ideas about engineering. Htwo has an interesting video about adverts for fake games [6]. It s surprising how they apparently make money from advertising games that don t exist. Elena Hashman wrote an insightful blog post about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome [7]. I hope they make some progress on curing it soon. The fact that it seems similar to long Covid which is quite common suggests that a lot of research will be applied to that sort of thing. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about the risks of MS Copilot [8]. Krebs has an interesting article about how Apple does Wifi AP based geo-location and how that can be abused for tracking APs in warzones etc. Bad Apple! [9]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post on How AI Will Change Democracy [10]. Charles Stross wrote an amusing and insightful post about MS Recall titled Is Microsoft Trying to Commit Suicide [11]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about seeing the world as a data structure [12]. Luke Miani has an informative YouTube video about eBay scammers selling overprices MacBooks [13]. The Yorkshire Ranter has an insightful article about Ronald Coase and the problems with outsourcing big development contracts as an array of contracts without any overall control [14].

17 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.13 on CRAN: Some Updates

rcpp logo The Rcpp Core Team is once again pleased to announce a new release (now at 1.0.13) of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has since been uploaded to Debian. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course r2u should catch up tomorrow too. The release was uploaded last week, but not only does Rcpp always gets flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) but CRAN also found two packages regressing which then required them to take five days to get back to us. One issue was known; another did not reproduce under our tests against over 2800 reverse dependencies leading to the eventual release today. Yay. Checks are good and appreciated, and it does take time by humans to review them. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo as well as the r-universe page and repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2867 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 256 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 86.3 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1848 (JSS, 2011) and 324 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 641. This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The move towards a more standardized approach for the C API of R leads to a few changes; Kevin did most of the PRs for this. Andrew Johnsom also provided a very nice PR to update internals taking advantage of variadic templates. The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13 (2024-07-11)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Set R_NO_REMAP if not already defined (Dirk in #1296)
    • Add variadic templates to be used instead of generated code (Andrew Johnson in #1303)
    • Count variables were switches to size_t to avoid warnings about conversion-narrowing (Dirk in #1307)
    • Rcpp now avoids the usage of the (non-API) DATAPTR function when accessing the contents of Rcpp Vector objects where possible. (Kevin in #1310)
    • Rcpp now emits an R warning on out-of-bounds Vector accesses. This may become an error in a future Rcpp release. (Kevin in #1310)
    • Switch VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR to new API-compliant RO variants (Kevin in #1317 fixing #1316)
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Small updates to the CI test containers have been made (#1304)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues). If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

14 July 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: Kenya Visa Process

Prior to arrival in Kenya, you need to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) on their website by uploading all the required documents. This system is in place since Jan 2024 after the country abolished the visa system, implementing the eTA portal. The required documents will depend on the purpose of your visit, which in my case, was to attend a conference. Here is the list of documents I submitted for my eTA: Reservation means I didn t book the flights and hotels, but rather reserved them. Additionally, optional means that those documents were not mandatory to submit, but I submitted them in the Other Documents section in order to support my application. After submitting the eTA, I had to make a payment of around 35 US Dollars (approximately 3000 Indian Rupees). It took 40 hours for me to receive an email from Kenya stating that my eTA has been approved, along with an attached PDF, making this one of my smoothest experiences of obtaining travel documents to travel to a country :). An eTA is technically not a visa, but I put the word visa in the title due to familiarity with the term.

12 July 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2024

Welcome to the June 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced
  2. GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility
  3. New reproducibility-related academic papers
  4. Misc development news
  5. Website updates
  6. Reproducibility testing framework


Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced We are very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility Vagrant Cascadian will be holding a Reproducible Builds session as part of the monthly Guix patch review series on July 11th at 17:00 UTC. These online events are intended to encourage everyone everyone becoming a patch reviewer and the goal of reviewing patches is to help Guix project accept contributions while maintaining our quality standards and learning how to do patch reviews together in a friendly hacking session.

Development news In Debian this month, 4 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 14 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Only one issue types was updated, though, explaining that we don t vary the build path anymore.
On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote that whilst he had previously collected issues that introduce non-determinism he has now moved on to discuss about mitigations , in the sense of how can we avoid whole categories of problem without patching an infinite number of individual packages . In addition, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen announced the release of two versions of GNU Mes. [ ][ ]
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In NixOS, with the 24.05 release out, it was again validated that our minimal ISO is reproducible by building it on a virtual machine with no access to the binary cache.
What s more, we continued to write patches in order to fix specific reproducibility issues, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann writing three patches (for qutebrowser, samba and systemd), Chris Lamb filing Debian bug #1074214 against the fastfetch package and Arnout Engelen proposing fixes to refind and for the Scala compiler [ .
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded two versions (270 and 271) to Debian, and made the following changes as well:
  • Drop Build-Depends on liblz4-tool in order to fix Debian bug #1072575. [ ]
  • Update tests to support zipdetails version 4.004 that is shipped with Perl 5.40. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Akihiro Suda very helpfully making the <h4> elements more distinguishable from the <h3> level [ ][ ] as well as adding a guide for Dockerfile reproducibility [ ]. In addition Fay Stegerman added two tools, apksigcopier and reproducible-apk-tools, to our Tools page.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Marking the virt(32 64)c-armhf nodes as down. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node in order to debug a regression on the ppc64el architecture. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo re-aligned the /etc/default/jenkins file with changes performed upstream [ ] and changed how configuration files are handled on the rb-mail1 host. [ ], whilst Vagrant Cascadian documented the failure of the virt32c and virt64c nodes after initial investigation [ ].

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

Russ Allbery: Review: The Splinter in the Sky

Review: The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Publisher: Saga Press
Copyright: July 2023
ISBN: 1-6680-0849-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 372
The Splinter in the Sky is a stand-alone science fiction political thriller. It is Kemi Ashing-Giwa's first novel. Enitan is from Koriko, a vegetation-heavy moon colonized by the Vaalbaran empire. She lives in the Ijebu community with her sibling Xiang and has an on-again, off-again relationship with Ajana, the Vaalbaran-appointed governor. Xiang is studying to be an architect, which requires passing stringent entrance exams to be allowed to attend an ancillary imperial school intended for "primitives." Enitan works as a scribe and translator, one of the few Korikese allowed to use the sacred Orin language of Vaalbara. In her free time, she grows and processes tea. When Xiang mysteriously disappears while she's at work, Enitan goes to Ajana for help. Then Ajana dies, supposedly from suicide. The Vaalbaran government demands a local hostage while the death is investigated, someone who will be held as a diplomatic "guest" on the home world and executed if there is any local unrest. This hostage is supposed to be the child of the local headwoman, a concept that the Korikese do not have. Seeing a chance to search for Xiang, Enitan volunteers, heading into the heart of imperial power with nothing but desperate determination and a tea set. The empire doesn't stand a chance. Admittedly, a lot of the reason why the empire doesn't stand a chance is because the author is thoroughly on Enitan's side. Before she even arrives on Gondwana, Vaalbara's home world, Enitan is recruited as a spy by the other Gondwana power and Vaalbara's long-standing enemy. Her arrival in the Splinter, the floating arcology that serves as the center of Vaalbaran government, is followed by a startlingly meteoric rise in access. Some of this is explained by being a cultural curiosity for bored nobles, and some is explained by political factors Enitan is not yet aware of, but one can see the author's thumb resting on the scales. This was the sort of book that was great fun to read, but whose political implausibility provoked "wait, that didn't make sense" thoughts afterwards. I think one has to assume that the total population of Vaalbara is much less than first comes to mind when considering an interplanetary empire, which would help explain the odd lack of bureaucracy. Enitan is also living in, effectively, the palace complex, for reasonably well-explained political reasons, and that could grant her a surprising amount of access. But there are other things that are harder to explain away: the lack of surveillance, the relative lack of guards, and the odd political structure that's required for the plot to work. It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but the plot rests heavily on a conspiratorial view of how government power is wielded that I think strains plausibility. I'm not naive enough to think that the true power structure of a society matches the formal power structure, but I don't think they diverge as much as people think they do. It's one thing to say that the true power brokers of society can be largely unknown to the general population. In a repressive society with a weak media, that's believable. It's quite another matter for the people inside the palace to be in the dark about who is running what. I thought that was the biggest problem with this book. Its greatest feature is the characters, and particularly the character relationships. Enitan is an excellent protagonist: fascinating, sympathetic, determined, and daring in ways that make her success more believable. Early in the book, she forms an uneasy partnership that becomes the heart of the book, and I loved everything about that relationship. The politics of her situation might be a bit too simple, but the emotions were extremely well-done. This is a book about colonialism. Specifically, it's a book about cultural looting, appropriation, and racist superiority. The Vaalbarans consider Enitan barely better than an animal, and in her home they're merciless and repressive. Taken out of that context into their imperial capital, they see her as a harmless curiosity and novelty. Enitan exploits this in ways that are entirely believable. She is also driven to incandescent fury in ways that are entirely believable, and which she only rarely can allow herself to act on. Ashing-Giwa drives home the sheer uselessness of even the more sympathetic Vaalbarans more forthrightly than science fiction is usually willing to be. It's not a subtle point, but it is an accurate one. The first two thirds of this book had me thoroughly engrossed and unable to put it down. The last third unfortunately turns into a Pok mon hunt of antagonists, which I found less satisfying and somewhat less believable. I wish there had been more need for Enitan to build political alliances and go deeper into the social maneuverings of the first part of the book, rather than gaining some deus ex machina allies who trivially solve some otherwise-tricky plot problems. The setup is amazing; the resolution felt a bit like escaping a maze by blasting through the walls, which I don't think played to the strengths of the characters and relationships that Ashing-Giwa had constructed. The advantage of that approach is that we do get a satisfying resolution and a standalone novel. The central relationship of the book is unfortunately too much of a spoiler to talk about in a review, but I thought it was the best part of the story. This is a political thriller on the surface, but I think it's heart is an unexpected political alliance with a fascinatingly tricky balance of power. I was delighted that Ashing-Giwa never allows the tension in that relationship to collapse into one of the stock patterns it so easily could have become. The Splinter in the Sky reminded me a little of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's not as assured or as adroitly balanced as that book, and the characters are not quite as memorable, but that's a very high bar. The political point is even sharper, and it has some of the same appeal. I had so much fun reading this book. You may need to suspend your disbelief about some of the politics, and I wish the conclusion had been a bit less brute-force, but this is great stuff. Recommended when you're in the mood for a character story in the trappings of a political thriller. Rating: 8 out of 10

