Search Results: "pm"

28 March 2024

Joey Hess: the vulture in the coal mine

Turns out that VPS provider Vultr's terms of service were quietly changed some time ago to give them a "perpetual, irrevocable" license to use content hosted there in any way, including modifying it and commercializing it "for purposes of providing the Services to you." This is very similar to changes that Github made to their TOS in 2017. Since then, Github has been rebranded as "The world s leading AI-powered developer platform". The language in their TOS now clearly lets them use content stored in Github for training AI. (Probably this is their second line of defense if the current attempt to legitimise copyright laundering via generative AI fails.) Vultr is currently in damage control mode, accusing their concerned customers of spreading "conspiracy theories" (-- founder David Aninowsky) and updating the TOS to remove some of the problem language. Although it still allows them to "make derivative works", so could still allow their AI division to scrape VPS images for training data. Vultr claims this was the legalese version of technical debt, that it only ever applied to posts in a forum (not supported by the actual TOS language) and basically that they and their lawyers are incompetant but not malicious. Maybe they are indeed incompetant. But even if I give them the benefit of the doubt, I expect that many other VPS providers, especially ones targeting non-corporate customers, are watching this closely. If Vultr is not significantly harmed by customers jumping ship, if the latest TOS change is accepted as good enough, then other VPS providers will know that they can try this TOS trick too. If Vultr's AI division does well, others will wonder to what extent it is due to having all this juicy training data. For small self-hosters, this seems like a good time to make sure you're using a VPS provider you can actually trust to not be eyeing your disk image and salivating at the thought of stripmining it for decades of emails. Probably also worth thinking about moving to bare metal hardware, perhaps hosted at home. I wonder if this will finally make it worthwhile to mess around with VPS TPMs?

21 March 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: Thailand Trip

This post is the second and final part of my Malaysia-Thailand trip. Feel free to check out the Malaysia part here if you haven t already. Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok is around 1500 km by road, and so I took a Malaysian Airlines flight to travel to Bangkok. The flight staff at the Kuala Lumpur only asked me for a return/onward flight and Thailand immigration asked a few questions but did not check any documents (obviously they checked and stamped my passport ;)). The currency of Thailand is the Thai baht, and 1 Thai baht = 2.5 Indian Rupees. The Thailand time is 1.5 hours ahead of Indian time (For example, if it is 12 noon in India, it will be 13:30 in Thailand). I landed in Bangkok at around 3 PM local time. Fletcher was in Bangkok that time, leaving for Pattaya and we had booked the same hostel. So I took a bus to Pattaya from the airport. The next bus for which the tickets were available was at 7 PM, so I took tickets for that one. The bus ticket cost was 143 Thai Baht. I didn t buy SIM at the airport, thinking there must be better deals in the city. As a consequence, there was no way to contact Fletcher through internet. Although I had a few minutes call remaining out of my international roaming pack.
A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.
Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
Our accommodation was near Jomtien beach, so I got off at the last stop, as the bus terminates at the Jomtien beach. Then I decided to walk towards my accommodation. I was using OsmAnd for navigation. However, the place was not marked on OpenStreetMap, and it turned out I missed the street my hostel was on and walked around 1 km further as I was chasing a similarly named incorrect hostel on OpenStreetMap. Then I asked for help from two men sitting at a caf . One of them said he will help me find the street my hostel is on. So, I walked with him, and he told me he lives in Thailand for many years, but he is from Kuwait. He also gave me valuable information. Like, he told me about shared hail-and-ride songthaews which run along the Jomtien Second Road and charge 10 Baht for any distance on their route. This tip significantly reduced our expenses. Further, he suggested me 7-Eleven shops for buying a local SIM. Like Malaysia, Thailand has 24/7 7-Eleven convenience stores, a lot of them not even 100 m apart. The Kuwaiti person dropped me at the address where my hostel was. I tried searching for a person in-charge of that hostel, and soon I realized there was no reception. After asking for help from locals for some time, I bumped into Fletcher, who also came to this address and was searching for the same. After finding a friend, I felt a sigh of relief. Adjacent to the property, there was a hairdresser shop. We went there and asked about this property. The woman called the owner, and she also told us the required passcodes to go inside. Our accommodation was in a room on the second floor, which required us to put a passcode for opening. We entered the passcode and entered the room. So, we stayed at this hostel which had no reception. Due to this, it took 2 hours to find our room and enter. It reminded me of a difficult experience I had in Albania, where me and Akshat were not able to find our apartment in one of the hottest days and the owner didn t know our language. Traveling from the place where the bus dropped me to the hostel, I saw streets were filled with bars and massage parlors, which was expected. Prostitutes were everywhere. We went out at night towards the beach and also roamed around in 7-Elevens to buy a SIM card for myself. I got a SIM for 7 day unlimited internet for 399 baht. Turns out that the rates of SIM cards at the airport were not so different from inside the city.
Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya
Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.
Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
In terms of speaking English, locals didn t know English at all in both Pattaya and Bangkok. I normally don t expect locals to know English in a non-English speaking country, but the fact that Bangkok is one of the most visited places by tourists made me expect locals to know some English. Talking to locals is an integral part of travel for me, which I couldn t do a lot in Thailand. This aspect is much more important for me than going to touristy places. So, we were in Pattaya. Next morning, Fletcher and I went to Tiger park using shared songthaew. After that, we planned to visit Pattaya Floating market which is near the Tiger Park, but we felt the ticket prices were higher than it was worth. Fletcher had to leave for Bangkok on that day. I suggested him to go to Suvarnabhumi Airport from the Jomtien beach bus terminal (this was the route I took the last day in opposite direction) to avoid traffic congestion inside Bangkok, as he can follow up with metro once he reaches the airport. From the floating market, we were walking in sweltering heat to reach the Jomtien beach. I tried asking for a lift and eventually got successful as a scooty stopped, and surprisingly the person gave a ride to both of us. He was from Delhi, so maybe that s the reason he stopped for us. Then we took a songthaew to the bus terminal and after having lunch, Fletcher left for Bangkok.
A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.
This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.
Next day I went to Bangkok, but Fletcher already left for Kuala Lumpur. Here I had booked a private room in a hotel (instead of a hostel) for four nights, mainly because of my luggage. This costed 5600 INR for four nights. It was 2 km from the metro station, which I used to walk both sides. In Bangkok, I visited Sukhumvit and Siam by metro. Going to some areas require crossing the Chao Phraya river. For this, I took Chao Phraya Express Boat for going to places like Khao San road and Wat Arun. I would recommend taking the boat ride as it had very good views. In Bangkok, I met a person from Pakistan staying in my hotel and so here also I got some company. But by the time I met him, my days were almost over. So, we went to a random restaurant selling Indian food where we ate some paneer dish with naan and that restaurant person was from Myanmar.
Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry
Wat Arun temple
Khao San Road
A food stall at Khao San Road
Chao Phraya Express Boat
For eating, I mainly relied on fruits and convenience stores. Bananas were very tasty. This was the first time I saw banana flesh being yellow. Mangoes were delicious and pineapples were smaller and flavorful. I also ate Rose Apple, which I never had before. I had Chhole Kulche once in Sukhumvit. That was a little expensive as it costed 164 baht. I also used to buy premix coffee packets from 7-Eleven convenience stores and prepare them inside the stores.
Banana with yellow flesh
Fruits at a stall in Bangkok
Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.
Corn in Bangkok.
A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.
In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.
My booking from Bangkok to Delhi was in Air India flight, and they were serving alcohol in the flight. I chose red wine, and this was my first time having alcohol in a flight.
Red wine being served in Air India

