Search Results: "joe"

15 September 2021

Ian Jackson: Get source to Debian packages only via dgit; "official" git links are beartraps

tl;dr dgit clone sourcepackage gets you the source code, as a git tree, in ./sourcepackage. cd into it and dpkg-buildpackage -uc -b. Do not use: "VCS" links on official Debian web pages like tracker.debian.org; "debcheckout"; searching Debian's gitlab (salsa.debian.org). These are good for Debian experts only. If you use Debian's "official" source git repo links you can easily build a package without Debian's patches applied.[1] This can even mean missing security patches. Or maybe it can't even be built in a normal way (or at all). OMG WTF BBQ, why? It's complicated. There is History. Debian's "most-official" centralised source repository is still the Debian Archive, which is a system based on tarballs and patches. I invented the Debian source package format in 1992/3 and it has been souped up since, but it's still tarballs and patches. This system is, of course, obsolete, now that we have modern version control systems, especially git. Maintainers of Debian packages have invented ways of using git anyway, of course. But this is not standardised. There is a bewildering array of approaches. The most common approach is to maintain git tree containing a pile of *.patch files, which are then often maintained using quilt. Yes, really, many Debian people are still using quilt, despite having git! There is machinery for converting this git tree containing a series of patches, to an "official" source package. If you don't use that machinery, and just build from git, nothing applies the patches. [1] This post was prompted by a conversation with a friend who had wanted to build a Debian package, and didn't know to use dgit. They had got the source from salsa via a link on tracker.d.o, and built .debs without Debian's patches. This not a theoretical unsoundness, but a very real practical risk. Future is not very bright In 2013 at the Debconf in Vaumarcus, Joey Hess, myself, and others, came up with a plan to try to improve this which we thought would be deployable. (Previous attempts had failed.) Crucially, this transition plan does not force change onto any of Debian's many packaging teams, nor onto people doing cross-package maintenance work. I worked on this for quite a while, and at a technical level it is a resounding success. Unfortunately there is a big limitation. At the current stage of the transition, to work at its best, this replacement scheme hopes that maintainers who update a package will use a new upload tool. The new tool fits into their existing Debian git packaging workflow and has some benefits, but it does make things more complicated rather than less (like any transition plan must, during the transitional phase). When maintainers don't use this new tool, the standardised git branch seen by users is a compatibility stub generated from the tarballs-and-patches. So it has the right contents, but useless history. The next step is to allow a maintainer to update a package without dealing with tarballs-and-patches at all. This would be massively more convenient for the maintainer, so an easy sell. And of course it links the tarballs-and-patches to the git history in a proper machine-readable way. We held a "git packaging requirements-gathering session" at the Curitiba Debconf in 2019. I think the DPL's intent was to try to get input into the git workflow design problem. The session was a great success: my existing design was able to meet nearly everyone's needs and wants. The room was obviously keen to see progress. The next stage was to deploy tag2upload. I spoke to various key people at the Debconf and afterwards in 2019 and the code has been basically ready since then. Unfortunately, deployment of tag2upload is mired in politics. It was blocked by a key team because of unfounded security concerns; positive opinions from independent security experts within Debian were disregarded. Of course it is always hard to get a team to agree to something when it's part of a transition plan which treats their systems as an obsolete setup retained for compatibility. Current status If you don't know about Debian's git packaging practices (eg, you have no idea what "patches-unapplied packaging branch without .pc directory" means), and don't want want to learn about them, you must use dgit to obtain the source of Debian packages. There is a lot more information and detailed instructions in dgit-user(7). Hopefully either the maintainer did the best thing, or, if they didn't, you won't need to inspect the history. If you are a Debian maintainer, you should use dgit push-source to do your uploads. This will make sure that users of dgit will see a reasonable git history.
edited 2021-09-15 14:48 Z to fix a typo


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20 July 2021

Enrico Zini: Run a webserver for a specific user *only*

I'm creating a program that uses the web browser for its user interface, and I'm reasonably sure I'm not the first person doing this. Normally such a problem would listen to a port on localhost, and tell the browser to connect to it. Bonus points for listening to a randomly allocated free port, so that one does not need to involve some amount of luck to get the program started. However, using a local port still means that any user on the local machine can connect to it, which is generally a security issue. A possible solution would be to use AF_UNIX Unix Domain Sockets, which are supported by various web servers, but as far as I understand not currently by browsers. I checked Firefox and Chrome, and they currently seem to fail to even acknowledge the use case. I'm reasonably sure I'm not the first person doing this, and yes, it's intended as an understatement. So, dear Lazyweb, is there a way to securely use a browser as a UI for a user's program, without exposing access to the backend to other users in the system? Access token in the URL Emanuele Di Giacomo suggests to add an access token to the URL that gets passed to the browser. This would work to protect access on localhost: even if the application cannot use HTTPS, other users cannot see packets that go through the local interface, so both the access token and the session cookie that one could send afterwards would be protected. Network namespaces I thought about isolating server and browser in a private network namespace with something like unshare(1), but it seems to require root. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote to correct that:
It's possible to unshare the network namespace by first unsharing the user namespace and thus becoming root which is possible without being root since #898446 got fixed. For example you can run this as the normal user: lxc-usernsexec -- lxc-unshare -s NETWORK -- ip addr If you don't want to depend on lxc, you can write a wrapper in Perl or Python. I have a Perl implementation of that in mmdebstrap.
Firewalling Martin Schuster wrote to suggest another option:
I had the same issue. My approach was "weird", but worked: Block /outgoing/ connections to the port, unless the uid is correct. That might be counter-intuitive, but of course all connections /to/ localhost will be done /from/ localhost also. Something like: iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d localhost --dport 8123 -m owner --uid-owner joe -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d localhost --dport 8123 -j REJECT

16 July 2021

Jamie McClelland: From Ikiwiki to Hugo

Back in the days of Etch, I converted this blog from Drupal to ikiwiki. I remember being very excited about this brand new concept of static web sites derived from content stored in a version control system. And now over a decade later I ve moved to hugo. I feel some loyalty to ikiwiki and Joey Hess for opening my eyes to the static web site concept. But ultimately I grew tired of splitting my time and energy between learning ikiwiki and hugo, which has been my tool of choice for new projects. When I started getting strange emails that I suspect had something to do with spammers filling out ikiwiki s commenting registration system, I choose to invest my time in switching to hugo over debugging and really understanding how ikiwiki handles user registration. I carefully reviewed anarcat s blog on converting from ikiwiki to hugo and learned about a lot of ikiwiki features I am not using. Wow, it s times like these that I m glad I keep it really simple. Based on the various ikiwiki2hugo python scripts I studied, I eventually wrote a far simpler one tailored to my needs. Also, in what could only be called a desperate act of procrastination combined with a touch of self-hatred (it s been a rough week) I rejected all the commenting options available to me and choose to implement my own in PHP. What?!?! Why would anyone do such a thing? I refer you to my previous sentence about desperate procrastination. And also I know it s fashionable to hate PHP, but honestly as the first programming language I learned, there is something comforting and familiar about it. And, on a more objective level, I can deploy it easily to just about any hosting provider in the world. I don t have to maintain a unicorn service or a nodejs service and make special configuration entries in my web configuration. All I have to do is upload the php files and I m done. Well, I m sure I ll regret this decision. Special thanks to Alexander Bilz for the anatole hugo theme. I choose it via a nearly random click to avoid the rabbit hole of choosing a theme. And, by luck, it has turned out quite well. I only had to override the commento partial theme page to hijack it for my own commenting system s use.

10 July 2021

Joey Hess: a bitter pill for Microsoft Copilot

These blackberries are so sweet and just out there in the commons, free for the taking. While picking a gallon this morning, I was thinking about how neat it is that Haskell is not one programming language, but a vast number of related languages. A lot of smart people have, just for fun, thought of ways to write Haskell programs that do different things depending on the extensions that are enabled. (See: Wait, what language is this?) I've long wished for an AI to put me out of work programming. Or better, that I could collaborate with. Haskell's type checker is the closest I've seen to that but it doesn't understand what I want. I always imagined I'd support citizenship a full, general AI capable of that. I did not imagine that the first real attempt would be the product of a rent optimisation corporate AI, that throws all our hard work in a hopper, and deploys enough lawyers to muddy the question of whether that violates our copyrights. Perhaps it's time to think about non-copyright mitigations. Here is an easy way, for Haskell developers. Pick an extension and add code that loops when it's not enabled. Or when it is enabled. Or when the wrong combination of extensions are enabled.
 -# LANGUAGE NumDecimals #- 
main :: IO ()
main = if show(1e1) /= "10" then main else do
I will deploy this mitigation in my code where I consider it appropriate. I will not be making my code do anything worse than looping, but of course this method could be used to make Microsoft Copilot generate code that is as problimatic as necessary.