2 July 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in June 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

1 July 2024

Russell Coker: VoLTE in Australia

Introduction In Australia the 3G mobile frequencies are to be reused so they are in the process of shutting down the 3G service. That means that everyone has to use VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) for phone calls (including emergency calls). The shutdown time varies by telco, Kogan Mobile (one of the better services which has good value for money and generally works well) shut down their 3G service in January. Aldi Mobile (another one of the good services which is slightly more expensive but has included free calls to most first-world countries and uses the largest phone network) will shut theirs down at the end of August. For background there s a Fosdem talk about OpenSIPS with VoLTE and VoNR [1], it s more complex than you want to know. Also VoNR (Voice over New Radio) is the standard for 5G voice and it s different from VoLTE and has a fallback to VoLTE. Another good lecture for background information is the Fosdem talk on VoLTE at the handset end [2]. The PinePhonePro In October 2023 I tried using my PinePhonePro as my main phone but that only lasted a few days due to problems with calls and poor battery life [3]. Since then I went back to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. So that has been my main phone for 5 years now, giving a cost of $1.50 per week. I had tried using a Huawei Nova 7i running Android without Google Play as an experiment but that had failed, I do many things that need Android apps [4]. I followed the PinePhone wiki to get my PinePhonePro working with VoLTE [5]. That worked fine for me, the only difference from the instructions is that I had to use device /dev/ttyUSB3 and that the modem kept resetting itself during the process and when that happened I had to kill minicom and start again. After changing the setting and saving it the PinePhonePro seemed to work well with VoLTE on a Kogan Mobile SIM (so definitely not using 3G). One issue I have found is that Plasma Mobile (my preferred FOSS phone GUI) appears to have a library issue that results in polling every 14ms even when the screen is locked [6]. If you have a few processes doing that (which means the most lightly used Plasma system) it really hurts battery use. The maintainer has quite reasonably deferred action on this bug report given the KDE 6 transition. Later on in the Trixie development cycle I hope to get this issue resolved, I don t expect it to suddenly make battery life good. But it might make battery life acceptable. I am now idly considering carrying around my PinePhonePro in a powered off state for situations where I might need to do high security operations (root logins to servers or online banking) but for which carrying a laptop isn t convenient. It will do well for the turn on, do 30 mins of work that needs security, and then turn off scenario. Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Redmi 9A The Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been my main phone for 5 years and it has worked well, so it would be ideal if it could do VoLTE as the PinePhonePro isn t ready yet. All the web pages I ve seen about the Mate 10 Pro say that it will either allow upgrading to a VoLTE configuration if run with the right SIM or only support it with the right SIM. I did a test with a Chinese SIM which gave an option of turning on VoLTE but didn t allow any firmware updates and the VoLTE option went away when I put an Australian SIM in. Some forum comments had led me to believe that it would either permanently enable VoLTE or allow upgrading the firmware to one that enables VoLTE if I used a Chinese SIM but that is not the case. I didn t expect a high probability of success but I had to give it a go as it s a nice phone. I did some tests on a Redmi 9A (a terrible phone that has really bad latency on the UI in spite of having reasonably good hardware). The one I tested on didn t have VoLTE enabled when I got it, to test that I used the code *#*#4636#*#* in the dialler to get the menu of SIM information and it showed that VoLTE was not provisioned. I then had to update to the latest release of Android for that phone and enter *#*#86583#*#* in the dialler to enable VoLTE, the message displayed after entering that magic number must end in DISABLE . I get the impression that the code in question makes the phone not check certain aspects of whether the carrier is good for VoLTE and just do it. So apparently Kogan Mobile somehow gives the Redmi 9A the impression that VoLTE isn t supported but if the phone just goes ahead and connects it will work. I don t plan to use a Redmi 9A myself as it s too slow, but I added it to my collection to offer to anyone else I know who needs a phone with VoLTE and doesn t use the phone seriously or to someone who needs a known good phone for testing things. Samsung Galaxy Note 9 I got some Samsung Galaxy Note 9 phones to run Droidian as an experiment [7]. But Droidian dropped support for the Note 9 and I couldn t figure out how to enable VoLTE via Droidian, which was very annoying after I had spent $109 on a test phone and $215 on a phone for real use (I have no plans to try Droidian again at this time). I tried installing LineageOS on one Note 9 [8] which was much easier than expected (especially after previously installing Droidian). But VoLTE wasn t an option. According to Reddit LineageOS doesn t support VoLTE on Samsung devices and you can use a magisk module or a VoLTE enabler module but those aren t supported by LineageOS either [9]. I downloaded an original image for the Note 9 from SamsMobile.com [10]. That image booted past the orange stage (where if you have problems then your phone is probably permanently useless) but didn t boot into the OS. A friend helped me out with that and it turned out that the Heimdal flash tool on Linux didn t do something it needed to do and that Odin on Windows was required. After using Odin everything was fine and I have a Note 9 with VoLTE running the latest Samsung firmware which is security patch level 1st July 2022!!! So I have a choice between using a Note 9 for data and SMS while running a current version of Lineage OS with all security fixes or running a Samsung image with no security updates for 2 years which supports phone calls. So based on this I have to recommend Pixel as the phone of choice, it has a decent level of support from Google and long term support from LineageOS. According to the LineageOS web site you can run the current version of Lineage on the original Pixel phone from 2016! Of course getting VoLTE to work on it might be another saga, but it would probably be easier to do with LineageOS on a Pixel than on a Samsung phone. Conclusion The operation of the Note 9 for me is decent now apart from the potential security issues. The same goes for selling one of the phones. The PinePhonePro still has potential to become my daily driver at some future time if I and others can optimise power use. Also a complicating factor is that I want to have both Jabber and Matrix be actually instant IM systems not IM with a 5 minute delay, so suspend mode isn t a good option. Pixel phones will be a much higher priority when looking at phones to buy in future. The older Pixel phones go for as little as $100 on eBay and can still run the latest LineageOS. VoLTE seems needlessly complicated.

