Planet Debian

Back in February, I got curious to see if VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming. It did not, despite the fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating around for years. I did however find a standalone plugin for VLC to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the plugin and get it into Debian. I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago, and am very happy to report that it entered Debian a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.

With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able to stream videos using a simple call to

vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent

It can handle magnet links too. Now if only native vlc had bittorrent support. Then a lot more would be helping each other to share public domain and creative commons movies. The plugin need some stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent with many files, but is already usable. Please note that the plugin is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill up your disk if you are not careful. Have fun. :)

I would love to get help maintaining this package. Get in touch if you are interested.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Petter Reinholdtsen http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english

Some days ago I found an key chain at home that was a small digital photo frame, and it seems that was not used since 2009 (old times when I was not using Debian at home yet). The photo frame was still working (I connected it with an USB cable and after some seconds, it turned on), and showed 37 photos from 2009 indeed.

When I connected it with USB cable to the computer, it was asking “Connect USB? Yes/No” I pressed the button saying “yes” and nothing happened in the computer (I was expecting an USB drive to be shown in Dolphin, but no).

I looked at “dmesg” output and it was shown as a CDROM:

[ 1620.497536] usb 3-2: new full-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd [ 1620.639507] usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1908, idProduct=1320 [ 1620.639513] usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 [ 1620.639515] usb 3-2: Product: Photo Frame [ 1620.639518] usb 3-2: Manufacturer: BUILDWIN [ 1620.640549] usb-storage 3-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected [ 1620.640770] usb-storage 3-2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 1908 pid 1320: 20000 [ 1620.640807] scsi host7: usb-storage 3-2:1.0 [ 1621.713594] scsi 7:0:0:0: CD-ROM buildwin Photo Frame 1.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 [ 1621.715400] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [ 1621.715745] sr 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1 [ 1621.715932] sr 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5

But not automounted.
I mounted it and then looked at the files, but I couldn’t find photos there, only these files:

Autorun.inf FEnCodeUnicode.dll LanguageUnicode.ini DPFMate.exe flashlib.dat StartInfoUnicode.ini

The Autorun.inf file was pointing to the DPFMate.exe file.

I connected the device to a Windows computer and then I could run the DPFMate.exe program, and it was a program to manage the photos in the device.

I was wondering if I could manage the device from Debian and then searched for «dpf “digital photo frame” linux dpfmate» and found this page:

http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/hardware/Abeyerr_Digital_Photo_Frame/

Yes, that one was my key chain!

I looked for gphoto in Debian, going to https://packages.debian.org/gphoto and then learned that the program I need to install was gphoto2.
I installed it and then went to its Quick Start Guide to learn how to access the device, get the photos etc. In particular, I used these commands:

gphoto2 --auto-detect Model Port ---------------------------------------------------------- AX203 USB picture frame firmware ver 3.4.x usbscsi:/dev/sg1 gphoto2 --get-all-files

(it copied all the pictures that were in the photo frame, to the current folder in my computer)

gphoto2 --upload-file=name_of_file

(to put some file in the photo frame)

gphoto2 --delete-file=1-38

(to delete the file 1 to 38 in the photo frame).

larjona https://larjona.wordpress.com English – The bright side

directhex https://apebox.org/wordpress debian – APEBOX.ORG

I never fancied having accounts with the big players that much, so I never touched e.g. Twitter.

But Mastodon is the kind of service that works for me. You can find me on https://fosstodon.org.

My nick over there is sunweaver. I'll be posting intersting stuff of my work there, probably more regularly than on the blog.

sunweaver http://sunweavers.net/blog/blog/1 sunweaver's blog

I've recently sent the following email to fellows, I'm posting it here for the benefit of the wider community and also for any fellows who don't receive the email.

Dear fellows,

Given the decline of the Fellowship and FSFE's migration of fellows into a supporter program, I no longer feel that there is any further benefit that a representative can offer to fellows.

With recent blogs, I've made a final effort to fulfill my obligations to keep you informed. I hope fellows have a better understanding of who we are and can engage directly with FSFE without a representative. Fellows who want to remain engaged with FSFE are encouraged to work through your local groups and coordinators as active participation is the best way to keep an organization on track.

This resignation is not a response to any other recent events. From a logical perspective, if the Fellowship is going to evolve out of a situation like this, it is in the hands of local leaders and fellowship groups, it is no longer a task for a single representative.

There are many positive experiences I've had working with people in the FSFE community and I am also very grateful to FSFE for those instances where I have been supported in activities for free software.

Going forward, leaving this role will also free up time and resources for other free software projects that I am engaged in.

I'd like to thank all those of you who trusted me to represent you and supported me in this role during such a challenging time for the Fellowship.

Sincerely,

Daniel Pocock

Daniel.Pocock https://danielpocock.com/tags/debian DanielPocock.com - debian

As a follow-up to my post with Suggestions for Trump Supporters [1] I notice that many people seem to have private definitions of words that they like to use.

