Matthew Garrett: Making an Orbic Speed RC400L autoboot when USB power is attached
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/62419.html
December 7, 2022, 6:33 AM
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been trying to hack an Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot so it'll automatically boot when power is attached. When plugged in it would flash a "Welcome" screen and then switch to a display showing the battery charging - it wouldn't show up on USB, and didn't turn on any networking. So, my initial assumption was that the bootloader was making a policy decision not to boot Linux. After getting root (as described in the previous post), I was able to cat /pr...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, November 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-november-2022.html
December 3, 2022, 10:57 PM
In November I was assigned 24 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative. I worked 9 of those hours and will carry over the
remainder.
I updated the linux (4.19) package to the latest stable update, but
didn't upload it. I attended the monthly LTS team meeting.
--------------------
Vincent Bernat: Broken commit diff on Cisco IOS XR
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2022-cisco-show-commit-changes-diff
December 3, 2022, 3:40 PM
TL;DR
Never trust show commit changes diff on Cisco IOS XR.
Cisco IOS XR is the operating system running for the Cisco ASR, NCS, and
8000 routers. Compared to Cisco IOS, it features a candidate
configuration and a running configuration. In configuration mode, you can
modify the first one and issue the commit command to apply it to the running
configuration.1 This is a common concept for many NOS.
Before committing the candidate configuration to the running configuration, you
may want to check...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: Already December.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Dec-2.html.en#2022-Dec-2-19:13:56
December 2, 2022, 10:13 AM
Already December. Things changed a lot. Six months ago I was at home most of the time. I hope I can keep on going out for a while.
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/12/02/floss-activities/
December 2, 2022, 2:13 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
vcs-home:
add links
(1
2)
purple-discord:
link repology
duck:
add indicator
how-can-i-help:
cleanups
libusbgx:
fix C++ build
devscripts:
add error info
debbugs:
allow mbox export of responses,
toggle response display using CSS
Debian website:
drop spam domain
Debian package uploads:
libemail-outlook-message-perl
(backports
1 2),
purple-discord,
sptag,
celery
(1
2)
Debian wiki pages:
access...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 228 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-228-released/
December 2, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 228. This version includes the following changes:
[ FC Stegerman ]
* As an optimisation, don't run apktool if no differences are detected before
the signing block. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!105)
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support both the python3-progressbar and python3-progressbar2 Debian
packages, two modules providing the "progressbar" Python module.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#323)
* ...
--------------------
Enrico Zini: Things I learnt in November 2022
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/debian/til-2022-11
November 30, 2022, 11:00 PM
Debian:
You can Build-Depend on debhelper-compat (=version) and get rid of
debhelper as a build-dependency, and of debian/compat
(details)
You can Build-Depend on dh-sequence-foo and get rid of the corresponding
dh-foo build-dependency, and of the need to add --with foo in
debian/rules
(details)
You can (and should) get rid of dh-buildinfo, which is now handled
automatically
In salsa.debian.org there is a default CI
pipeline for Debian packages
that works beautifully without nee...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Making unphishable 2FA phishable
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/62175.html
November 30, 2022, 9:53 PM
One of the huge benefits of WebAuthn is that it makes traditional phishing attacks impossible. An attacker sends you a link to a site that looks legitimate but isn't, and you type in your credentials. With SMS or TOTP-based 2FA, you type in your second factor as well, and the attacker now has both your credentials and a legitimate (if time-limited) second factor token to log in with. WebAuthn prevents this by verifying that the site it's sending the secret to is the one that issued it in the fir...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/11/new-developers-2022-10.html
November 30, 2022, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Abraham Raji (abraham)
Phil Morrell (emorrp1)
Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa)
Mathias Gibbens (gibmat)
Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun)
Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Gavin Lai
Martin Dosch
Taavi Väänänen
Daichi Fukui
Daniel Gröber
Vivek K J
William Wilson
Ruben Pollan
Congratulations!...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links November 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/11/30/links-november-2022/
November 30, 2022, 10:26 AM
Here’s the US Senate Statement of Frances Haugen who used to work for Facebook countering misinformation and espionage [1]. She believes that Facebook is capable of dealing with the online radicalisation and promotion of bad things on it’s platform but is unwilling to do so for financial reasons. We need strong regulation of Facebook and it probably needs to be broken up.
Interesting article from The Atlantic about filtered cigarettes being more unhealthy than unfiltered [2]. Every time I th...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Fed Unbound
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-7359137-1-5.html
November 30, 2022, 5:08 AM
Review: The Fed Unbound, by Lev Menand

Publisher:
Columbia Global Reports


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-7359137-1-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
156