Russ Allbery: Review: Snuff

Review: Snuff, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #39
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: October 2011
Printing: January 2013
ISBN: 0-06-221886-7
Format: Mass market
Pages: 470
Snuff is the 39th Discworld novel and the 8th (and last) Watch novel. This is not a good place to start reading. Sam Vines has been talked, cajoled, and coerced into taking a vacation. Since he is now the Duke of Ankh, he has a country estate that he's never visited. Lady Sybil is insistent on remedying this, as is Vetinari. Both of them may have ulterior motives. They may also be colluding. It does not take long for Vimes to realize that something is amiss in the countryside. It's not that the servants are uncomfortable with him talking to them, the senior servants are annoyed that he talks to the wrong servants, and the maids turn to face the wall at the sight of him. Those are just the strange customs of the aristocracy, for which he has little understanding and even less patience. There's something else going on. The nobility is wary, the town blacksmith is angry about something more than disliking the nobles, and the bartender doesn't want to get involved. Vimes smells something suspicious. When he's framed for a murder, the suspicions seem justified. It takes some time before the reader learns what the local nobility are squirming about, so I won't spoil it. What I will say is that Snuff is Pratchett hammering away at one of his favorite targets: prejudice, cruelty, and treating people like things. Vimes, with his uncompromising morality, is one of the first to realize the depth of the problem. It takes most of the rest longer to come around, even Sybil. It's both painful, and painfully accurate, to contemplate how often recognition of other people's worth only comes once they do something that you recognize as valuable. This is one of the better-plotted Discworld novels. Vimes starts out with nothing but suspicions and stubbornness, and manages to turn Snuff into a mystery novel through dogged persistence. The story is one continuous plot arc with the normal Pratchett color (Young Sam's obsession with types of poo, for example) but without extended digressions. It also has considerably better villains than most Pratchett novels: layers of foot soldiers and plotters, each of which have to be dealt with in a suitable way. Even the concluding action sequences worked for me, which is not always a given in Discworld. The problem, unfortunately, is that the writing is getting a bit wobbly. Pratchett died of early-onset Alzheimer's in 2015, four years after this book was first published, and this is the first novel where I can see some early effects. It mostly shows up in the dialogue: it's just a bit flabby and a bit repetitive, and the characters, particularly towards the end of the book, start repeating the name of the person they're talking to every other line. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and it was annoying enough to rob a bit of enjoyment from the end of the book. That aside, though, this was a solid Discworld novel. Vimes testing his moral certainty against the world and forcing it into a more ethical shape is always rewarding, and here he takes more risks, with better justification, than in most of the Watch novels. We also find out that Vimes has a legacy from the events of Thud!, which has interesting implications that I wish Pratchett had more time to explore. I think the best part of this book is how it models the process of social change through archetypes: the campaigner who knew the right choice early on, the person who formed their opinion the first time they saw injustice, the person who gets there through a more explicit moral code, the ones who have to be pushed by someone who was a bit faster, the ones who have to be convinced but then work to convince others, and of course the person who is willing to take on the unfair and far-too-heavy burden of being exceptional enough that they can be used as a tool to force other people to acknowledge them as a person. And, since this is Discworld, Vetinari is lurking in the scenery pulling strings, balancing threats, navigating politics, and giving Vimes just enough leeway to try to change the world without abusing his power. I love that the amount of leeway Vimes gets depends on how egregious the offense is, and Vetinari calibrates this quite carefully without ever saying so openly. Recommended, and as much as I don't want to see this series end, this is not a bad entry for the Watch novels to end on. Followed in publication order by Raising Steam. Rating: 8 out of 10

19 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: First Iteration of My Free Software Mirror

As I m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e., mirrors.de.sahilister.net (was mirrors.sahilister.in), is hosted in Germany and serves traffic for Termux, NomadBSD, Blender, BlendOS and GIMP. For a while in between, it hosted OSMC project mirror as well. To explain what is a Free Software download mirror thing is first, I ll quote myself from work blog -
As most Free Software doesn t have commercial backing and require heavy downloads, the concept of software download mirrors helps take the traffic load off of the primary server, leading to geographical redundancy, higher availability and faster download in general.
So whenever someone wants to download a particular (mirrored) software and click download, upstream redirects the download to one of the mirror server which is geographical (or in other parameters) nearby to the user, leading to faster downloads and load sharing amongst all mirrors. Since the time I got into Linux and servers, I always wanted to help the community somehow, and mirroring seemed to be the most obvious thing. India seems to be a country which has traditionally seen less number of public download mirrors. IITB, TiFR, and some of the public institutions used to host them for popular Linux and Free Softwares, but they seem to be diminishing these days. In the last months of 2021, I started using Termux and saw that it had only a few mirrors (back then). I tried getting a high capacity, high bandwidth node in budget but it was hard in India in 2021-22. So after much deliberation, I decided to go where it s available and chose a German hosting provider with the thought of adding India node when conditions are favorable (thankfully that happened, and India node is live too now.). Termux required only 29 GB of storage, so went ahead and started mirroring it. I raised this issue in Termux s GitHub repository in January 2022. This blog post chronicles the start of the mirror. Termux has high request counts from a mirror point of view. Each Termux client, usually checks every mirror in selected group for availability before randomly selecting one for download (only other case is when client has explicitly selected a single mirror using termux-repo-change). The mirror started getting thousands of requests daily due to this but only a small percentage would actually get my mirror in selection, so download traffic was lower. Similar thing happened with OSMC too (which I started mirroring later). With this start, I started exploring various project that would be benefit from additional mirrors. Public information from Academic Computer Club in Ume s mirror and Freedif s mirror stats helped to figure out storage and bandwidth requirements for potential projects. Fun fact, Academic Computer Club in Ume (which is one of the prominent Debian, Ubuntu etc.) mirror, now has 200 Gbits/s uplink to the internet through SUNET. Later, I migrated to a different provider for better speeds and added LibreSpeed test on the mirror server. Those were fun times. Between OSMC, Termux and LibreSpeed, I was getting almost 1.2 millions hits/day on the server at its peak, crossing for the first time a TB/day traffic number. Next came Blender, which took the longest time to set up of around 9 10 months. Blender had a push-trigger requirement for rsync from upstream that took quite some back and forth. It now contributes the most amount of traffic on the mirror. On release days, mirror does more than 3 TB/day and normal days, it hovers around 2 TB/day. Gimp project is the latest addition. At one time, the mirror traffic touched 4.97 TB/day traffic number. That s when I decided on dropping LibreSpeed server to solely focus on mirroring for now, keeping the bandwidth allotment for serving downloads only. The mirror projects selection grew organically. I used to reach out many projects discussing the need of for additional mirrors. Some projects outright denied mirroring request as Germany already has a good academic mirrors boosting 20-25 Gbits/s speeds from FTP era, which seems fair. Finding the niche was essential to only add softwares, which would truly benefit from additional capacity. There were months when nothing much would happen with the mirror, rsync would continue to update the mirror while nginx would keep on serving the traffic. Nowadays, the mirror pushes around 70 TB/month. I occasionally check logs, vnstat, add new security stuff here and there and pay the bills. It now saturates the Gigabit link sometimes and goes beyond that, peaking around 1.42 Gbits/s (the hosting provider seems to be upping their game). The plan is to upgrade the link to better speeds. vnstat yearly
Yearly traffic stats (through vnstat -y )
On the way, learned quite a few things like - GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday Access Logs
GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday's Access Logs. Click to enlarge
Generated from IPinfo.io
In hindsight, the statistics look amazing, hundreds of TBs of traffic served from the mirror, month after month. That does show that there s still an appetite for public mirrors in time of commercially donated CDNs and GitHub. The world could have done with one less mirror, but it saved some time, lessened the burden for others, while providing redundancy and traffic localization with one additional mirror. And it s fun for someone like me who s into infrastructure that powers the Internet. Now, I ll try focusing and expanding the India mirror, which in itself started pushing almost half a TB/day. Long live Free Software and public download mirrors.

8 June 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2024

Welcome to the May 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. A peek into build provenance for Homebrew
  2. Distribution news
  3. Mailing list news
  4. Miscellaneous news
  5. Two new academic papers
  6. diffoscope
  7. Website updates
  8. Upstream patches
  9. Reproducibility testing framework


A peek into build provenance for Homebrew Joe Sweeney and William Woodruff on the Trail of Bits blog wrote an extensive post about build provenance for Homebrew, the third-party package manager for MacOS. Their post details how each bottle (i.e. each release):
[ ] built by Homebrew will come with a cryptographically verifiable statement binding the bottle s content to the specific workflow and other build-time metadata that produced it. [ ] In effect, this injects greater transparency into the Homebrew build process, and diminishes the threat posed by a compromised or malicious insider by making it impossible to trick ordinary users into installing non-CI-built bottles.
The post also briefly touches on future work, including work on source provenance:
Homebrew s formulae already hash-pin their source artifacts, but we can go a step further and additionally assert that source artifacts are produced by the repository (or other signing identity) that s latent in their URL or otherwise embedded into the formula specification.