Notes
  • In this whole trip spanning two weeks, I did not pay for drinking water (except for once in Pattaya which was 9 baht) and toilets. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have plenty of malls where you should find a free-of-cost toilet nearby. For drinking water, I relied mainly on my accommodation providing refillable water for my bottle.
  • Thailand seemed more expensive than Malaysia on average. Malaysia had discounted price due to the Chinese New year.
  • I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok. Maybe because Pattaya has beach and Bangkok doesn t. Pattaya seemed more lively, and I could meet and talk to a few people as opposed to Bangkok.
  • Chao Phraya River express boat costs 150 baht for one day where you can hop on and off to any boat.

19 March 2024

Colin Watson: apt install everything?

On Mastodon, the question came up of how Ubuntu would deal with something like the npm install everything situation. I replied:
Ubuntu is curated, so it probably wouldn t get this far. If it did, then the worst case is that it would get in the way of CI allowing other packages to be removed (again from a curated system, so people are used to removal not being self-service); but the release team would have no hesitation in removing a package like this to fix that, and it certainly wouldn t cause this amount of angst. If you did this in a PPA, then I can t think of any particular negative effects.
OK, if you added lots of build-dependencies (as well as run-time dependencies) then you might be able to take out a builder. But Launchpad builders already run arbitrary user-submitted code by design and are therefore very carefully sandboxed and treated as ephemeral, so this is hardly novel. There s a lot to be said for the arrangement of having a curated system for the stuff people actually care about plus an ecosystem of add-on repositories. PPAs cover a wide range of levels of developer activity, from throwaway experiments to quasi-official distribution methods; there are certainly problems that arise from it being difficult to tell the difference between those extremes and from there being no systematic confinement, but for this particular kind of problem they re very nearly ideal. (Canonical has tried various other approaches to software distribution, and while they address some of the problems, they aren t obviously better at helping people make reliable social judgements about code they don t know.) For a hypothetical package with a huge number of dependencies, to even try to upload it directly to Ubuntu you d need to be an Ubuntu developer with upload rights (or to go via Debian, where you d have to clear a similar hurdle). If you have those, then the first upload has to pass manual review by an archive administrator. If your package passes that, then it still has to build and get through proposed-migration CI before it reaches anything that humans typically care about. On the other hand, if you were inclined to try this sort of experiment, you d almost certainly try it in a PPA, and that would trouble nobody but yourself.

17 March 2024

Thomas Koch: Minimal overhead VMs with Nix and MicroVM

Posted on March 17, 2024
Joachim Breitner wrote about a Convenient sandboxed development environment and thus reminded me to blog about MicroVM. I ve toyed around with it a little but not yet seriously used it as I m currently not coding. MicroVM is a nix based project to configure and run minimal VMs. It can mount and thus reuse the hosts nix store inside the VM and thus has a very small disk footprint. I use MicroVM on a debian system using the nix package manager. The MicroVM author uses the project to host production services. Otherwise I consider it also a nice way to learn about NixOS after having started with the nix package manager and before making the big step to NixOS as my main system. The guests root filesystem is a tmpdir, so one must explicitly define folders that should be mounted from the host and thus be persistent across VM reboots. I defined the VM as a nix flake since this is how I started from the MicroVM projects example:
 
  description = "Haskell dev MicroVM";
  inputs.impermanence.url = "github:nix-community/impermanence";
  inputs.microvm.url = "github:astro/microvm.nix";
  inputs.microvm.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  outputs =   self, impermanence, microvm, nixpkgs  :
    let
      persistencePath = "/persistent";
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      user = "thk";
      vmname = "haskell";
      nixosConfiguration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem  
          inherit system;
          modules = [
            microvm.nixosModules.microvm
            impermanence.nixosModules.impermanence
            ( pkgs, ...  :  
            environment.persistence.$ persistencePath  =  
                hideMounts = true;
                users.$ user  =  
                  directories = [
                    "git" ".stack"
                  ];
                 ;
               ;
              environment.sessionVariables =  
                TERM = "screen-256color";
               ;
              environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
                ghc
                git
                (haskell-language-server.override   supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ];  )
                htop
                stack
                tmux
                tree
                vcsh
                zsh
              ];
              fileSystems.$ persistencePath .neededForBoot = nixpkgs.lib.mkForce true;
              microvm =  
                forwardPorts = [
                    from = "host"; host.port = 2222; guest.port = 22;  
                    from = "guest"; host.port = 5432; guest.port = 5432;   # postgresql
                ];
                hypervisor = "qemu";
                interfaces = [
                    type = "user"; id = "usernet"; mac = "00:00:00:00:00:02";  
                ];
                mem = 4096;
                shares = [  
                  # use "virtiofs" for MicroVMs that are started by systemd
                  proto = "9p";
                  tag = "ro-store";
                  # a host's /nix/store will be picked up so that no
                  # squashfs/erofs will be built for it.
                  source = "/nix/store";
                  mountPoint = "/nix/.ro-store";
                   
                  proto = "virtiofs";
                  tag = "persistent";
                  source = "~/.local/share/microvm/vms/$ vmname /persistent";
                  mountPoint = persistencePath;
                  socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-$ vmname -persistent";
                 