Sean Whitton: Live replacement of provider cloud images with upstream Debian

Tonight I m provisioning a new virtual machine at Hetzner and I wanted to share how Consfigurator is helping with that. Hetzner have a Debian buster image you can start with, as you d expect, but it comes with things like cloud-init, preconfiguration to use Hetzner s apt mirror which doesn t serve source packages(!), and perhaps other things I haven t discovered. It s a fine place to begin, but I want all the configuration for this server to be explicit in my Consfigurator consfig, so it is good to start with pristine upstream Debian. I could boot one of Hetzner s installation ISOs but that s slow and manual. Consfigurator can replace the OS in the VM s root filesystem and reboot for me, and we re ready to go. Here s the configuration:
(defhost foo.silentflame.com (:deploy ((:ssh :user "root") :sbcl))
  (os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64)
  ;; Hetzner's Debian 10 image comes with a three-partition layout and boots
  ;; with traditional BIOS.
  (disk:has-volumes
   (physical-disk
    :device-file "/dev/sda" :boots-with '(grub:grub :target "i386-pc")))
  (on-change (installer:cleanly-installed-once
              nil
              ;; This is a specification of the OS Hetzner's image has, so
              ;; Consfigurator knows how to install SBCL and debootstrap(8).
              ;; In this case it's the same Debian release as the replacement.
              '(os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64))
    ;; Clear out the old OS's EFI system partition contents, in case we can
    ;; switch to booting with EFI at some point (if we wanted we could specify
    ;; an additional x86_64-efi target above, and grub-install would get run
    ;; to repopulate /boot/efi, but I don't think Hetzner can boot from it yet).
    (file:directory-does-not-exist "/boot/efi/EFI")
    (apt:installed "linux-image-amd64")
    (installer:bootloaders-installed)
    (fstab:entries-for-volumes
     (disk:volumes
       (mounted-ext4-filesystem :mount-point "/")
       (partition
        (mounted-fat32-filesystem
         :mount-options '("umask=0077") :mount-point "/boot/efi"))))
    (file:lacks-lines "/etc/fstab" "# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM")
    (file:is-copy-of "/etc/resolv.conf" "/old-os/etc/resolv.conf")
    (mount:unmounted-below-and-removed "/old-os"))
  (apt:mirror "http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian")
  (apt:no-pdiffs)
  (apt:standard-sources.list)
  (sshd:installed)
  (as "root" (ssh:authorized-keys +spwsshkey+))
  (sshd:no-passwords)
  (timezone:configured "Etc/UTC")
  (swap:has-swap-file "2G")
  (network:clean-/etc/network/interfaces)
  (network:static "enp1s0" "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" "xxx.xxx.1.1" "255.255.255.255"))
and to use it you evaluate this at the REPL:
CONSFIG> (deploy ((:ssh :user "root" :hop "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx") :sbcl) foo.silentflame.com)
Here the :HOP parameter specifies the IP address of the new machine, as DNS hasn t been updated yet. Consfigurator installs SBCL and debootstrap(8), prepares a minimal system, replaces the contents of /, gets to work applying the other properties, and then reboots. This gets us a properly populated fstab:
UUID=...            /           ext4    relatime    0   1
PARTUUID=...        /boot/efi   vfat    umask=0077  0   2
/var/lib/swapfile   swap        swap    defaults    0   0
(slightly doctored for more readable alignment) There s ordering logic so that the swapfile will end up after whatever filesystem contains it; a UUID is used for ext4 filesystems, but for fat32 filesystems, to be safe, a PARTUUID is used. The application of (INSTALLER:BOOTLOADERS-INSTALLED) handles calling both update-grub(8) and grub-install(8), relying on the metadata specified about /dev/sda. Next time we execute Consfigurator against the machine, it ll ignore all the property applications attached to the application of (INSTALLER:CLEANLY-INSTALLED-ONCE) with ON-CHANGE, and just apply everything following that block. There are a few things I don t have good solutions for. When you boot Hetzner s image the primary network interface is eth0, but then for a freshly debootstrapped Debian you get enp1s0, and I haven t got a good way of knowing what it ll be (if you know it ll have the same name, you can use (NETWORK:PRESERVE-STATIC-ONCE) to create a file in /etc/network/interfaces.d based on the current default route and corresponding interface). Another tricky thing is SSH host keys. It s easy to use Consfigurator to add host keys to your laptop s ~/.ssh/known_hosts, but in this case the host key changes back and forth from whatever the Hetzner image has and the newly generated key you get afterwards. One option might be to copy the old host keys out of /old-os before it gets deleted, like how /etc/resolv.conf is copied. This work is based on Propellor s equivalent functionality. I think my approach to handling /etc/fstab and bootloader installation is an improvement on what Joey does.

17 June 2021

Joey Hess: typed pipes in every shell

Powershell and nushell take unix piping beyond raw streams of text to structured or typed data. Is it possible to keep a traditional shell like bash and still get typed pipes? I think it is possible, and I'm now surprised noone seems to have done it yet. This is a fairly detailed design for how to do it. I've not implemented it yet. RFC. Let's start with a command called typed. You can use it in a pipeline like this:
typed foo   typed bar   typed baz
What typed does is discover the types of the commands to its left and its right, while communicating the type of the command it runs back to them. Then it checks if the types match, and runs the command, communicating the type information to it. Pipes are unidirectional, so it may seem hard to discover the type to the right, but I'll explain how it can be done in a minute. Now suppose that foo generates json, and bar filters structured data of a variety of types, and baz consumes csv and pretty-prints a table. Then bar will be informed that its input is supposed to be json, and that its output should be csv. If bar didn't support json, typed foo and typed bar would both fail with a type error. Writing "typed" in front of everything is annoying. But it can be made a shell alias like "t". It also possible to wrap programs using typed:
cat >~/bin/foo <<EOF
#/usr/bin/typed /usr/bin/foo
EOF
Or program could import a library that uses typed, so it natively supports being used in typed pipelines. I'll explain one way to make such a library later on, once some more details are clear. Which gets us back to a nice simple pipeline, now automatically typed.
foo   bar   baz
If one of the commands is not actually typed, the other ones in the pipe will treat it as having a raw stream of text as input or output. Which will sometimes result in a type error (yay, I love type errors!), but in other cases can do something useful.
find   bar   baz
# type error, bar expected json or csv
foo   bar   less
# less displays csv 
So how does typed discover the types of the commands to the left and right? That's the hard part. It has to start by finding the pids to its left and right. There is no really good way to do that, but on Linux, it can be done: Look at what /proc/self/fd/0 and /proc/self/fd/1 link to, which contains the unique identifiers of the pipes. Then look at other processes' fd/0 and fd/1 to find matching pipe identifiers. (It's also possible to do this on OSX, I believe. I don't know about BSDs.) Searching through all processes would be a bit expensive (around 15 ms with an average number of processes), but there's a nice optimisation: The shell will have started the processes close together in time, so the pids are probably nearby. So look at the previous pid, and the next pid, and fan outward. Also, check isatty to detect the beginning and end of the pipeline and avoid scanning all the processes in those cases. To indicate the type of the command it will run, typed simply opens a file with an extension of ".typed". The file can be located anywhere, and can be an already existing file, or can be created as needed (eg in /run). Once it discovers the pid at the other end of a pipe, typed first looks at /proc/$pid/cmdline to see if it's also running typed. If it is, it looks at its open file handles to find the first ".typed" file. It may need to wait for the file handle to get opened, which is why it needs to verify the pid is running typed. There also needs to be a way for typed to learn the type of the command it will run. Reading /usr/share/typed/$command.typed is one way. Or it can be specified at the command line, which is useful for wrapper scripts:
cat >~/bin/bar <<EOF
#/usr/bin/typed --type="JSON   CSV" --output-type="JSON   CSV" /usr/bin/bar
EOF
And typed communicates the type information to the command that it runs. This way a command like bar can know what format its input should be in, and what format to use as output. This might be done with environment variables, eg INPUT_TYPE=JSON and OUTPUT_TYPE=CSV I think that's everything typed needs, except for the syntax of types and how the type checking works. Which I should probably not try to think up off the cuff. I used Haskell ADT syntax in the example above, but don't think that's necessarily the right choice. Finally, here's how to make a library that lets a program natively support being used in a typed pipeline. It's a bit tricky, because it has to run typed, because typed checks /proc/$pid/cmdline as detailed above. So, check an environment variable. When not set yet, set it, and exec typed, passing it the path to the program, which it will re-exec. This should be done before program does anything else.
This work was sponsored by Mark Reidenbach on Patreon.