Distribution news In Debian this month, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (aka josch) noticed that the Debian binary package bash version 5.2.15-2+b3 was uploaded to the archive twice. Once to bookworm and once to sid but with differing content. This is problem for reproducible builds in Debian due its assumption that the package name, version and architecture triplet is unique. However, josch highlighted that
This example with bash is especially problematic since bash is Essential:yes, so there will now be a large portion of .buildinfo files where it is not possible to figure out with which of the two differing bash packages the sources were compiled.
In response to this, Holger Levsen performed an analysis of all .buildinfo files and found that this needs almost 1,500 binNMUs to fix the fallout from this bug. Elsewhere in Debian, Vagrant Cascadian posted about a Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU) sprint to take place during early June, and it was announced that there is now a #debian-snapshot IRC channel on OFTC to discuss the creation of a new source code archiving service to, perhaps, replace snapshot.debian.org. Lastly, 11 reviews of Debian packages were added, 15 were updated and 48 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated by Chris Lamb as well. [ ][ ]
Elsewhere in the world of distributions, deep within a larger announcement from Colin Percival about the release of version 14.1-BETA2, it was mentioned that the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly.
In Fedora, however, the change proposal mentioned in our report for April 2024 was approved, so, per the ReproduciblePackageBuilds wiki page, the add-determinism tool is now running in new builds for Fedora 41 ( rawhide ). The add-determinism tool is a Rust program which, as its name suggests, adds determinism to files that are given as input by attempting to standardize metadata contained in binary or source files to ensure consistency and clamping to $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in all instances . This is essentially the Fedora version of Debian s strip-nondeterminism. However, strip-nondeterminism is written in Perl, and Fedora did not want to pull Perl in the buildroot for every package. The add-determinism tool eliminates many causes of non-determinism and work is ongoing to continue the scope of packages it can operate on.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month, regular contributor kpcyrd wrote to the list with an update on their source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. The whatsrc.org project, which was launched last month in response to the XZ Utils backdoor, now contains and indexes almost 250,000 unique source code archives. In their post, kpcyrd gives an example of its intended purpose, noting that it shown that whilst there seems to be consensus about [the] source code for zsh 5.9 in various Linux distributions, it does not align with the contents of the zsh Git repository . Holger Levsen also posted to the list with a pre-announcement of sorts for the 2024 Reproducible Builds summit. In particular:
[Whilst] the dates and location are not fixed yet, however if you don help us with finding a suitable location soon, it is very likely that we ll meet again in Hamburg in the 2nd half of September 2024 [ ].
Lastly, Frederic-Emmanuel Picca wrote to the list asking for help understanding the non-reproducible status of the Debian silx package and received replies from both Vagrant Cascadian and Chris Lamb.

Miscellaneous news strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. This month strip-nondeterminism version 1.14.0-1 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb chiefly to incorporate a change from Alex Muntada to avoid a dependency on Sub::Override to perform monkey-patching and break circular dependencies related to debhelper [ ]. Elsewhere in our tooling, Jelle van der Waa modified reprotest because the pipes module will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].
It was also noticed that a new blog post by Daniel Stenberg detailing How to verify a Curl release mentions the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. This is because:
The [curl] release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Furthermore, Fay Stegerman filed a bug against the Signal messenger app for Android to report that their reproducible builds cannot, in fact, be reproduced. However, Fay is quick to note that she has:
found zero evidence of any kind of compromise. Some differences are yet unexplained but everything I found seems to be benign. I am disappointed that Reproducible Builds have been broken for months but I have zero reason to doubt Signal s security in any way.

Lastly, it was observed that there was a concise and diagrammatic overview of supply chain threats on the SLSA website.

Two new academic papers Two new scholarly papers were published this month. Firstly, Mathieu Acher, Beno t Combemale, Georges Aaron Randrianaina and Jean-Marc J z quel of University of Rennes on Embracing Deep Variability For Reproducibility & Replicability. The authors describe their approach as follows:
In this short [vision] paper we delve into the application of software engineering techniques, specifically variability management, to systematically identify and explicit points of variability that may give rise to reproducibility issues (e.g., language, libraries, compiler, virtual machine, OS, environment variables, etc.). The primary objectives are: i) gaining insights into the variability layers and their possible interactions, ii) capturing and documenting configurations for the sake of reproducibility, and iii) exploring diverse configurations to replicate, and hence validate and ensure the robustness of results. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to address the complexities associated with reproducibility and replicability in modern software systems and environments, facilitating a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on these critical aspects.
(A PDF of this article is available.)
Secondly, Ludovic Court s, Timothy Sample, Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli have collaborated to publish a paper on Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment. Their paper was motivated because:
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.
(A PDF of this article is also available.)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 266, 267, 268 and 269 to Debian, making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Use xz --list to supplement output when comparing .xz archives; essential when metadata differs. (#1069329)
    • Include xz --verbose --verbose (ie. double) output. (#1069329)
    • Strip the first line from the xz --list output. [ ]
    • Only include xz --list --verbose output if the xz has no other differences. [ ]
    • Actually append the xz --list after the container differences, as it simplifies a lot. [ ]
  • Testing improvements:
    • Allow Debian testing to fail right now. [ ]
    • Drop apktool from Build-Depends; we can still test APK functionality via autopkgtests. (#1071410)
    • Add a versioned dependency for at least version 5.4.5 for the xz tests as they fail under (at least) version 5.2.8. (#374)
    • Fix tests for 7zip 24.05. [ ][ ]
    • Fix all tests after additon of xz --list. [ ][ ]
  • Misc:
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
In addition, James Addison fixed an issue where the HTML output showed only the first difference in a file, while the text output shows all differences [ ][ ][ ], Sergei Trofimovich amended the 7zip version test for older 7z versions that include the string [64] [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian relaxed the versioned dependency to allow version 5.4.1 for the xz tests [ ] and proposed updates to guix for versions 267, 268 and pushed version 269 to Guix. Furthermore, Eli Schwartz updated the diffoscope.org website in order to explain how to install diffoscope on Gentoo [ ].

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb making the print CSS stylesheet nicer [ ]. Fay Stegerman made a number of updates to the page about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ][ ][ ] and Holger Levsen added some of their presentations to the Resources page. Furthermore, IOhannes zm lnig stipulated support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in clang version 16.0.0+ [ ], Jan Zerebecki expanded the Formal definition page and fixed a number of typos on the Buy-in page [ ] and Simon Josefsson fixed the link to Trisquel GNU/Linux on the Projects page [ ].

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a number of patches to fix specific reproducibility issues, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Enable the rebuilder-snapshot API on osuosl4. [ ]
    • Schedule the i386 architecture a bit more often. [ ]
    • Adapt cleanup_nodes.sh to the new way of running our build services. [ ]
    • Add 8 more workers for the i386 architecture. [ ]
    • Update configuration now that the infom07 and infom08 nodes have been reinstalled as real i386 systems. [ ]
    • Make diffoscope timeouts more visible on the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ]
    • Mark the cbxi4a-armhf node as down. [ ][ ]
    • Only install the hdmi2usb-mode-switch package only on Debian bookworm and earlier [ ] and only install the haskell-platform package on Debian bullseye [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Install the ntpdate utility as we need it later. [ ]
    • Document the progress on the i386 architecture nodes at Infomaniak. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated and unnoticed notice. [ ]
    • Add live_setup_schroot to the list of so-called zombie jobs. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo reinstalled the infom07 and infom08 nodes [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4a node as online [ ].