There are some situations where the use of a word is contentious and different groups of people have different meanings. One example that is known to most people involved with computers is “hacker”. That means “criminal” according to mainstream media and often “someone who experiments with computers” to those of us who like experimenting with computers. There is ongoing discussion about whether we should try and reclaim the word for it’s original use or whether we should just accept that’s a lost cause. But generally based on context it’s clear which meaning is intended. There is also some overlap between the definitions, some people who like to experiment with computers conduct experiments with computers they aren’t permitted to use. Some people who are career computer criminals started out experimenting with computers for fun.

But some times words are misused in ways that fail to convey any useful ideas and just obscure the real issues. One example is the people who claim to be left-wing Libertarians. Murray Rothbard (AKA “Mr Libertarian”) boasted about “stealing” the word Libertarian from the left [2]. Murray won that battle, they should get over it and move on. When anyone talks about “Libertarianism” nowadays they are talking about the extreme right. Claiming to be a left-wing Libertarian doesn’t add any value to any discussion apart from demonstrating the fact that the person who makes such a claim is one who gives hipsters a bad name. The first time penny-farthings were fashionable the word “libertarian” was associated with left-wing politics. Trying to have a sensible discussion about politics while using a word in the opposite way to almost everyone else is about as productive as trying to actually travel somewhere by penny-farthing.

Another example is the word “communist” which according to many Americans seems to mean “any person or country I don’t like”. It’s often invoked as a magical incantation that’s supposed to automatically win an argument. One recent example I saw was someone claiming that “Russia has always been communist” and rejecting any evidence to the contrary. If someone was to say “Russia has always been a shit country” then there’s plenty of evidence to support that claim (Tsarist, communist, and fascist Russia have all been shit in various ways). But no definition of “communism” seems to have any correlation with modern Russia. I never discovered what that person meant by claiming that Russia is communist, they refused to make any comment about Russian politics and just kept repeating that it’s communist. If they said “Russia has always been shit” then it would be a clear statement, people can agree or disagree with that but everyone knows what is meant.

The standard response to pointing out that someone is using a definition of a word that is either significantly different to most of the world (or simply inexplicable) is to say “that’s just semantics”. If someone’s “contribution” to a political discussion is restricted to criticising people who confuse “their” and “there” then it might be reasonable to say “that’s just semantics”. But pointing out that someone’s writing has no meaning because they choose not to use words in the way others will understand them is not just semantics. When someone claims that Russia is communist and Americans should reject the Republican party because of their Russian connection it’s not even wrong. The same applies when someone claims that Nazis are “leftist”.

Generally the aim of a political debate is to convince people that your cause is better than other causes. To achieve that aim you have to state your cause in language that can be understood by everyone in the discussion. Would the person who called Russia “communist” be more or less happy if Russia had common ownership of the means of production and an absence of social classes? I guess I’ll never know, and that’s their failure at debating politics.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/09/01/suggestions-trump-supporters/
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/yazeq3cw

Related posts:

1. TED – Defining Words I recently joined the community based around the TED conference...
2. political compass It appears that some people don’t understand what right-wing means...
3. Terms of Abuse for Minority Groups Due to the comments on my blog post about Divisive...

etbe https://etbe.coker.com.au etbe – Russell Coker

I now have a rudimentary [roadmap][] for reaching 1.0 of [vmdb2][], my Debian image building tool.

The visual roadmap is generated from the following YAML file:

vmdb2_1_0: label: | vmdb2 is production ready depends: - ci_builds_images - docs - x220_install docs: label: | vmdb2 has a user manual of acceptable quality x220_install: label: | x220 can install Debian onto a Thinkpad x220 laptop ci_builds_images: label: | CI builds and publishes images using vmdb2 depends: - amd64_images - arm_images amd64_images: label: | CI: amd64 images arm_images: label: | CI: arm images of various kinds Lars Wirzenius' blog http://blog.liw.fi/englishfeed/ englishfeed

Following a teaser tweet two days ago, we are thrilled to announce that binb version 0.0.1 arrived on CRAN earlier this evening.

binb extends a little running joke^Htradition I created a while back and joins three other CRAN packages offering RMarkdown integration:

• tint for tint is not Tufte : pdf or html papers with a fresher variant of the famed Tufte style;
• pinp for pinp is not PNAS : two-column pdf vignettes in the PNAS style (which we use for several of our packages);
• linl for linl is not Letter : pdf letters

All four offer easy RMarkdown integration, leaning heavily on the awesome super-power of pandoc as well as general R glue.

This package (finally) wraps something I had offered for Metropolis via a simpler GitHub repo – a repo I put together more-or-less spur-of-the-moment-style when asked for it during the useR! 2016 conference. It also adds the lovely IQSS Beamer theme by Ista Zahn which offers a rather sophisticated spin on the original Metropolis theme by Matthias Vogelgesang.

We put two simple teasers on the GitHub repo.

Metropolis

Consider the following minimal example, adapted from the original minimal example at the bottom of the Metropolis page:

--- title: A minimal example author: Matthias Vogelgesang date: \today institute: Centre for Modern Beamer Themes output: binb::metropolis --- # First Section ## First Frame Hello, world!