29 May 2021

Joey Hess: the end of the olduse.net exhibit

Ten years ago I began the olduse.net exhibit, spooling out Usenet history in real time with a 30 year delay. My archive has reached its end, and ten years is more than long enough to keep running something you cobbled together overnight way back when. So, this is the end for olduse.net. The site will continue running for another week or so, to give you time to read the last posts. Find the very last one, if you can! The source code used to run it, and the content of the website have themselves been archived up for posterity at The Internet Archive. Sometime in 2022, a spammer will purchase the domain, but not find it to be of much value. The Utzoo archives that underlay it have currently sadly been censored off the Internet by someone. This will be unsuccessful; by now they have spread and many copies will live on.
I told a lie ten years ago.
You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years.
Actually, those posts drop right now! Here are the followups to 30-year-old Usenet posts that I've accumulated over the past decade. Mike replied in 2011 to JPM's post in 1981 on fa.arms-d "Re: CBS Reports"
A greeting from the future: I actually watched this yesterday (2011-06-10) after reading about it here.
Christian Brandt replied in 2011 to schrieb phyllis's post in 1981 on the "comments" newsgroup "Re: thank you rrg"
Funny, it will be four years until you post the first subnet post i ever read and another eight years until my own first subnet post shows up.
Bernard Peek replied in 2012 to mark's post in 1982 on net.sf-lovers "Re: luke - vader relationship"
i suggest that darth vader is luke skywalker's mother.
You may be on to something there.
Martijn Dekker replied in 2012 to henry's post in 1982 on the "test" newsgroup "Re: another boring test message" trentbuck replied in 2012 to dwl's post in 1982 on the "net.jokes" newsgroup "Re: A child hood poem" Eveline replied in 2013 to a post in 1983 on net.jokes.q "Re: A couple"
Ha!
Bill Leary replied in 2015 to Darin Johnson's post in 1985 on net.games.frp "Re: frp & artwork" Frederick Smith replied in 2021 to David Hoopes's post in 1990 on trial.rec.metalworking "Re: Is this group still active?"

26 May 2021

Ian Jackson: Disconnecting from Freenode

I have just disconnected from irc.freenode.net for the last time. You should do the same. The awful new de facto operators are using user numbers as a public justification for their behaviour. Specifically, I recommend that you: Note that mentioning libera in the channel topic of your old channels on freenode is likely to get your channel forcibly taken over by the new de facto operators of freenode. They won't tolerate you officially directing people to the competition. I did an investigation and writeup of this situation for the Xen Project. It's a little out of date - it doesn't have the latest horrible behaviours from the new regime - but I think it is worth pasting it here:
Message-ID: <24741.12566.639691.461134@mariner.uk.xensource.com>
From: Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>
To: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org
CC: community.manager@xenproject.org
Subject: IRC networks
Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 16:39:02 +0100
Summary:
We have for many years used the Freenode IRC network for real-time
chat about Xen.  Unfortunately, Freenode is undergoing a crisis.
There is a dispute between, on the one hand, Andrew Lee, and on the
other hand, all (or almost all) Freenode volunteer staff.  We must
make a decision.
I have read all the publicly available materials and asked around with
my contacts.  My conclusions:
 * We do not want to continue to use irc.freenode.*.
 * We might want to use libera.chat, but:
 * Our best option is probably to move to OFTC https://www.oftc.net/
Discussion:
Firstly, my starting point.
I have been on IRC since at least 1993.  Currently my main public
networks are OFTC and Freenode.
I do not have any personal involvement with public IRC networks.  Of
the principals in the current Freenode dispute, I have only heard of
one, who is a person I have experience of in a Debian context but have
not worked closely with.
George asked me informally to use my knowledge and contacts to shed
light on the situation.  I decided that, having done my research, I
would report more formally and publicly here rather than just
informally to George.
Historical background:
 * Freenode has had drama before.  In about 2001 OFTC split off from
   Freenode after an argument over governance.  IIRC there was drama
   again in 2006.  Significant proportion of the Free Software world,
   including Debian, now use OFTC.  Debian switched in 2006.
Facts that I'm (now) pretty sure of:
 * Freenode's actual servers run on donated services; that is,
   the hardware is owned by those donating the services, and the
   systems are managed by Freenode volunteers, known as "staff".
 * The freenode domain names are currently registered to a limited
   liability company owned by Andrew Lee (rasengan).
 * At least 10 Freenode staff have quit in protest, writing similar
   resignation letters protesting about Andrew Lee's actions [1].  It
   does not appear that any Andrew Lee has the public support of any
   Freenode staff.
 * Andrew Lee claims that he "owns" Freenode.[2]
 * A large number of channel owners for particular Free Software
   projects who previously used Freenode have said they will switch
   away from Freenode.
Discussion and findings on Freenode:
There is, as might be expected, some murk about who said what to whom
when, what promises were made and/or broken, and so on.  The matter
was also complicated by the leaking earlier this week of draft(s) of
(at least one of) the Freenode staffers' resignation letters.
Andrew Lee has put forward a position statement [2].  A large part of
the thrust of that statement is allegations that the current head of
Freenode staff, tomaw, "forced out" the previous head, christel.  This
allegation is strongly disputed by by all those current (resigning)
Freenode staff I have seen comment.  In any case it does not seem to
be particularly germane; in none of my reading did tomaw seem to be
playing any kind of leading role.  tomaw is not mentioned in the
resignation letters.
Some of the links led to me to logs of discussions on #freenode.  I
read some of these in particular[3].  MB I haven't been able to verify
that these logs have not been tampered with.  Having said that and
taking the logs at face value, I found the rasengan writing there to
be disingenuous and obtuse.
Andrew Lee has been heavily involved in Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a hive of
scum and villainy, a pyramid scheme, and an environmental disaster,
all rolled into one.  This does not make me think well of Lee.
Additionally, it seems that Andrew Lee has been involved in previous
governance drama involving a different IRC network, Snoonet.
I have come to the very firm conclusion that we should have nothing to
do with Andrew Lee, and avoid using services that he has some
effective control over.
Alternatives:
The departing Freenode staff are setting up a replacement,
"libera.chat".  This is operational but still suffering from teething
problems and of course has a significant load as it deals with an
influx of users on a new setup.
On the staff and trust question: As I say, I haven't heard of any of
the Freenode staff, with one exception.  Unfortunately the one
exception does not inspire confidence in me[4] - although NB that is
only one data point.
On the other hand, Debian has had many many years of drama-free
involvement with OFTC.  OFTC has a formal governance arrangement and
it is associated with Software in the Public Interest.  I notice that
the last few OFTC'[s annual officer elections have been run partly by
Steve McIntyre.  Steve is a friend of mine (and he is a former Debian
Project Leader) and I take his involvement as a good sign.
I recommend that we switch to using OFTC as soon as possible.
Ian.
References:
Starting point for the resigning Freenode staff's side [1]:
  https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409
Andrew Lee's side [2]:
  https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/88549ec34ee32d01629354e4075d2d48
[3]
https://paste.sr.ht/~ircwright/7e751d2162e4eb27cba25f6f8893c1f38930f7c4
[4] I won't give the name since I don't want to be shitposting.


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24 May 2021

Antoine Beaupr : Leaving Freenode

The freenode IRC network has been hijacked. TL;DR: move to libera.chat or OFTC.net, as did countless free software projects including Gentoo, CentOS, KDE, Wikipedia, FOSDEM, and more. Debian and the Tor project were already on OFTC and are not affected by this.

What is freenode and why should I care? freenode is the largest remaining IRC network. Before this incident, it had close to 80,000 users, which is small in terms of modern internet history -- even small social networks are larger by multiple orders of magnitude -- but is large in IRC history. The IRC network is also extensively used by the free software community, being the default IRC network on many programs, and used by hundreds if not thousands of free software projects. I have been using freenode since at least 2006. This matters if you care about IRC, the internet, open protocols, decentralisation, and, to a certain extent, federation as well. It also touches on who has the right on network resources: the people who "own" it (through money) or the people who make it work (through their labor). I am biased towards open protocols, the internet, federation, and worker power, and this might taint this analysis.