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

6 June 2024

Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 - a brief report

From April 27th to 30th, 2024, MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 was held at the Pampulha Campus of UFMG - Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte city. MiniDebConf BH 2024 banners This was the fifth time that a MiniDebConf (as an exclusive in-person event about Debian) took place in Brazil. Previous editions were in Curitiba (2016, 2017, and 2018), and in Bras lia 2023. We had other MiniDebConfs editions held within Free Software events such as FISL and Latinoware, and other online events. See our event history. Parallel to MiniDebConf, on 27th (Saturday) FLISOL - Latin American Free Software Installation Festival took place. It's the largest event in Latin America to promote Free Software, and It has been held since 2005 simultaneously in several cities. MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 was a success (as were previous editions) thanks to the participation of everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian. We value the presence of both beginner users who are familiarizing themselves with the system and the official project developers. The spirit of welcome and collaboration was present during all the event. MiniDebConf BH 2024 flisol 2024 edition numbers During the four days of the event, several activities took place for all levels of users and collaborators of the Debian project. The official schedule was composed of: MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra The final numbers for MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 show that we had a record number of participants. Of the 224 participants, 15 were official Brazilian contributors, 10 being DDs (Debian Developers) and 05 (Debian Maintainers), in addition to several unofficial contributors. The organization was carried out by 14 people who started working at the end of 2023, including Prof. Lo c Cerf from the Computing Department who made the event possible at UFMG, and 37 volunteers who helped during the event. As MiniDebConf was held at UFMG facilities, we had the help of more than 10 University employees. See the list with the names of people who helped in some way in organizing MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. The difference between the number of people registered and the number of attendees in the event is probably explained by the fact that there is no registration fee, so if the person decides not to go to the event, they will not suffer financial losses. The 2024 edition of MiniDebconf Belo Horizonte was truly grand and shows the result of the constant efforts made over the last few years to attract more contributors to the Debian community in Brazil. With each edition the numbers only increase, with more attendees, more activities, more rooms, and more sponsors/supporters. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo

MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Activities The MiniDebConf schedule was intense and diverse. On the 27th, 29th and 30th (Saturday, Monday and Tuesday) we had talks, discussions, workshops and many practical activities. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra On the 28th (Sunday), the Day Trip took place, a day dedicated to sightseeing around the city. In the morning we left the hotel and went, on a chartered bus, to the Belo Horizonte Central Market. People took the opportunity to buy various things such as cheeses, sweets, cacha as and souvenirs, as well as tasting some local foods. MiniDebConf BH 2024 mercado After a 2-hour tour of the Market, we got back on the bus and hit the road for lunch at a typical Minas Gerais food restaurant. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra With everyone well fed, we returned to Belo Horizonte to visit the city's main tourist attraction: Lagoa da Pampulha and Capela S o Francisco de Assis, better known as Igrejinha da Pampulha. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra We went back to the hotel and the day ended in the hacker space that we set up in the events room for people to chat, packaging, and eat pizzas. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Crowdfunding For the third time we ran a crowdfunding campaign and it was incredible how people contributed! The initial goal was to raise the amount equivalent to a gold tier of R$ 3,000.00. When we reached this goal, we defined a new one, equivalent to one gold tier + one silver tier (R$ 5,000.00). And again we achieved this goal. So we proposed as a final goal the value of a gold + silver + bronze tiers, which would be equivalent to R$ 6,000.00. The result was that we raised R$7,239.65 (~ USD 1,400) with the help of more than 100 people! Thank you very much to the people who contributed any amount. As a thank you, we list the names of the people who donated. MiniDebConf BH 2024 doadores Food, accommodation and/or travel grants for participants Each edition of MiniDebConf brought some innovation, or some different benefit for the attendees. In this year's edition in Belo Horizonte, as with DebConfs, we offered bursaries for food, accommodation and/or travel to help those people who would like to come to the event but who would need some kind of help. In the registration form, we included the option for the person to request a food, accommodation and/or travel bursary, but to do so, they would have to identify themselves as a contributor (official or unofficial) to Debian and write a justification for the request. Number of people benefited: The food bursary provided lunch and dinner every day. The lunches included attendees who live in Belo Horizonte and the region. Dinners were paid for attendees who also received accommodation and/or travel. The accommodation was held at the BH Jaragu Hotel. And the travels included airplane or bus tickets, or fuel (for those who came by car or motorbike). Much of the money to fund the bursaries came from the Debian Project, mainly for travels. We sent a budget request to the former Debian leader Jonathan Carter, and He promptly approved our request. In addition to this event budget, the leader also approved individual requests sent by some DDs who preferred to request directly from him. The experience of offering the bursaries was really good because it allowed several people to come from other cities. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Photos and videos You can watch recordings of the talks at the links below: And see the photos taken by several collaborators in the links below: Thanks We would like to thank all the attendees, organizers, volunteers, sponsors and supporters who contributed to the success of MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Sponsors Gold: Silver: Bronze: Supporters Organizers

1 June 2024

Russell Coker: Links May 2024 (late)

VoltageDivide has an interesting article on Unconventional Uses of FPGAs [1]. Tagline Every sensor is a temperature sensor, nearly everything is a resistor or a conductor if you try hard enough and anything is an antenna. Datasheets are just a suggestion, and finally, often we pretend things are ideal, when they often are not. Interesting blog post about the way npm modules that depend on everything exposed flaws in the entire npm system [2]. The conclusion should have included use a fake name for doing unusual tests . Krebs on Security has an interesting article about MFA bombing [3]. Looks like Apple has some flaws in their MFA system, other companies developing MFA should learn from this. Joey wrote an informative blog post about the Vultr hosting company wanting to extract data from VMs run for clients to train ML [4]. If your email is stored on such a VM it could be generated by an AI system. John Goerzen wrote an interesting post looking at the causes of the xz issue from a high level [5]. Interesting article about self proclaimed Autistic pro-natalists [6]. They seem somewhat abusive to their kids and are happy to associate with neo-Nazis. :( Joey Hess wrote an interesting blog post about the possibility of further undiscovered attacks on xz [7]. Going back to an earlier version seems like a good idea. The Guardian has an interesting article about Amazon s 2 pizza rule and the way the company is structured [8]. It s interesting how they did it, but we really need to have it broken up via anti-trust legislation. John Goerzen wrote an informative post about Facebook censorship and why we should all move to Mastodon [9]. Facebook needs to be broken up under anti-trust laws. Kobold Letters is an attack on HTML email that results in the visual representation of email changing when it is forwarded. [10]. You could have the original email hide some sections which are revealed with the recipient forwards it for a CEO impersonation attack.

27 May 2024

Thomas Koch: Rebuild search with trust

Posted on January 20, 2024
Finally there is a thing people can agree on: Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it: Honey I federated the search engine - finding stuff online post-big tech - a lightning talk at the recent chaos communication congress The speaker however did not mention, that there have already been many attempts at building distributed search engines. So why do I think that such an attempt could finally succeed? My definition of success is:
A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.
The exact algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites is a secret even to most Googlers. Still it is clear, that it relies heavily on big data: billions of queries, a comprehensive web index and user behaviour data. - All this is not available to us. A distributed search engine however can instead rely on user input. Every admin of one node seeds the node ranking with their personal selection of trusted sites. They connect their node with nodes of people they trust. This results in a web of (transitive) trust much like pgp. For comparison, imagine you are searching for something in a world without computers: You ask the people around you. They probably forward your question to their peers. I already had a look at YaCy. It is active, somewhat usable and has a friendly maintainer. Unfortunately I consider the codebase to show its age. It takes a lot of time for a newcomer to find their way around and it contains a lot of cruft. Nevertheless, YaCy is a good example that a decentralized search software can be done even by a small team or just one person. I myself started working on a software in Haskell and keep my notes here: Populus:DezInV. Since I m learning Haskell along the way, there is nothing there to see yet. Additionally I took a yak shaving break to learn nix. By the way: DuckDuckGo is not the alternative. And while I would encourage you to also try Yandex for a second opinion, I don t consider this a solution.

Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian

Posted on January 16, 2024
The nix package manager is available in Debian since May 2020. Why would one use it in Debian? Especially the last point nagged me every time I set up a new Debian installation. My emacs configuration and my Desktop setup expects certain software to be installed. Please be aware that I m a beginner with nix and that my config might not follow best practice. Additionally many nix users are already using the new flakes feature of nix that I m still learning about. So I ve got this file at .config/nixpkgs/config.nix1:
with (import <nixpkgs>  );
 
  packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs;  
    thk-emacsWithPackages = (pkgs.emacsPackagesFor emacs-gtk).emacsWithPackages (
      epkgs:
      (with epkgs.elpaPackages; [
        ace-window
        company
        org
        use-package
      ]) ++ (with epkgs.melpaPackages; [
        editorconfig
        flycheck
        haskell-mode
        magit
        nix-mode
        paredit
        rainbow-delimiters
        treemacs
        visual-fill-column
        yasnippet-snippets
      ]) ++ [    # From main packages set
      ]
    );

    userPackages = buildEnv  
      extraOutputsToInstall = [ "doc" "info" "man" ];
      name = "user-packages";
      paths = [
        ghc
        git
        (pkgs.haskell-language-server.override   supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ];  )
        nix
        stack
        thk-emacsWithPackages
        tmux
        vcsh
        virtiofsd
      ];
     ;
   ;
 
Every time I change the file or want to receive updates, I do:
nix-env --install --attr nixpkgs.userPackages --remove-all
You can see that I install nix with nix. This gives me a newer version than the one available in Debian stable. However, the nix-daemon still runs as the older binary from Debian. My dirty hack is to put this override in /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service.d/override.conf:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=@/home/thk/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix-daemon nix-daemon --daemon
I m not too interested in a cleaner way since I hope to fully migrate to Nix anyways.