                ];
                socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-control.socket";
                vcpu = 3;
                volumes = [];
                writableStoreOverlay = "/nix/.rwstore";
               ;
              networking.hostName = vmname;
              nix.enable = true;
              nix.nixPath = ["nixpkgs=$ builtins.storePath <nixpkgs> "];
              nix.settings =  
                extra-experimental-features = ["nix-command" "flakes"];
                trusted-users = [user];
               ;
              security.sudo =  
                enable = true;
                wheelNeedsPassword = false;
               ;
              services.getty.autologinUser = user;
              services.openssh =  
                enable = true;
               ;
              system.stateVersion = "24.11";
              systemd.services.loadnixdb =  
                description = "import hosts nix database";
                path = [pkgs.nix];
                wantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
                requires = ["nix-daemon.service"];
                script = "cat $ persistencePath /nix-store-db-dump nix-store --load-db";
               ;
              time.timeZone = nixpkgs.lib.mkDefault "Europe/Berlin";
              users.users.$ user  =  
                extraGroups = [ "wheel" "video" ];
                group = "user";
                isNormalUser = true;
                openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
                  "ssh-rsa REDACTED"
                ];
                password = "";
               ;
              users.users.root.password = "";
              users.groups.user =  ;
             )
          ];
         ;
    in  
      packages.$ system .default = nixosConfiguration.config.microvm.declaredRunner;
     ;
 
I start the microVM with a templated systemd user service:
[Unit]
Description=MicroVM for Haskell development
Requires=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
After=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
AssertFileNotEmpty=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake/flake.nix
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sh -c "[ /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite -ot %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump ]   nix-store --dump-db >%h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump"
ExecStartPre=ln -f -t %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent/ %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump
ExecStartPre=-%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new -s microvm -d
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new-window -t microvm: -n "%i" "exec %h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix run --impure %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake"
The above service definition creates a dump of the hosts nix store db so that it can be imported in the guest. This is necessary so that the guest can actually use what is available in /nix/store. There is an effort for an overlayed nix store that would be preferable to this hack. Finally the microvm is started inside a tmux session named microvm . This way I can use the VM with SSH or through the console and also access the qemu console. And for completeness the virtiofsd service:
[Unit]
Description=serve host persistent folder for dev VM
AssertPathIsDirectory=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent
[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/virtiofsd \
 --socket-path=$ XDG_RUNTIME_DIR /microvm-%i-persistent \
 --shared-dir=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent \
 --gid-map :995:%G:1: \
 --uid-map :1000:%U:1:

14 March 2024

Matthew Garrett: Digital forgeries are hard

Closing arguments in the trial between various people and Craig Wright over whether he's Satoshi Nakamoto are wrapping up today, amongst a bewildering array of presented evidence. But one utterly astonishing aspect of this lawsuit is that expert witnesses for both sides agreed that much of the digital evidence provided by Craig Wright was unreliable in one way or another, generally including indications that it wasn't produced at the point in time it claimed to be. And it's fascinating reading through the subtle (and, in some cases, not so subtle) ways that that's revealed.

One of the pieces of evidence entered is screenshots of data from Mind Your Own Business, a business management product that's been around for some time. Craig Wright relied on screenshots of various entries from this product to support his claims around having controlled meaningful number of bitcoin before he was publicly linked to being Satoshi. If these were authentic then they'd be strong evidence linking him to the mining of coins before Bitcoin's public availability. Unfortunately the screenshots themselves weren't contemporary - the metadata shows them being created in 2020. This wouldn't fundamentally be a problem (it's entirely reasonable to create new screenshots of old material), as long as it's possible to establish that the material shown in the screenshots was created at that point. Sadly, well.

One part of the disclosed information was an email that contained a zip file that contained a raw database in the format used by MYOB. Importing that into the tool allowed an audit record to be extracted - this record showed that the relevant entries had been added to the database in 2020, shortly before the screenshots were created. This was, obviously, not strong evidence that Craig had held Bitcoin in 2009. This evidence was reported, and was responded to with a couple of additional databases that had an audit trail that was consistent with the dates in the records in question. Well, partially. The audit record included session data, showing an administrator logging into the data base in 2011 and then, uh, logging out in 2023, which is rather more consistent with someone changing their system clock to 2011 to create an entry, and switching it back to present day before logging out. In addition, the audit log included fields that didn't exist in versions of the product released before 2016, strongly suggesting that the entries dated 2009-2011 were created in software released after 2016. And even worse, the order of insertions into the database didn't line up with calendar time - an entry dated before another entry may appear in the database afterwards, indicating that it was created later. But even more obvious? The database schema used for these old entries corresponded to a version of the software released in 2023.

This is all consistent with the idea that these records were created after the fact and backdated to 2009-2011, and that after this evidence was made available further evidence was created and backdated to obfuscate that. In an unusual turn of events, during the trial Craig Wright introduced further evidence in the form of a chain of emails to his former lawyers that indicated he had provided them with login details to his MYOB instance in 2019 - before the metadata associated with the screenshots. The implication isn't entirely clear, but it suggests that either they had an opportunity to examine this data before the metadata suggests it was created, or that they faked the data? So, well, the obvious thing happened, and his former lawyers were asked whether they received these emails. The chain consisted of three emails, two of which they confirmed they'd received. And they received a third email in the chain, but it was different to the one entered in evidence. And, uh, weirdly, they'd received a copy of the email that was submitted - but they'd received it a few days earlier. In 2024.

And again, the forensic evidence is helpful here! It turns out that the email client used associates a timestamp with any attachments, which in this case included an image in the email footer - and the mysterious time travelling email had a timestamp in 2024, not 2019. This was created by the client, so was consistent with the email having been sent in 2024, not being sent in 2019 and somehow getting stuck somewhere before delivery. The date header indicates 2019, as do encoded timestamps in the MIME headers - consistent with the mail being sent by a computer with the clock set to 2019.

But there's a very weird difference between the copy of the email that was submitted in evidence and the copy that was located afterwards! The first included a header inserted by gmail that included a 2019 timestamp, while the latter had a 2024 timestamp. Is there a way to determine which of these could be the truth? It turns out there is! The format of that header changed in 2022, and the version in the email is the new version. The version with the 2019 timestamp is anachronistic - the format simply doesn't match the header that gmail would have introduced in 2019, suggesting that an email sent in 2022 or later was modified to include a timestamp of 2019.