What happened? It's a long story, but basically:
  1. back in 2017, the former head of staff sold the freenode.net domain (and its related company) to Andrew Lee, "American entrepreneur, software developer and writer", and, rather weirdly, supposedly "crown prince of Korea" although that part is kind of complex (see House of Yi, Yi Won, and Yi Seok). It should be noted the Korean Empire hasn't existed for over a century at this point (even though its flag, also weirdly, remains)
  2. back then, this was only known to the public as this strange PIA and freenode joining forces gimmick. it was suspicious at first, but since the network kept running, no one paid much attention to it. opers of the network were similarly reassured that Lee would have no say in the management of the network
  3. this all changed recently when Lee asserted ownership of the freenode.net domain and started meddling in the operations of the network, according to this summary. this part is disputed, but it is corroborated by almost a dozen former staff which collectively resigned from the network in protest, after legal threats, when it was obvious freenode was lost.
  4. the departing freenode staff founded a new network, irc.libera.chat, based on the new ircd they were working on with OFTC, solanum
  5. meanwhile, bot armies started attacking all IRC networks: both libera and freenode, but also OFTC and unrelated networks like a small one I help operate. those attacks have mostly stopped as of this writing (2021-05-24 17:30UTC)
  6. on freenode, however, things are going for the worse: Lee has been accused of taking over a channel, in a grotesque abuse of power; then changing freenode policy to not only justify the abuse, but also remove rules against hateful speech, effectively allowing nazis on the network (update: the change was reverted, but not by Lee)
Update: even though the policy change was reverted, the actual conversations allowed on freenode have already degenerated into toxic garbage. There are also massive channel takeovers (presumably over 700), mostly on channels that were redirecting to libera, but also channels that were still live. Channels that were taken over include #fosdem, #wikipedia, #haskell... Instead of working on the network, the new "so-called freenode" staff is spending effort writing bots and patches to basically automate taking over channels. I run an IRC network and this bot is obviously not standard "services" stuff... This is just grotesque. At this point I agree with this HN comment:
We should stop implicitly legitimizing Andrew Lee's power grab by referring to his dominion as "Freenode". Freenode is a quarter-century-old community that has changed its name to libera.chat; the thing being referred to here as "Freenode" is something else that has illegitimately acquired control of Freenode's old servers and user database, causing enormous inconvenience to the real Freenode.
I don't agree with the suggested name there, let's instead call it "so called freenode" as suggested later in the thread.

What now? I recommend people and organisations move away from freenode as soon as possible. This is a major change: documentation needs to be fixed, and the migration needs to be coordinated. But I do not believe we can trust the new freenode "owners" to operate the network reliably and in good faith. It's also important to use the current momentum to build a critical mass elsewhere so that people don't end up on freenode again by default and find an even more toxic community than your typical run-of-the-mill free software project (which is already not a high bar to meet). Update: people are moving to libera in droves. It's now reaching 18,000 users, which is bigger than OFTC and getting close to the largest, traditionnal, IRC networks (EFnet, Undernet, IRCnet are in the 10-20k users range). so-called freenode is still larger, currently clocking 68,000 users, but that's a huge drop from the previous count which was 78,000 before the exodus began. We're even starting to see the effects of the migration on netsplit.de. Update 2: the isfreenodedeadyet.com site is updated more frequently than netsplit and shows tons more information. It shows 25k online users for libera and 61k for so-called freenode (down from ~78k), and the trend doesn't seem to be stopping for so-called freenode. There's also a list of 400+ channels that have moved out. Keep in mind that such migrations take effect over long periods of time.

Where do I move to? The first thing you should do is to figure out which tool to use for interactive user support. There are multiple alternatives, of course -- this is the internet after all -- but here is a short list of suggestions, in preferred priority order:
  1. irc.libera.chat
  2. irc.OFTC.net
  3. Matrix.org, which bridges with OFTC and (hopefully soon) with libera as well, modern IRC alternative
  4. XMPP/Jabber also still exists, if you're into that kind of stuff, but I don't think the "chat room" story is great there, at least not as good as Matrix
Basically, the decision tree is this:
  • if you want to stay on IRC:
    • if you are already on many OFTC channels and few freenode channels: move to OFTC
    • if you are more inclined to support the previous freenode staff: move to libera
    • if you care about matrix users (in the short term): move to OFTC
  • if you are ready to leave IRC:
    • if you want the latest and greatest: move to Matrix
    • if you like XML and already use XMPP: move to XMPP
Frankly, at this point, everyone should seriously consider moving to Matrix. The user story is great, the web is a first class user, it supports E2EE (although XMPP as well), and has a lot of momentum behind it. It even bridges with IRC well (which is not the case for XMPP) so if you're worried about problems like this happening again. (Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if similar drama happens on OFTC or libera in the future. The history of IRC is full of such epic controversies, takeovers, sabotage, attacks, technical flamewars, and other silly things. I am not sure, but I suspect a federated model like Matrix might be more resilient to conflicts like this one.) Changing protocols might mean losing a bunch of users however: not everyone is ready to move to Matrix, for example. Graybeards like me have been using irssi for years, if not decades, and would take quite a bit of convincing to move elsewhere. I have mostly kept my channels on IRC, and moved either to OFTC or libera. In retrospect, I think I might have moved everything to OFTC if I would have thought about it more, because almost all of my channels are there. But I kind of expect a lot of the freenode community to move to libera, so I am keeping a socket open there anyways.

How do I move? The first thing you should do is to update documentation, websites, and source code to stop pointing at freenode altogether. This is what I did for feed2exec, for example. You need to let people know in the current channel as well, and possibly shutdown the channel on freenode. Since my channels are either small or empty, I took the radical approach of:
  • redirecting the channel to ##unavailable which is historically the way we show channels have moved to another network
  • make the channel invite-only (which effectively enforces the redirection)
  • kicking everyone out of the channel
  • kickban people who rejoin
  • set the topic to announce the change
In IRC speak, the following commands should do all this:
/msg ChanServ set #anarcat mlock +if ##unavailable
/msg ChanServ clear #anarcat users moving to irc.libera.chat
/msg ChanServ set #anarcat restricted on
/topic #anarcat this channel has moved to irc.libera.chat
If the channel is not registered, the following might work
/mode #anarcat +if ##unavailable
Then you can leave freenode altogether:
/disconnect Freenode unacceptable hijack, policy changes and takeovers. so long and thanks for all the fish.
Keep in mind that some people have been unable to setup such redirections, because the new freenode staff have taken over their channel, in which case you're out of luck... Some people have expressed concern about their private data hosted at freenode as well. If you care about this, you can always talk to NickServ and DROP your nick. Be warned, however, that this assumes good faith of the network operators, which, at this point, is kind of futile. I would assume any data you have registered on there (typically: your NickServ password and email address) to be compromised and leaked. If your password is used elsewhere (tsk, tsk), change it everywhere. Update: there's also another procedure, similar to the above, but with a different approach. Keep in mind that so-called freenode staff are actively hijacking channels for the mere act of mentioning libera in the channel topic, so thread carefully there.

Last words This is a sad time for IRC in general, and freenode in particular. It's a real shame that the previous freenode staff have been kicked out, and it's especially horrible that if the new policies of the network are basically making the network open to nazis. I wish things would have gone out differently: now we have yet another fork in the IRC history. While it's not the first time freenode changes name (it was called OPN before), now the old freenode is still around and this will bring much confusion to the world, especially since the new freenode staff is still claiming to support FOSS. I understand there are many sides to this story, and some people were deeply hurt by all this. But for me, it's completely unacceptable to keep pushing your staff so hard that they basically all (except one?) resign in protest. For me, that's leadership failure at the utmost, and a complete disgrace. And of course, I can't in good conscience support or join a network that allows hate speech. Regardless of the fate of whatever we'll call what's left of freenode, maybe it's time for this old IRC thing to die already. It's still a sad day in internet history, but then again, maybe IRC will never die...

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Kget Goodness

Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud. At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager. And I wonder what Google was consuming when making Google Takeout. They provide you with a specially crafted link for the downloads, and if for any reason your network gets lost, you are forced to redownload your takeout again. And with the pathetic download manager in Chrome and Firefox, an average Joe user would run in loops. THANK YOU GOOG. While I can understand the reason behind making the links time bound and invalidating them as soon as the time expires. But, enlighten your PMs that the world is not even. Not everyone has the same internet bandwidth. And admit that the download manager in your browser is crap. And then devise a better workflow and a product.