  1. Note the nixpkgs in the path. This is not a config file for nix the package manager but for the nix package collection. See the nixpkgs manual.

Thomas Koch: Chromium gtk-filechooser preview size

Posted on January 9, 2024
I wanted to report this issue in chromiums issue tracker, but it gave me:
Something went wrong, please try again later.
Ok, then at least let me reply to this askubuntu question. But my attempt to signup with my launchpad account gave me:
Launchpad Login Failed. Please try logging in again.
I refrain from commenting on this to not violate some code of conduct. So this is what I wanted to write:
GTK file chooser image preview size should be configurable The file chooser that appears when uploading a file (e.g. an image to Google Fotos) learned to show a preview in issue 15500. The preview image size is hard coded to 256x512 in kPreviewWidth and kPreviewHeight in ui/gtk/select_file_dialog_linux_gtk.cc. Please make the size configurable. On high DPI screens the images are too small to be of much use.
Yes, I should not use chromium anymore.

20 May 2024

Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 - um breve relato

De 27 a 30 de abril de 2024 foi realizada a MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 no Campus Pampulha da UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, em Belo Horizonte - MG. MiniDebConf BH 2024 banners Esta foi a quinta vez que uma MiniDebConf (como um evento presencial exclusivo sobre Debian) aconteceu no Brasil. As edi es anteriores foram em Curitiba (2016, 2017, e 2018), e em Bras lia 2023. Tivemos outras edi es de MiniDebConfs realizadas dentro de eventos de Software Livre como o FISL e a Latinoware, e outros eventos online. Veja o nosso hist rico de eventos. Paralelamente MiniDebConf, no dia 27 (s bado) aconteceu o FLISOL - Festival Latino-americano de Instala o de Software Livre, maior evento da Am rica Latina de divulga o de Software Livre realizado desde o ano de 2005 simultaneamente em v rias cidades. A MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 foi um sucesso (assim como as edi es anteriores) gra as participa o de todos(as), independentemente do n vel de conhecimento sobre o Debian. Valorizamos a presen a tanto dos(as) usu rios(as) iniciantes que est o se familiarizando com o sistema quanto dos(as) desenvolvedores(as) oficiais do projeto. O esp rito de acolhimento e colabora o esteve presente em todos os momentos. MiniDebConf BH 2024 flisol N meros da edi o 2024 Durante os quatro dias de evento aconteceram diversas atividades para todos os n veis de usu rios(as) e colaboradores(as) do projeto Debian. A programa o oficial foi composta de: MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Os n meros finais da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 mostram que tivemos um recorde de participantes. Dos 224 participantes, 15 eram contribuidores(as) oficiais brasileiros sendo 10 DDs (Debian Developers) e 05 (Debian Maintainers), al m de diversos(as) contribuidores(as) n o oficiais. A organiza o foi realizada por 14 pessoas que come aram a trabalhar ainda no final de 2023, entre elas o Prof. Lo c Cerf do Departamento de Computa o que viabilizou o evento na UFMG, e 37 volunt rios(as) que ajudaram durante o evento. Como a MiniDebConf foi realizado nas instala es da UFMG, tivemos a ajuda de mais de 10 funcion rios da Universidade. Veja a lista com os nomes das pessoas que ajudaram de alguma forma na realiza o da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. A diferen a entre o n mero de pessoas inscritas e o n mero de pessoas presentes provavelmente se explica pelo fato de n o haver cobran a de inscri o, ent o se a pessoa desistir de ir ao evento ela n o ter preju zo financeiro. A edi o 2024 da MiniDebconf Belo Horizonte foi realmente grandiosa e mostra o resultado dos constantes esfor os realizados ao longo dos ltimos anos para atrair mais colaboradores(as) para a comunidade Debian no Brasil. A cada edi o os n meros s aumentam, com mais participantes, mais atividades, mais salas, e mais patrocinadores/apoiadores. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo

MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Atividades A programa o da MiniDebConf foi intensa e diversificada. Nos dias 27, 29 e 30 (s bado, segunda e ter a-feira) tivemos palestras, debates, oficinas e muitas atividades pr ticas. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra J no dia 28 (domingo), ocorreu o Day Trip, um dia dedicado a passeios pela cidade. Pela manh sa mos do hotel e fomos, em um nibus fretado, para o Mercado Central de Belo Horizonte. O pessoal aproveitou para comprar v rias coisas como queijos, doces, cacha as e lembrancinhas, al m de experimentar algumas comidas locais. MiniDebConf BH 2024 mercado Depois de 2 horas de passeio pelo Mercado, voltamos para o nibus e pegamos a estrada para almo armos em um restaurante de comida t pica mineira. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Com todos bem alimentados, voltamos para Belo Horizonte para visitarmos o principal ponto tur stico da cidade: a Lagoa da Pampulha e a Capela S o Francisco de Assis, mais conhecida como Igrejinha da Pampulha. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Voltamos para o hotel e o dia terminou no hacker space que montamos na sala de eventos para o pessoal conversar, empacotar, e comer umas pizzas. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Financiamento coletivo Pela terceira vez fizemos uma campanha de financiamento coletivo e foi incr vel como as pessoas contribu ram! A meta inicial era arrecadar o valor equivalente a uma cota ouro de R$ 3.000,00. Ao atingirmos essa meta, definimos uma nova, equivalente a uma cota ouro + uma cota prata (R$ 5.000,00). E novamente atingimos essa meta. Ent o propusermos como meta final o valor de uma cota ouro + prata + bronze, que seria equivalente a R$ 6.000,00. O resultado foi que arrecadamos R$ 7.239,65 com a ajuda de mais de 100 pessoas! Muito obrigado as pessoas que contribu ram com qualquer valor. Como forma de agradecimento, listamos os nomes das pessoas que doaram. MiniDebConf BH 2024 doadores Bolsas de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens para participantes Cada edi o da MiniDebConf trouxe alguma inova o, ou algum benef cio diferente para os(a) participantes. Na edi o deste ano em Belo Horizonte, assim como acontece nas DebConfs, oferecemos bolsas de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens para ajudar aquelas pessoas que gostariam de vir para o evento mas que precisariam de algum tipo de ajuda. No formul rio de inscri o, colocamos a op o para a pessoa solicitar bolsa de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens, mas para isso, ela deveria se identificar como contribuidor(a) (oficial ou n o oficial) do Debian e escrever uma justificativa para o pedido. N mero de pessoas beneficiadas: A bolsa de alimenta o forneceu almo o e jantar todos os dias. Os almo os inclu ram pessoas que moram em Belo Horizonte e regi o. J o jantares foram pagos para os(as) participantes que tamb m receberam a bolsa de hospedagem e/ou passagens. A hospedagem foi realizada no Hotel BH Jaragu . E as passagens inclu ram de avi o ou de nibus, ou combust vel (para quem veio de carro ou moto). Boa parte do dinheiro para custear as bolsas vieram do Projeto Debian, principalmente para as passagens. Enviamos um or amento o ent o l der do Debian Jonathan Carter, e ele prontamente aprovou o nosso pedido. Al m deste or amento do evento, o l der tamb m aprovou os pedidos individuais enviados por alguns DDs que preferiram solicitar diretamente para ele. A experi ncia de oferecer as bolsas foi realmente muito boa porque permitiu a vinda de v rias pessoas de outras cidades. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Fotos e v deos Voc pode assistir as grava es das palestras nos links abaixo: E ver as fotos feitas por v rios(as) colaboradores(as) nos links abaixo: Agradecimentos Gostar amos de agradecer a todos(as) os(as) participantes, organizadores(as), volunt rios(as), patrocinadores(as) e apoiadores(as) que contribu ram para o sucesso da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Patrocinadores Ouro: Prata: Bronze: Apoiadores Organiza o

