Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.3.9.2 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/08#rcppeigen_0.3.3.9.2
April 8, 2022, 11:31 PM
A new release 0.3.3.9.2 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN today (and already went to Debian). Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.
This update was (as it happens) requested by CRAN as R aims to bring the Fortran / C interface to best practices. We call dgesdd twice in one example and use a character argument, and the-powers-that-be now prefer better control over that character argument. So we did. Another change, kindly cont...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-03/
April 8, 2022, 8:14 AM
Welcome to the March 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our monthly reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month.
The in-toto project was accepted as an “incubating project” within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). in-toto is a framework that protects the software supply chain by collecting and verifying relevant data. It does so by enabling libraries to collect information about software supply chain actions and ...
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Jacob Adams: The Unexpected Importance of the Trailing Slash
https://tookmund.com/2022/04/importance-of-the-trailing-slash
April 8, 2022, 12:00 AM
For many using Unix-derived systems today, we take for granted
that /some/path and /some/path/ are the same.
Most shells will even add a trailing slash for you when you press the Tab key
after the name of a directory or a symbolic link to one.
However, many programs treat these two paths as subtly different in certain cases,
which I outline below, as all three have tripped me up
in various ways1.
POSIX and Coreutils
Perhaps the trickiest use of the trailing slash in a distinguishing way is in...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Ubuntu plocate security review
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-04-07-16-13_ubuntu_plocate_security_review.html
April 7, 2022, 2:30 PM
Seemingly, the Ubuntu security team made a (quick!) review of plocate prior to
inclusion in main. I'm pretty happy about the result:
I reviewed plocate 1.1.15-1ubuntu2 as checked into jammy. This shouldn't be
considered a full audit but rather a quick gauge of maintainability.
plocate is a locate implementation based on posting lists and io_uring,
intended as a drop-in replacement for mlocate.
- No CVE History.
- Build-Depends on liburing and libzstd
- The pre/post inst/rm scripts adds a ploc...
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Jonathan Dowland: Hope in a Darkened Heart
https://jmtd.net/log/Hope_in_a_Darkened_Heart/
April 6, 2022, 8:01 PM
I first heard Virginia Astley via Lauren Laverne, who played (I think) "With my
eyes wide open" from her first album, "From Gardens Where We Feel Secure". Mostly
ambient, a conceptual piece about a garden in an English Summer, spanning dawn to
dusk. Bucolic ambient, dream pop.
It was a little outside my wheel-house, but I loved it, and wanted to find out
more. I soon learned that official, physical copies of it were rare and
expensive.
Some time later I stumbled across her second album...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/04/my-debian-activities-in-march-2022/
April 6, 2022, 5:01 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 332 and rejected 15 packages. This ratio gives a reason to hope. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 342.
Debian LTS
This was my ninety-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:
[DLA 2932-1] tiff security update for three CVEs
[DLA 2931-1] cyrus-sasl2 security for one CVE
[DLA...
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Bits from Debian: Infomaniak Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/04/debconf22-infomaniak-platinum.html
April 6, 2022, 10:30 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Infomaniak
has committed to support DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the fourth year in a row that Infomaniak is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company,
also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers,
live-streaming and video on demand services.
It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical
to the functioning of the services and products prov...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: One, by Be
https://jmtd.net/log/One,_by_Be/
April 6, 2022, 8:59 AM
The sublime One, by Be is a pastoral, English summer time instrumental improvisation around field recordings and the theme of the honey bee. A lovely piece to accompany deep thinking. I’m reminded of Virginia Astley. Be are associated with Caught by the River, a collective who explore ways of setpping out of daily digital live and embrace, nature, walks, calm, etc....
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Jonathan Dowland: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
https://jmtd.net/log/My_Life_In_The_Bush_Of_Ghosts/
April 6, 2022, 8:59 AM
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is a weird sound-collage-style album by Brian
Eno and David Byrne, released in 1981. It has African-inspired rhythms layered
with lots of samples from American radio and TV. It sounds almost like a field
recording of the United States was made by wildlife surveyors.
My copy is the UK first
pressing
which includes the track "Qu'ran" which was removed from later editions (and
re-instated again later on).