This is by no means the only indication that Craig Wright's evidence may be misleading (there's the whole argument that the Bitcoin white paper was written in LaTeX when general consensus is that it's written in OpenOffice, given that's what the metadata claims), but it's a lovely example of a more general issue.

Our technology chains are complicated. So many moving parts end up influencing the content of the data we generate, and those parts develop over time. It's fantastically difficult to generate an artifact now that precisely corresponds to how it would look in the past, even if we go to the effort of installing an old OS on an old PC and setting the clock appropriately (are you sure you're going to be able to mimic an entirely period appropriate patch level?). Even the version of the font you use in a document may indicate it's anachronistic. I'm pretty good at computers and I no longer have any belief I could fake an old document.

(References: this Dropbox, under "Expert reports", "Patrick Madden". Initial MYOB data is in "Appendix PM7", further analysis is in "Appendix PM42", email analysis is "Sixth Expert Report of Mr Patrick Madden")

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13 March 2024

Russell Coker: The Shape of Computers

Introduction There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to. This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors. I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests. Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc. Desktop/Laptop PCs When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a add a screen to make a laptop as opposed to the add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop model but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display. The PC as box with connections for keyboard, display, etc has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors. The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2]. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US. I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it s designed for use cases that don t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales. We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn t take off largely because it wasn t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server. The Interesting New Things Watch Like The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as pocket watches for about 10 years. The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80 s? With today s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful? Phone Like Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence. Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as three fold (where three means the number of segments with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes. Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the watch part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that s enough for a lot of phone functionality. The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices. Laptop Like One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5 touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over. The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet. Another interesting thing that s on offer is a laptop with 7 touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu. Useful Hardware for Developing These Things I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap. The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too. The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it s hardware isn t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day. Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well. What We Must Do Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn t get it going. To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets. Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done even today s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable. ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do. Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it s own special apps it s not usable in a I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like ok google type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks. I will write more posts about these thing. Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

11 March 2024

Joachim Breitner: Convenient sandboxed development environment

I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy. In a way it is surprising and reassuring that, as far as I can tell, this commonly does not happen. Most open source developers out there seem to be nice and well-meaning, after all.

Convenient or it won t happen Nevertheless I thought I should do something about this. The safest option would probably to use dedicated virtual machines for the development work, with very little interaction with my main system. But knowing me, that did not seem likely to happen, as it sounded like a fair amount of hassle. So I aimed for a viable compromise between security and convenient, and one that does not get too much in the way of my current habits. For instance, it seems desirable to have the project files accessible from my unconstrained environment. This way, I could perform certain actions that need access to secret keys or tokens, but are (unlikely) to run code (e.g. git push, git pull from private repositories, gh pr create) from the outside , and the actual build environment can do without access to these secrets. The user experience I thus want is a quick way to enter a development environment where I can do most of the things I need to do while programming (network access, running command line and GUI programs), with access to the current project, but without access to my actual /home directory. I initially followed the blog post Application Isolation using NixOS Containers by Marcin Sucharski and got something working that mostly did what I wanted, but then a colleague pointed out that tools like firejail can achieve roughly the same with a less global setup. I tried to use firejail, but found it to be a bit too inflexible for my particular whims, so I ended up writing a small wrapper around the lower level sandboxing tool https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap.

Selective bubblewrapping This script, called dev and included below, builds a new filesystem namespace with minimal /proc and /dev directories, it s own /tmp directories. It then binds-mound some directories to make the host s NixOS system available inside the container (/bin, /usr, the nix store including domain socket, stuff for OpenGL applications). My user s home directory is taken from ~/.dev-home and some configuration files are bind-mounted for convenient sharing. I intentionally don t share most of the configuration for example, a direnv enable in the dev environment should not affect the main environment. The X11 socket for graphical applications and the corresponding .Xauthority file is made available. And finally, if I run dev in a project directory, this project directory is bind mounted writable, and the current working directory is preserved. The effect is that I can type dev on the command line to enter dev mode rather conveniently. I can run development tools, including graphical ones like VSCode, and especially the latter with its extensions is part of the sandbox. To do a git push I either exit the development environment (Ctrl-D) or open a separate terminal. Overall, the inconvenience of switching back and forth seems worth the extra protection. Clearly, isn t going to hold against a determined and maybe targeted attacker (e.g. access to the X11 and the nix daemon socket can probably be used to escape easily). But I hope it will help against a compromised dev dependency that just deletes or exfiltrates data, like keys or passwords, from the usual places in $HOME.

Rough corners There is more polishing that could be done.
  • In particular, clicking on a link inside VSCode in the container will currently open Firefox inside the container, without access to my settings and cookies etc. Ideally, links would be opened in the Firefox running outside. This is a problem that has a solution in the world of applications that are sandboxed with Flatpak, and involves a bunch of moving parts (a xdg-desktop-portal user service, a filtering dbus proxy, exposing access to that proxy in the container). I experimented with that for a bit longer than I should have, but could not get it to work to satisfaction (even without a container involved, I could not get xdg-desktop-portal to heed my default browser settings ). For now I will live with manually copying and pasting URLs, we ll see how long this lasts.
  • With this setup (and unlike the NixOS container setup I tried first), the same applications are installed inside and outside. It might be useful to separate the set of installed programs: There is simply no point in running evolution or firefox inside the container, and if I do not even have VSCode or cabal available outside, so that it s less likely that I forget to enter dev before using these tools. It shouldn t be too hard to cargo-cult some of the NixOS Containers infrastructure to be able to have a separate system configuration that I can manage as part of my normal system configuration and make available to bubblewrap here.
So likely I will refine this some more over time. Or get tired of typing dev and going back to what I did before

The script
The dev script (at the time of writing)

7 March 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: prrd 0.0.6 at CRAN: Several Improvements

Thrilled to share that a new version of prrd arrived at CRAN yesterday in a first update in two and a half years. prrd facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and others. prrd screenshot image The key idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development that is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session). This release, the first since 2021, brings a number of enhancments. In particular, the summary function is now improved in several ways. Josh also put in a nice PR that generalizes some setup defaults and values. The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.6 (2024-03-06)
  • The summary function has received several enhancements:
    • Extended summary is only running when failures are seen.
    • The summariseQueue function now displays an anticipated completion time and remaining duration.
    • The use of optional package foghorn has been refined, and refactored, when running summaries.
  • The dequeueJobs.r scripts can receive a date argument, the date can be parse via anydate if anytime ins present.
  • The enqueeJobs.r now considers skipped package when running 'addfailed' while ensuring selecting packages are still on CRAN.
  • The CI setup has been updated (twice),
  • Enqueing and dequing functions and scripts now support relative directories, updated documentation (#18 by Joshua Ulrich).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Guido G nther: Phosh Nightly Package Builds

Tightening the feedback loop Link to heading One thing we notice ever so often is that although Phosh s source code is publicly available and upcoming changes are open for review the feedback loop between changes being made to the development branch and users noticing the change can still be quiet long. This can be problematic as we ideally want to catch a regression or broken use case triggered by a change on the development branch (aka main) before the general availability of a new version.

