Search Results: "rsl"

9 March 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]
  • Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). [ ]
  • Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]
  • Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. [ ]
  • Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]
  • Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]
  • Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]
  • Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]
  • Make test_zip black clean. [ ]
In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:
  • Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]
  • Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [ ][ ]
  • Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]
    • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]
    • Add an Erlang package set. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]
    • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
    • Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]
    • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. [ ]
    • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]
    • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]
Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:
  • Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]
In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

21 December 2023

Russell Coker: Links December 2023

David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the latest round of UFO delusion [1]. There aren t a heap of scientists secretly working on UFOs. David Brin wrote an informative and insightful blog post about rich doomsday preppers who want to destroy democracy [2]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how ChatGPT helps people write letters and how that decreases the value of the letter [3]. What can we do to show that letters mean something? Hand deliver them? Pay someone to hand deliver them? Cory concentrates on legal letters and petitions but this can apply to other things too. David Brin wrote an informative blog post about billionaires prepping for disaster and causing the disaster [4]. David Brin wrote an insightful Wired article about ways of dealing with potential rogue AIs [5]. David Brin has an interesting take on government funded science [6]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI Risks which is worth reading [7]. Ximion wrote a great blog post about how tp use AppStream metadata to indicate what type of hardware/environment is required to use an app [8]. This is great for the recent use of Debian on phones and can provide real benefits for more traditional uses (like all those servers that accidentally got LibreOffice etc installed). Also for Convergence it will be good to have the app launcher take note of this, when your phone isn t connected to a dock there s no point offering to launch apps that require a full desktop screen. Russ Albery wrote an interesting summary of the book Going Infinite about the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX fiasco [9]. That summary really makes Sam sound Autistic. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article Microincentives and Enshittification explaining why Google search has to suck [10]. Charles Stross posted the text of a lecture he gave titles We re Sorry We Created the Torment Nexus [11] about sci-fi ideas that shouldn t be implemented. The Daily WTF has many stories of corporate computer stupidity, but The White Appliphant is one of the most epic [12]. The Verge has an informative article on new laws in the US and the EU to give a right to repair and how this explains the sudden change to 7 year support for Pixel phones [13].
Related posts:
  1. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  2. Links December 2022 Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with...
  3. Links May 2023 Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an interesting blog post about their work...

14 October 2023

Ravi Dwivedi: Kochi - Wayanad Trip in August-September 2023

A trip full of hitchhiking, beautiful places and welcoming locals.

Day 1: Arrival in Kochi Kochi is a city in the state of Kerala, India. This year s DebConf was to be held in Kochi from 3rd September to 17th of September, which I was planning to attend. My friend Suresh, who was planning to join, told me that 29th August 2023 will be Onam, a major festival of the state of Kerala. So, we planned a Kerala trip before the DebConf. We booked early morning flights for Kochi from Delhi and reached Kochi on 28th August. We had booked a hostel named Zostel in Ernakulam. During check-in, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using a Google account. I told them I don t have a Google account and I don t want to create one either. The people at the front desk seemed receptive, so I went ahead with telling them the problems of such a sign-in being mandatory for check-in. Anyways, they only took a photo of my passport and let me check-in without a Google account. We stayed in a ten room dormitory, which allowed travellers of any gender. The dormitory room was air-conditioned, spacious, clean and beds were also comfortable. There were two bathrooms in the dormitory and they were clean. Plus, there was a separate dormitory room in the hostel exclusive for females. I noticed that that Zostel was not added in the OpenStreetMap and so, I added it :) . The hostel had a small canteen for tea and snacks, a common sitting area outside the dormitories, which had beds too. There was a separate silent room, suitable for people who want to work.
Dormitory room in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.
Beds in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.
We had lunch at a nearby restaurant and it was hard to find anything vegetarian for me. I bought some freshly made banana chips from the street and they were tasty. As far as I remember, I had a big glass of pineapple juice for lunch. Then I went to the Broadway market and bought some cardamom and cinnamon for home. I also went to a nearby supermarket and bought Matta brown rice for home. Then, I looked for a courier shop to send the things home but all of them were closed due to Onam festival. After returning to the Zostel, I overslept till 9 PM and in the meanwhile, Suresh planned with Saidut and Shwetank (who met us during our stay in Zostel) to go to a place in Fort Kochi for dinner. I suspected I will be disappointed by lack of vegetarian options as they were planning to have fish. I already had a restaurant in mind - Brindhavan restaurant (suggested by Anupa), which was a pure vegetarian restaurant. To reach there, I got off at Palarivattom metro station and started looking for an auto-rickshaw to get to the restaurant. I didn t get any for more than 5 minutes. Since that restaurant was not added to the OpenStreetMap, I didn t even know how far that was and which direction to go to. Then, I saw a Zomato delivery person on a motorcycle and asked him where the restaurant was. It was already 10 PM and the restaurant closes at 10:30. So, I asked him whether he can drop me off. He agreed and dropped me off at that restaurant. It was 4-5 km from that metro station. I tipped him and expressed my gratefulness for the help. He refused to take the tip, but I insisted and he accepted. I entered the restaurant and it was coming to a close, so many items were not available. I ordered some Kadhai Paneer (only item left) with naan. It tasted fine. Since the next day was Thiruvonam, I asked the restaurant about the Sadya thali menu and prices for the next day. I planned to eat Sadya thali at that restaurant, but my plans got changed later.
Onam sadya menu from Brindhavan restaurant.

Day 2: Onam celebrations Next day, on 29th of August 2023, we had plan to leave for Wayanad. Wayanad is a hill station in Kerala and a famous tourist spot. Praveen suggested to visit Munnar as it is far closer to Kochi than Wayanad (80 km vs 250 km). But I had already visited Munnar in my previous trips, so we chose Wayanad. We had a train late night from Ernakulam Junction (at 23:30 hours) to Kozhikode, which is the nearest railway station from Wayanad. So, we checked out in the morning as we had plans to roam around in Kochi before taking the train. Zostel was celebrating Onam on that day. To opt-in, we had to pay 400 rupees, which included a Sadya Thali and a mundu. Me and Suresh paid the amount and opted in for the celebrations. Sadya thali had Rice, Sambhar, Rasam, Avial, Banana Chips, Pineapple Pachadi, Pappadam, many types of pickels and chutneys, Pal Ada Payasam and Coconut jaggery Pasam. And, there was water too :). Those payasams were really great and I had one more round of them. Later, I had a lot of variety of payasams during the DebConf.
Sadya lined up for serving
Sadya thali served on banana leaf.
So, we hung out in the common room and put our luggage there. We played UNO and had conversations with other travellers in the hostel. I had a fun time there and I still think it is one of the best hostel experiences I had. We made good friends with Saiduth (Telangana) and Shwetank (Uttarakhand). They were already aware about the software like debian, and we had some detailed conversations about the Free Software movement. I remember explaining the difference between the terms Open Source and Free Software . I also told them about the Streetcomplete app, a beginner friendly app to edit OpenStreetMap. We had dinner at a place nearby (named Palaraam), but again, the vegetarian options were very limited! After dinner, we came back to the Zostel and me and Suresh left for Ernakulam Junction to catch our train Maveli Express (16604).

Day 3: Going to Wayanad Maveli Express was scheduled to reach Kozhikode at 03:25 (morning). I had set alarms from 03:00 to 03:30, with the gap of 10 minutes. Every time I woke up, I turned off the alarm. Then I woke up and saw train reaching the Kozhikode station and woke up Suresh for deboarding. But then I noticed that the train is actually leaving the station, not arriving! This means we missed our stop. Now we looked at the next stops and whether we can deboard there. I was very sleepy and wanted to take a retiring room at some station before continuing our journey to Wayanad. The next stop was Quilandi and we checked online that it didn t have a retiring room. So, we skipped this stop. We got off at the next stop named Vadakara and found out no retiring room was available. So, we asked about information regarding bus for Wayanad and they said that there is a bus to Wayanad around 07:00 hours from bus station which was a few kilometres from the railway station. We took a bus for Kalpetta (in Wayanad) at around 07:00. The destination of the buses were written in Malayalam, which we could not read. Once again, the locals helped us to get on to the bus to Kalpetta. Vadakara is not a big city and it can be hard to find people who know good Hindi or English, unlike Kochi. Despite language issues, I had no problem there in navigation, thanks to locals. I mostly spent time sleeping during the bus journey. A few hours later, the bus dropped us at Kalpetta. We had a booking at a hostel in Rippon village. It was 16 km from Kalpetta. On the way, we were treated with beautiful views of nature, which was present everywhere in Wayanad. The place was covered with tea gardens and our eyes were treated with beautiful scenery at every corner.
We were treated with such views during the Wayanad trip.
Rippon village was a very quiet place and I liked the calm atmosphere. This place is blessed by nature and has stunning scenery. I found English was more common than Hindi in Wayanad. Locals were very nice and helped me, even if they didn t know my language.
A road in Rippon.
After catching some sleep at the hostel, I went out in the afternoon. I hitchhiked to reach the main road from the hostel. I bought more spices from a nearby shop and realized that I should have waited for my visit to Wayanad to buy cardamom, which I already bought from Kochi. Then, I was looking for post office to send spices home. The people at the spices shop told me that the nearby Rippon post office was closed by that time, but the post office at Meppadi was open, which was 5 km from there. I went to Meppadi and saw the post office closes at 15:00, but I reached five minutes late. My packing was not very good and they asked me to pack it tighter. There was a shop near the post office and the people there gave me a cardboard and tapes, and helped pack my stuff for the post. By the time I went to the post office again, it was 15:30. But they accepted my parcel for post.

Day 4: Kanthanpara Falls, Zostel Wayanad and Karapuzha Dam Kanthanpara waterfalls were 2 km from the hostel. I hitchhiked to the place from the hostel on a scooty. Entry ticket was worth Rs 40. There were good views inside and nothing much to see except the waterfalls.
Entry to Kanthanpara Falls.
Kanthanpara Falls.
We had a booking at Zostel Wayanad for this day and so we shifted there. Again, as with their Ernakulam branch, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using Google, but when I said I don t have a Google account they checked me in without that. There were tea gardens inside the Zostel boundaries and the property was beautiful.
A view of Zostel Wayanad.
A map of Wayanad showing tourist places.
A view from inside the Zostel Wayanad property.
Later in the evening, I went to Karapuzha Dam. I witnessed a beautiful sunset during the journey. Karapuzha dam had many activites, like ziplining, and was nice to roam around. Chembra Peak is near to the Zostel Wayanad. So, I was planning to trek to the heart shaped lake. It was suggested by Praveen and looking online, this trek seemed worth doing. There was an issue however. The charges for trek were Rs 1770 for upto five people. So, if I go alone I will have to spend Rs 1770 for the trek. If I go with another person, we split Rs 1770 into two, and so on. The optimal way to do it is to go in a group of five (you included :D). I asked front desk at Zostel if they can connect me with people going to Chembra peak the next day, and they told me about a group of four people planning to go to Chembra peak the next day. I got lucky! All four of them were from Kerala and worked in Qatar.

