Russ Allbery: Review: Night Watch
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-230740-1.html
May 31, 2023, 2:51 AM
Review: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #29


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
November 2002


Printing:
August 2014


ISBN:
0-06-230740-1


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
451

Night Watch is the 29th Discworld novel and the sixth Watch novel.
I would really like to tell people they could start here if they wanted
to, for reasons that I will get into in a moment, but I think I would be
doing yo...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-86051-2.html
May 30, 2023, 2:09 AM
Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older

Series:
Mossa and Pleiti #1


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-86051-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
169

The Mimicking of Known Successes is a science fiction mystery
novella, the first of an expected series. (The second novella is
scheduled to be published in February of 2024.)
Mossa is an Investigator, called in after a man disappears from t...
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Shirish Agarwal: Pearls of Luthra, Dahaad, Tetris & Discord.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/05/30/pearls-of-luthra-dahaad-tetris-discord/
May 29, 2023, 11:49 PM
Pearls of Luthra
Pearls of Luthra is the first book by Brian Jacques and I think I am going to be a fan of his work. This particular book you have to be wary of. While it is a beautiful book with quite a few illustrations, I have to warn that if you are somebody who feels hungry at the very mention of food, then you will be hungry throughout the book. There isn’t a single page where food isn’t mentioned and not just any kind of food, the kind of food that is geared towards sweet tooth. S...
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John Goerzen: Recommendations for Tools for Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10500-recommendations-for-tools-for-backing-up-and-archiving-to-removable-media
May 29, 2023, 4:57 PM
I have several TB worth of family photos, videos, and other data. This needs to be backed up — and archived.
Backups and archives are often thought of as similar. And indeed, they may be done with the same tools at the same time. But the goals differ somewhat:
Backups are designed to recover from a disaster that you can fairly rapidly detect.
Archives are designed to survive for many years, protecting against disaster not only impacting the original equipment but also the original person th...
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Jonathan Carter: MiniDebConf Germany 2023
https://jonathancarter.org/2023/05/29/minidebconf-germany-2023/
May 29, 2023, 12:48 PM
This year I attended Debian Reunion Hamburg (aka MiniDebConf Germany) for the second time. My goal for this MiniDebConf was just to talk to people and make the most of the time I have there. No other specific plans or goals. Despite this simple goal, it was a very productive and successful event for me.
Tuesday 23rd:
Arrived much later than planned after about 18h of travel, went to bed early.
Wednesday 24th:
Was in a discussion about individual package maintainership.
Was ...
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Russell Coker: Considering Convergence
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
May 29, 2023, 7:41 AM
What is Convergence
In 2013 Kyle Rankin (at the time Linux Journal columnist and CSO of Purism) wrote a Linux Journal article about Linux convergence [1] (which means using a phone and a dock to replace a desktop) featuring the Nokia N900 smart phone and a chroot environment on the Motorola Droid 4 Android phone. Both of them have very limited hardware even by the standards of the day and neither of which were systems I’d consider using all the time. None of the Android phones I used at that t...
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Russ Allbery: Book haul
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-05/001.html
May 29, 2023, 4:31 AM
I think this is partial because I also have a stack of other books that I
missed recording. At some point, I should stop using this method to track
book acquisitions in favor of one of the many programs intended for this
purpose, but it's in the long list of other things I really should do one
of these days.
As usual, I have already read and reviewed a few of these. I might be
getting marginally better at reading books shortly after I acquire them?
Maybe?
Steven Brust — Tsalmoth (sff)
...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Python 3.11, pip and (breaking) system packages
https://veronneau.org/python-311-pip-and-breaking-system-packages.html
May 29, 2023, 4:00 AM
As we get closer to Debian Bookworm's release, I thought I'd share
one change in Python 3.11 that will surely affect many people.
Python 3.11 implements the new PEP 668, Marking Python base environments
as “externally managed”1. If you use pip regularly on Debian, it's
likely you'll eventually hit the externally-managed-environment error:
error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
pyth...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.4.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/27#rcpparmadillo_0.12.4.0.0
May 27, 2023, 9:35 PM
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is
widely used by (currently) 1074 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.3 million
tim...
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Valhalla's Things: Late Victorian Combinations
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/05/26-late_victorian_combinations/index.html
May 26, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on May 26, 2023