Gunnar Wolf: Constructed truths truth and knowledge in a post-truth world

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Constructed truths truth and knowledge in a post-truth world , a book published in Springer Link
Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their brand s value. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are witnessing what has been termed the post-truth phenomenon. The undeniable freedom that horizontal communication has given us automatically brings with it the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and truth seems to become a group belief. Contrary to my original expectations, the core topic of the book is not about how current-day media brings about post-truth mindsets. Instead it goes into a much deeper philosophical debate: What is truth? Does truth exist by itself, objectively, or is it a social construct? If activists with different political leanings debate a given subject, is it even possible for them to understand the same points for debate, or do they truly experience parallel realities? The author wrote this book clearly prompted by the unprecedented events that took place in 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis forced humanity into isolation and online communication. Donald Trump is explicitly and repeatedly presented throughout the book as an example of an actor that took advantage of the distortions caused by post-truth. The first chapter frames the narrative from the perspective of information flow over the last several decades, on how the emergence of horizontal, uncensored communication free of editorial oversight started empowering the netizens and created a temporary information flow utopia. But soon afterwards, algorithmic gatekeepers started appearing, creating a set of personalized distortions on reality; users started getting news aligned to what they already showed interest in. This led to an increase in polarization and the growth of narrative-framing-specific communities that served as echo chambers for disjoint views on reality. This led to the growth of conspiracy theories and, necessarily, to the science denial and pseudoscience that reached unimaginable peaks during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, when readers decide based on completely subjective criteria whether a scientific theory such as global warming is true or propaganda, or question what most traditional news outlets present as facts, we face the phenomenon known as fake news. Fake news leads to post-truth, a state where it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and serves only a rhetorical function, making rational discourse impossible. Toward the end of the first chapter, the tone of writing quickly turns away from describing developments in the spread of news and facts over the last decades and quickly goes deep into philosophy, into the very thorny subject pursued by said discipline for millennia: How can truth be defined? Can different perspectives bring about different truth values for any given idea? Does truth depend on the observer, on their knowledge of facts, on their moral compass or in their honest opinions? Zoglauer dives into epistemology, following various thinkers ideas on what can be understood as truth: constructivism (whether knowledge and truth values can be learnt by an individual building from their personal experience), objectivity (whether experiences, and thus truth, are universal, or whether they are naturally individual), and whether we can proclaim something to be true when it corresponds to reality. For the final chapter, he dives into the role information and knowledge play in assigning and understanding truth value, as well as the value of second-hand knowledge: Do we really own knowledge because we can look up facts online (even if we carefully check the sources)? Can I, without any medical training, diagnose a sickness and treatment by honestly and carefully looking up its symptoms in medical databases? Wrapping up, while I very much enjoyed reading this book, I must confess it is completely different from what I expected. This book digs much more into the abstract than into information flow in modern society, or the impact on early 2020s politics as its editorial description suggests. At 160 pages, the book is not a heavy read, and Zoglauer s writing style is easy to follow, even across the potentially very deep topics it presents. Its main readership is not necessarily computing practitioners or academics. However, for people trying to better understand epistemology through its expressions in the modern world, it will be a very worthy read.

3 March 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.1.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix, Interface Polish

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1130 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.8 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 578 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.1 prepared by Conrad yesterday. It was delayed for a few hours as CRAN noticed an error in one package which we all concluded was spurious as it could be reproduced outside of the one run there. Following from the previous release, we also use the slighty faster Lighter header in the examples. And once it got to CRAN I also updated the Debian package. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.1.0 (2024-03-02)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.1 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Workaround in norm() for yet another bug in macOS accelerate framework
  • Update README for RcppArmadillo usage counts
  • Update examples to use '#include <RcppArmadillo/Lighter>' for faster compilation excluding unused Rcpp features

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities Feb 2024

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

Changes

Issues

Review
  • Spam: reported 1 Debian bug report
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: ovito, tahoe-lafs, tpm2-tss-engine
  • Debian wiki: produce HTML dump for a user, unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