Day 5: Chembra peak trek The date was 1st September 2023. I woke up early (05:30 in the morning) for the Chembra peak trek. I had bought hiking shoes especially for trekking, which turned out to be a very good idea. The ticket counter opens at 07:00. The group of four with which I planned to trek met me around 06:00 in the Zostel. We went to the ticket counter around 06:30. We had breakfast at shops selling Maggi noodles and bread omlette near the ticket counter. It was a hot day and the trek was difficult for an inexperienced person like me. The scenery was green and beautiful throughout.
Terrain during trekking towards the Chembra peak.
Heart-shaped lake at the Chembra peak.
Me at the heart-shaped lake.
Views from the top of the Chembra peak.
View of another peak from the heart-shaped lake.
While returning from the trek, I found out a shop selling bamboo rice, which I bought and will make bamboo rice payasam out of it at home (I have some coconut milk from Kerala too ;)). We returned to Zostel in the afternoon. I had muscle pain after the trek and it has still not completely disappeared. At night, we took a bus from Kalpetta to Kozhikode in order to return to Kochi.

Day 6: Return to Kochi At midnight of 2nd of September, we reached Kozhikode bus stand. Then we roamed around for something to eat. I didn t find anything vegetarian to eat. No surprises there! Then we went to Kozhikode railway station and looked for retiring rooms, but no luck there. We waited at the station and took the next train to Kochi at 03:30 and reached Ernakulam Junction at 07:30 (half hours before train s scheduled time!). From there, we went to Zostel Fort Kochi and stayed one night there and checked out next morning.

Day 7: Roaming around in Fort Kochi On 3rd of September, we roamed around in Fort Kochi. We visited the usual places - St Francis Church, Dutch Palace, Jew Town, Pardesi Synagogue. I also visited some homestays and the owners were very happy to show their place even when I made it clear that I was not looking for a stay. In the evening, we went to Kakkanad to attend DebConf. The story continues in my DebConf23 blog post.

27 February 2023

Daniel Lange: Thunderbird gpg key import

Thunderbird, srsly? 5MB (or 4.8MiB) import limit. Sure. My modest pubring (111 keys) is 18MB. The Debian keyring is 28MB. May be, just may be, add another 0 to that if statement? So, until that happens, workarounds ... Option 1: Export each pubkey into a separate file. The import dialog allows to select them all in one go. But - of course - it will ask confirmation for each. So prepare some valerian tea.
gpg --with-colons --list-public-keys grep ^pub cut -d : -f 5 xargs -I -n 1 gpg -ao .pub --export ;
Option 2: Strip all the signatures, so Thunderbird gets a smaller file to chew on. This uses pgp-clean from signing-party.
gpg --with-colons --list-public-keys grep ^pub cut -d : -f 5 xargs pgp-clean -s >> there_you_go_thunderbird.pub
Option 1 will retain the signatures on individual keys, Option 2 will not.

23 February 2022

Ian Jackson: Rooting an Eos Fairphone 4

Last week I received (finally) my Fairphone 4, supplied with a de-googled operating system, which I had ordered from the E Foundation s shop in December. (I m am very hard on hardware and my venerable Fairphone 2 is really on its last legs.) I expect to have full control over the software on any computing device I own which is as complicated, capable, and therefore, hazardous, as a mobile phone. Unfortunately the Eos image (they prefer to spell it /e/ os , srsly!) doesn t come with a way to get root without taking fairly serious measures including unlocking the bootloader. Unlocking the bootloader wouldn t be desirable for me but I can t live without root. So. I started with these helpful instructions: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/fairphone-4-root.4376421/ I found the whole process a bit of a trial, and I thought I would write down what I did. But, it s not straightforward, at least for someone like me who only has a dim understanding of all this Android stuff. Unfortunately, due to the number of missteps and restarts, what I actually did is not really a sensible procedure. So here is a retcon of a process I think will work: Unlock the bootloader The E Foundation provide instructions for unlocking the bootloader on a stock FP4, here https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP4/install and they seem applicable to the Murena phone supplied with Eos pre-installed, too. NB tht unlocking the bootloader wipes the phone. So we do it first. So:
  1. Power on the phone, with no SIM installed
  2. You get a welcome screen.
  3. Skip all things on startup including wifi
  4. Go to the very end of the settings, tap a gazillion times on the phone s version until you re a developer
  5. In the developer settings, allow usb debugging
  6. In the developer settings, allow oem bootloader unlocking
  7. Connect a computer via a USB cable, say yes on phone to USB debugging
  8. adb reboot bootloader
  9. The phone will reboot into a texty kind of screen, the bootloader
  10. fastboot flashing unlock
  11. The phone will reboot, back to the welcome screen
  12. Repeat steps 3-9 (maybe not all are necessary)
  13. fastboot flashing unlock_critical
  14. The phone will reboot, back to the welcome screen
Note that although you are running fastboot, you must run this command with the phone in bootloader mode, not fastboot (aka fastbootd ) mode. If you run fastboot flashing unlcok from fastboot you just get a don t know what you re talking about . I found conflicting instructions on what kind of Vulcan nerve pinches could be used to get into which boot modes, and had poor experiences with those. adb reboot bootloader always worked reliably for me. Some docs say to run fastboot oem unlock; I used flashing. Maybe this depends on the Android tools version. Initial privacy prep and OTA update We want to update the supplied phone OS. The build mine shipped with is too buggy to run Magisk, the application we are going to use to root the phone. (With the pre-installed phone OS, Magisk crashes at the patch boot image step.) But I didn t want to let the phone talk to Google, even for the push notifications registration.
  1. From the welcome screen, skip all things except location, date, time. Notably, do not set up wifi
  2. In settings, microg section
    1. turn off cloud messaging
    2. turn off google safetynet
    3. turn off google registration (NB you must do this after the other two, because their sliders become dysfunctional after you turn google registration off)
    4. turn off both location modules
  3. In settings, location section, turn off allowed location for browser and magic earth
  4. Now go into settings and enable wifi, giving it your wifi details
  5. Tell the phone to update its operating system. This is a big download.
Install Magisk, the root manager (As a starting point I used these instructions https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-magisk/ and a lot of random forum posts.) You will need the official boot.img. Bizarrely there doesn t seem to be a way to obtain this from the phone. Instead, you must download it. You can find it by starting at https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP4/install which links to https://images.ecloud.global/stable/FP4/. At the time of writing, the most recent version, whose version number seemed to correspond to the OS update I installed above, was IMG-e-0.21-r-20220123158735-stable-FP4.zip.
  1. Download the giant zipfile to your computer
  2. Unzip it to extract boot.img
  3. Copy the file to your phone s storage . Eg, via adb: with the phone booted into the main operating system, using USB debugging, adb push boot.img /storage/self/primary/Download.
  4. On the phone, open the browser, and enter https://f-droid.org. Click on the link to install f-droid. You will need to enable installing apps from the browser (follow the provided flow to the settings, change the setting, and then use Back, and you can do the install). If you wish, you can download the f-droid apk separately on a computer, and verify it with pgp.
  5. Using f-droid, install Magisk. You will need to enable installing apps from f-droid. (I installed Magisk from f-droid because 1. I was going to trust f-droid anyway 2. it has a shorter URL than Magisk s.)
  6. Open the Magisk app. Tell Magisk to install (Magisk, not the app). There will be only one option: patch boot file. Tell it to patch the boot.img file from before.
  7. Transfer the magisk_patched-THING.img back to your computer (eg via adb pull).
  8. adb reboot bootloader
  9. fastboot boot magisk_patched-THING.img (again, NB, from bootloader mode, not from fastboot mode)
  10. In Magisk you ll see it shows as installed. But it s not really; you ve just booted from an image with it. Ask to install Magisk with Direct install .
After you have done all this, I believe that each time you do an over-the-air OS update, you must, between installing the update and rebooting the phone, ask Magisk to Install to inactive slot (after OTA) . Presumably if you forget you must do the fastboot boot dance again. After all this, I was able to use tsu in Termux. There s a strange behaviour with the root prompt you get apropos Termux s request for root; I found that it definitely worked if Termux wasn t the foreground app You have to leave the bootloader unlocked. Howwever, as I understand it, the phone s encryption will still prevent an attacker from hoovering the data out of your phone. The bootloader lock is to prevent someone tricking you into entering the decryption passkey into a trojaned device. Other things to change There are probably other things to change. I have not yet transferred my Signal account from my old phone. It is possible that Signal will require me to re-enable the google push notifications, but I hope that having disabled them in microg it will be happy to use its own system, as it does on my old phone.

comment count unavailable comments

1 September 2021

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in August 2021

Here s my (twenty-third) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 32nd month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ Tough month but I mostly spent on it churning through the immense backlog. But that somewhat backfired and I have even more backlog than ever. :D Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:

Uploads and bug fixes:
  • ruby3.0 (3.0.0-2) - Upload to unstable! \o/

Other $things:
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
This was my 7th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I ve joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ I mostly worked on different things, I guess. But mostly on packaging keylime and some Google Agents upload(s) and SRU(s). Also did a lot of reviewing, et al. I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or will start to list stuff from next month onward, as I ve been doing before. :D

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my twenty-third month as a Debian LTS and eleventh month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 23.75 hours for LTS and 40.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(however, I only worked for 23.75h on ELTS work, thereby, carrying the rest to next month)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other (E)LTS Work:
  • Front-desk duty from 26-07 until 01-08 and from 30-08 until 05-09 for both LTS and ELTS.
  • Triaged haproxy, ntfs-3g, and cyrus-imapd, and exiv2, ffmpeg, git, gpac, inetutils, mc, modsecurity-crs, node-object-path, php-pear, systemd-cron, node-tar, ruby2.3, gst-plugins-bad0.10, jsoup, libxstream-java, qemu, tomcat7, ruby2.1, prototypejs, pillow, cpio, and qtbase-opensource-src, and amd64-microcode.
  • Mark CVE-2021-39240/haproxy as not-affected for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-39241/haproxy as not-affected for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-39242/haproxy as not-affected for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-33582/cyrus-imapd as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-18771/exiv2 as no-dsa for exiv2 for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-18899/exiv2 as no-dsa for exiv2 for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-38171/ffmpeg as postponed for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-40330/git as no-dsa for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2020-19481/gpac as ignored for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-40491/inetutils as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-36370/mc as no-dsa for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-35368/modsecurity-crs as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-23434/node-object-path as end-of-life for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-32610/php-pear as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2017-9525/systemd-cron as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-37701/node-tar as end-of-life for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-37712/node-tar as end-of-life in stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-3750/qemu as postponsed for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-27511/prototypejs as postponsed for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-23437/pillow as postponed for stretch and jessie.
  • Auto EOL ed gpac, cacti, openscad, cgal, cyrus-imapd-2.4, libsolv, mosquitto, atomicparsley, gtkpod, node-tar, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, neutron, inetutils and linux for jessie.
  • Drop cpio from ela-needed; open issues don t warrant an ELA.
  • Attended monthly Debian LTS meeting.
  • Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts).
  • General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

31 January 2021

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in January 2021

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during January 2021 (previous month):

Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. 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. This month, I:
I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, releasing version 164, version 165 and version 166 as well as triaging and merging many contributions from others:

Debian Uploads Debian LTS This month I worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the project via the following video:

1 January 2021

Chris Lamb: OpenUK Influencer 2021

After a turbulent 2020, I am very grateful to have been chosen in OpenUK's 2021 honours as one of the 100 top influencers in the UK's open technology community, which recognises contributions to open source software, open data and open hardware. Congratulations to all of the other open source heroes and heroines who were also listed am looking forward to an exciting year together.

9 September 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2020

Welcome to the August 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our monthly reports, we summarise the things that we have been up to over the past month. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.