KGET Thankfully, there s Kget in the KDE Suite. While there s insanity elsewhere, luckily the kget tool still can do nice things. nuff said.
KGET to the rescue
KGET to the rescue

25 April 2021

Antoine Beaupr : Lost article ideas

I wrote for LWN for about two years. During that time, I wrote (what seems to me an impressive) 34 articles, but I always had a pile of ideas in the back of my mind. Those are ideas, notes, and scribbles lying around. Some were just completely abandoned because they didn't seem a good fit for LWN. Concretely, I stored those in branches in a git repository, and used the branch name (and, naively, the last commit log) as indicators of the topic. This was the state of affairs when I left:
remotes/private/attic/novena                    822ca2bb add letter i sent to novena, never published
remotes/private/attic/secureboot                de09d82b quick review, add note and graph
remotes/private/attic/wireguard                 5c5340d1 wireguard review, tutorial and comparison with alternatives
remotes/private/backlog/dat                     914c5edf Merge branch 'master' into backlog/dat
remotes/private/backlog/packet                  9b2c6d1a ham radio packet innovations and primer
remotes/private/backlog/performance-tweaks      dcf02676 config notes for http2
remotes/private/backlog/serverless              9fce6484 postponed until kubecon europe
remotes/private/fin/cost-of-hosting             00d8e499 cost-of-hosting article online
remotes/private/fin/kubecon                     f4fd7df2 remove published or spun off articles
remotes/private/fin/kubecon-overview            21fae984 publish kubecon overview article
remotes/private/fin/kubecon2018                 1edc5ec8 add series
remotes/private/fin/netconf                     3f4b7ece publish the netconf articles
remotes/private/fin/netdev                      6ee66559 publish articles from netdev 2.2
remotes/private/fin/pgp-offline                 f841deed pgp offline branch ready for publication
remotes/private/fin/primes                      c7e5b912 publish the ROCA paper
remotes/private/fin/runtimes                    4bee1d70 prepare publication of runtimes articles
remotes/private/fin/token-benchmarks            5a363992 regenerate timestamp automatically
remotes/private/ideas/astropy                   95d53152 astropy or python in astronomy
remotes/private/ideas/avaneya                   20a6d149 crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator
remotes/private/ideas/backups-benchmarks        fe2f1f13 review of backup software through performance and features
remotes/private/ideas/cumin                     7bed3945 review of the cumin automation tool from WM foundation
remotes/private/ideas/future-of-distros         d086ca0d modern packaging problems and complex apps
remotes/private/ideas/on-dying                  a92ad23f another dying thing
remotes/private/ideas/openpgp-discovery         8f2782f0 openpgp discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), thanks to jonas meurer
remotes/private/ideas/password-bench            451602c0 bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes
remotes/private/ideas/prometheus-openmetrics    2568dbd6 openmetrics standardizing prom metrics enpoints
remotes/private/ideas/telling-time              f3c24a53 another way of telling time
remotes/private/ideas/wallabako                 4f44c5da talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking
remotes/private/stalled/bench-bench-bench       8cef0504 benchmarking http benchmarking tools
remotes/private/stalled/debian-survey-democracy 909bdc98 free software surveys and debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work
Wow, what a mess! Let's see if I can make sense of this:

Attic Those are articles that I thought about, then finally rejected, either because it didn't seem worth it, or my editors rejected it, or I just moved on:
  • novena: the project is ooold now, didn't seem to fit a LWN article. it was basically "how can i build my novena now" and "you guys rock!" it seems like the MNT Reform is the brain child of the Novena now, and I dare say it's even cooler!
  • secureboot: my LWN editors were critical of my approach, and probably rightly so - it's a really complex subject and I was probably out of my depth... it's also out of date now, we did manage secureboot in Debian
  • wireguard: LWN ended up writing extensive coverage, and I was biased against Donenfeld because of conflicts in a previous project

Backlog Those were articles I was planning to write about next.
  • dat: I already had written Sharing and archiving data sets with Dat, but it seems I had more to say... mostly performance issues, beaker, no streaming, limited adoption... to be investigated, I guess?
  • packet: a primer on data communications over ham radio, and the cool new tech that has emerged in the free software world. those are mainly notes about Pat, Direwolf, APRS and so on... just never got around to making sense of it or really using the tech...
  • performance-tweaks: "optimizing websites at the age of http2", the unwritten story of the optimization of this website with HTTP/2 and friends
  • serverless: god. one of the leftover topics at Kubecon, my notes on this were thin, and the actual subject, possibly even thinner... the only lie worse than the cloud is that there's no server at all! concretely, that's a pile of notes about Kubecon which I wanted to sort through. Probably belongs in the attic now.

Fin Those are finished articles, they were published on my website and LWN, but the branches were kept because previous drafts had private notes that should not be published.

Ideas A lot of those branches were actually just an empty commit, with the commitlog being the "pitch", more or less. I'd send that list to my editors, sometimes with a few more links (basically the above), and they would nudge me one way or the other. Sometimes they would actively discourage me to write about something, and I would do it anyways, send them a draft, and they would patiently make me rewrite it until it was a decent article. This was especially hard with the terminal emulator series, which took forever to write and even got my editors upset when they realized I had never installed Fedora (I ended up installing it, and I was proven wrong!)

Stalled Oh, and then there's those: those are either "ideas" or "backlog" that got so far behind that I just moved them out of the way because I was tired of seeing them in my list.
  • stalled/bench-bench-bench benchmarking http benchmarking tools, a horrible mess of links, copy-paste from terminals, and ideas about benchmarking... some of this trickled out into this benchmarking guide at Tor, but not much more than the list of tools
  • stalled/debian-survey-democracy: "free software surveys and Debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work"... A long standing concern of mine is that all Debian work is supposed to be volunteer, and paying explicitly for work inside Debian has traditionally been frowned upon, even leading to serious drama and dissent (remember Dunc-Tank)? back when I was writing for LWN, I was also doing paid work for Debian LTS. I also learned that a lot (most?) Debian Developers were actually being paid by their job to work on Debian. So I was confused by this apparent contradiction, especially given how the LTS project has been mostly accepted, while Dunc-Tank was not... See also this talk at Debconf 16. I had hopes that this study would show the "hunch" people have offered (that most DDs are paid to work on Debian) but it seems to show the reverse (only 36% of DDs, and 18% of all respondents paid). So I am still confused and worried about the sustainability of Debian.

What do you think? So that's all I got. As people might have noticed here, I have much less time to write these days, but if there's any subject in there I should pick, what is the one that you would find most interesting? Oh! and I should mention that you can write to LWN! If you think people should know more about some Linux thing, you can get paid to write for it! Pitch it to the editors, they won't bite. The worst that can happen is that they say "yes" and there goes two years of your life learning to write. Because no, you don't know how to write, no one does. You need an editor to write. That's why this article looks like crap and has a smiley. :)

24 April 2021

Joey Hess: here's your shot

The nurse releases my shoulder and drops the needle in a sharps bin, slaps on a smiley bandaid. "And we're done!" Her cheeryness seems genuine but a little strained. There was a long line. "You're all boosted, and here's your vaccine card." Waiting out the 15 minutes in observation, I look at the card.
Moderna COVID-19/22 vaccine booster
3/21/2025              lot #5829126
    NOT A VACCINE PASSPORT  
(Tear at perforated line.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here's your shot at
$$ ONE HUNDRED MILLION $$
       Scratch
       and win
I bite my nails, when I'm not wearing this mask. So I scrub inneffectively at the grainy silver box. Not like the woman across from me, three kids in tow, who's zipping through her sheaf of scratchers. The message on mine becomes clear: 1 month free Amazon Prime Ah well.