It creates a three-page pdf file which we converted into this animated gif (which loses font crispness, sadly):

IQSS

Similarly, for IQSS we use the following input adapting the example above but showing sections and subsections for the nice headings it generates:

--- title: A minimal example author: Ista Zahn date: \today institute: IQSS output: binb::iqss --- # First Section ## First Sub-Section ### First Frame Hello, world! # Second Section ## Second Subsection ### Second Frame Another planet!

This creates this pdf file which we converted into this animated gif (also losing font crispness):

The initial (short) NEWS entry follows:

Changes in binb version 0.0.1 (2018-09-19)

• Initial CRAN release supporting Metropolis and IQSS

For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog Thinking inside the box

It's only two weeks to the beginning of the privacy and anonymity colloquium we will be celebrating at the Engineering Faculty of my University. Of course, it's not by mere chance we are holding this colloquium starts just after the Tor Meeting, which will happen for the first time in Latin America (and in our city!)

So, even though changes are still prone to happen, I am happy to announce the activity program for the colloquium!

I know some people will ask, so — We don't have the infrastructure to commit to having a video feed from it. We will, though, record the presentations on video, and I have the committment to the university to produce a book from it within a year time. So, at some point in the future, I will be able to give you a full copy of the topics we will discuss!

But, if you are in Mexico City, no excuses: You shall come to the colloquium!

AttachmentSize poster.pdf881.35 KB poster_small.jpg81.22 KB gwolf http://gwolf.org Gunnar Wolf

I wrote an alternative to debootstrap. I call it mmdebstrap which is short for multi-mirror debootstrap. Its interface is very similar to debootstrap, so you can just do:

$ sudo mmdebstrap unstable ./unstable-chroot

And you'll get a Debian unstable chroot just as debootstrap would create it. It also supports the --variant option with minbase and buildd values which install the same package sets as debootstrap would.

A list of advantages in contrast to debootstrap:

• more than one mirror possible (or really anything that is a legal apt sources.list entry)
• security and updates mirror included for Debian stable chroots (a wontfix for debootstrap)
• 2-3 times faster (for debootstrap variants)
• chroot with apt in 11 seconds (if only installing Essential: yes and apt)
• gzipped tarball with apt is 27M small
• bit-by-bit reproducible output (if $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set)
• unprivileged operation using Linux user namespaces, fakechroot or proot (mode is chosen automatically)
• can operate on filesystems mounted with nodev
• foreign architecture chroots with qemu-user (without manually invoking --second-stage)

You can find the code here:

https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/mmdebstrap

Johannes Schauer https://blog.mister-muffin.de/feed/None Mister Muffin Blog

As in previous years we’re trying to organize an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisons, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 21st in Edinburgh, the day before ELC Europe starts there. Cirrus Logic have generously offered to host this in their Edinburgh office:

7B Nightingale Way
Quartermile
Edinburgh
EH3 9EG

As with previous years let’s pull together an agenda through a mailing list discussion on alsa-devel – if you’ve got any topics you’d like to discuss please join the discussion there.

There’s no cost for the miniconference but if you’re planning to attend please sign up using the document here.

broonie https://blog.sirena.org.uk Technicalities

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In August, about 220 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 5 hours (out of 10 hours allocated, thus keeping 5 extra hours for September).
• Antoine Beaupré did 23.75 hours.
• Ben Hutchings did 5 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 8 extra hours, thus keeping 8 extra hours for September).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not manage to work but returned all his hours to the pool (out of 23.75 hours allocated + 19.5 extra hours).
• Holger Levsen did 10 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 16 extra hours, thus keeping 14 extra hours for September).
• Hugo Lefeuvre did nothing (out of 10 hours allocated, but he gave back those hours).
• Markus Koschany did 23.75 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did 6 hours (out of 8 hours allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for September).
• Ola Lundqvist did 4.5 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 8 remaining hours, thus keeping 11.5 extra hours for September).
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 6 hours (out of 18h allocated, thus keeping 12 extra hours for September).
• Santiago Ruano Rincón did 8 hours (out of 20 hours allocated, thus keeping 12 extra hours for September).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 23.75 hours.

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours decreased to 206 hours per month, we lost two sponsors and gained only one.

The security tracker currently lists 38 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 24 packages needing an update.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 35 months)
• GitHub (for 26 months)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 3 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 51 months)
• Blablacar (for 50 months)
• Linode (for 40 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 29 months)
• Plat’Home (for 29 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 50 months)
• Nantes Métropole (for 45 months)
• Dalenys (for 41 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 36 months)
• Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 36 months)
• Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 30 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 24 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 20 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 14 months)
• Vente-privee.com (for 11 months)
• CINECA (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers – IntarS Austria (for 51 months)
• Evolix (for 51 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 51 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 50 months)
• MyTux (for 50 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 48 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 48 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 46 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 45 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 45 months)
• NUMLOG (for 45 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 44 months)
• WinGo AG (for 44 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes – LHEEA (for 40 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 38 months)
• Entr’ouvert (for 35 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 33 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 27 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI – UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 27 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 27 months)
• Bearstech (for 18 months)
• LiHAS (for 18 months)
• People Doc (for 15 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 13 months)
• Supagro (for 8 months)
• Demarcq SAS (for 7 months)
• TrapX Security (for 4 months)
• NCC Group

