Shirish Agarwal: John Grisham s books, Evolution removed from textbooks
The more I say, the more depressed I will become so will leave it for now. In many ways the destruction seems similar to the destruction that happened in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. So as can be seen from what I have shared this book was mostly about environment and punitive damages and also how punitive damages have been ceiling in America (South). This was done via lobbying by the coal groups and apparently destroyed people s lives, communities, even whole villages. It also shared how most people called black lung and how those claims had been denied by Coal Companies all the time. And there are hardly any unions. While the book itself is a fiction piece, there is a large amount of truth in it. And that is one of the reasons people write a fiction book. You could write about reality using fictional names and nobody can sue you while you set the reality as it is. In many ways, it is a tell-all.
Welcome to the August 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
The US National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have released a document called Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers (PDF) as part of their Enduring Security Framework (ESF) work.
The document expressly recommends having reproducible builds as part of advanced recommended mitigations, along with hermetic builds. Page 31 (page 35 in the PDF) says:
Reproducible builds provide additional protection and validation against attempts to compromise build systems. They ensure the binary products of each build system match: i.e., they are built from the same source, regardless of variable metadata such as the order of input files, timestamps, locales, and paths. Reproducible builds are those where re-running the build steps with identical input artifacts results in bit-for-bit identical output. Builds that cannot meet this must provide a justification why the build cannot be made reproducible.The full press release is available online.
On our mailing list this month, Marc Prud hommeaux posted a feature request for diffoscope which additionally outlines a project called The App Fair, an autonomous distribution network of free and open-source macOS and iOS applications, where validated apps are then signed and submitted for publication .
This is the core of a two-decade-old debate among security people, and it s one that the benevolent God faction has consistently had the upper hand in. They re the curated computing advocates who insist that preventing you from choosing an alternative app store or side-loading a program is for your own good because if it s possible for you to override the manufacturer s wishes, then malicious software may impersonate you to do so, or you might be tricked into doing so. [..] This benevolent dictatorship model only works so long as the dictator is both perfectly benevolent and perfectly competent. We know the dictators aren t always benevolent. [ ] But even if you trust a dictator s benevolence, you can t trust in their perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. Benevolent dictator computing works well, but fails badly. Designing a computer that intentionally can t be fully controlled by its owner is a nightmare, because that is a computer that, once compromised, can attack its owner with impunity.
In Debian this month, the essential and required package sets became 100% reproducible in Debian bookworm on the amd64 and arm64 architectures. These two subsets of the full Debian archive refer to Debian package priority levels as described in the 2.5 Priorities section of the Debian Policy there is no canonical minimal installation package set in Debian due to its diverse methods of installation.
As it happens, these package sets are not reproducible on the i386 architecture because the ncurses package on that architecture is not yet reproducible, and the sed package currently fails to build from source on armhf too. The full list of reproducible packages within these package sets can be viewed within our QA system, such as on the page of required packages in amd64 and the list of essential packages on arm64, both for Debian bullseye.
podman on Debian bullseye:
$ sudo apt install podman
$ podman run --rm -it debian:bullseye bash
$ SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=$(date --utc --date=2022-08-29 +%s) mmdebstrap unstable > unstable.tar
$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to be not greater than SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
/etc/machine-id, /var/cache/ldconfig/aux-cache, /var/log/dpkg.log, /var/log/alternatives.log and /var/log/bootstrap.log, and for cdebootstrap we also need to delete the /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/apt/term.log files as well.
/etc/machine-id file in both debootstrap [ ] and cdebootstrap [ ].
randomness_in_browserify_output [ ], haskell_abi_hash_differences [ ], nondeterministic_ids_in_html_output_generated_by_python_sphinx_panels [ ]. Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo removed the deterministic flag from the captures_kernel_variant flag [ ].
Vagrant Cascadian posted an update of the status of Reproducible Builds in GNU Guix, writing that:
The post itself contains a lot more details, including a brief discussion of tooling. Elsewhere in GNU Guix, however, Vagrant updated a number of packages such asIgnoring the pesky unknown packages, it is more like ~93% reproducibleand ~7% unreproducible... that feels a bit better to me!These numbers wander around over time, mostly due to packages movingback into an "unknown" state while the build farms catch up with eachother... although the above numbers seem to have been pretty consistentover the last few days.
itpp [ ], perl-class-methodmaker [ ], libnet [ ], directfb [ ] and mm-common [ ], as well as updated the version of reprotest to 0.7.21 [ ].