This month, Jennifer Helsby launched a new reproduciblewheels.com website to address the lack of reproducibility of Python wheels. To quote Jennifer s accompanying explanatory blog post:
One hiccup we ve encountered in SecureDrop development is that not all Python wheels can be built reproducibly. We ship multiple (Python) projects in Debian packages, with Python dependencies included in those packages as wheels. In order for our Debian packages to be reproducible, we need that wheel build process to also be reproducible
Parallel to this, transparencylog.com was also launched, a service that verifies the contents of URLs against a publicly recorded cryptographic log. It keeps an append-only log of the cryptographic digests of all URLs it has seen. (GitHub repo) On 18th September, Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a presentation in German, titled Wie reproducible builds Software sicherer machen ( How reproducible builds make software more secure ) at the Internet Security Digital Days 2020 conference.

Reproducible builds at DebConf20 There were a number of talks at the recent online-only DebConf20 conference on the topic of reproducible builds. Holger gave a talk titled Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org are made from their claimed sources. It also served as a general update on the status of reproducible builds within Debian. The video (145 MB) and slides are available. There were also a number of other talks that involved Reproducible Builds too. For example, the Malayalam language mini-conference had a talk titled , ? ( I want to join Debian, what should I do? ) presented by Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, the Clojure Packaging Team BoF session led by Elana Hashman, as well as Where is Salsa CI right now? that was on the topic of Salsa, the collaborative development server that Debian uses to provide the necessary tools for package maintainers, packaging teams and so on. Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) also gave a talk in Spanish titled Un camino verificable desde el origen hasta el binario ( A verifiable path from source to binary ). (Video, 88MB)

Development work After many years of development work, the compiler for the Rust programming language now generates reproducible binary code. This generated some general discussion on Reddit on the topic of reproducibility in general. Paul Spooren posted a request for comments to OpenWrt s openwrt-devel mailing list asking for clarification on when to raise the PKG_RELEASE identifier of a package. This is needed in order to successfully perform rebuilds in a reproducible builds context. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Chris Lamb provided some comments and pointers on an upstream issue regarding the reproducibility of a Snap / SquashFS archive file. [ ]

Debian Holger Levsen identified that a large number of Debian .buildinfo build certificates have been tainted on the official Debian build servers, as these environments have files underneath the /usr/local/sbin directory [ ]. He also filed against bug for debrebuild after spotting that it can fail to download packages from snapshot.debian.org [ ]. This month, several issues were uncovered (or assisted) due to the efforts of reproducible builds. For instance, Debian bug #968710 was filed by Simon McVittie, which describes a problem with detached debug symbol files (required to generate a traceback) that is unlikely to have been discovered without reproducible builds. In addition, Jelmer Vernooij called attention that the new Debian Janitor tool is using the property of reproducibility (as well as diffoscope when applying archive-wide changes to Debian:
New merge proposals also include a link to the diffoscope diff between a vanilla build and the build with changes. Unfortunately these can be a bit noisy for packages that are not reproducible yet, due to the difference in build environment between the two builds. [ ]
56 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 24 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Specifically, Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_version_generated_by_python_param and the lessc_nondeterministic_keys toolchain issues. [ ][ ] Holger Levsen sponsored Lukas Puehringer s upload of the python-securesystemslib pacage, which is a dependency of in-toto, a framework to secure the integrity of software supply chains. [ ] Lastly, Chris Lamb further refined his merge request against the debian-installer component to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no]) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure and sent a ping to the team that maintains that code.

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

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In August, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 155, 156, 157 and 158 to Debian:
  • New features:
    • Support extracting data of PGP signed data. (#214)
    • Try files named .pgp against pgpdump(1) to determine whether they are Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) files. (#211)
    • Support multiple options for all file extension matching. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t raise an exception when we encounter XML files with <!ENTITY> declarations inside the Document Type Definition (DTD), or when a DTD or entity references an external resource. (#212)
    • pgpdump(1) can successfully parse some binary files, so check that the parsed output contains something sensible before accepting it. [ ]
    • Temporarily drop gnumeric from the Debian build-dependencies as it has been removed from the testing distribution. (#968742)
    • Correctly use fallback_recognises to prevent matching .xsb binary XML files.
    • Correct identify signed PGP files as file(1) returns data . (#211)
  • Logging improvements:
    • Emit a message when ppudump version does not match our file header. [ ]
    • Don t use Python s repr(object) output in Calling external command messages. [ ]
    • Include the filename in the not identified by any comparator message. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Bump Python requirement from 3.6 to 3.7. Most distributions are either shipping with Python 3.5 or 3.7, so supporting 3.6 is not only somewhat unnecessary but also cumbersome to test locally. [ ]
    • Drop some unused imports [ ], drop an unnecessary dictionary comprehensions [ ] and some unnecessary control flow [ ].
    • Correct typo of output in a comment. [ ]
  • Release process:
    • Move generation of debian/tests/control to an external script. [ ]
    • Add some URLs for the site that will appear on PyPI.org. [ ]
    • Update author and author email in setup.py for PyPI.org and similar. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Update PPU tests for compatibility with Free Pascal versions 3.2.0 or greater. (#968124)
    • Mark that our identification test for .ppu files requires ppudump version 3.2.0 or higher. [ ]
    • Add an assert_diff helper that loads and compares a fixture output. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Misc:
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo documented in setup.py that diffoscope works with Python version 3.8 [ ] and Frazer Clews applied some Pylint suggestions [ ] and removed some deprecated methods [ ].

Website This month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to:
  • Clarify & fix a few entries on the who page [ ][ ] and ensure that images do not get to large on some viewports [ ].
  • Clarify use of a pronoun re. Conservancy. [ ]
  • Use View all our monthly reports over View all monthly reports . [ ]
  • Move a is a suffix out of the link target on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH age. [ ]
In addition, Javier Jard n added the freedesktop-sdk project [ ] and Kushal Das added SecureDrop project [ ] to our projects page. Lastly, Michael P hn added internationalisation and translation support with help from Hans-Christoph Steiner [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operate a Jenkins-based testing framework to power tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • System health checks:
    • Improve explanation how the status and scores are calculated. [ ][ ]
    • Update and condense view of detected issues. [ ][ ]
    • Query the canonical configuration file to determine whether a job is disabled instead of duplicating/hardcoding this. [ ]
    • Detect several problems when updating the status of reporting-oriented metapackage sets. [ ]
    • Detect when diffoscope is not installable [ ] and failures in DNS resolution [ ].
  • Debian:
    • Update the URL to the Debian security team bug tracker s Git repository. [ ]
    • Reschedule the unstable and bullseye distributions often for the arm64 architecture. [ ]
    • Schedule buster less often for armhf. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Force the build of certain packages in the work-in-progress package rebuilder. [ ][ ]
    • Only update the stretch and buster base build images when necessary. [ ]
  • Other distributions:
    • For F-Droid, trigger jobs by commits, not by a timer. [ ]
    • Disable the Archlinux HTML page generation job as it has never worked. [ ]
    • Disable the alternative OpenWrt rebuilder jobs. [ ]
  • Misc;
Many other changes were made too, including:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Use <pre> HTML tags when dumping fixed-width debugging data in the self-serve package scheduler. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Mark that the u-boot Universal Boot Loader should not build architecture independent packages on the arm64 architecture anymore. [ ]
Finally, build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Mailing list On our mailing list this month, Leo Wandersleb sent a message to the list after he was wondering how to expand his WalletScrutiny.com project (which aims to improve the security of Bitcoin wallets) from Android wallets to also monitor Linux wallets as well:
If you think you know how to spread the word about reproducibility in the context of Bitcoin wallets through WalletScrutiny, your contributions are highly welcome on this PR [ ]
Julien Lepiller posted to the list linking to a blog post by Tavis Ormandy titled You don t need reproducible builds. Morten Linderud (foxboron) responded with a clear rebuttal that Tavis was only considering the narrow use-case of proprietary vendors and closed-source software. He additionally noted that the criticism that reproducible builds cannot prevent against backdoors being deliberately introduced into the upstream source ( bugdoors ) are decidedly (and deliberately) outside the scope of reproducible builds to begin with. Chris Lamb included the Reproducible Builds mailing list in a wider discussion regarding a tentative proposal to include .buildinfo files in .deb packages, adding his remarks regarding requiring a custom tool in order to determine whether generated build artifacts are identical in a reproducible context. [ ] Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) posted a quick email to the list requesting whether there was a list of To do tasks in Reproducible Builds. Lastly, Chris Lamb responded at length to a query regarding the status of reproducible builds for Debian ISO or installation images. He noted that most of the technical work has been performed but there are at least four issues until they can be generally advertised as such . He pointed that the privacy-oriented Tails operation system, which is based directly on Debian, has had reproducible builds for a number of years now. [ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

28 July 2020

Chris Lamb: Pop culture matters

Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only 'high' art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible. Or so the theory goes. What these people do not realise is that pop and mass culture can often provide more information about the world, humanity in general and what is even more important ourselves. This is not quite the debate around whether high art is artistically better, simply that pop culture can be equally informative. Jeremy Bentham argued in the 1820s that "prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry", that it didn't matter where our pleasures come from. (John Stuart Mill, Bentham's intellectual rival, disagreed.) This fundamental question of philosophical utilitarianism will not be resolved here. However, what might begin to be resolved is our instinctive push-back against pop culture. We all share an automatic impulse to disregard things we do not like and to pretend they do not exist, but this wishful thinking does not mean that these cultural products do not continue to exist when we aren't thinking about them and, more to our point, continue to influence others and even ourselves. Take, for example, the recent trend for 'millennial pink'. With its empty consumerism, faux nostalgia, reductive generational stereotyping, objectively ugly sthetics and tedious misogyny (photographed with Rose Gold iPhones), the very combination appears to have been deliberately designed to annoy me, curiously providing circumstantial evidence in favour of intelligent design. But if I were to immediately dismiss millennial pink and any of the other countless cultural trends I dislike simply because I find them disagreeable, I would be willingly keeping myself blind to their underlying ideology, their significance and their effect on society at large. If I had any ethical or political reservations I might choose not to engage with them economically or to avoid advertising them to others, but that is a different question altogether. Even if we can't notice this pattern within ourselves we can first observe it in others. We can all recall moments where someone has brushed off a casual reference to pop culture, be it Tiger King, TikTok, team sports or Taylor Swift; if you can't, simply look for the abrupt change of tone and the slightly-too-quick dismissal. I am not suggesting you attempt to dissuade others or even to point out this mental tic, but merely seeing it in action can be highly illustrative in its own way. In summary, we can simultaneously say that pop culture is not worthy of our time relative to other pursuits while consuming however much of it we want, but deliberately dismissing pop culture doesn't mean that a lot of other people are not interacting with it and is therefore undeserving of any inquiry. And if that doesn't convince you, just like the once-unavoidable millennial pink, simply sticking our collective heads in the sand will not mean that wider societal-level ugliness is going to disappear anytime soon. Anyway, that's a very long way of justifying why I plan to re-watch TNG.

4 June 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2020

Welcome to the May 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. Nonetheless, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into seemingly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. In these reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month.