I previously wrote about uploading multitracks for two
tracks ...
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Jonathan Dowland: Death from Above
https://jmtd.net/log/Death_from_Above/
April 6, 2022, 8:59 AM
I received the last two Death From Above albums at Christmas and this weekend managed to give the first (Outrage Is Now) a spin. Pretty colours! They remain one of the best bands to see live. Last time I saw them in a support slot in Newcastle. My friend Rob, a man of few words said “I wouldn’t want to have to follow them on stage!”...
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Jonathan Dowland: Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (Music From The Soundtrack)
https://jmtd.net/log/A_Clockwork_Orange_OST/
April 6, 2022, 8:59 AM
I was reminded of this record over the weekend, as Radio 4's Front Row was
discussing the 50th anniversary of Kubrick's movie. To me, the
soundtrack has a strange, whimsical, almost cynical element to it (especially
with the selection of things like Pomp and Circumstance), but I was
familiar with the movie before the soundtrack and it might just be the
association that triggers those feelings.
I think I picked this up at Tynemouth Market when I lived close by, but I'm
not sure. I am sur...
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Matthew Garrett: Bearer tokens are just awful
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59353.html
April 5, 2022, 6:54 AM
As I mentioned last time, bearer tokens are not super compatible with a model in which every access is verified to ensure it's coming from a trusted device. Let's talk about that in a bit more detail.First off, what is a bearer token? In its simplest form, it's simply an opaque blob that you give to a user after an authentication or authorisation challenge, and then they show it to you to prove that they should be allowed access to a resource. In theory you could just hand someone a randomly gen...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.8 on CRAN: Upstream Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/04#rcppspdlog_0.0.8
April 5, 2022, 12:48 AM
A new version 0.0.8 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich.
This release brings a new upstream release 1.10.0 of spdlog. The (minimal) NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.8 (2022-04-04)
Upgraded to upstream releases spdlog 1.10.0
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a dif...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.0.0.0 on CRAN: Upstream Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/04#rcpparmadillo_0.11.0.0.0
April 5, 2022, 12:42 AM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 972 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 24 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 465 times ac...
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Kees Cook: security things in Linux v5.10
https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2022/04/04/security-things-in-linux-v5-10/
April 5, 2022, 12:01 AM
Previously: v5.9
Linux v5.10 was released in December, 2020. Here’s my summary of various security things that I found interesting:
AMD SEV-ES
While guest VM memory encryption with AMD SEV has been supported for a while, Joerg Roedel, Thomas Lendacky, and others added register state encryption (SEV-ES). This means it’s even harder for a VM host to reconstruct a guest VM’s state.
x86 static calls
Josh Poimboeuf and Peter Zijlstra implemented static calls for x86, which operates very similar...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, March 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-march-2022.html
April 4, 2022, 7:34 PM
In March I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from February. I worked 16 hours,
and will carry over the remaining time to April.
I backported the mitigations for Spectre-BHB (CVE-2022-0001,
CVE-2022-0002) on x86 processors, to Linux 4.9. I worked together
with Salvatore Bonaccorso in preparing the kernel updates that were
needed in all suites, and writing advisory text. I uploaded both
the linux (4.9) and linux-4.19 packag...
--------------------
Arturo Borrero González: Wikimedia Toolforge and Grid Engine
https://ral-arturo.org/2022/04/04/wmcs-toolforge-grid.html
April 4, 2022, 5:45 PM
This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by
Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
One of the most important and successful products provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation is
Toolforge, a hosting service commonly known in the industry as Platform as a Service (PaaS). In particular, it is a
platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications with the ultimate goal of helping the Wikimedia
mission from the technica...
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Ian Jackson: Otter (game server) 1.0.0 released
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11775.html
April 2, 2022, 3:39 PM
I have just released Otter 1.0.0.
Recap: what is Otter
Otter is my game server for arbitrary board games. Unlike most online game systems. It does not know (nor does it need to know) the rules of the game you are playing. Instead, it lets you and your friends play with common tabletop/boardgame elements such as hands of cards, boards, and so on. So it’s something like a “tabletop simulator” (but it does not have any 3D, or a physics engine, or anything like that).