The Fed Unbound is a short non-fiction exploration of US Federal
Reserve actions to reducing systemic risk caused by shadow banking. Its
particular focus is the role of the Fed from the 2008 financial crisis to
the present, including the COVID shock, but it includes a history of what
Mena...
--------------------
Jonathan McDowell: onak 0.6.2 released
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/11/onak-0.6.2.html
November 29, 2022, 9:41 PM
Over the weekend I released a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. At 2 years since the last release that means I’ve at least managed to speed up a bit, but it’s fair to say its development isn’t a high priority for me at present.
This release is largely driven by a collection of minor fixes that have built up, and the knowledge that a Debian freeze is coming in the new year. The fixes largely revolve around the signature verification that was introduced in 0.6.0, which m...
--------------------
Sam Hartman: Introducing Carthage
https://hartmans.dreamwidth.org/99985.html
November 29, 2022, 4:15 PM
For the past four years, I’ve been working on Carthage, a free-software
Infrastructure
as Code framework. We’ve finally reached a point where it makes
sense to talk about Carthage and what it can do. This is the first in a
series of blog
posts to introduce Carthage, discuss what it can do and show how it
works.
Why Another IAC Framework
It seems everywhere you look, there are products designed to support
the IAC pattern. On the simple side, you could check a Containerfile
into Git. Products ...
--------------------
Jelmer Vernooij: Detecting Package Transitions
https://www.jelmer.uk/detecting-transitions.html
November 28, 2022, 11:04 PM
Larger transitions in Debian are usually announced on e.g. debian-devel, but
it’s harder to track the current status of all transitions. Having done a lot
of QA uploads recently, I have on occasion uploaded packages involved in a transition.
This can be unhelpful for the people handling the transition, but there’s also
often not much point in uploading if your uploads are going to get stuck.
Talking to one of the release managers at a recent BSP, it was great to find out that
the release te...
--------------------
Steve Kemp: I put an LSP in your LISP ..
https://blog.steve.fi/i_put_an_lsp_in_your_lisp___.html
November 28, 2022, 4:45 PM
I recently wrote about yet another lisp I'd
been having fun with.
Over the past couple of years I've played with a few toy scripting languages,
or random interpreters, and this time I figured I'd do something beyond the
minimum, by implementing the Language Server Protocol.
In brief the language server protocol (LSP) is designed to abstract
functionality that might be provided by an editor, or IDE, into a small
"language server". If the language-server knows how to jump to definitions,
provid...
--------------------
John Goerzen: Flying Joy
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10427-flying-joy
November 28, 2022, 4:04 PM
Wisdom from my 5-year-old: When flying in a small plane, it is important to give your dolls a headset and let them see out the window, too!
Moments like this make me smile at being a pilot dad.
A week ago, I also got to give 8 children and one adult their first ever ride in any kind of airplane, through EAA’s Young Eagles program. I got to hear several say, “Oh wow! It’s SO beautiful!” “Look at all the little houses!”
And my favorite: “How can I be a pilot?”...
--------------------
Benjamin Mako Hill: The Financial Times has been printing an obvious error on its “Market Data” page for 18 months and nobody else seems to have noticed
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-financial-times-has-been-printing-an-obvious-error-on-its-market-data-page-for-18-months-and-nobody-else-seems-to-have-noticed
November 26, 2022, 8:37 PM
Market Data section of the Financial Times US Edition print edition from May 5, 2021.
If you’ve flipped through printed broadsheet newspapers, you’ve probably seen pages full of tiny text listing prices and other market information for stocks and commodities. And you’ve almost certainly just turned the page. Anybody interested in this market prices today will turn to the internet where these numbers are available in real time and where you don’t need to squint to find what you need. T...
--------------------
Matthew Garrett: Poking a mobile hotspot
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61725.html
November 26, 2022, 7:09 AM
I've been playing with an Orbic Speed, a relatively outdated device that only speaks LTE Cat 4, but the towers I can see from here are, uh, not well provisioned so throughput really isn't a concern (and refurbs are $18, so). As usual I'm pretty terrible at just buying devices and using them for their intended purpose, and in this case it has the irritating behaviour that if there's a power cut and the battery runs out it doesn't boot again when power returns, so here's what I've learned so far.F...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: podlators 5.00
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-11/001.html
November 25, 2022, 10:39 PM
podlators is my collection of POD formatting modules, which generate *roff
or text (possibly with escape sequence markup) from the documentation
format used by Perl and some other packages.
This is a major release, the biggest since the Pod::Simple rewrite in
2005. The headline news is that after some fairly extensive
investigation, this release of Pod::Man finally changes the default output
format to Unicode. No more replacement of characters in people's names,
or text in non-English langu...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Servant Mage
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-76904-3.html
November 24, 2022, 4:39 AM
Review: Servant Mage, by Kate Elliott

Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
1-250-76904-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
165

Servant Mage is a (so far at least) standalone fantasy novella.
Fellian is a servant mage, which means that she makes Lamps for the
customers of the inn, cleans the privies, and watches her effective owners
find ways to put her deeper into indentured servitude. That's the only
life permitted by the A...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: eventual consistency
https://jmtd.net/log/eventual_consistency/
November 23, 2022, 11:25 AM
Reading some documentation about using
hledger, a particular
passage jumped out at me:
It should be easy to work towards eventual consistency. …I should be able to
do them bit by little bit, leaving things half-done, and picking them up
later with little (mental) effort. Eventually my records would be perfect and
consistent.
This has been an approach I've used for many things in my life for a long time.
It has something in common with eat the elephant one mouthful at a time. I
think there a...
--------------------
François Marier: Name resolution errors in Ubuntu repositories while building a docker container
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/name-resolution-errors-ubuntu-repositories-while-building-docker-container/
November 23, 2022, 8:10 AM
I ran into what seemed to be a DNS problem when building a Docker container:
Err http://archive.ubuntu.com jammy Release.gpg
Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'
W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy/Release.gpg Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'
W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
I found that many solutions talked about
setting the default DNS server explicitly in /etc/docker/daemon.json:
{
Click here to read the complete article