News The Corona-Warn app that helps trace infection chains of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 in Germany had a feature request filed against it that it build reproducibly. A number of academics from Cornell University have published a paper titled Backstabber s Knife Collection which reviews various open source software supply chain attacks:
Recent years saw a number of supply chain attacks that leverage the increasing use of open source during software development, which is facilitated by dependency managers that automatically resolve, download and install hundreds of open source packages throughout the software life cycle.
In related news, the LineageOS Android distribution announced that a hacker had access to the infrastructure of their servers after exploiting an unpatched vulnerability. Marcin Jachymiak of the Sia decentralised cloud storage platform posted on their blog that their siac and siad utilities can now be built reproducibly:
This means that anyone can recreate the same binaries produced from our official release process. Now anyone can verify that the release binaries were created using the source code we say they were created from. No single person or computer needs to be trusted when producing the binaries now, which greatly reduces the attack surface for Sia users.
Synchronicity is a distributed build system for Rust build artifacts which have been published to crates.io. The goal of Synchronicity is to provide a distributed binary transparency system which is independent of any central operator. The Comparison of Linux distributions article on Wikipedia now features a Reproducible Builds column indicating whether distributions approach and progress towards achieving reproducible builds.

Distribution work In Debian this month: In Alpine Linux, an issue was filed and closed regarding the reproducibility of .apk packages. Allan McRae of the ArchLinux project posted their third Reproducible builds progress report to the arch-dev-public mailing list which includes the following call for help:
We also need help to investigate and fix the packages that fail to reproduce that we have not investigated as of yet.
In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update.

Software development

diffoscope Chris Lamb made the changes listed below to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. He also prepared and uploaded versions 142, 143, 144, 145 and 146 to Debian, PyPI, etc.
  • Comparison improvements:
    • Improve fuzzy matching of JSON files as file now supports recognising JSON data. (#106)
    • Refactor .changes and .buildinfo handling to show all details (including the GnuPG header and footer components) even when referenced files are not present. (#122)
    • Use our BuildinfoFile comparator (etc.) regardless of whether the associated files (such as the orig.tar.gz and the .deb) are present. [ ]
    • Include GnuPG signature data when comparing .buildinfo, .changes, etc. [ ]
    • Add support for printing Android APK signatures via apksigner(1). (#121)
    • Identify iOS App Zip archive data as .zip files. (#116)
    • Add support for Apple Xcode .mobilepovision files. (#113)
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t print a traceback if we pass a single, missing argument to diffoscope (eg. a JSON diff to re-load). [ ]
    • Correct differences typo in the ApkFile handler. (#127)
  • Output improvements:
    • Never emit the same id="foo" anchor reference twice in the HTML output, otherwise identically-named parts will not be able to linked to via a #foo anchor. (#120)
    • Never emit an empty id anchor either; it is not possible to link to #. [ ]
    • Don t pretty-print the output when using the --json presenter; it will usually be too complicated to be readable by the human anyway. [ ]
    • Use the SHA256 over MD5 hash when generating page names for the HTML directory-style presenter. (#124)
  • Reporting improvements:
    • Clarify the message when we truncate the number of lines to standard error [ ] and reduce the number of maximum lines printed to 25 as usually the error is obvious by then [ ].
    • Print the amount of free space that we have available in our temporary directory as a debugging message. [ ]
    • Clarify Command [ ] failed with exit code messages to remove duplicate exited with exit but also to note that diffoscope is interpreting this as an error. [ ]
    • Don t leak the full path of the temporary directory in Command [ ] exited with 1 messages. (#126)
    • Clarify the warning message when we cannot import the debian Python module. [ ]
    • Don t repeat stderr from if both commands emit the same output. [ ]
    • Clarify that an external command emits for both files, otherwise it can look like we are repeating itself when, in reality, it is being run twice. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Prevent apksigner test failures due to lack of binfmt_misc, eg. on Salsa CI and elsewhere. [ ]
    • Drop .travis.yml as we use Salsa instead. [ ]
  • Dockerfile improvements:
    • Add a .dockerignore file to whitelist files we actually need in our container. (#105)
    • Use ARG instead of ENV when setting up the DEBIAN_FRONTEND environment variable at runtime. (#103)
    • Run as a non-root user in container. (#102)
    • Install/remove the build-essential during build so we can install the recommended packages from Git. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Bump the officially required version of Python from 3.5 to 3.6. (#117)
    • Drop the (default) shell=False keyword argument to subprocess.Popen so that the potentially-unsafe shell=True is more obvious. [ ]
    • Perform string normalisation in Black [ ] and include the Black output in the assertion failure too [ ].
    • Inline MissingFile s special handling of deb822 to prevent leaking through abstract layers. [ ][ ]
    • Allow a bare try/except block when cleaning up temporary files with respect to the flake8 quality assurance tool. [ ]
    • Rename in_dsc_path to dsc_in_same_dir to clarify the use of this variable. [ ]
    • Abstract out the duplicated parts of the debian_fallback class [ ] and add descriptions for the file types. [ ]
    • Various commenting and internal documentation improvements. [ ][ ]
    • Rename the Openssl command class to OpenSSLPKCS7 to accommodate other command names with this prefix. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Rename the --debugger command-line argument to --pdb. [ ]
    • Normalise filesystem stat(2) birth times (ie. st_birthtime) in the same way we do with the stat(1) command s Access: and Change: times to fix a nondeterministic build failure in GNU Guix. (#74)
    • Ignore case when ordering our file format descriptions. [ ]
    • Drop, add and tidy various module imports. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
In addition:
  • Jean-Romain Garnier fixed a general issue where, for example, LibarchiveMember s has_same_content method was called regardless of the underlying type of file. [ ]
  • Daniel Fullmer fixed an issue where some filesystems could only be mounted read-only. (!49)
  • Emanuel Bronshtein provided a patch to prevent a build of the Docker image containing parts of the build s. (#123)
  • Mattia Rizzolo added an entry to debian/py3dist-overrides to ensure the rpm-python module is used in package dependencies (#89) and moved to using the new execute_after_* and execute_before_* Debhelper rules [ ].

Chris Lamb also performed a huge overhaul of diffoscope s website:
  • Add a completely new design. [ ][ ]
  • Dynamically generate our contributor list [ ] and supported file formats [ ] from the main Git repository.
  • Add a separate, canonical page for every new release. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Generate a latest release section and display that with the corresponding date on the homepage. [ ]
  • Add an RSS feed of our releases [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and add to Planet Debian [ ].
  • Use Jekyll s absolute_url and relative_url where possible [ ][ ] and move a number of configuration variables to _config.yml [ ][ ].

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

Other tools Elsewhere in our tooling: strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. In May, Chris Lamb uploaded version 1.8.1-1 to Debian unstable and Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixed an off-by-one error when parsing PNG image modification times. (#16) In disorderfs, our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues, Chris Lamb replaced the term dirents in place of directory entries in human-readable output/log messages [ ] and used the astyle source code formatter with the default settings to the main disorderfs.cpp source file [ ]. Holger Levsen bumped the debhelper-compat level to 13 in disorderfs [ ] and reprotest [ ], and for the GNU Guix distribution Vagrant Cascadian updated the versions of disorderfs to version 0.5.10 [ ] and diffoscope to version 145 [ ].

Project documentation & website
  • Carl Dong:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Rename the Who page to Projects . [ ]
    • Ensure that Jekyll enters the _docs subdirectory to find the _docs/index.md file after an internal move. (#27)
    • Wrap ltmain.sh etc. in preformatted quotes. [ ]
    • Wrap the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH Python examples onto more lines to prevent visual overflow on the page. [ ]
    • Correct a preferred spelling error. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Sort our Academic publications page by publication year [ ] and add Trusting Trust and Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling [ ].
  • Juri Dispan:

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org that, amongst many other tasks, tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced. Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • System health status:
    • Improve page description. [ ]
    • Add more weight to proxy failures. [ ]
    • More verbose debug/failure messages. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Work around strangeness in the Bash shell let VARIABLE=0 exits with an error. [ ]
  • Debian:
    • Fail loudly if there are more than three .buildinfo files with the same name. [ ]
    • Fix a typo which prevented /usr merge variation on Debian unstable. [ ]
    • Temporarily ignore PHP s horde](https://www.horde.org/) packages in Debian bullseye. [ ]
    • Document how to reboot all nodes in parallel, working around molly-guard. [ ]
  • Further work on a Debian package rebuilder:
    • Workaround and document various issues in the debrebuild script. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve output in the case of errors. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve documentation and future goals [ ][ ][ ][ ], in particular documentiing two real world tests case for an impossible to recreate build environment [ ].
    • Find the right source package to rebuild. [ ]
    • Increase the frequency we run the script. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve downloading and selection of the sources to build. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve version string handling.. [ ]
    • Handle build failures better. [ ]. [ ]. [ ]
    • Also consider architecture all .buildinfo files. [ ][ ]
In addition:
  • kpcyrd, for Alpine Linux, updated the alpine_schroot.sh script now that a patch for abuild had been released upstream. [ ]
  • Alexander Couzens of the OpenWrt project renamed the brcm47xx target to bcm47xx. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo fixed the printing of the build environment during the second build [ ][ ][ ] and made a number of improvements to the script that deploys Jenkins across our infrastructure [ ][ ][ ].
Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian clarified in the documentation that you need to be user jenkins to run the blacklist command [ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ].

Mailing list: There were a number of discussions on our mailing list this month: Paul Spooren started a thread titled Reproducible Builds Verification Format which reopens the discussion around a schema for sharing the results from distributed rebuilders:
To make the results accessible, storable and create tools around them, they should all follow the same schema, a reproducible builds verification format. The format tries to be as generic as possible to cover all open source projects offering precompiled source code. It stores the rebuilder results of what is reproducible and what not.
Hans-Christoph Steiner of the Guardian Project also continued his previous discussion regarding making our website translatable. Lastly, Leo Wandersleb posted a detailed request for feedback on a question of supply chain security and other issues of software review; Leo is the founder of the Wallet Scrutiny project which aims to prove the security of Android Bitcoin Wallets:
Do you own your Bitcoins or do you trust that your app allows you to use your coins while they are actually controlled by them ? Do you have a backup? Do they have a copy they didn t tell you about? Did anybody check the wallet for deliberate backdoors or vulnerabilities? Could anybody check the wallet for those?
Elsewhere, Leo had posted instructions on his attempts to reproduce the binaries for the BlueWallet Bitcoin wallet for iOS and Android platforms.