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

Sponsors The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

2 March 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: Malaysia Trip

Last month, I had a trip to Malaysia and Thailand. I stayed for six days in each of the countries. The selection of these countries was due to both of them granting visa-free entry to Indian tourists for some time window. This post covers the Malaysia part and Thailand part will be covered in the next post. If you want to travel to any of these countries in the visa-free time period, I have written all the questions asked during immigration and at airports during this trip here which might be of help. I mostly stayed in Kuala Lumpur and went to places around it. Although before the trip, I planned to visit Ipoh and Cameron Highlands too, but could not cover it during the trip. I found planning a trip to Malaysia a little difficult. The country is divided into two main islands - Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. Then there are more islands - Langkawi, Penang island, Perhentian and Redang Islands. Reaching those islands seemed a little difficult to plan and I wish to visit more places in my next Malaysia trip. My first day hostel was booked in Chinatown part of Kuala Lumpur, near Pasar Seni LRT station. As soon as I checked-in and entered my room, I met another Indian named Fletcher, and after that we accompanied each other in the trip. That day, we went to Muzium Negara and Little India. I realized that if you know the right places to buy what you want, Malaysia could be quite cheap. Malaysian currency is Malaysian Ringgit (MYR). 1 MYR is equal to 18 INR. For 2 MYR, you can get a good masala tea in Little India and it costs like 4-5 MYR for a masala dosa. The vegetarian food has good availability in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to the Tamil community. I also tried Mee Goreng, which was vegetarian, and I found it fine in terms of taste. When I checked about Mee Goreng on Wikipedia, I found out that it is unique to Indian immigrants in Malaysia (and neighboring countries) but you don t get it in India!
Mee Goreng, a dish made of noodles in Malaysia.
For the next day, Fletcher had planned a trip to Genting Highlands and pre booked everything. I also planned to join him but when we went to KL Sentral to take the bus, his bus tickets were sold out. I could take a bus at a different time, but decided to visit some other place for the day and cover Genting Highlands later. At the ticket counter, I met a family from Delhi and they wanted to go to Genting Highlands but due to not getting bus tickets for that day, they decided to buy a ticket for the next day and instead planned for Batu Caves that day. I joined them and went to Batu Caves. After returning from Batu Caves, we went our separate ways. I went back and took rest at my hostel and later went to Petronas Towers at night. Petronas Towers is the icon of Kuala Lumpur. Having a photo there was a must. I was at Petronas Towers at around 9 PM. Around that time, Fletcher came back from Genting Highlands and we planned to meet at KL Sentral to head for dinner.
Me at Petronas Towers.
We went back to the same place as the day before where I had Mee Goreng. This time we had dosa and a masala tea. Their masala tea from the last day was tasty and that s why I was looking for them in the first place. We also met a Malaysian family having Indian ancestry dining there and had a nice conversation. Then we went to a place to eat roti canai in Pasar Seni market. Roti canai is a popular non-vegetarian dish in Malaysia but I took the vegetarian version.
Photo with Malaysians.
The next day, we went to Berjaya Time Square shopping place which sells pretty cheap items for daily use and souveniers too. However, I bought souveniers from Petaling Street, which is in Chinatown. At night, we explored Bukit Bintang, which is the heart of Kuala Lumpur and is famous for its nightlife. After that, Fletcher went to Bangkok and I was in Malaysia for two more days. Next day, I went to Genting Highlands and took the cable car, which had awesome views. I came back to Kuala Lumpur by the night. The remaining day I just roamed around in Bukit Bintang. Then I took a flight for Bangkok on 7th Feb, which I will cover in the next post. In Malaysia, I met so many people from different countries - apart from people from Indian subcontinent, I met Syrians, Indonesians (Malaysia seems to be a popular destination for Indonesian tourists) and Burmese people. Meeting people from other cultures is an integral part of travel for me. My expenses for Food + Accommodation + Travel added to 10,000 INR for a week in Malaysia, while flight costs were: 13,000 INR (Delhi to Kuala Lumpur) + 10,000 INR (Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok) + 12,000 INR (Bangkok to Delhi). For OpenStreetMap users, good news is Kuala Lumpur is fairly well-mapped on OpenStreetMap.

Tips
  • I bought local SIM from a shop at KL Sentral station complex which had news in their name (I forgot the exact name and there are two shops having news in their name) and it was the cheapest option I could find. The SIM was 10 MYR for 5 GB data for a week. If you want to make calls too, then you need to spend extra 5 MYR.
  • 7-Eleven and KK Mart convenience stores are everywhere in the city and they are open all the time (24 hours a day). If you are a vegetarian, you can at least get some bread and cheese from there to eat.
  • A lot of people know English (and many - Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis - know Hindi) in Kuala Lumpur, so I had no language problems most of the time.
  • For shopping on budget, you can go to Petaling Street, Berjaya Time Square or Bukit Bintang. In particular, there is a shop named I Love KL Gifts in Bukit Bintang which had very good prices. just near the metro/monorail stattion. Check out location of the shop on OpenStreetMap.

26 February 2024

Sergio Durigan Junior: Planning to orphan Pagure on Debian

I have been thinking more and more about orphaning the Pagure Debian package. I don t have the time to maintain it properly anymore, and I have also lost interest in doing so.

What s Pagure Pagure is a git forge written entirely in Python using pygit2. It was almost entirely developed by one person, Pierre-Yves Chibon. He is (was?) a Red Hat employee and started working on this new git forge almost 10 years ago because the company wanted to develop something in-house for Fedora. The software is amazing and I admire Pierre-Yves quite a lot for what he was able to achieve basically alone. Unfortunately, a few years ago Fedora decided to move to Gitlab and the Pagure development pretty much stalled.

Pagure in Debian Packaging Pagure for Debian was hard, but it was also very fun. I learned quite a bit about many things (packaging and non-packaging related), interacted with the upstream community, decided to dogfood my own work and run my Pagure instance for a while, and tried to get newcomers to help me with the package (without much success, unfortunately). I remember that when I had started to package Pagure, Debian was also moving away from Alioth and discussing options. For a brief moment Pagure was a contender, but in the end the community decided to self-host Gitlab, and that s why we have Salsa now. I feel like I could have tipped the scales in favour of Pagure had I finished packaging it for Debian before the decision was made, but then again, to the best of my knowledge Salsa doesn t use our Gitlab package anyway

Are you interested in maintaining it? If you re interested in maintaining the package, please get in touch with me. I will happily pass the torch to someone else who is still using the software and wants to keep it healthy in Debian. If there is nobody interested, then I will just orphan it.

Freexian Collaborators: Long term support for Samba 4.17

Freexian is pleased to announce a partnership with Catalyst to extend the security support of Samba 4.17, which is the version packaged in Debian 12 Bookworm. Samba 4.17 will reach upstream s end-of-support this upcoming March (2024), and the goal of this partnership is to extend it until June 2028 (i.e. the end of Debian 12 s regular security support). One of the main aspects of this project is that it will also include support for Samba as Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC). Unfortunately, support for Samba as AD-DC in Debian 11 Bullseye, Debian 10 Buster and older releases has been discontinued before the end of the life cycle of those Debian releases. So we really expect to improve the situation of Samba in Debian 12 Bookworm, ensuring full support during the 5 years of regular security support. We would like to mention that this is an experiment, and we will do our best to make it a success, and to try to continue it for Samba versions included in future Debian releases. Our long term goal is to bring confidence to Samba s upstream development community that they can mark some releases as being supported for 5 years (or more) and that the corresponding work will be funded by companies that benefit from this work (because we would have already built that community). If your company relies on Samba and wants to help sustain LTS versions of Samba, please reach out to us. For companies using Debian, the simplest way is to subscribe to our Debian LTS offer at a gold level (or above) and let us know that you want to contribute to Samba LTS when you send your subscription form. For others, please reach out to us at sales@freexian.com and we will figure out a way to contribute. In the mean time, this project has been possible thanks to the current LTS sponsors and ELTS customers. We hope the whole community of Debian and Samba users will benefit from it. For any question, don t hesitate to contact us.