Some time ago, on an early Friday afternoon our internet connection died. After a reasonable time had passed we called the customer service, they told us that they would look into it and then call us back.
On Friday evening we had not heard from them, and I was starting to get worried. At the time in the evening when I would have been relaxing online I grabbed the first Victorian sewing-related book I found on my hard disk and started to read it...
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Valhalla's Things: Correspondence Book
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/05/26-correspondence_book/index.html
May 26, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on May 26, 2023




I write letters. The kind that are written on paper with a dip pen 1 and ink, stamped and sent through the post, spend a few days or weeks maturing like good wine in a depot somewhere2, and then get delivered to the recipient.
Some of them (mostly cards) are to people who will receive them and thank me via xmpp (that sounds odd, but actually works out nicely), but others are proper letters with long texts that I exchange with penpals.
Most of th...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.6 on CRAN: More updates from QuantLib
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/25#qlcal-r_0.0.6
May 25, 2023, 10:33 PM
The sixth release of the still new-ish qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
This release brings updates to a few calendars which...
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Jonathan Carter: Upgraded this host to Debian 12 (bookworm)
https://jonathancarter.org/2023/05/25/upgraded-this-host-to-debian-12-bookworm/
May 25, 2023, 10:10 AM
I upgraded the host running my blog to Debian 12 today. My website has existed in some form since 1997, it changed from pure html to a Python CGI script in the early 2000s, and when blogging became big around then, I migrated to WordPress around 2004.
This WordPress instance ran on Ubuntu up until 2010, and then on Debian ever since. Upgrades are just too easy. I did end up hitting one small bug with today’s upgrade though, I run the PHP fast process manager on the Apache MPM event server, ...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2023)
https://bits.debian.org/2023/05/new-developers-2023-04.html
May 25, 2023, 10:00 AM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
James Lu (jlu)
Hugh McMaster (hmc)
Agathe Porte (gagath)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Soren Stoutner
Matthijs Kooijman
Vinay Keshava
Jarrah Gosbell
Carlos Henrique Lima Melara
Cordell Bloor
Congratulations!...
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Jonathan McDowell: RIP Brenda McDowell
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/05/rip-brenda-mcdowell.html
May 24, 2023, 7:02 PM
My mother died earlier this month. She’d been diagnosed with cancer back in February 2022 and had been through major surgery and a couple of rounds of chemotherapy, so it wasn’t a complete surprise even if it was faster at the end than expected. That doesn’t make it easy, but I’m glad to be able to say that her immediate family were all with her at home at the end.
I was touched by the number of people who turned up, both to the wake and the subsequent funeral ceremony. Mum had done a l...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Gear 23.04.1 Snaps Released! Snapcraft updates and more.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-gear-23-04-1-snaps-released-snapcraft-updates-and-more/
May 24, 2023, 6:27 PM
Kweather Snap
I have completed the 23.04.1 KDE Gear applications release for snaps! With this release comes several new KDE Snaps!
Kweather
Krecorder
Kclock
Alligator
Ghostwriter
Kasts
Tokodon
Plus many long outdated / broken snaps are updated and or fixed!
Check them all out here:
https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE
I have been busy triaging and squashing bugs in regards to snaps on https://bugs.kde.org
Snapcraft:
Updated the kde-neon extension for the ...
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Jonathan Carter: Debian Reunion MiniDebConf 2022
https://jonathancarter.org/2023/05/24/debian-reunion-minidebconf-2022/
May 24, 2023, 1:32 PM
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that I’ve had a lot on my plate in the last few years, and that I have a *huge* backlog of little tasks to finish. Just last week, I finally got to all my keysigning from DebConf22. This week, I’m at MiniDebConf Germany in Hamburg. It’s the second time I’m here! And it’s great already. Last year I drafted a blog entry, but never got around to publishing it. So, in order to mentally tick off yet another thing, here follows a somewhat imperfect (I had t...
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Craig Small: Devices with cgroup v2
https://dropbear.xyz/2023/05/23/devices-with-cgroup-v2/
May 23, 2023, 12:13 PM
Docker and other container systems by default restrict access to devices on the host. They used to do this with cgroups with the cgroup v1 system, however, the second version of cgroups removed this controller and the man page says:
Cgroup v2 device controller has no interface files and is implemented on top of cgroup BPF.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst
That is just awesome, nothing to see here, go look at the BPF documents if you have cgroup v2.
Wit...
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Jonathan Dowland: neovim plugins and distributions
https://jmtd.net/log/neovim/
May 23, 2023, 11:04 AM
I've been watching the neovim community for a while and what seems like a
cambrian explosion of plugins emerging. A few weeks back I decided to spend
most of a "day of learning" on investigating some of the plugins and
technologies that I'd read about: Language Server
Protocol,
TreeSitter,
neorg (a grandiose organiser plugin),
etc.
It didn't go so well. I spent most of my time fighting version
incompatibilities or tracing through scant documentation or code to figure out
what plugin was incompa...
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Bits from Debian: proxmox Platinum Sponsor of DebConf23
https://bits.debian.org/2023/05/proxmox-platinum-debconf23.html
May 23, 2023, 9:17 AM
We are pleased to announce that Proxmox
has committed to sponsor DebConf23 as a
Platinum Sponsor.
Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server software.
The product portfolio from Proxmox, including server virtualization, backup,
and email security, helps companies of any size, sector, or industry to
simplify their IT infrastructures. The Proxmox solutions are based on the
great Debian platform, and we are happy that we can give back to the
community by sponsoring DebConf23.
Wit...
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Sergio Durigan Junior: Using WireGuard to host services at home
https://blog.sergiodj.net/posts/using-wireguard-host-services-home/
May 23, 2023, 4:56 AM
It’s been a while since I had this idea to leverage the power of
WireGuard to self-host stuff at home. Even though I pay for a proper
server somewhere in the world, there are some services that I don’t
consider critical to put there, or that I consider too critical to
host outside my home.
It’s only NATural
With today’s ISP packages for end users, I find it very annoying the
amount of trouble they create when you try to host anything at home.
Dynamic IPs, NAT/CGNAT, port-blocking, traff...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Half-Built Garden
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-21097-6.html
May 23, 2023, 2:46 AM
Review: A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-21097-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
340