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

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Jelle van der Waa and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

26 May 2020

Russell Coker: Cruises and Covid19

Problems With Cruises GQ has an insightful and detailed article about Covid19 and the Diamond Princess [1], I recommend reading it. FastCompany has a brief article about bookings for cruises in August [2]. There have been many negative comments about this online. The first thing to note is that the cancellation policies on those cruises are more lenient than usual and the prices are lower. So it s not unreasonable for someone to put down a deposit on a half price holiday in the hope that Covid19 goes away (as so many prominent people have been saying it will) in the knowledge that they will get it refunded if things don t work out. Of course if the cruise line goes bankrupt then no-one will get a refund, but I think people are expecting that won t happen. The GQ article highlights some serious problems with the way cruise ships operate. They have staff crammed in to small cabins and the working areas allow transmission of disease. These problems can be alleviated, they could allocate more space to staff quarters and have more capable air conditioning systems to put in more fresh air. During the life of a cruise ship significant changes are often made, replacing engines with newer more efficient models, changing the size of various rooms for entertainment, installing new waterslides, and many other changes are routinely made. Changing the staff only areas to have better ventilation and more separate space (maybe capsule-hotel style cabins with fresh air piped in) would not be a difficult change. It would take some money and some dry-dock time which would be a significant expense for cruise companies. Cruises Are Great People like social environments, they want to have situations where there are as many people as possible without it becoming impossible to move. Cruise ships are carefully designed for the flow of passengers. Both the layout of the ship and the schedule of events are carefully planned to avoid excessive crowds. In terms of meeting the requirement of having as many people as possible in a small area without being unable to move cruise ships are probably ideal. Because there is a large number of people in a restricted space there are economies of scale on a cruise ship that aren t available anywhere else. For example the main items on the menu are made in a production line process, this can only be done when you have hundreds of people sitting down to order at the same time. The same applies to all forms of entertainment on board, they plan the events based on statistical knowledge of what people want to attend. This makes it more economical to run than land based entertainment where people can decide to go elsewhere. On a ship a certain portion of the passengers will see whatever show is presented each night, regardless of whether it s singing, dancing, or magic. One major advantage of cruises is that they are all inclusive. If you are on a regular holiday would you pay to see a singing or dancing show? Probably not, but if it s included then you might as well do it and it will be pretty good. This benefit is really appreciated by people taking kids on holidays, if kids do things like refuse to attend a performance that you were going to see or reject food once it s served then it won t cost any extra. People Who Criticise Cruises For the people who sneer at cruises, do you like going to bars? Do you like going to restaurants? Live music shows? Visiting foreign beaches? A cruise gets you all that and more for a discount price. If Groupon had a deal that gave you a cheap hotel stay with all meals included, free non-alcoholic drinks at bars, day long entertainment for kids at the kids clubs, and two live performances every evening how many of the people who reject cruises would buy it? A typical cruise is just like a Groupon deal for non-stop entertainment from 8AM to 11PM. Will Cruises Restart? The entertainment options that cruises offer are greatly desired by many people. Most cruises are aimed at budget travellers, the price is cheaper than a hotel in a major city. Such cruises greatly depend on economies of scale, if they can t get the ships filled then they would need to raise prices (thus decreasing demand) to try to make a profit. I think that some older cruise ships will be scrapped in the near future and some of the newer ships will be sold to cruise lines that cater to cheap travel (IE P&O may scrap some ships and some of the older Princess ships may be transferred to them). Overall I predict a decrease in the number of middle-class cruise ships. For the expensive cruises (where the cheapest cabins cost over $1000US per person per night) I don t expect any real changes, maybe they will have fewer passengers and higher prices to allow more social distancing or something. I am certain that cruises will start again, but it s too early to predict when. Going on a cruise is about as safe as going to a concert or a major sporting event. No-one is predicting that sporting stadiums will be closed forever or live concerts will be cancelled forever, so really no-one should expect that cruises will be cancelled forever. Whether companies that own ships or stadiums go bankrupt in the mean time is yet to be determined. One thing that s been happening for years is themed cruises. A group can book out an entire ship or part of a ship for a themed cruise. I expect this to become much more popular when cruises start again as it will make it easier to fill ships. In the past it seems that cruise lines let companies book their ships for events but didn t take much of an active role in the process. I think that the management of cruise lines will look to aggressively market themed cruises to anyone who might help, for starters they could reach out to every 80s and 90s pop group those fans are all old enough to be interested in themed cruises and the musicians won t be asking for too much money. Conclusion Humans are social creatures. People want to attend events with many other people. Covid 19 won t be the last pandemic, and it may not even be eradicated in the near future. The possibility of having a society where no-one leaves home unless they are in a hazmat suit has been explored in science fiction, but I don t think that s a plausible scenario for the near future and I don t think that it s something that will be caused by Covid 19.
Related posts:
  1. Cruises It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite...
  2. A Computer Conference on a Cruise Ship After LCA [1] there was a discussion about possible locations...
  3. My First Cruise A few weeks ago I went on my first cruise,...

10 September 2017

Charles Plessy: Summary of the discussion on off-line keys.

Last month, there has been an interesting discussion about off-line GnuPG keys and their storage systems on the debian-project@l.d.o mailing list. I tried to summarise it in the Debian wiki, in particular by creating two new pages.

20 August 2017

Vincent Bernat: IPv6 route lookup on Linux

TL;DR: With its implementation of IPv6 routing tables using radix trees, Linux offers subpar performance (450 ns for a full view 40,000 routes) compared to IPv4 (50 ns for a full view 500,000 routes) but fair memory usage (20 MiB for a full view).
In a previous article, we had a look at IPv4 route lookup on Linux. Let s see how different IPv6 is.

Lookup trie implementation Looking up a prefix in a routing table comes down to find the most specific entry matching the requested destination. A common structure for this task is the trie, a tree structure where each node has its parent as prefix. With IPv4, Linux uses a level-compressed trie (or LPC-trie), providing good performances with low memory usage. For IPv6, Linux uses a more classic radix tree (or Patricia trie). There are three reasons for not sharing:
  • The IPv6 implementation (introduced in Linux 2.1.8, 1996) predates the IPv4 implementation based on LPC-tries (in Linux 2.6.13, commit 19baf839ff4a).
  • The feature set is different. Notably, IPv6 supports source-specific routing1 (since Linux 2.1.120, 1998).
  • The IPv4 address space is denser than the IPv6 address space. Level-compression is therefore quite efficient with IPv4. This may not be the case with IPv6.
The trie in the below illustration encodes 6 prefixes: Radix tree For more in-depth explanation on the different ways to encode a routing table into a trie and a better understanding of radix trees, see the explanations for IPv4. The following figure shows the in-memory representation of the previous radix tree. Each node corresponds to a struct fib6_node. When a node has the RTN_RTINFO flag set, it embeds a pointer to a struct rt6_info containing information about the next-hop. Memory representation of a routing table The fib6_lookup_1() function walks the radix tree in two steps:
  1. walking down the tree to locate the potential candidate, and
  2. checking the candidate and, if needed, backtracking until a match.
Here is a slightly simplified version without source-specific routing: 
static struct fib6_node *fib6_lookup_1(struct fib6_node *root,
                                       struct in6_addr  *addr)
 
    struct fib6_node *fn;
    __be32 dir;
    /* Step 1: locate potential candidate */
    fn = root;
    for (;;)  
        struct fib6_node *next;
        dir = addr_bit_set(addr, fn->fn_bit);
        next = dir ? fn->right : fn->left;
        if (next)  
            fn = next;
            continue;
         
        break;
     
    /* Step 2: check prefix and backtrack if needed */
    while (fn)  
        if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_RTINFO)  
            struct rt6key *key;
            key = fn->leaf->rt6i_dst;
            if (ipv6_prefix_equal(&key->addr, addr, key->plen))  
                if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_RTINFO)
                    return fn;
             
         
        if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_ROOT)
            break;
        fn = fn->parent;
     
    return NULL;

Caching While IPv4 lost its route cache in Linux 3.6 (commit 5e9965c15ba8), IPv6 still has a caching mechanism. However cache entries are directly put in the radix tree instead of a distinct structure. Since Linux 2.1.30 (1997) and until Linux 4.2 (commit 45e4fd26683c), almost any successful route lookup inserts a cache entry in the radix tree. For example, a router forwarding a ping between 2001:db8:1::1 and 2001:db8:3::1 would get those two cache entries: 
$ ip -6 route show cache
2001:db8:1::1 dev r2-r1  metric 0
    cache
2001:db8:3::1 via 2001:db8:2::2 dev r2-r3  metric 0
    cache
These entries are cleaned up by the ip6_dst_gc() function controlled by the following parameters: 
$ sysctl -a   grep -F net.ipv6.route
net.ipv6.route.gc_elasticity = 9
net.ipv6.route.gc_interval = 30
net.ipv6.route.gc_min_interval = 0
net.ipv6.route.gc_min_interval_ms = 500
net.ipv6.route.gc_thresh = 1024
net.ipv6.route.gc_timeout = 60
net.ipv6.route.max_size = 4096
net.ipv6.route.mtu_expires = 600
The garbage collector is triggered at most every 500 ms when there are more than 1024 entries or at least every 30 seconds. The garbage collection won t run for more than 60 seconds, except if there are more than 4096 routes. When running, it will first delete entries older than 30 seconds. If the number of cache entries is still greater than 4096, it will continue to delete more recent entries (but no more recent than 512 jiffies, which is the value of gc_elasticity) after a 500 ms pause. Starting from Linux 4.2 (commit 45e4fd26683c), only a PMTU exception would create a cache entry. A router doesn t have to handle those exceptions, so only hosts would get cache entries. And they should be pretty rare. Martin KaFai Lau explains:
Out of all IPv6 RTF_CACHE routes that are created, the percentage that has a different MTU is very small. In one of our end-user facing proxy server, only 1k out of 80k RTF_CACHE routes have a smaller MTU. For our DC traffic, there is no MTU exception.
Here is how a cache entry with a PMTU exception looks like: 
$ ip -6 route show cache
2001:db8:1::50 via 2001:db8:1::13 dev out6  metric 0
    cache  expires 573sec mtu 1400 pref medium

Performance We consider three distinct scenarios:
Excerpt of an Internet full view
In this scenario, Linux acts as an edge router attached to the default-free zone. Currently, the size of such a routing table is a little bit above 40,000 routes.
/48 prefixes spread linearly with different densities
Linux acts as a core router inside a datacenter. Each customer or rack gets one or several /48 networks, which need to be routed around. With a density of 1, /48 subnets are contiguous.
/128 prefixes spread randomly in a fixed /108 subnet
Linux acts as a leaf router for a /64 subnet with hosts getting their IP using autoconfiguration. It is assumed all hosts share the same OUI and therefore, the first 40 bits are fixed. In this scenario, neighbor reachability information for the /64 subnet are converted into routes by some external process and redistributed among other routers sharing the same subnet2.

Route lookup performance With the help of a small kernel module, we can accurately benchmark3 the ip6_route_output_flags() function and correlate the results with the radix tree size: Maximum depth and lookup time Getting meaningful results is challenging due to the size of the address space. None of the scenarios have a fallback route and we only measure time for successful hits4. For the full view scenario, only the range from 2400::/16 to 2a06::/16 is scanned (it contains more than half of the routes). For the /128 scenario, the whole /108 subnet is scanned. For the /48 scenario, the range from the first /48 to the last one is scanned. For each range, 5000 addresses are picked semi-randomly. This operation is repeated until we get 5000 hits or until 1 million tests have been executed. The relation between the maximum depth and the lookup time is incomplete and I can t explain the difference of performance between the different densities of the /48 scenario. We can extract two important performance points:
  • With a full view, the lookup time is 450 ns. This is almost ten times the budget for forwarding at 10 Gbps which is about 50 ns.
  • With an almost empty routing table, the lookup time is 150 ns. This is still over the time budget for forwarding at 10 Gbps.
With IPv4, the lookup time for an almost empty table was 20 ns while the lookup time for a full view (500,000 routes) was a bit above 50 ns. How to explain such a difference? First, the maximum depth of the IPv4 LPC-trie with 500,000 routes was 6, while the maximum depth of the IPv6 radix tree for 40,000 routes is 40. Second, while both IPv4 s fib_lookup() and IPv6 s ip6_route_output_flags() functions have a fixed cost implied by the evaluation of routing rules, IPv4 has several optimizations when the rules are left unmodified5. Those optimizations are removed on the first modification. If we cancel those optimizations, the lookup time for IPv4 is impacted by about 30 ns. This still leaves a 100 ns difference with IPv6 to be explained. Let s compare how time is spent in each lookup function. Here is a CPU flamegraph for IPv4 s fib_lookup(): IPv4 route lookup flamegraph Only 50% of the time is spent in the actual route lookup. The remaining time is spent evaluating the routing rules (about 30 ns). This ratio is dependent on the number of routes we inserted (only 1000 in this example). It should be noted the fib_table_lookup() function is executed twice: once with the local routing table and once with the main routing table. The equivalent flamegraph for IPv6 s ip6_route_output_flags() is depicted below: IPv6 route lookup flamegraph Here is an approximate breakdown on the time spent:
  • 50% is spent in the route lookup in the main table,
  • 15% is spent in handling locking (IPv4 is using the more efficient RCU mechanism),
  • 5% is spent in the route lookup of the local table,
  • most of the remaining is spent in routing rule evaluation (about 100 ns)6.
Why does the evaluation of routing rules is less efficient with IPv6? Again, I don t have a definitive answer.