8 April 2021

Sean Whitton: consfigurator-live-build

One of my goals for Consfigurator is to make it capable of installing Debian to my laptop, so that I can stop booting to GRML and manually partitioning and debootstrapping a basic system, only to then turn to configuration management to set everything else up. My configuration management should be able to handle the partitioning and debootstrapping, too. The first stage was to make Consfigurator capable of debootstrapping a basic system, chrooting into it, and applying other arbitrary configuration, such as installing packages. That s been in place for some weeks now. It s sophisticated enough to avoid starting up newly installed services, but I still need to add some bind mounting. Another significant piece is teaching Consfigurator how to partition block devices. That s quite tricky to do in a sufficiently general way I want to cleanly support various combinations of LUKS, LVM and regular partitions, including populating /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab. I have some ideas about how to do it, but it ll probably take a few tries to get the abstractions right. Let s imagine that code is all in place, such that Consfigurator can be pointed at a block device and it will install a bootable Debian system to it. Then to install Debian to my laptop I d just need to take my laptop s disk drive out and plug it into another system, and run Consfigurator on that system, as root, pointed at the block device representing my laptop s disk drive. For virtual machines, it would be easy to write code which loop-mounts an empty disk image, and then Consfigurator could be pointed at the loop-mounted block device, thereby making the disk image file bootable. This is adequate for virtual machines, or small single-board computers with tiny storage devices (not that I actually use any of those, but I want Consfigurator to be able to make disk images for them!). But it s not much good for my laptop. I casually referred to taking out my laptop s disk drive and connecting it to another computer, but this would void my laptop s warranty. And Consfigurator would not be able to update my laptop s NVRAM, as is needed on UEFI systems. What s wanted here is a live system which can run Consfigurator directly on the laptop, pointed at the block device representing its physical disk drive. Ideally this live system comes with a chroot with the root filesystem for the new Debian install already built, so that network access is not required, and all Consfigurator has to do is partition the drive and copy in the contents of the chroot. The live system could be set up to automatically start doing that upon boot, but another option is to just make Consfigurator itself available to be used interactively. The user boots the live system, starts up Emacs, starts up Lisp, and executes a Consfigurator deployment, supplying the block device representing the laptop s disk drive as an argument to the deployment. Consfigurator goes off and partitions that drive, copies in the contents of the chroot, and executes grub-install to make the laptop bootable. This is also much easier to debug than a live system which tries to start partitioning upon boot. It would look something like this:
    ;; melete.silentflame.com is a Consfigurator host object representing the
    ;; laptop, including information about the partitions it should have
    (deploy-these :local ...
      (chroot:partitioned-and-installed
        melete.silentflame.com "/srv/chroot/melete" "/dev/nvme0n1"))
Now, building live systems is a fair bit more involved than installing Debian to a disk drive and making it bootable, it turns out. While I want Consfigurator to be able to completely replace the Debian Installer, I decided that it is not worth trying to reimplement the relevant parts of the Debian Live tool suite, because I do not need to make arbitrary customisations to any live systems. I just need to have some packages installed and some files in place. Nevertheless, it is worth teaching Consfigurator how to invoke Debian Live, so that the customisation of the chroot which isn t just a matter of passing options to lb_config(1) can be done with Consfigurator. This is what I ve ended up with in Consfigurator s source code:
(defpropspec image-built :lisp (config dir properties)
  "Build an image under DIR using live-build(7), where the resulting live
system has PROPERTIES, which should contain, at a minimum, a property from
CONSFIGURATOR.PROPERTY.OS setting the Debian suite and architecture.  CONFIG
is a list of arguments to pass to lb_config(1), not including the '-a' and
'-d' options, which Consfigurator will supply based on PROPERTIES.
This property runs the lb_config(1), lb_bootstrap(1), lb_chroot(1) and
lb_binary(1) commands to build or rebuild the image.  Rebuilding occurs only
when changes to CONFIG or PROPERTIES mean that the image is potentially
out-of-date; e.g. if you just add some new items to PROPERTIES then in most
cases only lb_chroot(1) and lb_binary(1) will be re-run.
Note that lb_chroot(1) and lb_binary(1) both run after applying PROPERTIES,
and might undo some of their effects.  For example, to configure
/etc/apt/sources.list, you will need to use CONFIG not PROPERTIES."
  (:desc (declare (ignore config properties))
         #?"Debian Live image built in $ dir ")
  (let* (...)
    ;; ...
     (eseqprops
      ;; ...
      (on-change
          (eseqprops
           (on-change
               (file:has-content ,auto/config ,(auto/config config) :mode #o755)
             (file:does-not-exist ,@clean)
             (%lbconfig ,dir)
             (%lbbootstrap t ,dir))
           (%lbbootstrap nil ,dir)
           (deploys ((:chroot :into ,chroot)) ,host))
        (%lbchroot ,dir)
        (%lbbinary ,dir)))))
Here, %lbconfig is a property running lb_config(1), %lbbootstrap one which runs lb_bootstrap(1), etc. Those properties all just change directory to the right place and run the command, essentially, with a little extra code to handle failed debootstraps and the like. The ON-CHANGE and ESEQPROPS combinators work together to sequence the interaction of the Debian Live suite and Consfigurator. This way, we only rebuild the chroot if the configuration changed, and we only rebuild the image if the chroot changed. Now over in my personal consfig:
(try-register-data-source
 :git-snapshot :name "consfig" :repo #P"src/cl/consfig/" ...)
(defproplist hybrid-live-iso-built :lisp ()
  "Build a Debian Live system in /srv/live/spw.
Typically this property is not applied in a DEFHOST form, but rather run as
needed at the REPL.  The reason for this is that otherwise the whole image will
get rebuilt each time a commit is made to my dotfiles repo or to my consfig."
  (:desc "Sean's Debian Live system image built")
  (live-build:image-built.
      '("--archive-areas" "main contrib non-free" ...)
      "/srv/live/spw"
    (os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64)
    (basic-props)
    (apt:installed "whatever" "you" "want")
    (git:snapshot-extracted "/etc/skel/src" "dotfiles")
    (file:is-copy-of "/etc/skel/.bashrc" "/etc/skel/src/dotfiles/.bashrc")
    (git:snapshot-extracted "/root/src/cl" "consfig")))
The first argument to LIVE-BUILD:IMAGE-BUILT. is additional arguments to lb_config(1). The third argument onwards are the properties for the live system. The cool thing is GIT:SNAPSHOT-EXTRACTED the calls to this ensure that a copy of my Emacs configuration and my consfig end up in the live image, ready to be used interactively to install Debian, as described above. I ll need to add something like (chroot:host-chroot-bootstrapped melete.silentflame.com "/srv/chroot/melete") too. As with everything Consfigurator-related, Joey Hess s Propellor is the giant upon whose shoulders I m standing.

7 February 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2020

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:
The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high
It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:
Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.
Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:
Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:
The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?
It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:
"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."
Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:
We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?
New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:
A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.
Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

20 January 2021

Molly de Blanc: Inauguration Pie

How can I put four years into a pie? I m thinking of Inauguration Day 2017 through to today, Inauguration Day 2021. In truth things started back in 2015, when Donald Trump announced his run for the United States presidency, and I don t know how long things will continue past the moment when President-Elect Joe Biden becomes President Joe Biden. For the United States, it s been a hell of a time. For the world, it d been even worse. Every generation thinks that they lived through more than anyone else, that they had it worse. I had a Boomer tell me that the existential stress of COVID is nothing compared to the Vietnam War. I m sure when we are living through a global water crisis, I ll tell the kids that we had it bad too. Everyday I listen to the radio and read Twitter, aware that the current state of endless wars wars against terrorism and drugs, organized crime and famine, climate change and racism is global, and not limited to just what s happening to and around me. That makes it feel worse and bigger and I wonder if earlier generations can really grasp how big that is. The last four years brought me in closer working relationships with people in India and Nigeria. I would call these people my friends in that if they were in town I would want to see them and show them around. Most of them I would offer a space in my small apartment, in case they needed somewhere to sleep and wanted to save the money. We chat, though we only have the internet as opposed to elevator rides in tall office buildings and slow walks down to the shops during lunch breaks. From these relationships I have learned very little about life in India or Nigeria, and I only visited India separately from any of my colleagues there. (I went for a wedding. My visa to Nigeria was denied on account of a medical issue.) But, I follow these people on social media and see what they share, the same political and social utterances that could be the same here or virtually any other place, as long as we replace the right keywords. Exchange the name of one leader, conservative party, or government unit for another. When I first saw the #EndSARS hashtag show up, I thought the images were from Black Lives Matter protests. Stop police brutality. And that was only in the last few months. I ve had three jobs since Trump first announced his candidacy in three very different places. In the first I felt like I wasn t able to talk about the sexism and discrimination I was dealing with in the office, and how much more so my views on an organizational partnership with a government whose policies I strongly disagreed with. In the second I was able to talk about these things, but there was nothing to do about them. I ve been in love and had my heart broken three times in three very different ways that all came down to someone valuing someone else more than they valued me. Can I bake heartbreak into a pie? Is it even fair to distract from the political world with my own loss? What about COVID-19? There s bitterness and anger and tears and pain emotional and physical. There is desperation and desolation and loneliness. Covid has colored everything during the past year. It is a burden our new political leaders will take on. Biden and Harris, all of the new people in Congress, and everyone else who has taken on an elected position now must content with Covid with new levels of responsibility. Not only do their decisions affect the people they come into contact with, they now affect everyone their policies touch and perhaps even more than that. The government hired people to build walls. Our government approved it and people willingly took on the job of building those walls. Families were separated. Children were placed in inhumane conditions; children were tortured. Remember when the guards at border detention facilities were raping children? Remember when children had guards? Women were forcefully operated upon and had their bodies permanently changed without their permission, against their desires. People were executed by the state. There were so many things I ve lost track of them all. I remember bits and pieces as I write this, coming back to me like singing a song I haven t thought about in years. With each line, I remember another one. Being worried about coming home from Cuba, when the visitation rules were changed in the middle of my trip. Climate change, again and again. Pollution and microplastics and watching the country being broken into pieces and sold off in the name of economy and progress. People losing their access to healthcare, through clinics closing down and loss of insurance. What do you bake into a pie that tastes like sedition? What are the flavors of loss and racism and hate? How to you balance the sourness with subtle hints of hope, which feels to tender and fragile? Do we pair equal parts of the palatable with the unpalatable, in the name of our neatly divided senate? I have hope, of course I have hope, and I have always had hope, but now it feels thinner than ever, like a ganache or a caramel after your hand slips and you pour too much cream in. A custard or compote or curd that that refuses to thicken no matter how long you cook it. I see that things could be better, but better does not mean good and better does not mean enough. So I will put my hope into this pie. I put my pain and anger into the dough. I will put my tears and helplessness and bitterness into the filling. I will cover it sweetness and the delicate hope I ve spun out of sugar. Soon I will bake it and share it with the three other people I see because the most important thing about surviving these past years, these past months and weeks and days, is that we did it together. We will commiserate on what we ve overcome, and we will share our hope and the sweetness of the moment, as the spun sugar dissolves on our tongues. There is so much we have left to do, so much we must do. We will be angry in the future, we may be angry later today, but until then, we have pie.