In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 220 and 221 to Debian, as well as made the following changes:
external_tools.py to reflect changes to xxd and the vim-common package. [ ]xxd package now, not the vim-common package. [ ]at-spi-sharp (build failure when build on a multiprocessor machine).borgbackup (fails to build in 2038, fix)buzztrax (parallelism-related issue)chart-testing (date-related issue)memcached (fails to build in 2038)nim (fails to build in 2038)perl-Time-Moment (fails to build in 2038)python-bson (fails to build in 2038)python-heatclient (fails to build in 2038)python3.8 (fails to build in 2038)reproducible-faketoolss3fs (date-related issue)systemd (date-related issue)wayfire.multipath-tools.node-canvas-confetti.psi (forwarded upstream).sphinx-panels (forwarded upstream).sysfsutils.geeqie.
The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
deb-src lines to enable test builds a Non-maintainer Upload (NMU) campaign targeting 708 sources without .buildinfo files found in Debian unstable, including 475 in bookworm. [ ][ ]linux-image-generic kernel package installed. [ ]SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for all our new bootstrap jobs. [ ]/bin/sh symlink [ ].
#reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
$HTTP_PROXY isn t set.
:wq for today.
Too much has been written, a war of support letters is going on, Debian is heading head first like Lemmings into the same war. And then, there is this by the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):
Civil Rights Activist Nadine Strossen s Response To #CancelStallman:
I find it so odd that the strong zeal for revenge and punishment if someone says anything that is perceived to be sexist or racist or discriminatory comes from liberals and progressives. There are so many violations [in cases like Stallman s] of such fundamental principles to which progressives and liberals cling in general as to what is justice, what is fairness, what is due process.Unfortunately, I don t think the Anti-Harassment Team of Debian and others of the usual group of warriors will ever read less understand what is written there. So sad.
One is proportionality: that the punishment should be proportional to the offense. Another one is restorative justice: that rather than retribution and punishment, we should seek to have the person constructively come to understand, repent, and make amends for an infraction. Liberals generally believe society to be too punitive, too harsh, not forgiving enough. They are certainly against the death penalty and other harsh punishments even for the most violent, the mass murderers. Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don t understand the double standard!
Another cardinal principle is we shouldn t have any guilt by association. [To hold culpable] these board members who were affiliated with him and ostensibly didn t do enough to punish him for things that he said which by the way were completely separate from the Free Software Foundation is multiplying the problems of unwarranted punishment. It extends the punishment where the argument for responsibility and culpability becomes thinner and thinner to the vanishing point. That is also going to have an enormous adverse impact on the freedom of association, which is an important right protected in the U.S. by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court has upheld freedom of association in cases involving organizations that were at the time highly controversial. It started with NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, but we have a case that s going to the Supreme Court right now regarding Black Lives Matter. The Supreme Court says even if one member of the group does commit a crime in both of those cases physical violence and assault that is not a justification for punishing other members of the group unless they specifically intended to participate in the particular punishable conduct.
Now, let s assume for the sake of argument, Stallman had an attitude that was objectively described as discriminatory on the basis on race and gender (and by the way I have seen nothing to indicate that), that he s an unrepentant misogynist, who really believes women are inferior. We are not going to correct those ideas, to enlighten him towards rejecting them and deciding to treat women as equals through a punitive approach! The only approach that could possibly work is an educational one! Engaging in speech, dialogue, discussion and leading him to re-examine his own ideas.
Even if I strongly disagree with a position or an idea, an expression of an idea, advocacy of an idea, and even if the vast majority of the public disagrees with the idea and finds it offensive, that is not a justification for suppressing the idea. And it s not a justification for taking away the equal rights of the person who espouses that idea including the right to continue holding a tenured position or other prominent position for which that person is qualified.