History The following graph shows the performance progression of route lookups through Linux history: IPv6 route lookup performance progression All kernels are compiled with GCC 4.9 (from Debian Jessie). This version is able to compile older kernels as well as current ones. The kernel configuration is the default one with CONFIG_SMP, CONFIG_IPV6, CONFIG_IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES and CONFIG_IPV6_SUBTREES options enabled. Some other unrelated options are enabled to be able to boot them in a virtual machine and run the benchmark. There are three notable performance changes:
  • In Linux 3.1, Eric Dumazet delays a bit the copy of route metrics to fix the undesirable sharing of route-specific metrics by all cache entries (commit 21efcfa0ff27). Each cache entry now gets its own metrics, which explains the performance hit for the non-/128 scenarios.
  • In Linux 3.9, Yoshifuji Hideaki removes the reference to the neighbor entry in struct rt6_info (commit 887c95cc1da5). This should have lead to a performance increase. The small regression may be due to cache-related issues.
  • In Linux 4.2, Martin KaFai Lau prevents the creation of cache entries for most route lookups. The most sensible performance improvement comes with commit 4b32b5ad31a6. The second one is from commit 45e4fd26683c, which effectively removes creation of cache entries, except for PMTU exceptions.

Insertion performance Another interesting performance-related metric is the insertion time. Linux is able to insert a full view in less than two seconds. For some reason, the insertion time is not linear above 50,000 routes and climbs very fast to 60 seconds for 500,000 routes. Insertion time Despite its more complex insertion logic, the IPv4 subsystem is able to insert 2 million routes in less than 10 seconds.

Memory usage Radix tree nodes (struct fib6_node) and routing information (struct rt6_info) are allocated with the slab allocator7. It is therefore possible to extract the information from /proc/slabinfo when the kernel is booted with the slab_nomerge flag: 
# sed -ne 2p -e '/^ip6_dst/p' -e '/^fib6_nodes/p' /proc/slabinfo   cut -f1 -d:
   name            <active_objs> <num_objs> <objsize> <objperslab> <pagesperslab>
fib6_nodes         76101  76104     64   63    1
ip6_dst_cache      40090  40090    384   10    1
In the above example, the used memory is 76104 64+40090 384 bytes (about 20 MiB). The number of struct rt6_info matches the number of routes while the number of nodes is roughly twice the number of routes: Nodes The memory usage is therefore quite predictable and reasonable, as even a small single-board computer can support several full views (20 MiB for each): Memory usage The LPC-trie used for IPv4 is more efficient: when 512 MiB of memory is needed for IPv6 to store 1 million routes, only 128 MiB are needed for IPv4. The difference is mainly due to the size of struct rt6_info (336 bytes) compared to the size of IPv4 s struct fib_alias (48 bytes): IPv4 puts most information about next-hops in struct fib_info structures that are shared with many entries.

Conclusion The takeaways from this article are:
  • upgrade to Linux 4.2 or more recent to avoid excessive caching,
  • route lookups are noticeably slower compared to IPv4 (by an order of magnitude),
  • CONFIG_IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES option incurs a fixed penalty of 100 ns by lookup,
  • memory usage is fair (20 MiB for 40,000 routes).
Compared to IPv4, IPv6 in Linux doesn t foster the same interest, notably in term of optimizations. Hopefully, things are changing as its adoption and use at scale are increasing.
  1. For a given destination prefix, it s possible to attach source-specific prefixes: 
    ip -6 route add 2001:db8:1::/64 \
  from 2001:db8:3::/64 \
  via fe80::1 \
  dev eth0
    Lookup is first done on the destination address, then on the source address.
  2. This is quite different of the classic scenario where Linux acts as a gateway for a /64 subnet. In this case, the neighbor subsystem stores the reachability information for each host and the routing table only contains a single /64 prefix.
  3. The measurements are done in a virtual machine with one vCPU and no neighbors. The host is an Intel Core i5-4670K running at 3.7 GHz during the experiment (CPU governor set to performance). The benchmark is single-threaded. Many lookups are performed and the result reported is the median value. Timings of individual runs are computed from the TSC.
  4. Most of the packets in the network are expected to be routed to a destination. However, this also means the backtracking code path is not used in the /128 and /48 scenarios. Having a fallback route gives far different results and make it difficult to ensure we explore the address space correctly.
  5. The exact same optimizations could be applied for IPv6. Nobody did it yet.
  6. Compiling out table support effectively removes those last 100 ns.
  7. There is also per-CPU pointers allocated directly (4 bytes per entry per CPU on a 64-bit architecture). We ignore this detail.

28 February 2017

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in February 2017

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):
Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously or accidentally 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. (I have been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund my work in this area.) This month I:
I also made the following changes to our tooling:
diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

  • New features:
    • Add a machine-readable JSON output format. (Closes: #850791).
    • Add an --exclude option. (Closes: #854783).
    • Show results from debugging packages last. (Closes: #820427).
    • Extract archive members using an auto-incrementing integer avoiding the need to sanitise filenames. (Closes: #854723).
    • Apply --max-report-size to --text output. (Closes: #851147).
    • Specify <html lang="en"> in the HTML output. (re. #849411).
  • Bug fixes:
    • Fix errors when comparing directories with non-directories. (Closes: #835641).
    • Device and RPM fallback comparisons require xxd. (Closes: #854593).
    • Fix tests that call xxd on Debian Jessie due to change of output format. (Closes: #855239).
    • Add missing Recommends for comparators. (Closes: #854655).
    • Importing submodules (ie. parent.child) will attempt to import parent. (Closes: #854670).
    • Correct logic of module_exists ensuring we correctly skip the debian.deb822 tests when python3-debian is not installed. (Closes: #854745).
    • Clean all temporary files in the signal handler thread instead of attempting to pass the exception back to the main thread. (Closes: #852013).
    • Fix behaviour of setting report maximums to zero (ie. no limit).
  • Optimisations:
    • Don't uselessly run xxd(1) on non-directories.
    • No need to track libarchive directory locations.
    • Optimise create_limited_print_func.
  • Tests:
    • When comparing two empty directories, ensure that the mtime of the directory is consistent to avoid non-deterministic failures.
    • Ensure we can at least import the "deb_fallback" and "rpm_fallback" modules.
    • Add test for symlink differing in destination.
    • Add tests for --progress, --status-fd and profiling output options as well as the Deb Changes,Buildinfo,Dsc and RPM fallback comparisons.
    • Add get_data and @skip_unless_module_exists test helpers.
    • Mark impossible-to-reach code to improve test coverage.

buildinfo.debian.net

buildinfo.debian.net is my experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them.

  • Drop raw_text fields now as we've moved these to Amazon S3.
  • Drop storage of Installed-Build-Depends and subsequently-orphaned Binary package instances to recover diskspace.

strip-nondeterminism

strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.

  • Print log entry when fixing a file. (Closes: #777239).
  • Run our entire testsuite in autopkgtests, not just the first test. (Closes: #852517).
  • Don't test for stat(2)'s blksize and block attributes. (Closes: #854937).
  • Use error() from Dh_Lib.pm over "manual" die().


Debian
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 817-1 for libphp-phpmailer, correcting a local file disclosure vulnerability where insufficient parsing of HTML messages could potentially be used by attacker to read a local file.
  • Issued DLA 826-1 for wireshark which fixes a denial of service vulnerability in wireshark, where a malformed NATO Ground Moving Target Indicator Format ("STANAG 4607") capture file could cause a memory exhausion/infinite loop.
Uploads
  • python-django (1:1.11~beta1-1) New upstream beta release.
  • redis (3:3.2.8-1) New upstream release.
  • gunicorn (19.6.0-11) Use $ misc:Pre-Depends to populate Pre-Depends for dpkg-maintscript-helper.
  • dh-virtualenv (1.0-1~bpo8+1) Upload to jessie-backports.

I sponsored the following uploads: I also performed the following QA uploads:
  • dh-kpatches (0.99.36+nmu4) Make kernel kernel builds reproducible.
Finally, I made the following non-maintainer uploads:
  • cpio (2.12+dfsg-3) Remove rmt.8.gz to prevent a piuparts error.
  • dot-forward (1:0.71-2.2) Correct a FTBFS; we don't install anything to /usr/sbin, so use GNU Make's $(wildcard ..) over the shell's own * expansion.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 116 packages: autobahn-cpp, automat, bglibs, bitlbee, bmusb, bullet, case, certspotter, checkit-tiff, dash-el, dash-functional-el, debian-reference, el-x, elisp-bug-hunter, emacs-git-messenger, emacs-which-key, examl, genwqe-user, giac, golang-github-cloudflare-cfssl, golang-github-docker-goamz, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, golang-github-go-openapi-spec, golang-github-google-certificate-transparency, golang-github-karlseguin-ccache, golang-github-karlseguin-expect, golang-github-nebulouslabs-bolt, gpiozero, gsequencer, jel, libconfig-mvp-slicer-perl, libcrush, libdist-zilla-config-slicer-perl, libdist-zilla-role-pluginbundle-pluginremover-perl, libevent, libfunction-parameters-perl, libopenshot, libpod-weaver-section-generatesection-perl, libpodofo, libprelude, libprotocol-http2-perl, libscout, libsmali-1-java, libtest-abortable-perl, linux, linux-grsec, linux-signed, lockdown, lrslib, lua-curses, lua-torch-cutorch, mariadb-10.1, mini-buildd, mkchromecast, mocker-el, node-arr-exclude, node-brorand, node-buffer-xor, node-caller, node-duplexer3, node-ieee754, node-is-finite, node-lowercase-keys, node-minimalistic-assert, node-os-browserify, node-p-finally, node-parse-ms, node-plur, node-prepend-http, node-safe-buffer, node-text-table, node-time-zone, node-tty-browserify, node-widest-line, npd6, openoverlayrouter, pandoc-citeproc-preamble, pydenticon, pyicloud, pyroute2, pytest-qt, pytest-xvfb, python-biomaj3, python-canonicaljson, python-cgcloud, python-gffutils, python-h5netcdf, python-imageio, python-kaptan, python-libtmux, python-pybedtools, python-pyflow, python-scrapy, python-scrapy-djangoitem, python-signedjson, python-unpaddedbase64, python-xarray, qcumber, r-cran-urltools, radiant, repo, rmlint, ruby-googleauth, ruby-os, shutilwhich, sia, six, slimit, sphinx-celery, subuser, swarmkit, tmuxp, tpm2-tools, vine, wala & x265. I additionally filed 8 RC bugs against packages that had incomplete debian/copyright files against: checkit-tiff, dash-el, dash-functional-el, libcrush, libopenshot, mkchromecast, pytest-qt & x265.