There are provided game m...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RInside 0.2.17
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/04/01#rinside_0.2.17
April 1, 2022, 10:13 PM
A new release 0.2.17 of RInside arrived on CRAN and in Debian today. This is the first release in two years since the 0.2.16 release. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by Rcpp.
This release brings a minor update for R 4.2.0, due out later this month, and kindly provided by Tomas Kalibera. It updates one function declaration; we wrapped some conditioning around so that RIn...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: I am more used to Rust.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Apr-1.html.en#2022-Apr-1-19:27:48
April 1, 2022, 10:27 AM
I am more used to Rust.
I can do simple string processing faster in Rust than say Python.
It has enough things to make it more pleasant to work with than C++.
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-59606-992-9.html
April 1, 2022, 4:28 AM
Review: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, by Tamsyn Muir

Publisher:
Subterranean Press


Copyright:
2020


ISBN:
1-59606-992-9


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
111

A witch put Princess Floralinda at the top of a forty-flight tower, but it
wasn't personal. This is just what witches do, particularly with
princesses with butter-coloured curls and sapphire-blue eyes. Princes
would come from miles around to battle up the floor...
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Russ Allbery: Updated eyrie Debian archive keyring
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-03/001.html
April 1, 2022, 3:15 AM
For anyone who uses my personal Debian repository (there are fewer and
fewer reasons to do that, but there are still some Debian packages there
that aren't available anywhere else), I've (finally) refreshed the archive
signing key.
The new key is available through the eyrie-archive-keyring package as
normal. Both the new and the old keys were provided in that package for a
while. As of today, the old key has been removed. The key can also be
downloaded from my web site....
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Russell Coker: Converting to UEFI
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/01/converting-to-uefi/
April 1, 2022, 2:17 AM
When I got my HP ML110 Gen9 working as a workstation I initially was under the impression that boot wasn’t supported on NVMe and booted it from USB. I found USB booting with legacy boot to be unreliable so decided to try EFI booting and noticed that the NVMe devices were boot candidates with UEFI. Making one of them bootable was more complex than expected because no-one seems to have documented such things. So here’s my documentation, it’s not great but this method has worked once for me.
...
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Antoine Beaupré: Salvaged my first Debian package
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-31-first-package-salvaged/
April 1, 2022, 1:50 AM
I finally salvaged my first Debian package, python-invoke. As
part of ITS 964718, I moved the package from the Openstack Team
to the Python team. The Python team might not be super happy with
it, because it's breaking some of its rules, but at least someone
(ie. me) is actively working (and using) the package.
Wait what
People not familiar with Debian will not understand anything in that
first paragraph, so let me expand. Know-it-all Debian developers (you
know who you are) can skip to the nex...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/04/01/floss-activities/
April 1, 2022, 1:27 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
fuelwatch:
cleanup
circuitbreaker:
fix dev requires
playerctl:
error on no player
mpv-mpris:
allow install layout override,
test MPRIS Quit,
add test fixes for
re-adding dropped check,
ensuring clean logs,
waiting for mpv,
old playerctl compat,
socat UNIX-CONNECT,
D-Bus dir perms
iotop-py:
fix date
dnsgraph:
dep missing error message usability
flower:
relax dep
apt:
document interval suffi...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: ZTA doesn't solve all problems, but partial implementations solve fewer
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59079.html
March 31, 2022, 11:06 PM
Traditional network access controls work by assuming that something is trustworthy based on some other factor - for example, if a computer is on your office network, it's trustworthy because only trustworthy people should be able to gain physical access to plug something in. If you restrict access to your services to requests coming from trusted networks, then you can assert that it's coming from a trusted device.Of course, this isn't necessarily true. A machine on your office network may be com...
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Russell Coker: AMT/MEBX on Debian
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/31/amt-mebx-debian/
March 31, 2022, 3:51 AM
I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX).
Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of technology gives remote access to your system at a level that allows in some ways overriding the OS. If this gets broken then you have big problems. Also all the code that matters is non-free. Please don’t comment on this post saying that AMT is bad, take it as known that it has issues and that people are forced ...