No comment | Liked this article? Click here. | My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Raphaël Hertzog https://raphaelhertzog.com apt-get install debian-wizard

Ever since I started blogging about my role in FSFE as Fellowship representative, I've been receiving communications and queries from various people, both in public and in private, about the relationship between FSF and FSFE. I've written this post to try and document my own experiences of the issue, maybe some people will find this helpful. These comments have also been shared on the LibrePlanet mailing list for discussion (subscribe here)

Being the elected Fellowship representative means I am both a member of FSFE e.V. and also possess a mandate to look out for the interests of the community of volunteers and donors (they are not members of FSFE e.V). In both capacities, I feel uncomfortable about the current situation due to the confusion it creates in the community and the risk that volunteers or donors may be confused.

The FSF has a well known name associated with a distinctive philosophy. Whether people agree with that philosophy or not, they usually know what FSF believes in. That is the power of a brand.

When people see the name FSFE, they often believe it is a subsidiary or group working within the FSF. The way that brands work, people associate the philosophy with the name, just as somebody buying a Ferrari in Berlin expects it to do the same things that a Ferrari does in Boston.

To give an example, when I refer to "our president" in any conversation, people not knowledgeable about the politics believe I am referring to RMS. More specifically, if I say to somebody "would you like me to see if our president can speak at your event?", some people think it is a reference to RMS. In fact, FSFE was set up as a completely independent organization with distinct membership and management and therefore a different president. When I try to explain this to people, they sometimes lose interest and the conversation can go cold very quickly.

FSFE leadership have sometimes diverged from FSF philosophy, for example, it is not hard to find some quotes about "open source" and one fellow recently expressed concern that some people behave like "FSF Light". But given that FSF's crown jewels are the philosophy, how can an "FSF Light" mean anything? What would "Ferrari Light" look like, a red lawnmower? Would it be a fair use of the name Ferrari?

Some concerned fellows have recently gone as far as accusing the FSFE staff of effectively domain squatting or trolling the FSF (I can't link to that because of FSFE's censorship regime). When questions appear about the relationship in public, there is sometimes a violent response with no firm details. (I can't link to that either because of FSFE's censorship regime)

The FSFE constitution calls on FSFE to "join forces" with the FSF and sometimes this appears to happen but I feel this could be taken further.

FSF people have also produced vast amounts of code (the GNU Project) and some donors appear to be contributing funds to FSFE in gratitude for that or in the belief they are supporting that. However, it is not clear to me that funds given to FSFE support that work. As Fellowship representative, a big part of my role is to think about the best interests of those donors and so the possibility that they are being confused concerns me.

Given the vast amounts of money and goodwill contributed by the community to FSFE e.V., including a recent bequest of EUR 150,000 and the direct questions about this issue I feel it is becoming more important for both organizations to clarify the issue.

FSFE has a transparency page on the web site and this would be a good place to publish all documents about their relationship with FSF. For example, FSFE could publish the documents explaining their authorization to use a name derived from FSF and the extent to which they are committed to adhere to FSF's core philosophy and remain true to that in the long term. FSF could also publish some guidelines about the characteristics of a sister organization, especially when that organization is authorized to share the FSF's name.

In the specific case of sister organizations who benefit from the tremendous privilege of using the FSF's name, could it also remove ambiguity if FSF mandated the titles used by officers of sister organizations? For example, the "FSFE President" would be referred to as "FSFE European President", or maybe the word president could be avoided in all sister organizations.

People also raise the question of whether FSFE can speak for all Europeans given that it only has a large presence in Germany and other organizations are bigger in other European countries. Would it be fair for some of those other groups to aspire to sister organization status and name-sharing rights too? Could dozens of smaller FSF sister organizations dilute the impact of one or two who go off-script?

Even if FSFE was to distance itself from FSF or even start using a new name and philosophy, as a member, representative and also volunteer I would feel uncomfortable with that as there is a legacy of donations and volunteering that have brought FSFE to the position the organization is in today.

That said, I would like to emphasize that I regard RMS and the FSF, as the original FSF, as having the final authority over the use of the name and I fully respect FSF's right to act unilaterally, negotiate with sister organizations or simply leave things as they are.

If you have questions or concerns about this topic, I would invite you to raise them on the LibrePlanet-discuss mailing list or feel free to email me directly.

Daniel.Pocock https://danielpocock.com/tags/debian DanielPocock.com - debian

If you remember my first post about home automation I mentioned a desire to use some sort of presence detection as part of deciding when to turn the heat on. Home Assistant has a wide selection of presence detection modules available, but the easy ones didn’t seem like the right solutions. I don’t want something that has to run on my phone to say where I am, but using the phone as the proxy for presence seemed reasonable. It connects to the wifi when at home, so watching for that involves no overhead on the phone and should be reliable (as long as I haven’t let my phone run down). I run OpenWRT on my main house router and there are a number of solutions which work by scraping the web interface. openwrt_hass_devicetracker is a bit better but it watches the hostapd logs and my wifi is actually handled by some UniFis.

