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/...
--------------------
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, 9:00 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...
--------------------
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 ...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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....
--------------------
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: ...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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.
--------------------
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...
--------------------
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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John Goerzen: Martha the Pilot
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10488-martha-the-pilot
May 3, 2023, 12:18 PM
Martha, now 5, can’t remember a time when she didn’t fly periodically. She’s come along in our airplane in short flights to a nearby restaurant and long ones to Michigan and South Dakota. All this time, she’s been riding in the back seat next to Laura.
Martha has been talking excitedly about riding up front next to me. She wants to “be my co-pilot”. I promised to give her an airplane wing pin when she did — one I got from a pilot of a commercial flight when I was a kid. Of cou...
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Neil Williams: Carrying Grief
https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/grief-universal-unique.html
May 2, 2023, 12:45 PM
This isn't a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is
because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of
Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of
quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things.
Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a
family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of
the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.18 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/05/01#rquantlib_0.4.18
May 2, 2023, 12:48 AM
A new release 0.4.18 of RQuantLib
arrived at CRAN earlier today,
and will be uploaded to Debian as
well.
QuantLib is a very
comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative
finance; RQuantLib
connects it to the R environment and language.
This release of RQuantLib
comes about six months after the previous maintenance release. It brings
a few small updates triggered by small changes in the QuantLib releases
1.29 and 1.30. It also contains updates reflecting changes in the
rgl package kindl...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Scanning heaps of 8mm movies
https://gwolf.org/2023/05/scanning-heaps-of-8mm-movies.html
May 1, 2023, 11:21 PM
After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items
he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many,
many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo
collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between
1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable
videocassette recorder.
I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in
a digital format, and while I’ve been making slow bu...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: May.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-May-1.html.en#2023-May-1-16:24:20
May 1, 2023, 7:24 AM
May. Doing some rust stuff and maintenance of existing C++ code.
Doing something that I can feel improves the codebase is nice.
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-001235-8.html
May 1, 2023, 4:03 AM
Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #28


Publisher:
HarperCollins


Copyright:
2001


Printing:
2008


ISBN:
0-06-001235-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
351

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th Discworld
novel and the first marketed for younger readers. Although it has enough
references to establish it as taking place on Discworld...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/05/01/floss-activities/
May 1, 2023, 12:42 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
libsafe:
allow local deps
i2c-tools:
usability
notmuch:
notmuch-mutt: fix queries, drop shell usage
duck:
add indicators
(1
2)
Debian BTS:
fix some QA/Python usertags
Debian QA services:
pass on HTTP errors,
block bingbot
(1
2),
update releases
Debian package tracker:
update hard-coded data
Debian wiki pages:
DebianExperimental,
DebianInstaller/CreateUSBMedia,
DebianLogo,
FileSystem,
Firmw...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links April 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/30/links-april-2023/
April 30, 2023, 7:00 AM
Cory Doctorow has an insightful article Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk [1] about the horrors that companies like Amazon are forcing on their employees.
Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell wrote an insightful article about the al Capone theory of sexual harassment [2]. Why people who sexually harass others usually perform other anti-social activity that is also easier to prosecute.
The IEEE has an interesting article about using ML for parts of the CPU design process, both the technical iss...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: dev-dependencies and Rust's unused_crate_dependencies lint
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2023/04/30/dev-dependencies-and-rusts-unused_crate_dependencies.html
April 30, 2023, 12:00 AM
I’m in the process of getting super-strict about the code quality of cretrit, the comparison-revealing encryption library that underlies the queryable encryption of the Enquo project.
While I’m going to write a whole big thing about Rust linting in the future, I bumped across a rather gnarly problem that I thought was worth sharing separately.
The problem, in short, is that the unused_crate_dependencies lint interacts badly with crates that are only needed for benchmarking, such as (in my ca...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Programming the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo with Arduino
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/04/30-programming_the_ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo_with_arduino/index.html
April 30, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on April 30, 2023