29 December 2020

Joey Hess: Withrawing github-backup

I am no longer maintaining github-backup. I'll contine hosting its website and git repo for the time being, but it needs a new maintainer if it's going to survive. I don't really think it needs to survive. If the farce of youtube-dl being removed from github, thus losing access to all its issues and pull requests, taught us anything, it's that having that happen does not make many people reconsider their dependence on github. (Not even youtube-dl it turns out, which is back on there.) Clearly people don't generally have any interest in backing that stuff up. As far as the git repositories on Github, they are getting archived very effectively by softwareheritage.org which vaccumes up all git repositories from Github. Which points to a problem, because the same can't be said for git repositories not hosted on Github. There's a form to submit them but the submissions often get hung up needing manual review, and it doesn't seem to pull in new commits actively if at all, based on the few git repositories I've had archived there so far. That seems like something it might be worth building some software to manage. But it's also just another case of Github's mass bending reality around it; the average Github user doesn't care about this and still gets archived; the average self-hosting git user may care about this slightly more, but most won't get archived, even if that software did get built.

14 December 2020

Jonathan Dowland: git rebasing and lab books

For my PhD work, I've been working on preparing an experimental branch of StrIoT for merging down to the main branch. This has been a long-lived branch (a year!) within which I've been exploring some ideas. Some of the code I want to keep, and some I don't. The history of the experimental branch is consequently messy. Looking it over and considering what a reviewer needs to see, there's a lot of things that are irrelevant and potentially distracting. And so, I've been going through an iterative process of steadily whittling down the history to the stuff that matters: some strings of commits are dropped, others squashed together, and others re-ordered. The resulting branch is a historic fiction. This is common practice. Joey Hess ruminated about it 5 years ago in "our beautiful fake histories", pointing out that the real history is also useful, and perhaps worth preserving. After a recent conversation with my supervisor I realised the situation was analagous to writing a research paper (or a thesis): the process of getting to the conclusion which the thesis documents is messy, with false starts, wrong directions, and plenty of roads-not-travelled. The eventual write-up focusses on the path that lead to the conclusion, and a lot of the side-quest stuff disappears. The "true history" then, is captured elsewhere: in lab books, diaries and the like, and these have their own value. So do my messy exploratory branches, before they've been cleaned up for merging.

8 December 2020

Russell Coker: Links December 2020

Business Insider has an informative article about the way that Google users can get locked out with no apparent reason and no recourse [1]. Something to share with clients when they consider putting everything in the cloud . Vice has an interestoing article about people jailbreaking used Teslas after Tesla has stolen software licenses that were bought with the car [2]. The Atlantic has an interesting article titled This Article Won t Change Your Mind [3]. It s one of many on the topic of echo chambers but has some interesting points that others don t seem to cover, such as regarding the benefits of groups when not everyone agrees. Inequality.org has lots of useful information about global inequality [4]. Jeffrey Goldberg has an insightful interview with Barack Obama for the Atlantic about the future course of American politics and a retrospective on his term in office [5]. A Game Designer s Analysis Of QAnon is an insightful Medium article comparing QAnon to an augmented reality game [6]. This is one of the best analysis of QAnon operations that I ve seen. Decrypting Rita is one of the most interesting web comics I ve read [7]. It makes good use of side scrolling and different layers to tell multiple stories at once. PC Mag has an article about the new features in Chrome 87 to reduce CPU use [8]. On my laptop I have 1/3 of all CPU time being used when it is idle, the majority of which is from Chrome. As the CPU has 2 cores this means the equivalent of 1 core running about 66% of the time just for background tabs. I have over 100 tabs open which I admit is a lot. But it means that the active tabs (as opposed to the plain HTML or PDF ones) are averaging more than 1% CPU time on an i7 which seems obviously unreasonable. So Chrome 87 doesn t seem to live up to Google s claims. The movie Bad President starring Stormy Daniels as herself is out [9]. Poe s Law is passe. Interesting summary of Parler, seems that it was designed by the Russians [10]. Wired has an interesting article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation, how to encrypt the operation of a program [11]. Joerg Jaspert wrote an interesting blog post about the difficulties packagine Rust and Go for Debian [12]. I think that the problem is many modern languages aren t designed well for library updates. This isn t just a problem for Debian, it s a problem for any long term support of software that doesn t involve transferring a complete archive of everything and it s a problem for any disconnected development (remote sites and sites dealing with serious security. Having an automatic system for downloading libraries is fine. But there should be an easy way of getting the same source via an archive format (zip will do as any archive can be converted to any other easily enough) and with version numbers.

27 November 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Farmer Protests and RCEP

Farmer Protests While I was hoping to write about RCEP exclusively, just today farmer protests have happened against three farm laws which had been passed by our Govt. about a month ago without consulting anybody. The bills benefit only big business houses at the cost of farmers. This has been amply shared by an open letter to one of the biggest business house which will benefit the most. Now while that is a national experience and what it tells, let me share, some experience from the State I come from, Maharashtra. About 4-5 years back Maharashtra delisted fruit and vegetables from the APMC market. But till date, the APMC market is working, why, the reasons are many. However, what it did was it forced the change to sugarcane, a water guzzling crop much more than previously. This has resulted in lowering the water table in Maharashtra and put them more into debt trap and later they had to commit suicide. Now let us see why the Punjab farmers have been so agitated that they are walking all the way to Delhi. They are right now, somewhere between Haryana-Delhi border. The reason is that because even their experiments with contract farming have not been good. This is why they are struggling to go to Delhi to make their collective voices heard and get the farm bills rolled back. Even the farmers from Gujarat were sued, but because of elections were put back, the intentions though are clear. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and for sugarcane and that too by Bajaj Company. At the end of the day, the laws made by the Govt. leaves our farmer at the mercy of big corporations. It is preposterous to believe that the farmer, with their small land holdings will be able to stand up to the Corporation. Add to that, they cannot go to Court. It is the SDM (Sub-Divisonal Magistrate) who will decide on the matters and has the last word. If this is allowed, in a couple of years there will be only few farmers or corporations who would have large hand-holdings, and they would be easily co-opted by the Government in power. Just in A gentleman who turned off water cannon being shot at farmers has been charged for murder  Currently, the Government procures rice in vast quantities and the farmers are assured at least some basic income, in the states of Punjab and Haryana
Procurement of Rice by Various States
Recently there was also an article in Indian Express which shares the farmer s apprehensions and does share that it s a complex problem with no easy solutions. The solution can only be dialogue between the two parties. This was also shared by Vivek Kaul, who is far more knowledgable than me on the subject and made a long read on the subject.