So how to do it more efficiently? Learn how to watch for ARP requests via Netlink! That way I could have something sitting idle and only doing any work when it sees a new event, that could be small enough to run directly on the router. I could then tie it together with the Mosquitto client libraries and announce presence via MQTT, tying it into Home Assistant with the MQTT Device Tracker.

I’m going to go into a bit more detail about the Netlink side of things, because I found it hard to find simple documentation and ended up reading kernel source code to figure out what I wanted. If you’re not interested in that you can find my mqtt-arp (I suck at naming simple things) tool locally or on GitHub. It ends up as an 8k binary for my MIPS based OpenWRT box and just needs fed a list of MAC addresses to watch for and details of the MQTT server. When it sees a device it cares about make an ARP request it reports the presence for that device as “home” (configurable), rate limiting it to at most once every 2 minutes. Once it hasn’t seen anything from the device for 10 minutes it declares the location to be unknown. I have found Samsung phones are a little prone to disconnecting from the wifi when not in use so you might need to lengthen the timeout if all you have are Samsung devices.

Home Assistant configuration is easy:

device_tracker: - platform: mqtt devices: noodles: 'location/by-mac/0C:11:22:33:44:55' helen: 'location/by-mac/4C:11:22:33:44:55'

On to the Netlink stuff…

Firstly, you can watch the netlink messages we’re interested in using iproute2 - just run ip monitor. Works as an unpriviledged user which is nice. This happens via an AF_NETLINK routing socket (rtnetlink(7)):

int sock; sock = socket(AF_NETLINK, SOCK_RAW, NETLINK_ROUTE);

We then want to indicate we’re listening for neighbour events:

struct sockaddr_nl group_addr; bzero(&group_addr, sizeof(group_addr)); group_addr.nl_family = AF_NETLINK; group_addr.nl_pid = getpid(); group_addr.nl_groups = RTMGRP_NEIGH; bind(sock, (struct sockaddr *) &group_addr, sizeof(group_addr));

At this point we’re good to go and can wait for an event message:

received = recv(sock, buf, sizeof(buf), 0);

This will be a struct nlmsghdr message and the nlmsg_type field will provide details of what type. In particular I look for RTM_NEWNEIGH, indicating a new neighbour has been seen. This is of type struct ndmsg and immediately follows the struct nlmsghdr in the received message. That has details of the address family type (IPv6 vs IPv4), the state and various flags (such as whether it’s NUD_REACHABLE indicating presence). The only slightly tricky bit comes in working out the MAC address, which is one of potentially several struct nlattr attributes which follow the struct ndmsg. In particular I’m interested in an nla_type of NDA_LLADDR, in which case the attribute data is the MAC address. The main_loop function in mqtt-arp.c shows this - it’s fairly simple stuff, and works nicely. It was just figuring out the relationship between it all and the exact messages I cared about that took me a little time to track down.

Jonathan McDowell https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/ Noodles' Emptiness

★ counterfeits in amazon pipeline

The 32 gb card I bought here at Amazon turned out to be fake. Within days I was getting read errors, even though the card was still mostly empty.

The logo is noticably blurry compared with a 32 gb card purchased elsewhere. Also, the color of the grey half of the card is subtly wrong, and the lettering is subtly wrong.

Amazon apparently has counterfiet stock in their pipeline, google "amazon counterfiet" for more.

You will not find this review on Sandisk Ultra 32GB Micro SDHC UHS-I Card with Adapter - 98MB/s U1 A1 - SDSQUAR-032G-GN6MA because it was rejected. As far as I can tell my review violates none of Amazon's posted guidelines. But it's specific about how to tell this card is counterfeit, and it mentions a real and ongoing issue that Amazon clearly wants to cover up.

Joey Hess http://joeyh.name/blog/ see shy jo

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 9 and Saturday September 15 2018:

• The fourth Reproducible Builds summit will take place from December 11th → 13th 2018 at the Mozilla Office. in Paris, France. If you are interested in attending please register by sending an email to holger@layer-acht.org. More details may be found on the associated event page.

• The Scala programming language merged a number of improvements to make the output from its compiler more reproducible. This work is available in the fifth milestone for the upcoming 2.13.0 release and is intended to be backported to the 2.12 tree.

• The program for NixOS’s 2018 conference was published this week — NixOS’s declarative package manager aims to make package management reliable and reproducible.

• The Briar secure messenger project published a blog post entitled “Building Briar Reproducible and Why It Matters”.

• A number of changes were made to systemd in order that it builds reproducibly. The issues were related to the test fixtures embedding the build path.

• Johannes Schauer (josch) created a merge request for the Debian Package Tracker to address that our test framework updated an internal API.

• Chris Lamb reviewed 43 Debian packages, adding to our knowledge about identified issues as well as updating a number of issue types including adding a note from upstream on the graphviz_nondeterminstic_output issue via a Tweet adding adding a new randomness_in_pdf2htmlex_html_output toolchain issue.