14 February 2017

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: About process limits

Graphs The other day I had to deal with an outage in one of our LDAP servers, which is running the old Debian Wheezy (yeah, I know, we should update it). We are running openldap, the slapd daemon. And after searching the log files, the cause of the outage was obvious: 
[...]
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.allow: Too many open files
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Too many open files
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.allow: Too many open files
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Too many open files
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.allow: Too many open files
slapd[7408]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Too many open files
[...]
[Please read About process limits, round 2 for updated info on this issue] I couldn t believe that openldap is using tcp_wrappers (or libwrap), an ancient software piece that hasn t been updated for years, replaced in many other ways by more powerful tools (like nftables). I was blinded by this and ran to open a Debian bug agains openldap: #854436 (openldap: please don t use tcp-wrappers with slapd). The reply from Steve Langasek was clear: 
If people are hitting open file limits trying to open two extra files,
disabling features in the codebase is not the correct solution.
Obvoursly, the problem was somewhere else. I started investigating about system limits, which seems to have 2 main components: According to my searchings, my slapd daemon was being hit by the latter. I reviewed the default system-wide limits and they seemed Ok. So, let s change the other limits. Most of the documentantion around the internet points you to a /etc/security/limits.conf file, which is then read by pam_limits. You can check current limits using the ulimit bash builtin. In the case of my slapd: 
arturo@debian:~% sudo su openldap -s /bin/bash
openldap@debian:~% ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority             (-e) 0
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 7915
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority              (-r) 0
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 2000
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited
This seems to suggest that the openldap user is constrained to 1024 openfiles (and some more if we check the hard limit). The 1024 limit seems low for a rather busy service. According to most of the internet docs, I m supposed to put this in /etc/security/limits.conf: 
[...]
#<domain>      <type>  <item>         <value>
openldap	soft	nofile		1000000
openldap	hard	nofile		1000000
[...]
I should check as well that pam_limits is loaded, in /etc/pam.d/other: 
[...]
session		required	pam_limits.so
[...]
After reloading the openldap session, you can check that, indeed, limits are changed as reported by ulimit. But at some point, the slapd daemon starts to drop connections again. Thing start to turn weird here. The changes we made until now don t work, probably because when the slapd daemon is spawned at bootup (by root, sysvinit in this case) no pam mechanisms are triggered. So, I was forced to learn a new thing: process limits. You can check the limits for a given process this way: 
arturo@debian:~% cat /proc/$(pgrep slapd)/limits
Limit                     Soft Limit           Hard Limit           Units
Max cpu time              unlimited            unlimited            seconds
Max file size             unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max data size             unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max stack size            8388608              unlimited            bytes
Max core file size        0                    unlimited            bytes
Max resident set          unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max processes             16000                16000                processes
Max open files            1024                 4096                 files
Max locked memory         65536                65536                bytes
Max address space         unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max file locks            unlimited            unlimited            locks
Max pending signals       16000                16000                signals
Max msgqueue size         819200               819200               bytes
Max nice priority         0                    0
Max realtime priority     0                    0
Max realtime timeout      unlimited            unlimited            us
Good, seems we have some more limits attached to our slapd daemon process. If we search the internet to know how to change process limits, most of the docs points to a tool known as prlimit. According to the manpage, this is a tool to get and set process resource limits, which is just what I was looking for. According to the docs, the prlimit system call is supported since Linux 2.6.36, and I m running 3.2, so no problem here. Things looks promising. But yes, more problems. The prlimit tool is not included in the Debian Wheezy release. A simple call to a single system call was not going to stop me now, so I searched more the web until I found this useful manpage: getrlimit(2). There is a sample C code included in the manpage, in which we only need to replace RLIMIT_CPU with RLIMIT_NOFILE: 
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>
#define errExit(msg) do   perror(msg); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); \
                          while (0)
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
 
    struct rlimit old, new;
    struct rlimit *newp;
    pid_t pid;
    if (!(argc == 2   argc == 4))  
        fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <pid> [<new-soft-limit> "
                "<new-hard-limit>]\n", argv[0]);
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
     
    pid = atoi(argv[1]);        /* PID of target process */
    newp = NULL;
    if (argc == 4)  
        new.rlim_cur = atoi(argv[2]);
        new.rlim_max = atoi(argv[3]);
        newp = &new;
     
    /* Set CPU time limit of target process; retrieve and display
       previous limit */
    if (prlimit(pid, RLIMIT_NOFILE, newp, &old) == -1)
        errExit("prlimit-1");
    printf("Previous limits: soft=%lld; hard=%lld\n",
            (long long) old.rlim_cur, (long long) old.rlim_max);
    /* Retrieve and display new CPU time limit */
    if (prlimit(pid, RLIMIT_NOFILE, NULL, &old) == -1)
        errExit("prlimit-2");
    printf("New limits: soft=%lld; hard=%lld\n",
            (long long) old.rlim_cur, (long long) old.rlim_max);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
And them compile it like this: 
arturo@debian:~% gcc limits.c -o limits
We can then call this new binary like this: 
arturo@debian:~% sudo limits $(pgrep slapd) 1000000 1000000
Finally, the limit seems OK: 
arturo@debian:~% cat /proc/$(pgrep slapd)/limits
Limit                     Soft Limit           Hard Limit           Units
Max cpu time              unlimited            unlimited            seconds
Max file size             unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max data size             unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max stack size            8388608              unlimited            bytes
Max core file size        0                    unlimited            bytes
Max resident set          unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max processes             16000                16000                processes
Max open files            1000000              1000000              files
Max locked memory         65536                65536                bytes
Max address space         unlimited            unlimited            bytes
Max file locks            unlimited            unlimited            locks
Max pending signals       16000                16000                signals
Max msgqueue size         819200               819200               bytes
Max nice priority         0                    0
Max realtime priority     0                    0
Max realtime timeout      unlimited            unlimited            us
Don t forget to apply this change every time the slapd daemon starts. Nobody found this issue before? really?

19 September 2016

Mike Gabriel: Rocrail changed License to some dodgy non-free non-License

The Background Story A year ago, or so, I took some time to search the internet for Free Software that can be used for controlling model railways via a computer. I was happy to find Rocrail [1] being one of only a few applications available on the market. And even more, I was very happy when I saw that it had been licensed under a Free Software license: GPL-3(+). A month ago, or so, I collected my old M rklin (Digital) stuff from my parents' place and started looking into it again after +15 years, together with my little son. Some weeks ago, I remembered Rocrail and thought... Hey, this software was GPLed code and absolutely suitable for uploading to Debian and/or Ubuntu. I searched for the Rocrail source code and figured out that it got hidden from the web some time in 2015 and that the license obviously has been changed to some non-free license (I could not figure out what license, though). This made me very sad! I thought I had found a piece of software that might be interesting for testing with my model railway. Whenever I stumble over some nice piece of Free Software that I plan to use (or even only play with), I upload this to Debian as one of the first steps. However, I highly attempt to stay away from non-free sofware, so Rocrail has become a no-option for me back in 2015. I should have moved on from here on... Instead... Proactively, I signed up with the Rocrail forum and asked the author(s) if they see any chance of re-licensing the Rocrail code under GPL (or any other FLOSS license) again [2]? When I encounter situations like this, I normally offer my expertise and help with such licensing stuff for free. My impression until here already was that something strange must have happened in the past, so that software developers choose GPL and later on stepped back from that decision and from then on have been hiding the source code from the web entirely. Going deeper... The Rocrail project's wiki states that anyone can request GitBlit access via the forum and obtain the source code via Git for local build purposes only. Nice! So, I asked for access to the project's Git repository, which I had been granted. Thanks for that. Trivial Source Code Investigation... So far so good. I investigated the source code (well, only the license meta stuff shipped with the source code...) and found that the main COPYING files (found at various locations in the source tree, containing a full version of the GPL-3 license) had been replaced by this text: 
Copyright (c) 2002 Robert Jan Versluis, Rocrail.net
All rights reserved.
Commercial usage needs permission.
The replacement happened with these Git commits: 
commit cfee35f3ae5973e97a3d4b178f20eb69a916203e
Author: Rob Versluis <r.j.versluis@rocrail.net>
Date:   Fri Jul 17 16:09:45 2015 +0200
    update copyrights
commit df399d9d4be05799d4ae27984746c8b600adb20b
Author: Rob Versluis <r.j.versluis@rocrail.net>
Date:   Wed Jul 8 14:49:12 2015 +0200
    update licence
commit 0daffa4b8d3dc13df95ef47e0bdd52e1c2c58443
Author: Rob Versluis <r.j.versluis@rocrail.net>
Date:   Wed Jul 8 10:17:13 2015 +0200
    update
Getting in touch again, still being really interested and wanting to help... As I consider such a non-license as really dangerous when distributing any sort of software, be it Free or non-free Software, I posted the below text on the Rocrail forum: 
Hi Rob,
I just stumbled over this post [3] [link reference adapted for this
blog post), which probably is the one you have referred to above.
It seems that Rocrail contains features that require a key or such
for permanent activation.  Basically, this is allowed and possible
even with the GPL-3+ (although Free Software activists will  not
appreciate that). As the GPL states that people can share the source
code, programmers can  easily deactivate license key checks (and
such) in the code and re-distribute that patchset as they  like.
Furthermore, the current COPYING file is really non-protective at
all. It does not really protect   you as copyright holder of the
code. Meaning, if people crash their trains with your software, you  
could actually be legally prosecuted for that. In theory. Or in the
U.S. ( ;-) ). Main reason for  having a long long license text is to
protect you as the author in case your software causes t trouble to
other people. You do not have any warranty disclaimer in your COPYING
file or elsewhere. Really not a good idea.
In that referenced post above, someone also writes about the nuisance
of license discussions in  this forum. I have seen various cases
where people produced software and did not really care for 
licensing. Some ended with a letter from a lawyer, some with some BIG
company using their code  under their copyright holdership and their
own commercial licensing scheme. This is not paranoia,  this is what
happens in the Free Software world from time to time.
A model that might be much more appropriate (and more protective to
you as the author), maybe, is a  dual release scheme for the code. A
possible approach could be to split Rocrail into two editions:  
Community Edition and Professional/Commercial Edition. The Community
Edition must be licensed in a  way that it allows re-using the code
in a closed-source, non-free version of Rocrail (e.g.   MIT/Expat
License or Apache2.0 License). Thus, the code base belonging to the
community edition  would be licensed, say..., as Apache-2.0 and for
the extra features in the Commercial Edition, you  may use any
non-free license you want (but please not that COPYING file you have
now, it really  does not protect your copyright holdership).
The reason for releasing (a reduced set of features of a) software as
Free Software is to extend  the user base. The honey jar effect, as
practise by many huge FLOSS projects (e.g. Owncloud,  GitLab, etc.).
If people could install Rocrail from the Debian / Ubuntu archives
directly, I am  sure that the user base of Rocrail will increase.
There may also be developers popping up showing  an interest in
Rocrail (e.g. like me). However, I know many FLOSS developers (e.g.
like me) that  won't waste their free time on working for a non-free
piece of software (without being paid).
If you follow (or want to follow) a business model with Rocrail, then
keep some interesting  features in the Commercial Edition and don't
ship that source code. People with deep interest may  opt for that.
Furthermore, another option could be dual licensing the code. As the
copyright holder of Rocrail  you are free to juggle with licenses and
apply any license to a release you want. For example, this  can be
interesing for a free-again Rocrail being shipped via Apple's iStore. 
Last but not least, as you ship the complete source code with all
previous changes as a Git project  to those who request GitBlit
access, it is possible to obtain all earlier versions of Rocrail. In 
the mail I received with my GitBlit credentials, there was some text
that  prohibits publishing the  code. Fine. But: (in theory) it is
not forbidden to share the code with a friend, for local usage.  This
friend finds the COPYING file, frowns and rewinds back to 2015 where
the license was still  GPL-3+. GPL-3+ code can be shared with anyone
and also published, so this friend could upload the  2015-version of
Rocrail to Github or such and start to work on a free fork. You also
may not want  this.
Thanks for working on this piece of software! It is highly
interesing, and I am still sad, that it  does not come with a free
license anymore. I won't continue this discussion and move on, unless
you  are interested in any of the above information and ask for more
expertise. Ping me here or directly  via mail, if needed. If the
expertise leads to parts of Rocrail becoming Free Software again, the 
expertise is offered free of charge ;-).
light+love
Mike
Wow, the first time I got moderated somewhere... What an experience! This experience now was really new. My post got immediately removed from the forum by the main author of Rocrail (with the forum's moderator's hat on). The new experience was: I got really angry when I discovererd having been moderated. Wow! Really a powerful emotion. No harassment in my words, no secrets disclosed, and still... my free speech got suppressed by someone. That feels intense! And it only occurred in the virtual realm, not face to face. Wow!!! I did not expect such intensity... The reason for wiping my post without any other communication was given as below and quite a statement to frown upon (this post has also been "moderately" removed from the forum thread [2] a bit later today): 
Mike,
I think its not a good idea to point out a way to get the sources back to the GPL periode.
Therefore I deleted your posting.
(The phpBB forum software also allows moderators to edit posts, so the critical passage could have been removed instead, but immediately wiping the full message, well...). Also, just wiping my post and not replying otherwise with some apology to suppress my words, really is a no-go. And the reason for wiping the rest of the text... Any Git user can easily figure out how to get a FLOSS version of Rocrail and continue to work on that from then on. Really. Now the political part of this blog post... Fortunately, I still live in an area of the world where the right of free speech is still present. I found out: I really don't like being moderated!!! Esp. if what I share / propose is really noooo secret at all. Anyone who knows how to use Git can come to the same conclusion as I have come to this morning. [Off-topic, not at all related to Rocrail: The last votes here in Germany indicate that some really stupid folks here yearn for another this time highly idiotic wind of change, where free speech may end up as a precious good.] To other (Debian) Package Maintainers and Railroad Enthusiasts... With this blog post I probably close the last option for Rocrail going FLOSS again. Personally, I think that gate was already closed before I got in touch. Now really moving on... Probably the best approach for my new train conductor hobby (as already recommended by the woman at my side some weeks back) is to leave the laptop lid closed when switching on the train control units. I should have listened to her much earlier. I have finally removed the Rocrail source code from my computer again without building and testing the application. I neither have shared the source code with anyone. Neither have I shared the Git URL with anyone. I really think that FLOSS enthusiasts should stay away from this software for now. For my part, I have lost my interest in this completely... References light+love,
Mike