15 May 2024

Evgeni Golov: Using HPONCFG on CentOS Stream 9 with OpenSSL 3.2

Today I've updated an HPE ProLiant DL325 G10 from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 (details on that to follow) and realized that hponcfg was broken afterwards. As I do not have a support contract with HPE, I couldn't just yell at them in private, so I am doing this in public now ;-)
# hponcfg
HPE Lights-Out Online Configuration utility
Version 5.6.0 Date 11/30/2020 (c) 2005,2020 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP
Error: Unable to locate SSL library.
       Install latest SSL library to use HPONCFG.
Welp, what the heck? But wait, 5.6.0 from 2020 looks old, let's update this first! hponcfg is part of the "Management Component Pack" (at least if you're not running RHEL or SLES where you get it via the "Service Pack for ProLiant" which requires a support contract) and can be downloaded from the Software Delivery Repository. The Software Delivery Repository tells you to configure it in /etc/yum.repos.d/mcp.repo as
[mcp]
name=Management Component Pack
baseurl=http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/repo/mcp/dist/dist_ver/arch/project_ver
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/GPG-KEY-mcp
gpgcheck=0? Suuure! Plain HTTP? Suuure! But it gets better! When you look at https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/repo/mcp/centos/ (you have to substitute dist with your distribution!) you'll see that there is no 9 folder and thus no packages for CentOS (Stream) 9. There are however folders for Oracle, Rocky and Alma. Phew. Let's take one of these!
[mcp]
name=Management Component Pack
baseurl=https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/repo/mcp/rocky/9/x86_64/current/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/repo/mcp/GPG-KEY-mcp
dnf upgrade hponcfg updates it to hponcfg-6.0.0-0.x86_64 and:
# hponcfg
HPE Lights-Out Online Configuration utility
Version 6.0.0 Date 10/30/2022 (c) 2005,2022 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP
Error: Unable to locate SSL library.
       Install latest SSL library to use HPONCFG.
Fuck. ldd doesn't show hponcfg being linked to libssl, do they dlopen() at runtime and fucked something up? ltrace to the rescue!
# ltrace hponcfg
 
popen("strings /bin/openssl   grep 'Ope"..., "r")            = 0x621700
fgets("OpenSSL 3.2.1 30 Jan 2024\n", 256, 0x621700)          = 0x7ffd870e2e10
strstr("OpenSSL 3.2.1 30 Jan 2024\n", "OpenSSL 3.0")         = nil
 
WAT? They run strings /bin/openssl grep 'OpenSSL' and compare the result with "OpenSSL 3.0"?! Sure, OpenSSL 3.2 in EL9 is rather fresh and didn't hit RHEL/Oracle/Alma/Rocky yet, but surely there are better ways to check for a compatible version of OpenSSL than THIS?! Anyway, I am not going to downgrade my OpenSSL. Neither will I patch it to pretend to be 3.0. But I can patch the hponcfg binary!
# vim /sbin/hponcfg
<go to line 146>
<replace 3.0 with 3.2>
:x
Yes, I used vim. Yes, it works. No, I won't guarantee this won't kill a kitten somewhere.
# ./hponcfg
HPE Lights-Out Online Configuration utility
Version 6.0.0 Date 10/30/2022 (c) 2005,2022 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP
Firmware Revision = 2.44 Device type = iLO 5 Driver name = hpilo
USAGE:
  hponcfg  -?
  hponcfg  -h
  hponcfg  -m minFw
  hponcfg  -r [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  hponcfg  -b [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  hponcfg  [-a] -w filename [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  hponcfg  -g [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  hponcfg  -f filename [-l filename] [-s namevaluepair] [-v] [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  hponcfg  -i [-l filename] [-s namevaluepair] [-v] [-m minFw] [-u username] [-p password]
  -h,  --help           Display this message
  -?                    Display this message
  -r,  --reset          Reset the Management Processor to factory defaults
  -b,  --reboot         Reboot Management Processor without changing any setting
  -f,  --file           Get/Set Management Processor configuration from "filename"
  -i,  --input          Get/Set Management Processor configuration from the XML input
                        received through the standard input stream.
  -w,  --writeconfig    Write the Management Processor configuration to "filename"
  -a,  --all            Capture complete Management Processor configuration to the file.
                        This should be used along with '-w' option
  -l,  --log            Log replies to "filename"
  -v,  --xmlverbose     Display all the responses from Management Processor
  -s,  --substitute     Substitute variables present in input config file
                        with values specified in "namevaluepairs"
  -g,  --get_hostinfo   Get the Host information
  -m,  --minfwlevel     Minimum firmware level
  -u,  --username       iLO Username
  -p,  --password       iLO Password
For comparison, here is the diff --text output:
# diff -u --text /sbin/hponcfg ./hponcfg
--- /sbin/hponcfg   2022-08-02 01:07:55.000000000 +0000
+++ ./hponcfg   2024-05-15 09:06:54.373121233 +0000
@@ -143,7 +143,7 @@
 helpget_hostinforesetwriteconfigallfileinputlogminfwlevelxmlverbosesubstitutetimeoutdbgverbosityrebootusernamepasswordlibpath%Ah*Ag7Ar=AwIAaMAfRAiXAl\AmgAvrAs At Ad Ab Au Ap Azhgrbaw:f:il:m:vs:t:d:z:u:p:tmpXMLinputFile%2d.xmlw+Error: Syntax Error - Invalid options present.
 =O@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@aQ@ M@ M@aQ@ M@aQ@ N@ M@ N@ P@aQ@aQ@ M@ M@aQ@aQ@LN@aQ@ M@ O@ M@ M@ M@ M@aQ@aQ@ M@<!----><LOGINUSER_LOGINPASSWORD<LOGIN USER_LOGIN="%s" PASSWORD="%s"ERROR: LOGIN tag is missing.
 >ERROR: LOGIN end tag is missing.
-strings    grep 'OpenSSL 1'   grep 'OpenSSL 3'OpenSSL 1.0OpenSSL 1.1OpenSSL 3.0which openssl 2>&1/usr/bin/opensslOpenSSL location - %s
+strings    grep 'OpenSSL 1'   grep 'OpenSSL 3'OpenSSL 1.0OpenSSL 1.1OpenSSL 3.2which openssl 2>&1/usr/bin/opensslOpenSSL location - %s
 Current version %s
 No response from command.
Pretty sure it won't apply like this with patch, but you get the idea. And yes, double-giggles for the fact that the error message says "Install latest SSL library to use HPONCFG" and the issues is because I have the latest SSL library installed

10 May 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2024

Welcome to the April 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. New backseat-signed tool to validate distributions source inputs
  2. NixOS is not reproducible
  3. Certificate vulnerabilities in F-Droid s fdroidserver
  4. Website updates
  5. Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux
  6. libntlm now releasing minimal source-only tarballs
  7. Distribution work
  8. Mailing list news
  9. diffoscope
  10. Upstream patches
  11. reprotest
  12. Reproducibility testing framework

New backseat-signed tool to validate distributions source inputs kpcyrd announced a new tool called backseat-signed, after:
I figured out a somewhat straight-forward way to check if a given git archive output is cryptographically claimed to be the source input of a given binary package in either Arch Linux or Debian (or both).
Elaborating more in their announcement post, kpcyrd writes:
I believe this to be the reproducible source tarball thing some people have been asking about. As explained in the README, I believe reproducing autotools-generated tarballs isn t worth everybody s time and instead a distribution that claims to build from source should operate on VCS snapshots instead of tarballs with 25k lines of pre-generated shell-script.
Indeed, many distributions packages already build from VCS snapshots, and this trend is likely to accelerate in response to the xz incident. The announcement led to a lengthy discussion on our mailing list, as well as shorter followup thread from kpcyrd about bootstrapping Autotools projects.

NixOS is not reproducible Morten Linderud posted an post on his blog this month, provocatively titled, NixOS is not reproducible . Although quickly admitting that his title is indeed clickbait , Morten goes on to clarify the precise guarantees and promises that NixOS provides its users. Later in the most, Morten mentions that he was motivated to write the post because:
I have heavily invested my free-time on this topic since 2017, and met some of the accomplishments we have had with Doesn t NixOS solve this? for just as long and I thought it would be of peoples interest to clarify[.]