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Russell Coker: Links March 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/31/links-march-2022/
March 31, 2022, 12:50 AM
Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP to Chrony which gives a good overview of how NTP works and how accurate the different versions are [1].
Bleeping Computer has an amusing article about criminals who copied a lot of data from NVidia servers including specs of their latest products [2], they are threatening to release all the data if NVidia doesn’t stop crippling their GPUs to make them unsuitable for crypto currency mining. I don’t support these criminals, but I thi...
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Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet?
https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/31/internet-kids.html
March 30, 2022, 10:00 PM
I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet.
Surely, we have seen a generation that we call “digital natives” grow up with
the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive
technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on.
And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering…
Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial
With their search engine website design, G...
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Bits from Debian: Lenovo Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/debconf22-lenovo-platinum.html
March 30, 2022, 9:00 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo
has committed to supporting DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the fourth year in a row that Lenovo is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products,
including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices,
smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo
understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world....
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppBDT 0.2.5: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/29#rcppbdt_0.2.5
March 29, 2022, 11:13 PM
A minor maintenance release for the RcppBDT package is now on CRAN.
The RcppBDT package is an early adopter of Rcpp and was one of the first packages utilizing Boost and its Date_Time library. The now more widely-used package anytime is a direct descentant of RcppBDT. Thanks again for the heads-up!
This release mostly deals with a one-definition rule violation detected by link-time optimisation (which can be enable when configuring R itself at build time with --enable-lto). I confused myself int...
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Jeremy Bicha: How to install a bunch of debs
https://jeremy.bicha.net/2022/03/29/how-to-install-a-bunch-of-debs/
March 29, 2022, 9:55 PM
Recently, I needed to check if a regression in Ubuntu 22.04 Beta was triggered by the mesa upgrade. Ok, sounds simple, let me just install the older mesa version.
Let’s take a look.
Oh, wow, there are about 24 binary packages (excluding the packages for debug symbols) included in mesa!
Because it’s no longer published in Ubuntu 22.04, we can’t use our normal apt way to install those packages. And downloading those one by one and then installing them sounds like too much work.
S...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Join Freexian to help improve Debian
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/03/29/join-freexian-to-help-improve-debian/
March 29, 2022, 10:29 AM
Freexian has set itself new ambitious goals in support of Debian and we would like to expand our team to help us reach those goals. We have drafted a mission statement to clarify our purpose and our values, and we hope to be able to attract talented software developers, entrepreneurs and Debian experts from our community.
Freexian’s mission is to help Debian evolve to be the leading Linux distribution and a model to follow in the free software world.We want to achieve that by enabling passi...
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Jacob Adams: A Lesson in Shortcuts
https://tookmund.com/2022/03/rob-pike-shortcuts
March 29, 2022, 12:00 AM
(The below was written by Rob Pike, copied here for posterity from The Wayback Machine)
Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I’m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assem...
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Russell Coker: Feedburner Seems to be Dying
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/29/feedburner-dying/
March 28, 2022, 11:00 PM
Many years ago Feedburner was a useful service. It proxied the RSS feed of your blog and gave you analytics of what happened with it. Now feeds using Feedburner randomly give HTTP error 404s. The Feedburner Twitter account is inactive and recommends that people Tweet at Google instead. It seems that Google wants to get rid of the service and random 404s probably aren’t a high priority for them.
I’ve just gone through the config for Planet Linux Australia [1] and changed as many Feedburner UR...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: What is going on with web servers
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-28-wtf-web-servers/
March 28, 2022, 2:11 PM
I stumbled upon this graph recently, which is w3techs.com
graph of "Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of web
servers". It seems I hadn't looked at it in a long while because I was
surprised at many levels:
Apache is now second, behind Nginx, since ~2022 (so that's really
new at least)
Cloudflare "server" is third ahead of the traditional third
(Microsoft IIS) - I somewhat knew that Cloudflare was hosting a
lot of stuff, but I somehow didn't expect to see it there at all
for some...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Hangouts Replacement
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/28/hangouts-replacement/
March 28, 2022, 8:08 AM
Google is currently in the process of killing Hangouts. Last year Hangouts was quite a nice IM system with integrated video chat and voice calling. Now they have decided to kill it and replace it with “Google Chat” and “Google Meet” both of which are integrated with the Gmail app on Android. To start getting people off the old platform they have disabled video and audio chats with more than 2 people in Hangouts. To do a video call you have to use Meet which has a worse user interface and...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: A Song for a New Day
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-9848-0259-3.html
March 27, 2022, 3:58 AM
Review: A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker

Publisher:
Berkley


Copyright:
September 2019


ISBN:
1-9848-0259-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
372

Luce Cannon was touring with a session band when the shutdown began.