The climate apocalypse has happened. Humans woke up to the danger, but a
little bit too late. Over one billion people died. But the world on the
other side of that apocalypse is not entirely grim. The corporations
responsible for so much of the damage have been pushed out of society and
isol...
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Adnan Hodzic: rpi-microk8s-bootstrap: Automate RPI device conversion into Kubernetes cluster nodes with Terraform
https://foolcontrol.org/?p=4555
May 22, 2023, 10:44 AM
Considering I’ve created my own private cloud in my home as part of: wp-k8s: WordPress on privately hosted Kubernetes cluster (Raspberry Pi 4 + Synology)....
The post rpi-microk8s-bootstrap: Automate RPI device conversion into Kubernetes cluster nodes with Terraform appeared first on FoolControl: Phear the penguin....
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Russ Allbery: Review: Tsalmoth
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-4668-8970-5.html
May 22, 2023, 2:39 AM
Review: Tsalmoth, by Steven Brust

Series:
Vlad Taltos #16


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-4668-8970-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
277

Tsalmoth is the sixteenth book in the Vlad Taltos series and (some
fans of the series groan) yet another flashback novel to earlier in Vlad's
life. It takes place between Yendi and
the interludes in Dragon (or, perhaps
more straightforwardly, between Yendi and Jhereg. Most o...
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Bits from Debian: Infomaniak First Platinum Sponsor of DebConf23
https://bits.debian.org/2023/05/infomaniak-platinum-debconf23.html
May 21, 2023, 12:08 PM
We are pleased to announce that Infomaniak
has committed to sponsor DebConf23 as a
Platinum Sponsor.
Infomaniak is a key player in the European Cloud and the leading developer of
Web technologies in Switzerland. It aims to be an independent European
alternative to the web giants and is committed to an ethical and sustainable
Web that respects privacy and creates local jobs. Infomaniak develops cloud
solutions (IaaS, PaaS, VPS), productivity tools for online collaboration and
video and radio stre...
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Junichi Uekawa: Shared library loading.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-May-20.html.en#2023-May-20-21:39:04
May 20, 2023, 12:39 PM
Shared library loading. ld.so seems to load shared libraries serially, looking through the load paths, looking through DT_LOADED sections, and looking up library paths or what's in ld.so.cache.
I thought I could scan DT_LOADED with just reading approx first 2kB of shared library, and get the full list of shared libraries first, and then readahead(2) the list of shared libraries available.
The result was that I could load blender binary slightly faster. blender spends about 300ms waiting fo...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html
May 19, 2023, 7:50 PM
There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water,
gas, electricity or heat distribution meters. The
Meter-Bus standard
(EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4) provide a cross vendor way
to talk to and collect meter data. I ran into this standard when I
wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find
free software that could do the job. The meters in question broadcast
encrypted messages with meter information via radio, and the hardest
part was to trac...
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Antoine Beaupré: A terrible Pixel Tablet
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-05-18-terrible-pixel-tablet/
May 18, 2023, 3:59 PM
In a strange twist of history, Google finally woke and thought "I know
what we need to do! We need to make a TABLET!".
So some time soon in 2023, Google will release "The tablet that only
Google could make", the Pixel Tablet.
Having owned a Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e
for a few years, I was very curious to see how this would pan out and
especially whether it would be easier to flash than the Samsung. As an
aside, I figured I would give that a shot, and within a few days
managed to completely brick ...
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Jamie McClelland: Cranky old timers should know perl
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2023/cranky-old-timers-should-know-perl/
May 17, 2023, 12:27 PM
I act like an old timer (I’ve been around linux for 25 years and I’m cranky
about new tech that is not easily maintained and upgraded) yet somehow I don’t
know perl. How did that happen?
I discovered this state when I decided to move from the heroically packaged yet
seemingly upstream
un-maintained
opendmarc package to
authentication_milter.
It’s written in perl. And, alas, not in
debian.
How hard could this be?
The instructions for installing seemed pretty straight forward: cpanm Mail::...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2023 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-04/
May 16, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In April, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 6.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
Adrian Bunk
did 18.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.5h to the next month.
Anton Gladky
did 8.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from ...
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Sven Hoexter: GCP: Private Service Connect Forwarding Rules can not be Updated
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/gcp_psc_forwarding_rule_terraform/
May 15, 2023, 7:21 AM
PSA for those foolish enough to use Google Cloud and try to use private service connect:
If you want to change the serviceAttachment your private service connect forwarding
rule points at, you must delete the forwarding rule and create a new one. Updates
are not supported. I've done that in the past via terraform, but lately encountered
strange errors like this:
Error updating ForwardingRule: googleapi: Error 400: Invalid value for field 'target.target':