• There were further updates to our website, including Holger Levsen adding a backdated news entry about the new logo.

Patches filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

  • 389-ds (version update to fix FTBFS-j1)
  • dateutils (fix FTBFS-2018-10-08)
  • gtk4 (fix FTBFS-j1)
  • mkfontscale (sort readdir(2))
  • pycurl (file FTBFS-j1)
  • python-openstacksdk (FTBFS-j1 / build stuck)
  • various python packages (drop environment.pickle files)

• Chris Lamb:

  • Debian bug #908379 filed against bro.
  • Debian bug #908480 filed against coinmp.
  • gdk-pixbuf (fixed: shared files must be identical)
  • gtk+3.0 (merged, filesystem ordering)
  • promise (merged, use sha512 instead of random)

diffoscope development

Chris Lamb made a large number of changes to diffoscope, our in-depth “diff-on-steroids” utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages:

• Ensure Debian substvar generation is deterministic regardless of installed packages. (#908072)
• Fix testsuite under LLVM >= 7.0. (#908074)
• Disable binwalk’s configuration for predictable results, etc. (#903444)
• Clarify distinction between tools and packages when generating substvars.
• Don’t print GPG output.
• Ensure we return bytes objections from Command.filter to prevent LLVM tracebacks.

These changes were then uploaded as diffoscope version 101.

Test framework development

There were a number of updates to our Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org by Holger Levsen this month, including:

• Use amd64 kernels on all i386 nodes. (#875990)
• Prevent failures if artifacts cannot be deleted.
• Detect build failures due to invalid characters in package relations, download problems, Git problems, etc.
• Stop complaining about wrong MTU on IRC.
• Update the build variation documentation to reflect we’re currently doing fewer kernel variation tests.
• Force amd64 kernel installation on the i386 architecture.

Misc.

This week’s edition was written by Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, heinrich5991, Holger Levsen and Vagrant Cascadian & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Reproducible builds folks https://reproducible-builds.org/blog/ reproducible-builds.org

Russ Allbery of the Debian project writes reviews of books he has read on his blog. It was through Russ's review that I learned of "Deep Work" by Cal Newport, and duly requested it from my local library.

I've a long-held skepticism of self-help books, but several aspects of this one strike the right notes for me. The author is a Computer Scientist, so there's a sense of kinship there, but the writing also follows the standard academic patterns of citing sources and a certain rigour to the new ideas that are presented. Despite this, there are a few sections of the book which I felt lacked much supporting evidence, or where some obvious questions of the relevant concept were not being asked. One of the case studies in the book is of a part-time PhD student with a full-time job and a young child, which I can relate to. The author obviously follows his own advice: he runs a productivity blog at calnewport.com and has no other social media presences. One of the key productivity tips he espouses in the book (and elsewhere) is simply "quit social media".

Through Newport's blog I learned that the title of his next book is Digital Minimalism. This intrigued me, because since I started thinking about minimalism myself, I've wondered about the difference of approach needed between minimalism in the "real world" and the digital domains. It turns out the topic of Newport's next book is about something different: from what I can tell, focussing on controlling how one spends one's time online for maximum productivity.

That's an interesting topic which I have more to write about at some point. However, my line of thought for the title "digital minimalism" spawned from reading Marie Kondo, Fumio Sakai and others. Many of the tips they offer to their readers revolve around moving meaning away from physical clutter and into the digital domain: scan your important papers, photograph your keepsakes, and throw away the physical copies. It struck me that whilst this was useful advice for addressing the immediate problem of clutter in the physical world, it exacerbates the problem of digital clutter, especially if we don't have good systems for effectively managing digital archives. Broadly speaking, I don't think we do: at least, not ones that are readily accessible to the majority of people. I have a hunch that most have no form of data backup in place at all, switch between digital hosting services on a relatively ad-hoc manner (flickr, snapchat, instagram…) and treat losing data (such as when an old laptop breaks, or a tablet or phone is stolen) as a fact of life, rather than something that could be avoided if our tools (or habits, or both) were better.

jmtd http://jmtd.net/log/ Jonathan Dowland's Weblog

Review: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi

Series: Interdependency #1 Publisher: Tor Copyright: March 2017 ISBN: 0-7653-8889-8 Format: Kindle Pages: 333

Cardenia Wu-Patrick was never supposed to become emperox. She had a quiet life with her mother, a professor of ancient languages who had a brief fling with the emperox but otherwise stayed well clear of the court. Her older half-brother was the imperial heir and seemed to enjoy the position and the politics. But then Rennered got himself killed while racing and Cardenia ended up heir whether she wanted it or not, with her father on his deathbed and unwanted pressure on her to take over Rennered's role in a planned marriage of state with the powerful Nohamapetan guild family.

Cardenia has far larger problems than those, but she won't find out about them until becoming emperox.

The Interdependency is an interstellar human empire balanced on top of a complex combination of hereditary empire, feudal guild system, state religion complete with founding prophet, and the Flow. The Flow is this universe's equivalent of the old SF trope of a wormhole network: a strange extra-dimensional space with well-defined entry and exit points and a disregard for the speed of light. The Interdependency relies on it even more than one might expect. As part of the same complex and extremely long-term plan of engineered political stability that created the guild, empire, and church balance of power, the Interdependency created an economic web in which each system is critically dependent on imports from other systems. This plus the natural choke points of the Flow greatly reduces the chances of war.