First came the hotel evacuation in the middle of the night due to bomb
threats against every hotel in the state. Then came the stadium bombing
just before they were ready to go on stage. Luce and most of the band
perf...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Imminent release for the media images for Debian 10.12 and 11.3 20220327 0010
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/imminent-release-for-media-images-for.html
March 27, 2022, 12:10 AM
 OK - so it wasn't quite all done in one day - and since today is TZ change day in the UK, it might actually run into the TZ bump but I suspect that it will all be done very soon now. Very few glitches - everybody cheerful with what's been done.I did spot someone in IRC who had been reading the release notes - which is always much appreciated. Lots of security fixes overall in the last couple of months but just a fairly normal time, I think.Thanks to the team behind all of this: the ftpmasters,...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 209 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-209-released/
March 27, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 209. This version includes the following changes:
* Update R test fixture for R 4.2.x series. (Closes: #1008446)
* Update minimum version of Black to prevent test failure on Ubuntu jammy.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Part way through testing Debian media images 20220326 1555UTC - Found a new useful utility
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/part-way-through-testing-debian-media.html
March 26, 2022, 10:15 PM
 For various obscure reasons, I have a mirror of Debian in one room and the main laptop and so on I use in another. The mirror is connected to a fast Internet line - and has a 1Gb Ethernet cable into the back directly from the router, the laptop and everything else - not so much, everything is wired, but depends on a WiFi link across the property. One end is fast - one end runs like a snail.Steve suggested I use a different tool to make images directly on the mirror machine - jigit. Slightly le...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian media team - testing and releasing Debian 11.3 - 20220326 1243UTC
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/debian-media-team-testing-and-releasing.html
March 26, 2022, 8:31 PM
And back to relative normality : the usual suspects are in Cambridge. It's a glorious day across the UK and we're spending it indoors with laptops :)We'll also be releasing a point release of Buster as a wrap up of recent changes.Debian 10 should move from full support to LTS on July August 14th - one year after the release of Debian 11 - and there will be a final point release of Buster somewhere around that point.All seems to be behaving itself well.Thanks to all for the hard work that goes in...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Still testing Debian media images 20220326 2026UTC- almost finished 11.3 - Buster starting soon
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/still-testing-debian-media-images.html
March 26, 2022, 8:27 PM
 And we're working through quite nicely.It's been a long, long day so far and we're about 1/2 way through :)Shout out to Isy, Sledge and RattusRattus in Cambridge and also smcv.Two releases in a day is a whole bunch :)
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 208 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-208-released/
March 25, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 208. This version includes the following changes:
[ Brent Spillner ]
* Add graceful handling for UNIX sockets and named pipes.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#292)
* Remove a superfluous log message and reformatt comment lines.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Reformat various files to satisfy current version of Black.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Ingo Juergensmann: New Server – NVMe Issues
https://blog.windfluechter.net/2022/03/24/new-server-nvme-issues/
March 24, 2022, 9:49 AM
My current server is somewhat aged. I bought it new in July 2014 with a 6-core Xeon E5-2630L, 32 GB RAM and 4x 3.5″ hot-swappable drives. Gladly I had the opportunity to extend the memory to 128 GB RAM at no additional cost by using memory from my ex-employer. It also has 4x 2 TB WD Red HDDs with 5400 rpm hooked up to the SATA backplane, but unfortunately only two of them are SATA-3 with 6 Gbit/s.