A few months ago we may have bought a few ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo boards from Olimex.
Since every time I go back to working with them I’ve forgotten how to do so, and my old notes on the fediverse are hard to find, this is the full procedure.
Setup
I start by sort-of-following https://docs.espressif.com/projects/arduino-esp32/en/latest/installing.html
Install arduino from the distribution packages (version 1.8 is ok).
Under File → Preferences...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: And it's now after 2100 - so the unexpurgated version
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/and-its-now-after-2100-so-unexpurgated.html
April 29, 2023, 9:23 PM
 We're all but done - a couple of bugs sorted. All testing complete....
--------------------
Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.1
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-04/001.html
April 29, 2023, 5:18 PM
This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.0, and the
upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from
ISC or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.
As of this release, we're no longer generating hashes and signed hashes.
Instead, the release is a simple tarball and a detached GnuPG signature,
similar to my other software releases. We're also maintaining the
releases in parallel on GitHub.
Fo...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Release testing for 11.7 - pictures (with appropriate identity protection)
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/release-testing-for-117-pictures-with.html
April 29, 2023, 3:16 PM
 ...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian Bullseye 11.7 release - testing going on - 202304291427
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/debian-bullseye-117-release-testing.html
April 29, 2023, 2:27 PM
 We've been joined by Simon (smcv) - lots of chat bouncing backwards and forwards. Laptops appearing out of backpacks suddenly being repurposed.Settling very much into a rhythm and routine.Working with two laptops on your lap ends up being quite heavy :)
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Russell Coker: Write a blog post in the style of Russell Coker
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/04/30/blog-post-style-russell-coker/
April 29, 2023, 2:18 PM
Feeling a bit bored I asked ChatGPT “Write a blog post in the style of Russell Coker” and the result is in the section below. I don’t know if ChatGPT knows that the person asking the question is the same as the person being asked about. If a human had created that I’d be certain that “great computer scientist and writer” was an attempt at flattery, for a machine I’m not sure.
I have not written a single book, but I expect that in some alternate universe some version of me has writt...
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Enrico Zini: Gtk4 model-backed radio button in Python
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/python/gkt4-model-backed-radio-button-in-python
April 29, 2023, 2:03 PM
Gtk4 has interesting ways of splitting models and views. One that I didn't find
very well documented, especially for Python bindings, is a set of radio buttons
backed by a common model.
The idea is to define an action that takes a string as a state. Each radio
button is assigned a string matching one of the possible states, and when the
state of the backend action is changed, the radio buttons are automatically
updated.
All the examples below use a string for a value type, but anything can be us...
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Andrew Cater: Debian Bullseye 11.7 release weekend 202304291215UTC
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/debian-bullseye-117-release-weekend.html
April 29, 2023, 11:46 AM
 A switch failure early on: some quick changes of wiring and we're off. The room is very quiet for a few minutes then a burst of chatter, then on we go.Just the noise of keyboards and quiet concentration
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Simon Josefsson: How To Trust A Machine
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/29/how-to-trust-a-machine/
April 29, 2023, 11:45 AM
Let’s reflect on some of my recent work that started with understanding Trisquel GNU/Linux, improving transparency into apt-archives, working on reproducible builds of Trisquel, strengthening verification of apt-archives with Sigstore, and finally thinking about security device threat models. A theme in all this is improving methods to have trust in machines, or generally any external entity. While I believe that everything starts by trusting something, usually something familiar and well-kn...
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Andrew Cater: Back in Cambridge - Debian point release for Debian Bullseye due this weekend - 11.7
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/back-in-cambridge-debian-point-release.html
April 29, 2023, 10:30 AM
Back in Cambridge for a point release weekend. Lots of people turning up - it comes to something when large monitors, a desktop machine require two or three trips to the car and there's still a crate of leads to go.As ever, lots of banter - computer renovations and updates were done yesterday - if they hadn't been, I'd have had at least another expert engineer on hand.This is *definitely* the place to be rather than at the other end of an IRC chat.This is *not* the release for Debian Bookworm: t...
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Abhijith PA: Attending FOSSASIA 2023
https://abhijithpa.me/2023/Attending-FOSSASIA-2023/
April 29, 2023, 6:53 AM
I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held
at Lifelong Learning Institute,
Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second
time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like
last time, I didn’t attend much talks but focussed on networking with
people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc.
I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing
stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the
people there used de...