The Canada Way Recently, while sparring on the Internet, came to know of the Canada way. Here, the Government makes the farmer a corporation and the Government helps them. But the Canada way seems to largely work as the Canadian Government owns the majority of the lands in question. And yes, Indians have benefited from it but that is also due to a. the currency differential between Canadian dollar and Indian Rupee and the 99-year land lease. There may be other advantages that the Canadian Government bestows and that is the reason possibly that most Punjabi farmers go to Canada and UK to farm. While looking at it, I also came across the situation in the United States and it seems the situation there seems to be becoming even more grim.

RCEP RCEP stands for Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. We were supposed to be part of this partnership. Now why didn t we join, for two reasons, our judicial infrastructure is the worst. It took 8 years to decide on a tax retrospective case (Vodafone) and that too finally outside India. And that decision, by no means an end. The other thing is all those who have joined RCEP have lesser duties, tariffs then India. What this means is that they are much more competitive than India. While there is fear that perhaps that China may take over its assets as it has done with few countries around the world, the opportunity for those countries was too good to pass up even with the dangers. But, then even India has taken loans from the Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB) Bank where China is the biggest shareholder. So it doesn t make sense to be insecure on that front. And again, it is up to India or any other sovereign country to decide to take loans from some country, some multilateral organization or any other way and on what terms.

What China has done and doing is similar to what IMF (being used primarily by the United States) had done in its past. The only difference is that time it was the United States, now it is China. America co-opted Governments, and got assets, China doing the same, no difference in tactics, more or less the same. There has also been a somewhat interesting paper which discusses how the RCEP may unfold in different circumstances. In short, it tells that the partners will benefit, some more than others. It also does compare the RCEP to CPTPP (The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). While the study is a bit academic in nature as the United States has walked out and the new president-elect Joe Biden hasn t made any moves and is unlikely to make any moves as there is deep divide and resentment about multilateral trade partnerships domestically within the United States. This news and understanding was quite shocking to me as it shows that unlike the United States of the past, which was supposed to be a beacon of capitalism and seemed to enjoy capitalism, it seems to be an opportunist only. There is also this truth that under Biden, there is only so many things on which he would need and can spend his political capital on.
Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats
As can be seen, economy at least for the democrats, this time around is pretty far round the corner. He has a host of battles and would have to choose which to fight and which to ignore. In the end, we are left to our own devices. At the moment, India does not know when it s economy will recover
PTI News, Nov 27, 2020
There has been another worrying bit of news, now all newspapers will need to get some sort of permission, certification from Govt. of India about any news of the world. This is harking back on the 1970 s, 1980 s era

20 November 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Rights, Press freedom and India

In some ways it is sad and interesting to see how personal liberty is viewed in India. And how it differs from those having the highest fame and power can get a different kind of justice then the rest cannot.

Arnab Goswami This particular gentleman is a class apart. He is the editor as well as Republic TV, a right-leaning channel which demonizes the minority, women whatever is antithesis to the Central Govt. of India. As a result there have been a spate of cases against him in the past few months. But surprisingly, in each of them he got hearing the day after the suit was filed. This is unique in Indian legal history so much so that a popular legal site which publishes on-going cases put up a post sharing how he was getting prompt hearings. That post itself needs to be updated as there have been 3 more hearings which have been done back to back for him. This is unusual as there have been so many cases pending for the SC attention, some arguably more important than this gentleman . So many precedents have been set which will send a wrong message. The biggest one, that even though a trial is taking place in the sessions court (below High Court) the SC can interject on matters. What this will do to the morale of both lawyers as well as judges of the various Sessions Court is a matter of speculation and yet as shared unprecedented. The saddest part was when Justice Chandrachud said
Justice Chandrachud If you don t like a channel then don t watch it. 11th November 2020 .
This is basically giving a free rope to hate speech. How can a SC say like that ? And this is the Same Supreme Court which could not take two tweets from Shri Prashant Bhushan when he made remarks against the judiciary .

J&K pleas in Supreme Court pending since August 2019 (Abrogation 370) After abrogation of 370, citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, the population of which is 13.6 million people including 4 million Hindus have been stuck with reduced rights and their land being taken away due to new laws. Many of the Hindus which regionally are a minority now rue the fact that they supported the abrogation of 370A . Imagine, a whole state whose answers and prayers have not been heard by the Supreme Court and the people need to move a prayer stating the same.

100 Journalists, activists languishing in Jail without even a hearing 55 Journalists alone have been threatened, booked and in jail for reporting of pandemic . Their fault, they were bring the irregularities, corruption made during the pandemic early months. Activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, who giving up her American citizenship and settling to fight for tribals is in jail for 2 years without any charges. There are many like her, There are several more petitions lying in the Supreme Court, for e.g. Varavara Rao, not a single hearing from last couple of years, even though he has taken part in so many national movements including the emergency as well as part-responsible for creation of Telengana state out of Andhra Pradesh .

Then there is Devangana kalita who works for gender rights. Similar to Sudha Bharadwaj, she had an opportunity to go to UK and settle here. She did her master s and came back. And now she is in jail for the things that she studied. While she took part in Anti-CAA sittings, none of her speeches were incendiary but she still is locked up under UAPA (Unlawful Practises Act) . I could go on and on but at the moment these should suffice.

Petitions for Hate Speech which resulted in riots in Delhi are pending, Citizen s Amendment Act (controversial) no hearings till date. All of the best has been explained in a newspaper article which articulates perhaps all that I wanted to articulate and more. It is and was amazing to see how in certain cases Article 32 is valid and in many it is not. Also a fair reading of Justice Bobde s article tells you a lot how the SC is functioning. I would like to point out that barandbench along with livelawindia makes it easier for never non-lawyers and public to know how arguments are done in court, what evidences are taken as well as give some clue about judicial orders and judgements. Both of these resources are providing an invaluable service and more often than not, free of charge.

Student Suicide and High Cost of Education
For quite sometime now, the cost of education has been shooting up. While I have visited this topic earlier as well, recently a young girl committed suicide because she was unable to pay the fees as well as additional costs due to pandemic. Further investigations show that this is the case with many of the students who are unable to buy laptops. Now while one could think it is limited to one college then it would be wrong. It is almost across all India and this will continue for months and years. People do know that the pandemic is going to last a significant time and it would be a long time before R value becomes zero . Even the promising vaccine from Pfizer need constant refrigeration which is sort of next to impossible in India. It is going to make things very costly.

Last Nail on Indian Media Just today the last nail on India has been put. Thankfully Freedom Gazette India did a much better job so just pasting that
Information and Broadcasting Ministry bringing OTT services as well as news within its ambit.
With this, projects like Scam 1992, The Harshad Mehta Story or Bad Boy Billionaires:India, Test Case, Delhi Crime, Laakhon Mein Ek etc. etc. such kind of series, investigative journalism would be still-births. Many of these web-series also shared tales of woman empowerment while at the same time showed some of the hard choices that women had to contend to live with. Even western media may be censored where it finds the political discourse not to its liking. There had been so many accounts of Mr. Ravish Kumar, the winner of Ramon Magsaysay, how in his shows the electricity was cut in many places. I too have been the victim when the BJP governed in Maharashtra as almost all Puneities experienced it. Light would go for just half or 45 minutes at the exact time. There is another aspect to it. The U.S. elections showed how independent media was able to counter Mr. Trump s various falsehoods and give rise to alternative ideas which lead the team of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Biden now being the President-elect while Kamala Harris being the vice-president elect. Although the journey to the white house seems as tough as before. Let s see what happens. Hopefully 2021 will bring in some good news. Update On 27th November 2020 Martin who runs the planet got an e-mail/notice by a Mr. Nikhil Sethi who runs the wikibio.com property. Mr. Sethi asked to remove the link pointing Devangana Kalita from my blog post to his site as he has used the no follow link. On inquiring further, the gentleman stated that it is an Updated mandate (his exact quote) from Google algorithm. To further understand the issue, I went to SERP as they are one of the more known ones on the subject. I also looked it up on Google as well. Found that the gentleman was BSing the whole time. The page basically talks about weightage of a page/site and authoritativeness which is known and yet highly contested ideas. In any case, the point for me was for whatever reason (could be fear, could be something else entirely), Mr. Sethi did not want me to link the content. Hence, I have complied above. I could have dragged it out but I do not wish Mr. Sethi any ill-being or/and further harm unduly and unintentionally caused by me. Hence, have taken down the link.

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