'<https://www.googleapis.com/compute/...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.10 on CRAN: New Upstream
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/14#rcppsimdjson_0.1.10
May 15, 2023, 12:41 AM
We are happy to share that the RcppSimdJson
package has been updated to release 0.1.10.
RcppSimdJson
wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via
very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code,
coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in
parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite
mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as
use of parallel SIMD ...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Joining files with FFmpeg
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-05-14-22-54_joining_files_with_ffmpeg.html
May 14, 2023, 9:54 PM
Joining video files (back-to-back) losslessly with FFmpeg is a surprisingly cumbersome
operation. You can't just, like, write all the inputs on the command line
or something; you need to use a special demuxer and then
write all the names in a text file and override the security for that file,
which is pretty crazy.
But there's one issue I had that I crashed into and which random searching
around didn't help for, namely this happening sometimes on switching files
(and the resulting files just ha...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html
May 14, 2023, 6:30 PM
The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days. A lot of
patches and issues have seen activity on
the project github
pages recently. A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
over at the Tormach headquarter in
Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway. If you
wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:
"LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
cutting machines, robots and hexapod...
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Holger Levsen: 20230514-fwupd
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230514-fwupd/
May 14, 2023, 3:20 PM
How-To use fwupd
As one cannot use fwupd on Qubes OS
to update firmwares this is a quick How-To for
using fwupd on Grml for future me.
boot into Grml.
mkdir /efi ; mount /boot/efi to /efi or set OverrideESPMountPoint=/boot/efi/EFI if you mount to the usual path.
apt update ; apt install fwupd fwupd-amd64-signed udisks2 policykit-1
fwupdmgr get-devices
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update
reboot into Qubes OS....
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C.J. Collier: Early Access: Inserting JSON data to BigQuery from Spark on Dataproc
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1931
May 14, 2023, 3:52 AM
Hello folks!
We recently received a case letting us know that Dataproc 2.1.1 was unable to write to a BigQuery table with a column of type JSON. Although the BigQuery connector for Spark has had support for JSON columns since 0.28.0, the Dataproc images on the 2.1 line still cannot create tables with JSON columns or write to existing tables with JSON columns.
The customer has graciously granted permission to share the code we developed to allow this operation. So if you are interested in worki...
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Sergio Durigan Junior: Ubuntu debuginfod and source code indexing
https://blog.sergiodj.net/posts/ubuntu-debuginfod-source-code-indexing/
May 13, 2023, 8:43 PM
You might remember that in my last post about the Ubuntu debuginfod
service I talked about wanting to extend it and make it index and
serve source code from packages. I’m excited to announce that this is
now a reality since the Ubuntu Lunar (23.04) release.
The feature should work for a lot of packages from the archive, but
not all of them. Keep reading to better understand why.
The problem
While debugging a package in Ubuntu, one of the first steps you need
to take is to install its source ...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html
May 13, 2023, 10:10 AM
A bit delayed,
the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch package in Debian now got the
latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm. Because it depend on a
package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
actually working, so the migration was delayed. A bug in the package
dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
(opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
ins...
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Holger Levsen: 20230512-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230512-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023/
May 12, 2023, 2:28 PM
Small reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in previous years there will be a rather small Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
We'll have days of hacking (inside and outside), a day trip and a small cheese & wine party, as well as daily standup meetings to learn what others are doing, and there shall also be talks and workshops. At the moment there are even s...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: crc32c 0.0.2 on CRAN: Build Fixes
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/11#crc32c_0.0.2
May 12, 2023, 12:37 AM
A first follow-up to the initial
announcement just days ago of the new crc32c
package. The package offers cyclical checksum with parity in
hardware-accelerated form on (recent enough) intel cpus as well as on
arm64.
This follow-up was needed because I missed, when switching to a
default static library build, that newest compilers would
complain if -fPIC was not set. gcc-12 on my
box was happy, gcc-13 on recent Fedora as used at CRAN was
not. A second error was assuming that saying
SystemRequirem...
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Valhalla's Things: I hate proprietary software
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/05/12-i_hate_proprietary_software/index.html
May 12, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on May 12, 2023