25 February 2024

Jacob Adams: AAC and Debian

Currently, in a default installation of Debian with the GNOME desktop, Bluetooth headphones that require the AAC codec1 cannot be used. As the Debian wiki outlines, using the AAC codec over Bluetooth, while technically supported by PipeWire, is explicitly disabled in Debian at this time. This is because the fdk-aac library needed to enable this support is currently in the non-free component of the repository, meaning that PipeWire, which is in the main component, cannot depend on it.

How to Fix it Yourself If what you, like me, need is simply for Bluetooth Audio to work with AAC in Debian s default desktop environment2, then you ll need to rebuild the pipewire package to include the AAC codec. While the current version in Debian main has been built with AAC deliberately disabled, it is trivial to enable if you can install a version of the fdk-aac library. I preface this with the usual caveats when it comes to patent and licensing controversies. I am not a lawyer, building this package and/or using it could get you into legal trouble. These instructions have only been tested on an up-to-date copy of Debian 12.
  1. Install pipewire s build dependencies
    sudo apt install build-essential devscripts
    sudo apt build-dep pipewire
    
  2. Install libfdk-aac-dev
    sudo apt install libfdk-aac-dev
    
    If the above doesn t work you ll likely need to enable non-free and try again
    sudo sed -i 's/main/main non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
    sudo apt update
    
    Alternatively, if you wish to ensure you are maximally license-compliant and patent un-infringing3, you can instead build fdk-aac-free which includes only those components of AAC that are known to be patent-free3. This is what should eventually end up in Debian to resolve this problem (see below).
    sudo apt install git-buildpackage
    mkdir fdk-aac-source
    cd fdk-aac-source
    git clone https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/fdk-aac
    cd fdk-aac
    gbp buildpackage
    sudo dpkg -i ../libfdk-aac2_*deb ../libfdk-aac-dev_*deb
    
  3. Get the pipewire source code
    mkdir pipewire-source
    cd pipewire-source
    apt source pipewire
    
    This will create a bunch of files within the pipewire-source directory, but you ll only need the pipewire-<version> folder, this contains all the files you ll need to build the package, with all the debian-specific patches already applied. Note that you don t want to run the apt source command as root, as it will then create files that your regular user cannot edit.
  4. Fix the dependencies and build options To fix up the build scripts to use the fdk-aac library, you need to save the following as pipewire-source/aac.patch
    --- debian/control.orig
    +++ debian/control
    @@ -40,8 +40,8 @@
                 modemmanager-dev,
                 pkg-config,
                 python3-docutils,
    -               systemd [linux-any]
    -Build-Conflicts: libfdk-aac-dev
    +               systemd [linux-any],
    +               libfdk-aac-dev
     Standards-Version: 4.6.2
     Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire
     Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire.git
    --- debian/rules.orig
    +++ debian/rules
    @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
     		-Dauto_features=enabled \
     		-Davahi=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-backend-native-mm=enabled \
    -		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=disabled \
    +		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-aptx=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3plus=disabled \
    
    Then you ll need to run patch from within the pipewire-<version> folder created by apt source:
    patch -p0 < ../aac.patch
    
  5. Build pipewire
    cd pipewire-*
    debuild
    
    Note that you will likely see an error from debsign at the end of this process, this is harmless, you simply don t have a GPG key set up to sign your newly-built package4. Packages don t need to be signed to be installed, and debsign uses a somewhat non-standard signing process that dpkg does not check anyway.
  1. Install libspa-0.2-bluetooth
    sudo dpkg -i libspa-0.2-bluetooth_*.deb
    
  2. Restart PipeWire and/or Reboot
    sudo reboot
    
    Theoretically there s a set of services to restart here that would get pipewire to pick up the new library, probably just pipewire itself. But it s just as easy to restart and ensure everything is using the correct library.

Why This is a slightly unusual situation, as the fdk-aac library is licensed under what even the GNU project acknowledges is a free software license. However, this license explicitly informs the user that they need to acquire a patent license to use this software5:
3. NO PATENT LICENSE NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without limitation the patents of Fraunhofer, ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with respect to this software. You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses.
To quote the GNU project:
Because of this, and because the license author is a known patent aggressor, we encourage you to be careful about using or redistributing software under this license: you should first consider whether the licensor might aim to lure you into patent infringement.
AAC is covered by a number of patents, which expire at some point in the 2030s6. As such the current version of the library is potentially legally dubious to ship with any other software, as it could be considered patent-infringing3.

Fedora s solution Since 2017, Fedora has included a modified version of the library as fdk-aac-free, see the announcement and the bugzilla bug requesting review. This version of the library includes only the AAC LC profile, which is believed to be entirely patent-free3. Based on this, there is an open bug report in Debian requesting that the fdk-aac package be moved to the main component and that the pipwire package be updated to build against it.

The Debian NEW queue To resolve these bugs, a version of fdk-aac-free has been uploaded to Debian by Jeremy Bicha. However, to make it into Debian proper, it must first pass through the ftpmaster s NEW queue. The current version of fdk-aac-free has been in the NEW queue since July 2023. Based on conversations in some of the bugs above, it s been there since at least 20227. I hope this helps anyone stuck with AAC to get their hardware working for them while we wait for the package to eventually make it through the NEW queue. Discuss on Hacker News
  1. Such as, for example, any Apple AirPods, which only support AAC AFAICT.
  2. Which, as of Debian 12 is GNOME 3 under Wayland with PipeWire.
  3. I m not a lawyer, I don t know what kinds of infringement might or might not be possible here, do your own research, etc. 2 3 4
  4. And if you DO have a key setup with debsign you almost certainly don t need these instructions.
  5. This was originally phrased as explicitly does not grant any patent rights. It was pointed out on Hacker News that this is not exactly what it says, as it also includes a specific note that you ll need to acquire your own patent license. I ve now quoted the relevant section of the license for clarity.
  6. Wikipedia claims the base patents expire in 2031, with the extensions expiring in 2038, but its source for these claims is some guy s spreadsheet in a forum. The same discussion also brings up Wikipedia s claim and casts some doubt on it, so I m not entirely sure what s correct here, but I didn t feel like doing a patent deep-dive today. If someone can provide a clear answer that would be much appreciated.
  7. According to Jeremy B cha: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021370#17

18 February 2024

Iustin Pop: New skis , new fun!