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Enrico Zini: Handling keyboard-like devices
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2023/debian/handling-keyboard-like-devices
April 28, 2023, 6:58 PM
I acquired some unusual input devices to experiment with, like a CNC control
panel and a bluetooth pedal page turner.
These identify and behave like a keyboard, sending nice and simple keystrokes,
and can be accessed with no drivers or other special software. However, their
keystrokes appear together with keystrokes from normal keyboards, which is the
expected default when plugging in a keyboard, but not what I want in this case.
I'd also like them to be readable via evdev and accessible by my o...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Snaps, Gear 23.04.0 available in snap store
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-gear-23-04-0-available-in-snap-store/
April 28, 2023, 4:04 PM
KDE Digikam 8.0.0 Snap
It has been another crazy busy couple of weeks. There are too many snaps released to list here, but you can track my progress here:
https://invent.kde.org/packaging/snapcraft-kde-applications/-/issues/30
Some notable releases are:
Digikam 8.0.0
KPhotoalbum ( New! )
KDevelop
Kate ( Now classic )
Arianna ( New! )
Kdenlive
Kommit ( New! )
I updated our Frameworks/QT5 content pack to kf5 105 and qt5 5.15.9.
I have added more documentation...
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Sven Hoexter: What's wrong in IT: commit messages
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/rant_what_is_wrong_in_it_commit_messages/
April 28, 2023, 8:15 AM
In my day job someone today took the time in the team daily to explain
his research why some of our configuration is wrong. He spent quite
some time on his own to look at the history in git and how everything
was setup initially, and ended up in the current - wrong - way. That triggered
me to validate that quickly, another 5min of work. So we agreed
to change it. A one line change, nothing spectacular, but lifetime was
invested to figure out why it should've a different value.
When the pull req...
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Shirish Agarwal: John Grisham’s books, Evolution removed from textbooks
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/john-grishams-books-evolution-removed-from-textbooks/
April 28, 2023, 3:34 AM
Gray Mountain – John Grisham
I have been perusing John Grisham’s books, some read and some re-read again. Almost all of the books that Mr. Grisham wrote are relevant even today. The Gray Mountain talks about how mountain top removal was done in Applachia, the U.S. (South). In fact NASA made a summary which either was borrowed from this book or the author borrowed from NASA, either could be true although seems it might be the former. And this is when GOI just made a new Forest ‘Conser...
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Jonathan McDowell: Repurposing my C.H.I.P.
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/04/repurposing-my-chip.html
April 27, 2023, 6:44 PM
Way back at DebConf16 Gunnar managed to arrange for a number of Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. boards to be distributed to those who were interested. I was lucky enough to be amongst those who received one, but I have to confess after some initial experimentation it ended up sitting in its box unused.
The reasons for that were varied; partly about not being quite sure what best to do with it, partly due to a number of limitations it had, partly because NTC sadly went insolvent and there was less momen...
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Thomas Lange: New feature for FAI.me build service
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-ssh-keys/
April 27, 2023, 6:25 PM
After the initial installation of a new machine, you often want to
login as root via ssh. Therefore it's convenient to provide
a ssh public key for a passwordless login.
This can now be done by just adding your user name from
salsa.debian.org, gitlab.com or github.com. You can also give a
customized URL from where to download the keys.
Before it was only possible to use a github account name.
The FAI.me build service then creates a customized installation ISO for
you, which will automatically ...
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Simon Josefsson: A Security Device Threat Model: The Substitution Attack
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/04/27/a-security-device-threat-model-the-substitution-attack/
April 27, 2023, 4:30 PM
I’d like to describe and discuss a threat model for computational devices. This is generic but we will narrow it down to security-related devices. For example, portable hardware dongles used for OpenPGP/OpenSSH keys, FIDO/U2F, OATH HOTP/TOTP, PIV, payment cards, wallets etc and more permanently attached devices like a Hardware Security Module (HSM), a TPM-chip, or the hybrid variant of a mostly permanently-inserted but removable hardware security dongles.
Our context is cryptographic hard...
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Arturo Borrero González: Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe summary
https://ral-arturo.org/2023/04/27/kubecon.html
April 27, 2023, 10:47 AM
This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited ...
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Bálint Réczey: Improve build time of Rust, Java and Intel Fortran projects with Firebuild’s new release!
https://balintreczey.hu/blog/improve-build-time-of-rust-java-and-intel-fortran-projects-with-firebuilds-new-release/
April 25, 2023, 9:38 PM
Rust is a hugely popular compiled programming language and accelerating it was an important goal for Firebuild for some time.
Firebuild‘s v0.8.0 release finally added Rust support in addition to numerous other improvements including support for Doxygen, Intel’s Fortran compiler and restored javac and javadoc acceleration.
Firebuild’s Rust + Cargo support
Firebuild treats programs as black boxes intercepting C standard library calls and system calls. It shortcuts the program invoc...
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