28 July 2016

Norbert Preining: TUG 2016 Day 3 Stories and Histories

The last day of TUG 2016, or at least the last day of talks, brought four one-hour talks from special guests, and several others, where many talks told us personal stories and various histories.
tug2016-biglow A great finish of a great conference. Jennifer Claudio The case for justified text Due to a strange timezone bug in my calendar program, I completely overslept a morning meeting and breakfast, as well as the first talk, so unfortunately I don t have anything to report about this surely intersting talk comparing justification in various word processors and TeX. Leyla Akhmadeeva, Rinat Gizatullin, Boris Veytsman Are justification and hyphenation good or bad for the reader? Still half dizzy and without coffee, I couldn t really follow this talk, and only woke up till the end when there was a lot of interesting discussion about speed reading and its non-existence (because it is simply skimming over text), and improvements on reading comprehension. Charles Bigelow Looking for legibility Another special guest, Charles Bigelow, presented a huge pool of research and work into readability, and how attitude and usage of fonts change over time. A very involving and well laid out talk, full of interesting background images and personal opinions and thoughts. Charles also touched onto topics of readability on modern devices like e-readers and mobiles. He compared the recent developments in font design for mobile devices with their work on Lucida 20+ years ago, and concluded that both arrived at the same solutions. A very educating and amusing talk packed full with information on readability. I surely will revisit the recording in a study session. David Walden Some notes on the history of digital typography David touches on many topics of the history of digital typography which he has experienced himself over the years: First the development of newspaper production and printing, then the evolvement of editors from simple text editors over word processors to full-fledged DTP programs. Finally he touches on various algorithmic problems that appear in the publishing business. Tim Inkster The beginning of my career Tim, our fanatastic guide through his print shop the Procupine s Quill on the second excursion day, talked about his private ups and downs in the printing business, all filled with an infinite flow of funny stories and surprising anecdotes. Without slides and anything but his voice and his stories, he kept us hanging on his lips without a break. I recommend watching the recording of his talk because one cannot convey the funny comments and great stories he shared with us in this simple blog. Joe Clark Type and tiles on the TTC Joe unveils the history of rise and fall of the underground types and
tiles in Toronto. It is surprising to me that a small metro network as in Toronto can have such a long history of changes of design, layout, presentation. Some of the photos completely stymed me how can anyone put up signs like that? I was thinking. To quote Joe (hopefully I remember correctly):
You see what happens without adult supervision.
Abdelouahad Bayar Towards an operational (La)TeX package supporting optical scaling of dynamic mathematical symbols A technical talk about a trial in providing optical scaling of mathematical symbols. As far as I understand it tries to improve on the TeX way of doing extensible math symbols by glueing things together. It seems to be highly involved and technically interesting project, but I couldn t completely grasp the aim of it. Michael Cohen, Blanca Mancilla, John Plaice Zebrackets: A score of years and delimiters John introduced us to Zebrackets, stripped parentheses and brackets, to help us keep track of pairing of those beasts. But as we know, Zebras are very elusive animals, and so we saw lots of stripped brackets around. The idea of better markup of matching parentheses is definitely worth developing. Charles Bigelow Probably approximately not quite correct: Revise, repeat The second talk of Charles, this time on the history of the Lucida fonts, from the early beginnings drawn on graph paper to recent developments using FontLab producing OpenType fonts. A truly unique crash course through the development of one of the very big families of fonts, and one of the first outside Computer Modern that had also support for proper math typesetting in TeX.
Aggressively legible!
One of the key phrases that popped up again and again was aggressively legible, mostly in negative connotations as far to fat symbols or far to big Arabic letters. But for me this font family is still close to my heart. I purchased it back than from Y&Y for my PhD thesis, and since then have upgraded to the TUG version including the OpenType fonts, and I use them for most of my presentation. Maybe I like the aggressive legibility! Chuck slided in lots of nice comments about Kris Holmes, the development practice in their cooperation, stories of business contacts, and many more, making this talk a very lively and amusing, and at the same time very educating talk.
This concluded the TUG conference talks, and we thanked Pavneet for his excellent organization. But since we still have up to two days of excursions, many people dispersed quickly, just to meet again for a optional Type and Tile Tour 3-5 subway stops with discussion of typesetting This guided tour through the underground of Toronto, guided by Joe Clark who spoke in the morning about this topic, was attended by far too many participants. I think there were around 25 when we left. I thought that this will not work out properly, and so decided to leave the group and wander around alone. The last program point for today was dinner with a blues music concert in the near by Jazz Bistro:
jazz-bistro Excellent life music in a bit schick/sophisticated atmosphere was a good finish for this excellent day. With Herb from MacTeX and his wife we killed two bottles of red wine, before slowly tingling back to the hotel. A great finishing day of talks.

3 July 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 61 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 19th and June 25th 2016. Media coverage GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Emil Velikov searched on IRC for hints on how to guarantee unique values during build to invalidate shader caches in Mesa, when also no VCS information is available. A possible solution is a timestamp, which is unique enough for local builds, but can still be reproducible by allowing it to be overwritten with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Packages fixed The following 9 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cclib librun-parts-perl llvm-toolchain-snapshot python-crypto python-openid r-bioc-shortread r-bioc-variantannotation ruby-hdfeos5 sqlparse The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 139 reviews have been added, 20 have been updated and 21 have been removed in this week. New issues found: 53 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Mateusz ukasik. diffoscope development Quote of the week "My builds are so reproducible, they fail exactly every second time." Johannes Ziemke (@discordianfish) Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb (lamby), Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

2 June 2016

Jamie McClelland: Mobile Instant Messaging

Now that I've gone down the signal road, when can I get off of it? The two contenders I've found for more politically conscious mobile-friendly instant messaging are Tox and XMPP. And the problems to solve are: The Tox Project has a great design (peer-to-peer) and handles end-to-end encryption as part of its core design. However, the Antox mobile client has not only failed to solve the battery drain problem but seems to also have a serious bandwidth issue as well. Also, what is up with this drama? How about XMPP? For years, XMPP clients have been using OTR - and many instant messaging applications support it, including ChatSecure. And now, there seems to be quite a bit of excitement around implementing a better protocol called OMEMO. Incidentally, the OMEMO protocol uses the same Double Ratchet (previously referred to as the Axolotl Ratchet) protocol that Signal uses. While there are some irritating hiccups around using the available GPL library for Double Ratchet on iPhone apps, it seems like these issues are being sorted out and soon we'll have some kind of standard way for XMPP clients to exchange end-to-end encrypted messages. Let's move on to notifications and battery drain. If you believe the author of the Android Conversations App there doesn't seem to be a problem. However, client state indication seems to be the only issue related to battery drainage he addresses and I couldn't figure out how to easily install that extension on our Debian Jessie prosody instance since it isn't included in the prosody-modules package in Debian and it requires additional modules for it to work. Chris Ballinger, the author of ChatSecure (iOS and Android XMPP app), is less optimistic about this problem in general. In short, he thinks we need a proper "push" mechanism and has even started to implement one. At the same time, a new (and different) XMPP standard called Push Notifications - XEP-0357 has been released and it is even implemented in Prosody (although not yet available in Debian). So the future seems bright, right? Well, not exactly. All of this "push" activity seems to solve this problem: A federated/decentralized application cannot properly use Apple's APNs or Google's GCM. In the words of Chris Ballinger:
The biggest problem is that there is no easy way to send push messages between my app and your app. For me to send a push to one of your app s users on iOS, I must first obtain an APNs SSL certificate/key pair from you, and one of your user s push token that uniquely identifies their device to Apple. These push tokens are potentially sensitive information because they allow Apple to locate your device (in order to send it a push).
So, even if we manage to get one of these two standards for push notifications up and running, we have only succeeded in solving Signal's centralization problem, not the dependence on Google Play Services and Apple Push Network (in fact it's quite mysterious to me how you could even use the Prosody implementation of Push Notifications with GCM or APN). So... what we really would need would be to figure out how to implement one of these two push standards and then get it to work with an alternative to GCM and APN (perhaps MQTT)? Which, I think would require changes to the XMPP client. Geez. I may be on Signal longer than I planned.

Next.