But a number of the ideas for which Richard Stallman has been attacked and punished are ideas that I as a feminist advocate of human rights find completely correct and positive from the perspective of women s equality and dignity! So for example, when he talks about the misuse and over use and flawed use of the term sexual assault, I completely agree with that critique! People are indiscriminantly using that term or synonyms to describe everything from the most appaulling violent abuse of helpless vulnerable victims (such as a rape of a minor) to any conduct or expression in the realm of gender or sexuality that they find unpleasant or disagreeable.
So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn t find that an appealing invitation. Maybe he used poor judgement in asking her out, maybe he didn t, but in any case that is NOT sexual assault or harassment. To call it that is to really demean the huge horror and violence and predation that does exist when you are talking about violent sexual assault. People use the term sexual assault/ sexual harassment to refer to any comment about gender or sexuality issues that they disagree with or a joke that might not be in the best taste, again is that to be commended? No! But to condemn it and equate it with a violent sexual assault again is really denying and demeaning the actual suffering that people who are victims of sexual assault endure. It trivializes the serious infractions that are committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. So that is one point that he made that I think is very important that I strongly agree with.
Secondly and relatedly, [Richard Stallman] never said that he endorse child pornography, which by definition the United States Supreme Court has defined it multiple times is the sexual exploitation of an actual minor. Coerced, forced, sexual activity by that minor, with that minor that happens to be filmed or photographed. That is the definition of child pornography. He never defends that! What the point he makes, a very important one, which the U.S. Supreme Court has also made, is mainly that we overuse and distort the term child pornography to refer to any depiction of any minor in any context that is even vaguely sexual.
So some people have not only denounced as child pornography but prosecuted and jailed loving devoted parents who committed the crime of taking a nude or semi-nude picture of their own child in a bathtub or their own child in a bathing suit. Again it is the hysteria that has totally refused to draw an absolutely critical distinction between actual violence and abuse, which is criminal and should be criminal, to any potentially sexual depiction of a minor. And I say potentially because I think if you look at a picture a parent has taken of a child in a bathtub and you see that as sexual, then I d say there s something in your perspective that might be questioned or challenged! But don t foist that upon the parent who is lovingly documenting their beloved child s life and activities without seeing anything sexual in that image.
This is a decision that involves line drawing. We tend to have this hysteria where once we hear terms like pedophilia of course you are going to condemn anything that could possibly have that label. Of course you would. But societies around the world throughout history various cultures and various religions and moral positions have disagreed about at what age do you respect the autonomy and individuality and freedom of choice of a young person around sexuality. And the U.S. Supreme Court held that in a case involving minors right to choose to have an abortion.
By the way, [contraception and abortion] is a realm of sexuality where liberals and progressives and feminists have been saying, Yes! If you re old enough to have sex. You should have the right to contraception and access to it. You should have the right to have an abortion. You shouldn t have to consult with your parents and have their permission or a judge s permission because you re sufficiently mature. And the Supreme Court sided in accord of that position. The U.S. Supreme Court said constitutional rights do not magically mature and spring into being only when someone happens to attain the state defined age of majority.
In other words the constitution doesn t prevent anyone from exercising rights, including Rights and sexual freedoms, freedom of choice and autonomy at a certain age! And so you can t have it both ways. You can t say well we re strongly in favor of minors having the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, to have an abortion what is in some people s minds murder but we re not going to trust them to decide to have sex with somewhat older than they are.
And I say somewhat older than they are because that s something where the law has also been subject to change. On all issues of when you obtain the age of majority, states differ on that widely and they choose different ages for different activities. When you re old enough to drive, to have sex with someone around your age, to have sex with someone much older than you. There is no magic objective answer to these questions. I think people need to take seriously the importance of sexual freedom and autonomy and that certainly includes women, feminists. They have to take seriously the question of respecting a young person s autonomy in that area.