The new server is a used/refurbished Supermicro server with 2x 14-core Xeon E5-2683 and 256 G...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: AMD's Pluton implementation seems to be controllable
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/58879.html
March 23, 2022, 8:42 AM
I've been digging through the firmware for an AMD laptop with a Ryzen 6000 that incorporates Pluton for the past couple of weeks, and I've got some rough conclusions. Note that these are extremely preliminary and may not be accurate, but I'm going to try to encourage others to look into this in more detail. For those of you at home, I'm using an image from here, specifically version 309. The installer is happy to run under Wine, and if you tell it to "Extract" rather than "Install" it'll leave a...
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Ulrike Uhlig: Workshops about anger, saying NO, and mapping one’s capacities and desires
https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/23/workshops.html
March 22, 2022, 11:00 PM
For the second year in a row, I proposed some workshops at the feminist
hackers assembly at the remote C3. I’m sharing them here because I
believe they might be useful to others.
Anger workshop
Based on my readings about the subject and a mediation training, I
created a first workshop about dealing with one’s own anger for the
feminist hackers assembly in 2020. Many women who attended said they
recognized themselves in what I was talking about. I created the
exercises in the workshop with...
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Tollef Fog Heen: DNSSEC, ssh and VerifyHostKeyDNS
https://err.no/personal/blog/tech/2022-03-22-dnssec-ssh/
March 22, 2022, 7:30 PM
OpenSSH has this very nice setting, VerifyHostKeyDNS, which when
enabled, will pull SSH host keys from DNS, and you no longer need to
either trust on first use, or copy host keys around out of band.
Naturally, trusting unsecured DNS is a bit scary, so this requires the
record to be signed using DNSSEC. This has worked for a long time,
but then broke, seemingly out of the blue. Running ssh -vvv gave
output similar to
debug1: found 4 insecure fingerprints in DNS
debug3: verify_host_key_dns: che...
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Gunnar Wolf: Long, long, long live Emacs after 39 years
https://gwolf.org/2022/03/long-long-long-live-emacs_after_39_years.html
March 21, 2022, 5:45 PM
Reading Planet Debian (see, Sam, we are
still having a conversation over
there? 😉), I read
Anarcat’s 20+ years of
Emacs. And.. Well,
should I brag contribute to the discussion? Of
course, why not?
Emacs is the first computer program I can name that I ever learnt to
use to do something minimally useful. 39 years ago.
From the Space Cadet keyboard that (obviously…)
influenced Emacs’ early design
The Emacs editor was born, according to
Wikipedia, in 1976, same year as
myself. I am clear...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/new-developers-2022-02.html
March 21, 2022, 4:00 PM
The following contributor got his Debian Developer account in the last two months:
Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro (vilmar)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Lu YaNing
Mathias Gibbens
Markus Blatt
Peter Blackman
David da Silva Polverari
Congratulations!...
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Antoine Beaupré: 20+ years of Emacs
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-20-20-years-emacs/
March 21, 2022, 3:08 AM
I enjoyed reading this article named "22 years of Emacs"
recently. It's kind of fascinating, because I realised I don't exactly
know for how long I've been using Emacs. It's lost in the mists of
history. If I would
have to venture a guess, it was back in the "early days", which in
that history is mapped around 1996-1997, when I installed my very own
"PC" with FreeBSD 2.2.x and painstakingly managed to make
XFree86 run on it.
Modelines. Those were the days... But I digress.
I am old...
The onl...
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Joerg Jaspert: Another shell script moved to rust
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/03/another-shell-script-moved-to-rust.html
March 20, 2022, 12:23 PM
Shell? Rust!
Not the first shell script I took and made a rust version of, but
probably my largest yet. This time I took my little tm (tmux
helper) tool which is (well, was) a
bit more than 600 lines of shell, and converted it to
Rust.
I got most of the functionality done now, only one major part is
missing.
What’s tm?
tm started as a tiny shell script to make handling
tmux easier. The first commit in
git was in July 2013, but I started writing and using it in 2011. It
started out as a kind-...
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Bits from Debian: DebConf22 registration and call for proposals are open!
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/debconf22-registration-and-call-for-proposals-are-open.html
March 18, 2022, 8:10 PM
Registration for DebConf22 is now open.
