There is a thorny topic we have been discussing in nonpublic channels (say, the
debian-private mailing list... It is impossible to call it a
private list if it has close to a thousand subscribers, but it sometimes deals with
sensitive material) for the last week. We have finally confirmation that we can bring this topic out to the open, and I expect several Debian people to talk about this. Besides, this information is now
repeated all over the public Internet, so I'm not revealing anything sensitive. Oh, and there is a
statement regarding Dmitry Bogatov published by the Tor project But I'll get to Tor soon.
One week ago, the 25-year old mathematician and
Debian Maintainer Dmitry Bogatov was arrested, accused of
organizing riots and calling for terrorist activities. Every evidence so far points to the fact that Dmitry is not guilty of what he is charged of He was filmed at different places at the times where the
calls for terrorism happened.
It seems that Dmitry was arrested because he runs a Tor exit node. I don't know the current situation in Russia, nor his political leanings But I do know what a Tor exit node looks like. I even had one at home for a short while.
What is Tor? It is a network overlay, meant for people to hide where they come from or who they are. Why? There are many reasons Uninformed people will talk about the evil wrongdoers (starting the list of course with the drug sellers or child porn distributors). People who have taken their time to understand what this is about will rather talk about people for whom free speech is not a given; journalists, political activists, whistleblowers. And also, about regular people Many among us have taken the habit of doing some of our Web surfing using Tor (probably via the very fine and interesting
TAILS distribution The Amnesiac Incognito Live System), just to increase the entropy, and just
because we can, because we want to preserve the freedom to be anonymous before it's taken away from us.
There are many types of nodes in Tor; most of them are just regular users or
bridges that forward traffic, helping Tor's anonymization. Exit nodes, where packets leave the Tor network and enter the
regular Internet, are much scarcer Partly because they can be quite problematic to people hosting them. But, yes, Tor
needs more exit nodes, not just for bandwidth sake, but because the more exit nodes there are, the harder it is for a hostile third party to monitor a sizable number of them for activity (and break the anonymization).
I am coincidentially starting a project with a group of students of my Faculty (we want to breathe life again into
LIDSOL - Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre). As we are just starting, they are documenting some technical and social aspects of the need for privacy and how Tor works; I expect them to publish their findings in
El Nigromante soon (which means... what? ), but definitively, part of what we want to do is to set up a Tor exit node at the university Well documented and with enough academic justification to avoid our network operation area ordering us to shut it down. Lets see what happens :)
Anyway, all in all Dmitry is in for a heavy time. He has been detained pre-trial at least until June, and he faces quite serious charges. He has done a lot of good, specialized work for the whole world to benefit. So, given I cannot do more, I'm just speaking my mind here in this space.
[Update] Dmitry's case has been
covered in LWN. There is also a
statement concerning the arrest of Dmitry Bogatov by the Debian project. This case is also
covered at The Register.
I ve written a simple application which will automatically extract media from CDs and DVDs when they are inserted into the drive attached to my server. This makes it easy for me to compile all of my media in one place and access it anytime I like. The application uses the modern udisks API, formerly known as DeviceKit-disks, and I wrote it in part to learn get some experience working with udisks (which, it turns out, is rather nice indeed).
Naturally, I wanted to grant this application the privileges necessary to mount, unmount and eject removable media. The server is headless, and the application runs as a daemon, so this would require explicit configuration. udisks uses PolicyKit for authorization, so I expected this to be very simple to do. In fact, it is very simple, but finding out exactly how to do it wasn t quite so easy.
The Internet is full of web pages which recommend editing /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf. As far as I can tell, nothing pays attention to this file anymore, and all of these instructions have been rendered meaningless. My system was also full of tools like polkit-auth, from the apparently-obsolete policykit package, which kept their configuration in some other ignored place, i.e. /var/lib/PolicyKit. It seems the configuration system has been through a revolution or two recently.
In Ubuntu 10.04, the right place to configure these things seems to be /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority, and this is documented in pklocalauthority(8). Authorization can be tested using pkcheck(1), and the default policy can be examined using pkaction(1).
I solved my problem by creating a file in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d with a .pkla extension with the following contents:
a short overview of my RC bug activities. more than usual, most of them in
the debian perl group, some of them new bugs.
It’s the 20th anniversary of the 
Yesterday I landed in Subversion a branch of 
There is one remaining task left before this is ready to be released: undo
support in the edit dialog entries. Once this is done, the next release
of Tasks will be announced. I also plan to work with Iain on cleaning up
this code and submitting it for inclusion into GTK+.
NP: Money Jungle, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Max
Roach