There have been famous cases of 18 year olds who have gone to prison because they had consensual sex with their girlfriends who were a couple of years younger. A lot of people would not consider that pedophilia and yet under some strict laws and some absolute definitions it is. Romeo and Juliet laws make an exception to pedophilia laws when there is only a relatively small age difference. But what is relatively small? So to me, especially when he says he is re-examining his position, Stallman is just thinking through the very serious debate of how to be protective and respectful of young people. He is not being disrespectful, much less wishing harm upon young people, which seems to be what his detractors think he s doing.
| Editor: | Maya Schenwar |
| Editor: | Joe Macar |
| Editor: | Alana Yu-lan Price |
| Publisher: | Haymarket Books |
| Copyright: | June 2016 |
| ISBN: | 1-60846-684-1 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Publisher: | PublicAffairs |
| Copyright: | 2013 |
| ISBN: | 1-61039-212-4 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Patch | Status |
|---|---|
| Black box testing sip | Merged |
| New unit test: smartools | Merged |
| New unit test:account_factory | Merged |
| New unit test: util classes | On Review |
| New unit test: archiver, conference, preferences | On Review |
| New unit test: dring, threadloop | On Review |
| Documentation | On Review |
| Refactoring + video_input unit test | Abandoned |
How to use the code?
Follow the instructions to build the daemon and instead of doing make , do make check . You will see something composed of:
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during July 2017 (previous month):
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.
strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.
buildinfo.debian.net is my experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them.
Since I use this as base for other PHP packages like SimKolab, I ve updated my packaging
example with: While I try to minimize Politics and Economics as much as I can on this blog, it sometimes surfaces. It is possible that some people may benefit or at least be aware.
A bit of background is necessary before I jump into the intricacies of the Maharashtra Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft Rules 2016 (RERA) .
Since ever, but more prominently since 2007/8 potential homeowners from across the country have been suffering at the hands of the builder/promoter for number of years. While it would be wrong to paint all the Real Estate Developers and Builders as cheats (we as in all tenants and homeowners hope there are good ones out there) many Real Estate Builders and promoters have cheated homeowners of their hard-earned money. This has also lessened the secondary (resale) market and tenants like me have to fight over morsels as supply is tight.
There were two broad ways in which the cheating is/was done
a. Take deposits and run away i.e. fly by night operators Here the only option for a homeowner is to file an FIR (First Information Report) and hope the culprits are caught. 99% of the time the builder/promoter goes somewhere abroad and the potential home buyers/home-owners are left holding the can. This is usually done by small real estate promoters and builders.
b. The big boys would take all or most money of the project, may register or not register the flat in your name, either build a quarter or half-finished building and then make excuses. There are some who do not even build. The money given is used by the builder/developer either for his own needs or using that money in some high-profile project which is expensive and may have huge returns. They know that home-owners can t do anything, at the most go to the court which will take more than a decade or two during which time the developer would have interest-free income and do whatever he wants to do.
One of the bigger stories which came up this year was when the Indian Cricket Captain, M.S. Dhoni (cricket is a religion in India, and the cricketers gods for millions of Indians) had to end his brand engagement and ambassadorship from Amrapali Housing Group. Apparently, his wife Sakshi was on the Board of directors at Amrapali Housing and had to resign
The Government knew of such issues and had been working since last few years. Under the present Government, a Model Agreement and a Model Real Estate Rules and Regulation Bill was passed on 31st March and came into force on 1st May 2016.
India, similar to the U.S. and U.K. follows a federal structure. While I have shared this before, most of the laws in India fall in either of three lists, Central List, Concurrent Lists and State Lists. Housing for instance, is a state subject so any laws concerning housing has to be made by the state legislature.
Having a statutory requirement to put the bill in 6 months from 1st of May, the Government of Maharashtra chose to put the draft rules in public domain on 12th December 2016, about 10 days ago and there were efforts to let it remain low-key so people do not object as we are still in the throes of demonetisation. By law they should have given 30 days for people to raise objections and give suggestions.
The State Government too could have easily asked an extension and as both the State and the Centre are of the same Political Party they would have easily got it.
With that, below is the e-mail I sent to suggesstionsonrera@maharashtra.gov.in
Sub Some suggestions for RERA biggest suggestion, need to give more time study the implications for house-owners.
Respected Sir/Madame,
I will be publishing the below mail as a public letter on my blog as well.
I am writing as a citizen, a voter, a potential home owner, currently a tenant . If houses supply is not in time, it is us, the tenants who have the most to lose as we have to fight over whatever is in the market. I do also hope to be a home buyer at some point in time so these rules would affect me also somewhere in the hazy future.