Certificate vulnerabilities in F-Droid s fdroidserver In early April, Fay Stegerman announced a certificate pinning bypass vulnerability and Proof of Concept (PoC) in the F-Droid fdroidserver tools for managing builds, indexes, updates, and deployments for F-Droid repositories to the oss-security mailing list.
We observed that embedding a v1 (JAR) signature file in an APK with minSdk >= 24 will be ignored by Android/apksigner, which only checks v2/v3 in that case. However, since fdroidserver checks v1 first, regardless of minSdk, and does not verify the signature, it will accept a fake certificate and see an incorrect certificate fingerprint. [ ] We also realised that the above mentioned discrepancy between apksigner and androguard (which fdroidserver uses to extract the v2/v3 certificates) can be abused here as well. [ ]
Later on in the month, Fay followed up with a second post detailing a third vulnerability and a script that could be used to scan for potentially affected .apk files and mentioned that, whilst upstream had acknowledged the vulnerability, they had not yet applied any ameliorating fixes.

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb updating the archive page to recommend -X and unzipping with TZ=UTC [ ] and adding Maven, Gradle, JDK and Groovy examples to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page [ ]. In addition Jan Zerebecki added a new /contribute/opensuse/ page [ ] and Sertonix fixed the automatic RSS feed detection [ ][ ].

Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux Joshua Drexel, Esther H nggi and Iy n M ndez Veiga of the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Hochschule Luzern (HSLU) in Switzerland published a paper this month entitled Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux. The paper establishes the context as follows:
Supply chain attacks have emerged as a prominent cybersecurity threat in recent years. Reproducible and bootstrappable builds have the potential to reduce such attacks significantly. In combination with independent, exhaustive and periodic source code audits, these measures can effectively eradicate compromises in the building process. In this paper we introduce both concepts, we analyze the achievements over the last ten years and explain the remaining challenges.
What is more, the paper aims to:
contribute to the reproducible builds effort by setting up a rebuilder and verifier instance to test the reproducibility of Arch Linux packages. Using the results from this instance, we uncover an unnoticed and security-relevant packaging issue affecting 16 packages related to Certbot [ ].
A PDF of the paper is available.

libntlm now releasing minimal source-only tarballs Simon Josefsson wrote on his blog this month that, going forward, the libntlm project will now be releasing what they call minimal source-only tarballs :
The XZUtils incident illustrate that tarballs with files that are not included in the git archive offer an opportunity to disguise malicious backdoors. [The] risk of hiding malware is not the only motivation to publish signed minimal source-only tarballs. With pre-generated content in tarballs, there is a risk that GNU/Linux distributions [ship] generated files coming from the tarball into the binary *.deb or *.rpm package file. Typically the person packaging the upstream project never realized that some installed artifacts was not re-built[.]
Simon s post goes into further details how this was achieved, and describes some potential caveats and counters some expected responses as well. A shorter version can be found in the announcement for the 1.8 release of libntlm.

Distribution work In Debian this month, Helmut Grohne filed a bug suggesting the removal of dh-buildinfo, a tool to generate and distribute .buildinfo-like files within binary packages. Note that this is distinct from the .buildinfo generation performed by dpkg-genbuildinfo. By contrast, the entirely optional dh-buildinfo generated a debian/buildinfo file that would be shipped within binary packages as /usr/share/doc/package/buildinfo_$arch.gz. Adrian Bunk recently asked about including source hashes in Debian s .buildinfo files, which prompted Guillem Jover to refresh some old patches to dpkg to make this possible, which revealed some quirks Vagrant Cascadian discovered when testing. In addition, 21 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 16 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number issue types have been added, such as new random_temporary_filenames_embedded_by_mesonpy and timestamps_added_by_librime toolchain issues. In openSUSE, it was announced that their Factory distribution enabled bit-by-bit reproducible builds for almost all parts of the package. Previously, more parts needed to be ignored when comparing package files, but now only the signature needs to be deleted. In addition, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published theunreproduciblepackage as a proper .rpm package which it allows to better test tools intended to debug reproducibility. Furthermore, it was announced that Bernhard s work on a 100% reproducible openSUSE-based distribution will be funded by NLnet. He also posted another monthly report for his reproducibility work in openSUSE. In GNU Guix, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen submitted a patch set for creating a reproducible source tarball for Guix. That is to say, ensuring that make dist is reproducible when run from Git. [ ] Lastly, in Fedora, a new wiki page was created to propose a change to the distribution. Titled Changes/ReproduciblePackageBuilds , the page summarises itself as a proposal whereby A post-build cleanup is integrated into the RPM build process so that common causes of build irreproducibility in packages are removed, making most of Fedora packages reproducible.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month:
  • Continuing a thread started in March 2024 about the Arch Linux minimal container now being 100% reproducible, John Gilmore followed up with a post about the practical and philosophical distinctions of local vs. remote storage of the various artifacts needed to build packages.
  • Chris Lamb asked the list which conferences readers are attending these days: After peak Covid and other industry-wide changes, conferences are no longer the must attend events they previously were especially in the area of software supply-chain security. In rough, practical terms, it seems harder to justify conference travel today than it did in mid-2019. The thread generated a number of responses which would be of interest to anyone planning travel in Q3 and Q4 of 2024.
  • James Addison wrote to the list about a quirk in Git related to its core.autocrlf functionality, thus helpfully passing on a slightly off-topic and perhaps not of direct relevance to anyone on the list today note that might still be the kind of issue that is useful to be aware of if-and-when puzzling over unexpected git content / checksum issues (situations that I do expect people on this list encounter from time-to-time) .

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 263, 264 and 265 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • Don t crash on invalid .zip files, even if we encounter their badness halfway through the file and not at the time of their initial opening. [ ]
  • Prevent odt2txt tests from always being skipped due to an (impossibly) new version requirement. [ ]
  • Avoid parens-in-parens in test skipping messages. [ ]
  • Ensure that tests with >=-style version constraints actually print the tool name. [ ]
In addition, Fay Stegerman fixed a crash when there are (invalid) duplicate entries in .zip which was originally reported in Debian bug #1068705). [ ] Fay also added a user-visible note to a diff when there are duplicate entries in ZIP files [ ]. Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool pointer for the zipdetails tool under GNU Guix [ ] and proposed updates to diffoscope in Guix as well [ ] which were merged as [264] [265], fixed a regression in test coverage and increased verbosity of the test suite[ ].

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

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, reprotest version 0.7.27 was uploaded to Debian unstable) by Vagrant Cascadian who made the following additional changes:
  • Enable specific number of CPUs using --vary=num_cpus.cpus=X. [ ]
  • Consistently use 398 days for time variation, rather than choosing randomly each time. [ ]
  • Disable builds of arch:any packages. [ ]
  • Update the description for the build_path.path option in README.rst. [ ]
  • Update escape sequences for compatibility with Python 3.12. (#1068853). [ ]
  • Remove the generic upstream signing-key [ ] and update the packages signing key with the currently active team members [ ].
  • Update the packaging Standards-Version to 4.7.0. [ ]
In addition, Holger Levsen fixed some spelling errors detected by the spellintian tool [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian updated reprotest in GNU Guix to 0.7.27.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In April, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Adjust for changed internal IP addresses at Codethink. [ ]
    • Automatically cleanup failed diffoscope user services if there are too many failures. [ ][ ]
    • Configure two new nodes at infomanik.cloud. [ ][ ]
    • Schedule Debian experimental even less. [ ][ ]
  • Breakage detection:
    • Exclude currently building packages from breakage detection. [ ]
    • Be more noisy if diffoscope crashes. [ ]
    • Health check: provide clickable URLs in jenkins job log for failed pkg builds due to diffoscope crashes. [ ]
    • Limit graph to about the last 100 days of breakages only. [ ]
    • Fix all found files with bad permissions. [ ]
    • Prepare dealing with diffoscope timeouts. [ ]
    • Detect more cases of failure to debootstrap base system. [ ]
    • Include timestamps of failed job runs. [ ]
  • Documentation updates:
    • Document how to access arm64 nodes at Codethink. [ ]
    • Document how to use infomaniak.cloud. [ ]
    • Drop notes about long stalled LeMaker HiKey960 boards sponsored by HPE and hosted at ETH. [ ]
    • Mention osuosl4 and osuosl5 and explain their usage. [ ]
    • Mention that some packages are built differently. [ ][ ]
    • Improve language in a comment. [ ]
    • Add more notes how to query resource usage from infomaniak.cloud. [ ]
  • Node maintenance:
    • Add ionos4 and ionos14 to THANKS. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Deprecate Squid on ionos1 and ionos10. [ ]
    • Drop obsolete script to powercycle arm64 architecture nodes. [ ]
    • Update system_health_check for new proxy nodes. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Make the update_jdn.sh script more robust. [ ][ ]
    • Update my SSH public key. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added some new host details. [ ]

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

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