It also means that Cardenia has inherited an empire that is more fragile than it may appear. Secret research happening at the most far-flung system in the Interdependency is about to tell her just how fragile.

John Clute and Malcolm Edwards provided one of the most famous backhanded compliments in SF criticism in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction when they described Isaac Asimov as the "default voice" of science fiction: a consistent but undistinguished style that became the baseline that other writers built on or reacted against. The field is now far too large for there to be one default voice in that same way, but John Scalzi's writing reminds me of that comment. He is very good at writing a specific sort of book: a light science fiction story that draws as much on Star Trek as it does on Heinlein, comfortably sits on the framework of standard SF tropes built by other people, adds a bit of humor and a lot of banter, and otherwise moves reliably and competently through a plot. It's not hard to recognize Scalzi's writing, so in that sense he has less of a default voice than Asimov had, but if I had to pick out an average science fiction novel his writing would come immediately to mind. At a time when the field is large enough to splinter into numerous sub-genres that challenge readers in different ways and push into new ideas, Scalzi continues writing straight down the middle of the genre, providing the same sort of comfortable familiarity as the latest summer blockbuster.

This is not high praise, and I am sometimes mystified at the amount of attention Scalzi gets (both positive and negative). I think his largest flaw (and certainly the largest flaw in this book) is that he has very little dynamic range, particularly in his characters. His books have a tendency to collapse into barely-differentiated versions of the same person bantering with each other, all of them sounding very much like Scalzi's own voice on his blog. The Collapsing Empire has emperox Scalzi grappling with news from scientist Scalzi carried by dutiful Scalzi with the help of profane impetuous Scalzi, all maneuvering against devious Scalzi. The characters are easy to keep track of by the roles they play in the plot, and the plot itself is agreeably twisty, but if you're looking for a book to hook into your soul and run you through the gamut of human emotions, this is not it.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. I like that voice; I read Scalzi's blog regularly. He's reliable, and I wonder if that's the secret to his success. I picked up this book because I wanted to read a decent science fiction novel and not take a big risk. It delivered exactly what I asked for. I enjoyed the plot, laughed at some of the characters, felt for Cardenia, enjoyed the way some villainous threats fell flat because of characters who had a firm grasp of what was actually important and acted on it, and am intrigued enough by what will happen next that I'm going to read the sequel. Scalzi aimed to entertain, succeeded, and got another happy customer. (Although I must note that I would have been happier if my favorite character in the book, by far, did not make a premature exit.)

I am mystified at how The Collapsing Empire won a Locus Award for best science fiction novel, though. This is just not an award sort of book, at least in my opinion. It's book four in an urban fantasy series, or the sixth book of Louis L'Amour's Sackett westerns. If you like this sort of thing, you'll like this version of it, and much of the appeal is that it's not risky and requires little investment of effort. I think an award winner should be the sort of book that lingers, that you find yourself thinking about at odd intervals, that expands your view of what's possible to do or feel or understand.

But that complaint is more about awards voters than about Scalzi, who competently executed on exactly what was promised on the tin. I liked the setup and I loved the structure of Cardenia's inheritance of empire, so I do kind of wish I could read the book that, say, Ann Leckie would have written with those elements, but I was entertained in exactly the way that I wanted to be entertained. There's real skill and magic in that.

Followed by The Consuming Fire. This book ends on a cliffhanger, as apparently does the next one, so if that sort of thing bothers you, you may want to wait until they're all available.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Russ Allbery https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ Eagle's Path

Did you download your binary of Visual Studio Code directly from the official website? If so, you’re not using a Free Software and only Microsoft knows what was added to this binary. And you should think of the worst possible.

It says « Open Source » and offers to download non open source binary packages. Very misleading.

The Microsoft Trick

I’m not a lawyer, I could be wrong or not accurate enough in my analysis (sorry!) but I’ll try nonetheless to give my understanding of the situation because the current state of licensing of Visual Studio Code tries to fool most users.

Microsoft uses here a simple but clever trick allowed by the license of the code source of Visual Studio Code: the MIT license, a permissive Free Software license.

Indeed, the MIT license is really straightforward. Do whatever you want with this software, keeps the original copyright and I’m not responsible of what could happen with this software. Ok. Except that, for the situation of Visual Studio Code, it only covers the source code, not the binary.

Unlike most of the GPL-based licenses for which both the source code and the binary built from this source code are covered by the terms of the license, using the MIT license authorizes Microsoft to make available the source code of the software, but do whatever they want with the binary of this software. And let’s be crystal-clear: 99,99% of the VSC users will never ever use directly the source code.

What a non-free license by Microsoft is

And of course Microsoft does not use purposely the MIT license for the binary of Visual Studio Code. In fact they use a fully-armed, Freedom-restricting license, the Microsoft Software License.