I came to know through the media that Maharashtra Govt. recently introduced draft rules for RERA Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 . I hope to impress upon you that these proposed Rules and Regulations need to be thoroughly revised and new draft rules shared with the public at large with proper announcement in all newspapers and proper time ( more than a month ) to study and give replies on the said matter.
My suggestions and complaints are as under
a. The first complaint and suggestion is that the date between the draft regulations and suggestions being invited by members of public is and was too little 12 December 2016 23 December 2016 (only 11 days) for almost 90 pages of Government rules and regulations which needs multiple rounds of re-reading to understand the implications of the draft rules .
Add to that unlike the Central Building Legislation, Model Agreement which was prepared by Centre and also given wide publicity, the Maharashtra Govt. didn t do any such publicity to bring it to the
This doesn t appear to cover the other kind of comment-moderation problem: that where overmoderation and attachment to poster identity leads to an environment of stifling conventionalism. Photography communities in particular (e.g. flickr, instagram, 500px) are vulnerable to turning into circlejerks where no-one is willing to say what they mean for fear of appearing the negative nancy (no pun intended) and where high post-count contributors poorly-supported opinions become elevated above said views merits. In such communities the typical discussion is at the level of tepid platitude: good exposure! , nice depth of field! , or cool HDR! . On the other end of the scale there s the imageboard style of community where anonymity is the norm, feedback is uncompromisingly harsh, and uselessly opaque criticism appears such on its face; unsuited to the overly sensitive but hideously valuable to the advancing novice. Ordinary web forums, with tools oriented towards a punitive he said the n-word! delete his account and everything he s posted! persona non grata, in damnatio memoriae! school of moderation, strongly tend to the former.ksandstr on LWN
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
We have a made numerous changes to Rblpapi since the previous release 0.3.2 in early December. You can see the commits, or look at the ChangeLog or NEWS.Rd to get an indea of the changes. We have new functions, improved internals, bug fixes and more.
In order to facilitate more widespread testing, I have just placed source and (Windows) binaries in the ghrr drat repo from which you can install the new version simply via
drat:::add("ghrr") # if you have drat installed
install.packages("Rblpapi") # uses the drat version b/c higher version number than releasedrat:::add("ghrr") # if you have drat installed
update.packages() # refresh all packages against all repos~/.R/rblpapiOptions.R exists which sets the options() values for automatic connection (see help(blpConnect)) as well as the blpUnitTests=TRUE option. This is needed to 'opt-in' as standard test setups at [Travis])(https://travis-ci.org/) or CRAN will not have access to a Bloomberg terminal.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Inspired by Rapha l Hertzog, here is a monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world:
What happened about the reproducible
builds effort for this week:
Media coverage
Debian's effort on reproducible builds has been covered in the June 2015 issue of
Linux Magazin in
Germany.
Toolchain fixes
debian/changelog entry when generating documentation.debian/changelog entry to Sphinx.sed instead of grep+mv to keep correct file permissions.PERL_HASH_SEED=0 during configure to make the generated .c and .h files stable.--disable-build-date to ./configure.debian/changelog entry as build date.debian/chanelog entry as build date.reproducible.debian.net how it goes for pathological cases.
It's now possible to specify both --html and --text output. When neither of
them is specified, the default will be to print a text report on the standard
output (thanks to Paul Wise for the suggestion).
Documentation update
Nicolas Boulenguez investigated Ada
libraries.
Package reviews
451 obsolete
reviews have
been removed and 156 added this week.
New identified issues: running kernel version getting captured, random filenames in GHC debug symbols, and timestamps in headers generated by qdbusxml2cpp.
Misc.
Holger Levsen went to re:publica and talked about
reproducible builds to developers and users there.
Holger also had a chance to meet FreeBSD developers and discuss the status of
FreeBSD. Investigations have
started on how it could be made part of our current test
system.
Laurent Guerby gave Lunar access to systems in the GCC Compile
Farm. Hopefully access to these powerful
machines will help to fix packages for GCC, Iceweasel, and similar packages
requiring long build times.
I prefer the classic Cybermen.
Next.