Even when it’s m/.
Years ago I watched my SO play Brütal Legend and of course loved it, but I’ve been only using used computers for a long time, and none of them was really able to run modern games.
Admittedly, he told me that I could use his computer to play the game while he wasn’t home (and I do have an account on that computer, that I’ve sporadically used to do computationally intensive stuff, but always remotely), but it was a hass...
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Simon Josefsson: Streamlined NTRU Prime sntrup761 goes to IETF
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/05/12/streamlined-ntru-prime-sntrup761-goes-to-ietf/
May 11, 2023, 10:03 PM
The OpenSSH project added support for a hybrid Streamlined NTRU Prime post-quantum key encapsulation method sntrup761 to strengthen their X25519-based default in their version 8.5 released on 2021-03-03. While there has been a lot of talk about post-quantum crypto generally, my impression has been that there has been a slowdown in implementing and deploying them in the past two years. Why is that? Regardless of the answer, we can try to collaboratively change things, and one effort that appea...
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Shirish Agarwal: India Press freedom, Profiteering, AMD issues in the wild.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/05/11/india-press-freedom-profiteering-amd-issues-in-the-wild/
May 11, 2023, 6:17 AM
India Press Freedom
Just about a week back, India again slipped in the Freedom index, this time falling to 161 out of 180 countries. The RW again made lot of noise as they cannot fathom why it has been happening so. A recent news story gives some idea. Every year NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) puts out its statistics of crimes happening across the country. The report is in public domain. Now according to report shared, around 40k women from Gujarat alone disappeared in the last five yea...
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Charles Plessy: Upvote to patch Firefox to render Markdown
http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/markdown2/
May 10, 2023, 11:43 PM
I previously wrote that when Firefox receives a file whose
media type is text/markdown, it prompts the user to download it, whereas
other browsers display rendered results.
Now it is possible to upvote a proposal on
connect.mozilla.org
asking that Firefox renders Markdown by default....
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DEP-17, Debian Reimbursements Web App, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-04-2023/
May 10, 2023, 12:00 AM
Contributing to Debian
is part of Freexian’s mission. This article
covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this
is made possible by organizations subscribing to our
Long Term Support contracts and
consulting services.
DEP-17 progress, by Helmut and Emilio
We posted a proposal for modifying dpkg to better cope with directory aliasing.
After an initial period of silence, the discussion took off, but was mostly
diverted to a competing proposal by Luca Boccassi: ...
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C.J. Collier: Instructions for installing Proxmox onto the Qotom device
https://wp.c9h.org/cj/?p=1862
May 9, 2023, 11:43 PM
These instructions are for qotom devices Q515P and Q1075GE. You can order one from Amazon or directly from Cherry Ni <export03@qotom.com>. Instructions are for those coming from Windows.
Prerequisites:
A USB keyboard and mouse
A powered HDMI monitor and an HDMI cable
A copy of the Proxmox VE Installer ISO
A USB disk from which to boot the installer
Software and instructions to burn the raw image to USB
The details of your wireless network including wireless network ID (SSID), WPA passwo...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: crc32c 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/08#crc32c_0.0.1
May 9, 2023, 1:13 AM
Happy to announce a new package: crc32c. This
arose out of a user request to add crc32c (which is related
to but differnt from crc32 without the trailing c) to my digest
package. Which I did (for now in a branch), using the software-fallback
version of crc32c from the reference implementation by
Google at their crc32c
repo.
However, the Google repo also offers hardware-accelerated versions
and switches at run-time. So I pondered a little about how to offer the
additional performance without plac...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Open to work!
https://blog.pault.ag/post/716775061205434368
May 8, 2023, 6:19 PM
I decided to leave my job (Principal Software Engineer) after 4 years. I have no idea what I want to do next, so I’ve been having loads of chats to try and work that out.
I like working in mission focused organizations, working to fix problems across the stack, from interpersonal down to the operating system. I enjoy “going where I’m rare”, places that don’t always get the most attention. At my last job, I most enjoyed working to drive engineering standards for all products across the...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in April 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/05/my-debian-activities-in-april-2023/
May 7, 2023, 11:41 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 103 and rejected 11 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 103.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-sixth 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 14h.
During that time I uploaded:
[DLA 3405-1] libxml2 security update for two CVE
[DLA 3406-1] sniproxy security update for one CVE
[sniproxy] updates for Unstable + Bullseye prepared and debdiffs ...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-04/
May 6, 2023, 7:55 PM
Welcome to the April 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. And, as always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
General news
Trisquel is a fully-free operating system building on the work of Ubuntu Linux. This month, Simon Josefsson published an article on his blog titled Trisquel is 42% Reproducible!. Simon wrote:...
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Dima Kogan: mrcal 2.3 released!
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2023/05/05_mrcal-23-released.html
May 5, 2023, 9:13 PM
Today I released mrcal 2.3 (the release notes are available here). Once again,
in the code there are lots of useful improvements, but nothing major. The big
update in this release is the documentation. Much of it was improved and
extended, especially practical guides in the how-to-calibrate page and the
recipes.
Major updates are imminent. I'm about to merge the cross-projection uncertainty
branch and the
triangulated-points-in-the-solver
branch to study chessboard-less calibrations and struc...
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Shirish Agarwal: CAT-6, AMD 5600G, Dealerships closing down, TRAI-caller and privacy.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/cat-6-amd-5600g-dealerships-closing-down-trai-caller-and-privacy/
May 5, 2023, 2:30 PM
CAT-6 patch cord & ONU
Few months back I was offered a fibre service. Most of the service offering has been using Chinese infrastructure including the ONU (Optical Network Unit). Wikipedia doesn’t have a good page on ONU hence had to rely on third-party sites. FS (a name I don’t really know) has some (good basic info. on ONU and how it’s part and parcel of the whole infrastructure. I also got an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) but it seems to be very basic and mostly dumb. I used th...
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Jonathan Dowland: sidebar dividers for mutt
https://jmtd.net/log/mutt_sidebar/
May 5, 2023, 10:12 AM
I wanted to start using (neo)mutt's sidebar and I wanted a way
of separating groups of mail folders in the list. To achieve
that I interleaved a couple of fake "divider" folder names.
It looks like this:

Screenshot of neomutt with sidebar
This was spurred on by an attempt to revamp my personal
organisation.
I've been using mutt for at least 20 years (these days
neomutt), which, by default, does not show you a list of
mail folders all the time. The default view is an index of
you...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 242 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-242-released/
May 5, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 242. This version includes the following changes:
* If the binwalk Python module is not available, ensure the user knows they
may be missing more differences in, for example, concatenated .cpio
archives.
* Factor out routine to generate a human-readable comments when
Python modules are missing.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Valhalla's Things: Hiking Slippers
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/05/05-hiking_slippers/index.html
May 5, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on May 5, 2023




When I travel for a few days I don’t usually1 bring any other shoe than the ones I’m wearing, plus some kind of slippers for use inside hotel / B&B rooms.
It’s good for not carrying useless weight, but it always leave me with a vague feeling of “what if my only shoes break”, followed by “on a Sunday, when the shops are closed”.
So I started to think in the general direction of hiking sandals, shoes that are designed to be worn ...
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Matthew Garrett: Twitter's e2ee DMs are better than nothing
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66791.html
May 4, 2023, 9:49 PM
(Edit 2023-05-10: This has now launched for a subset of Twitter users. The code that existed to notify users that device identities had changed does not appear to have been enabled - as a result, in its current form, Twitter can absolutely MITM conversations and read your messages)Elon Musk appeared on an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, with one of the topics being the fact that Twitter could be legally compelled to hand over users' direct messages to government agencies since they're ...
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Holger Levsen: 20230504-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20230504-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2023/
May 4, 2023, 6:42 PM
Small reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 from May 23 to 30
As in previous years there will be a rather small Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 event taking place from May 23rd until the 30th (with the 29th being a public holiday in Germany and elsewhere).
We'll have days of hacking (inside and outside), a day trip and a small cheese & wine party, as well as daily standup meetings to learn what others are doing, and there shall also be talks and workshops. At the moment there are even s...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, March/April 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-marchapril-2023.html
May 4, 2023, 2:22 PM
In March and April I worked a total of 28 hours for Freexian's
Debian LTS initiative, out of a maximum of 48 hours.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable and
stable-rt updates, and uploaded it at the end of April. I merged
the latest bullseye security update into the linux-5.10 package and
uploaded that at the same time.
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Emanuele Rocca: UEFI Secure Boot on the Raspberry Pi
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/secure-boot-rpi/
May 4, 2023, 11:29 AM
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly
ended up on Hacker News and I
received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1)
that Secure Boot on the RPi as described here is not actually truly secure. An
attacker who successfully gained root could just mount the firmware partition
and either add their own keys to the EFI variable store or replace the firmware
altogether with a malicious one. (2) The TianCore firmware cannot be used
instead of the proprietary blob as I mentioned. Wha...
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Valhalla's Things: Linen Slippers
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/05/04-linen_slippers/index.html
May 4, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on May 4, 2023




I hate going out to buy shoes. Even more so I hate buying home shoes, which is what I spend most of my life in, also because no matter what I buy they seem to disintegrate after a season or so. So, obviously, I’ve been on a quest to make my own.
As a side note, going barefoot (with socks) would only move the wear issue to the socks, so it’s not really a solution, and going bare barefoot on ceramic floors is not going to happen, kaythanksbye....
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