As I wrote a bit back, I had a really, really bad fourth quarter in 2023. As new years approached, and we were getting ready to go on a ski trip, I wasn t even sure if and how much I ll be able to ski. And I felt so out of it that I didn t even buy a ski pass for the whole week, just bought one day to see if a) I still like, and b) my knee can deal with it. And, of course, it was good. It was good enough that I ended up skiing the entire week, and my knee got better during the week. WTH?! I don t understand this anymore, but it was good. Good enough that this early year trip put me back on track and I started doing sports again. But the main point is, that during this ski week, and talking to the teacher, I realised that my ski equipment is getting a bit old. I bought everything roughly ten years ago, and while they still hold up OK, my ski skills have improved since then. I said to myself, 10 years is a good run, I ll replace this year the skis, next year the boot & helmet, etc. I didn t expect much from new skis - I mean, yes, better skis, but what does better mean? Well, once I ve read enough forum posts, apparently the skis I selected are that good , which to me meant they re not bad. Oh my, how wrong I was! Double, triple wrong! Rather than fighting with the skis, it s enough to think what I wand to do, and the skis do it. I felt OK-ish, maybe 10% limited by my previous skis, but the new skis are really good and also I know that I m just at 30% or so of the new skis - so room to grow. For now, I am able to ski faster, longer, and I feel less tired than before. I ve actually compared and I can do twice the distance in a day and feel slightly less tired at the end. I ve moved from this black is cool but a bit difficult, I ll do another run later in the day when I ve recovered to how cool, this blacks is quite empty of people, let s stay here for 2-3 more rounds . The skis are new, and I haven t used them on all the places I m familiar with - but the upgrade is huge. The people on the ski forum were actually not exaggerating, I realise now. St ckli++, and they re also made in Switzerland. Can t wait to get back to Saas Fee and to the couple of slopes that were killing me before, to see how they feel now. So, very happy with this choice. I d be even happier if my legs were less damaged, but well, you can t win them all. And not last, the skis are also very cool looking

Russell Coker: Release Years

In 2008 I wrote about the idea of having a scheduled release for Debian and other distributions as Mark Shuttleworth had proposed [1]. I still believe that Mark s original idea for synchronised release dates of Linux distributions (or at least synchronised feature sets) is a good one but unfortunately it didn t take off. Having been using Ubuntu a bit recently I ve found the version numbering system to be really good. Ubuntu version 16.04 was release in April 2016, it s support ended 5 years later in about April 2021, so any commonly available computers from 2020 should run it well and versions of applications released in about 2017 should run on it. If I have to support a Debian 10 (Buster) system I need to start with a web search to discover when it was released (July 2019). That suggests that applications packaged for Ubuntu 18.04 are likely to run on it. If we had the same numbering system for Debian and Ubuntu then it would be easier to compare versions. Debian 19.06 would be obviously similar to Ubuntu 18.04, or we could plan for the future and call it Debian 2019. Then it would be ideal if hardware vendors did the same thing (as car manufacturers have been doing for a long time). Which versions of Ubuntu and Debian would run well on a Dell PowerEdge R750? It takes a little searching to discover that the R750 was released in 2021, but if they called it a PowerEdge 2021R70 then it would be quite obvious that Ubuntu 2022.04 would run well on it and that Ubuntu 2020.04 probably has a kernel update with all the hardware supported. One of the benefits for the car industry in naming model years is that it drives the purchase of a new car. A 2015 car probably isn t going to impress anyone and you will know that it is missing some of the features in more recent models. It would be easier to get management to sign off on replacing old computers if they had 2015 on the front, trying to estimate hidden costs of support and lost productivity of using old computers is hard but saying it s a 2015 model and way out of date is easy. There is a history of using dates as software versions. The Reference Policy for SE Linux [2] (which is used for Debian) has releases based on date. During the Debian development process I upload policy to Debian based on the upstream Git and use the same version numbering scheme which is more convenient than the append git date to last full release system that some maintainers are forced to use. The users can get an idea of how much the Debian/Unstable policy has diverged from the last full release by looking at the dates. Also an observer might see the short difference between release dates of SE Linux policy and Debian release freeze dates as an indication that I beg the upstream maintainers to make a new release just before each Debian freeze which is expactly what I do. When I took over the Portslave [3] program I made releases based on date because there were several forks with different version numbering schemes so my options were to just choose a higher number (which is OK initially but doesn t scale if there are more forks) or use a date and have people know that the recent date is the most recent version. The fact that the latest release of Portslave is version 2010.04.19 shows that I have not been maintaining it in recent years (due to lack of hardware as well as lack of interest), so if someone wants to take over the project I would be happy to help them do so! I don t expect people at Dell and other hardware vendors to take much notice of my ideas (I have tweeted them photographic evidence of a problem with no good response). But hopefully this will start a discussion in the free software community.

10 February 2024

Andrew Cater: Debian point releases - updated media for Bullseye (11.9) and Bookworm (12.5) - 2024-02-10

It's been a LONG day: two point releases in a day takes of the order of twelve or thirteen hours of fairly solid work on behalf of those doing the releases and testing.Thanks firstly to the main Debian release team for all the initial work.Thanks to Isy, RattusRattus, Sledge and egw in Cottenham, smcv and Helen closer to the centre of Cambridge, cacin and others who have dropped in and out of IRC and helped testing.

I've been at home but active on IRC - missing the team (and the food) and drinking far too much coffee/eating too many biscuits.

We've found relatively few bugs that we haven't previously noted: it's been a good day. Back again, at some point a couple of months from now to do this all over again.With luck, I can embed a picture of the Cottenham folk below: it's fun to know _exactly_ where people are because you've been there yourself.



8 February 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, Interface Polish

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 575 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new (stable) upstream (minor) release Armadillo 12.8.0 prepared by Conrad two days ago. We, as usual, prepared a release candidate which we tested against the over 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. This found no issues, which was confirmed by CRAN once we uploaded and so it arrived as a new release today in a fully automated fashion. We also made a small change that had been prepared by GitHub issue #400: a few internal header files that were cluttering the top-level of the include directory have been moved to internal directories. The standard header is of course unaffected, and the set of full / light / lighter / lightest headers (matching we did a while back in Rcpp) also continue to work as one expects. This change was also tested in a full reverse-dependency check in January but had not been released to CRAN yet. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.0.0 (2024-02-06)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.0 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Faster detection of symmetric expressions by pinv() and rank()
    • Expanded shift() to handle sparse matrices
    • Expanded conv_to for more flexible conversions between sparse and dense matrices
    • Added cbrt()
    • More compact representation of integers when saving matrices in CSV format
  • Five non-user facing top-level include files have been removed (#432 closing #400 and building on #395 and #396)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

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