The the 23rd edition of DebConf will take place
from July 17th to 24th, 2022 at the
Innovation and Training Park (ITP) in Prizren,
Kosovo, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from July 10th to 16th.
Along with the registration, the DebConf content team announced the
call for proposals. Deadline to submit a
proposal to be considered in the main schedule is April 15th, 2022 23:59:59 UTC
(Friday).
DebConf is an event open to everyone, no matter how
you identify ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Debian Clojure Team Sprint --- May 13-14th 2022
https://veronneau.org/debian-clojure-team-sprint-may-13-14th-2022.html
March 18, 2022, 6:45 PM
I'm happy to announce the Debian Clojure Team will hold a remote sprint from
May 13th to May 14th 2022.
The goal of this sprint is to improve various aspects of the Clojure ecosystem
in Debian. As such, everyone is welcome to participate!
Here are a few items we are planning to work on, in no particular order:
Update leiningen to the latest upstream version, to let some libraries in
experimental migrate to unstable.
Work towards replacing our custom Clojure script with upstream's and package...
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Enrico Zini: Context-dependent logger in Python
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/python/context-dependent-logger-in-python
March 18, 2022, 10:53 AM
This is a common logging pattern in Python, to have loggers related to module
names:
import logging
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
class Bill:
def load_bill(self, filename: str):
log.info("%s: loading file", filename)
I often however find myself wanting to have loggers related to something
context-dependent, like the kind of file that is being processed. For example,
I'd like to log loading of bill loading when done by the expenses module, and
not when done by the printing mo...
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Gunnar Wolf: Speaking about the OpenPGP WoT on LibrePlanet this Saturday
https://gwolf.org/2022/03/speaking-about-the-openpgp-wot-on-libreplanet-this-saturday.html
March 17, 2022, 4:55 PM
So, LibrePlanet, the FSF’s conference, is coming!
I much enjoyed attending this conference in person in March 2018. This
year I submitted a talk again, and it got accepted — of course, given
the conference is still 100% online, I doubt I will be able to go 100%
conference-mode (I hope to catch a couple of other talks, but… well,
we are all eager to go back to how things were before 2020!)
Anyway, what is my talk about?
My talk is titled Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver
netw...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/03/17/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-february-2022/
March 17, 2022, 11:32 AM
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for February below.
Debian project funding
In February Raphaël and the LTS worked on a survey of Debian developers meant to solicit ideas for improvements in the Debian project at large. You can see the results of the initial discussion here in the list of ideas of which there are already over 30.The full survey is due to be emailed to Debian Developers shortly.In February € 2250 was put as...
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Michael Ablassmeier: python logging messages and exit codes
https://abbbi.github.io//logging/
March 16, 2022, 12:00 AM
Everyone knows that an application exit code should change based on
the success, error or maybe warnings that happened during execution.
Lately i came along some python code that was structured the following way:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import logging
def warnme():
# something bad happens
logging.warning("warning")
sys.exit(2)
def evil():
# something evil happens
logging.error("error")
sys.exit(1)
def main():
logging.basicConfig(
level=logging.DEBUG...
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Kunal Mehta: How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix
https://blog.legoktm.com/2022/03/15/how-to-mirror-the-russian-wikipedia-with-debian-and-kiwix.html
March 15, 2022, 1:02 AM
It has been reported that the Russian government has threatened to block access to Wikipedia for documenting narratives that do not agree with the official position of the Russian government.
One of the anti-censorship strategies I've been working on is Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader (and plenty of other content too). Kiwix is free and open source software developed by a great community
of people that I really enjoy working with.
With threats of censorship, traffic to Kiwix has increased fif...
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Sam Hartman: Nostalgia for Blogging
https://hartmans.dreamwidth.org/99374.html
March 14, 2022, 12:51 AM
Recently, I migrated this blog from Livejournal over to Dreamwidth. As part of the process, I was looking back at my blog entries from around 2007 or so.I miss those days. I miss the days when blogging was more of an interactive community. Comments got exchanged, and at least among my circle of friends people wrote thoughtful, well-considered entries. There was introspection into what was going on in people's lives, as well as technical stuff, as well as just keeping up with people who were ...
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