Lets have a look at some pieces of it. You can find the full license here: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

This license applies to the Visual Studio Code product. The source code is available under the MIT license agreement.

First sentence of the license. The difference between the license of the source code and the « product », meaning the binary you’re going to use, is clearly stated.

Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft.

Yeah right, no kidding. Big Surprise from Microsoft.

UPDATES. The software may periodically check for updates, and download and install them for you. You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources. Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with updates. You agree to receive these automatic updates without any additional notice. Updates may not include or support all existing software features, services, or peripheral devices.

I’ll break your installation without further notice and I don’t care what you were doing with it before, because, you know.

SCOPE OF LICENSE (…) you may not:

• work around any technical limitations in the software;

Also known as « hacking » since… years.

• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software, except and to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software;

Because, there is no way anybody should try to know what we are doing with the binary running on your computer.

• share, publish, rent or lease the software, or provide the software as a stand-alone offering for others to use.

I may be wrong (again I’m not a lawyer), but it seems to me they forbid you to redistribute this binary, except for the conditions mentioned in the INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS section (mostly for the need of your company or/and for giving demos of your products using VSC).

The following sections EXPORT RESTRICTIONS and CONSUMER RIGHTS; REGIONAL VARIATIONS include more and more restrictions about using and sharing the binary.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. The software is licensed “as-is.”

At last a term which could be identified as a term of a Free Software license. But in this case it’s of course to limit any obligation Microsoft could have towards you.

So the Microsoft software license is definitely not a Free Software license, if you were not convinced by the clever trick of dual licensing the source code and the binary.

What You Could Do

Some answers exist to use VSC in good condition. After all, the source code of VSC comes as a Free Software. So why not building it yourself? It also seems some initiatives appeared, like this repository. That could be a good start.

About the GNU/Linux distributions, packaging VSC (see here for the discussion in Debian) would be a great way to avoid people being abused by the Microsoft trick in order they use a « product » breaking almost any term of what makes a Free Software.

About Me

Carl Chenet, Free Software Indie Hacker, Founder of LinuxJobs.io, a Job board dedicated to Free and Open Source Jobs in the US.

Follow Me On Social Networks

• My Mastodon account : @carlchenet
• My Diaspora* account : @carlchenet
• My Twitter account : @carl_chenet

 

 

Carl Chenet https://carlchenet.com debian – Carl Chenet's Blog

I'm in a perpetual state of downsizing and ridding my life (and my family's life) of things we don't need: sometimes old computers. My main (nearly my sole) machine is my work-provided Thinkpad T470s: a fantastic laptop that works so well I haven't had anything to write about it. However, I decided that it was worth keeping just one spare, for emergencies or other odd situations. I have two candidate machines in my possession.

In the blue corner

left: X61S; right: R600

Toshiba Portégé R600. I've actually owned this now for 7 years, buying it originally to replace my beloved x40 which I loaned to my partner. At the time my main work machine was still a desktop. I received a new work laptop soon after buying this so it ended up gathering dust in a cupboard.

It's an extremely light laptop, even by today's standards. It compares favourably with the Apple Macbook Air 11" in that respect. A comfortable keyboard, but no trackpoint and a bog-standard trackpad. 1280x800 16:9 display, albeit TN panel technology with very limited viewing angles. Analog VGA video out on the laptop, but digital DVI-D out is possible via a separate dock, which was cheap and easy to acquire and very stowable. An integrated optical media drive which could be useful. Max 3G RAM (1G soldered, 2G in DIMM slot).

The CPU is apparently a generation newer but lower voltage and thus slower than its rival, which is…

In the red corner

x61s

Thinkpad X61s. The proportions match the Thinkpad X40, so it has a high nostalgia factor. Great keyboard, I love trackpoints, robust build. It has the edge on CPU over the Toshiba. A theoretical maximum of 8G (2x4) RAM, but practically nearer 4G (2x2), as the 4G sticks are too expensive. This is probably the "heart" choice.

The main drawback of the X61s is the display options: a 1024x768 TN panel, and no digital video out: VGA only on the laptop, and VGA only on the optional dock. It's possible to retro-fit a better panel, but it's not easy and the parts are now very hard to find. It's also a surprisingly heavy machine: heavier than I remember the X40 being, but it's been long enough ago that my expectations have changed.

The winner

Surprising myself perhaps more than anyone else, I've ended up opting for the Toshiba. The weight was the clincher. The CPU performance difference was too close to matter, and 3G RAM is sufficient for my spare laptop needs. Once I'd installed a spare SSD as the main storage device, day-to-day performance is very good. The resolution difference didn't turn out to be that important: it's still low enough that side-by-side text editor and browser feels crowded, so I end up using the same window management techniques as I would on the X61s.

What do I use it for? I've taken it on a couple of trips or holidays which I wouldn't want to risk my work machine for. I wrote nearly all of liquorice on it in downtime on a holiday to Turkey whilst my daughter was having her afternoon nap. I'm touching up this blog post on it now!

I suppose I should think about passing on the X61s to something/someone else.

jmtd http://jmtd.net/log/ Jonathan Dowland's Weblog