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January 28, 2026

Antoine Beaupré

Qalculate hacks

This is going to be a controversial statement because some people are absolute nerds about this, but, I need to say it.

Qalculate is the best calculator that has ever been made.

I am not going to try to convince you of this, I just wanted to put out my bias out there before writing down those notes. I am a total fan.

This page will collect my notes of cool hacks I do with Qalculate. Most examples are copy-pasted from the command-line interface (qalc(1)), but I typically use the graphical interface as it's slightly better at displaying complex formulas. Discoverability is obviously also better for the cornucopia of features this fantastic application ships.

Qalc commandline primer

On Debian, Qalculate's CLI interface can be installed with:

apt install qalc

Then you start it with the qalc command, and end up on a prompt:

anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
>

Then it's a normal calculator:

anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
> 1+1

  1 + 1 = 2

> 1/7

  1 / 7 ≈ 0.1429

> pi

  pi ≈ 3.142

>

There's a bunch of variables to control display, approximation, and so on:

> set precision 6
> 1/7

  1 / 7 ≈ 0.142857
> set precision 20
> pi

  pi ≈ 3.1415926535897932385

When I need more, I typically browse around the menus. One big issue I have with Qalculate is there are a lot of menus and features. I had to fiddle quite a bit to figure out that set precision command above. I might add more examples here as I find them.

Bandwidth estimates

I often use the data units to estimate bandwidths. For example, here's what 1 megabit per second is over a month ("about 300 GiB"):

> 1 megabit/s * 30 day to gibibyte 

  (1 megabit/second) × (30 days) ≈ 301.7 GiB

Or, "how long will it take to download X", in this case, 1GiB over a 100 mbps link:

> 1GiB/(100 megabit/s)

  (1 gibibyte) / (100 megabits/second) ≈ 1 min + 25.90 s

Password entropy

To calculate how much entropy (in bits) a given password structure, you count the number of possibilities in each entry (say, [a-z] is 26 possibilities, "one word in a 8k dictionary" is 8000), extract the base-2 logarithm, multiplied by the number of entries.

For example, an alphabetic 14-character password is:

> log2(26*2)*14

  log₂(26 × 2) × 14 ≈ 79.81

... 80 bits of entropy. To get the equivalent in a Diceware password with a 8000 word dictionary, you would need:

> log2(8k)*x = 80

  (log₂(8 × 000) × x) = 80 ≈

  x ≈ 6.170

... about 6 words, which gives you:

> log2(8k)*6

  log₂(8 × 1000) × 6 ≈ 77.79

78 bits of entropy.

Exchange rates

You can convert between currencies!

> 1 EUR to USD

  1 EUR ≈ 1.038 USD

Even fake ones!

> 1 BTC to USD

  1 BTC ≈ 96712 USD

This relies on a database pulled form the internet (typically the central european bank rates, see the source). It will prompt you if it's too old:

It has been 256 days since the exchange rates last were updated.
Do you wish to update the exchange rates now? y

As a reader pointed out, you can set the refresh rate for currencies, as some countries will require way more frequent exchange rates.

The graphical version has a little graphical indicator that, when you mouse over, tells you where the rate comes from.

Other conversions

Here are other neat conversions extracted from my history

> teaspoon to ml

  teaspoon = 5 mL

> tablespoon to ml

  tablespoon = 15 mL

> 1 cup to ml 

  1 cup ≈ 236.6 mL

> 6 L/100km to mpg

  (6 liters) / (100 kilometers) ≈ 39.20 mpg

> 100 kph to mph

  100 kph ≈ 62.14 mph

> (108km - 72km) / 110km/h

  ((108 kilometers) − (72 kilometers)) / (110 kilometers/hour) ≈
  19 min + 38.18 s

Completion time estimates

This is a more involved example I often do.

Background

Say you have started a long running copy job and you don't have the luxury of having a pipe you can insert pv(1) into to get a nice progress bar. For example, rsync or cp -R can have that problem (but not tar!).

(Yes, you can use --info=progress2 in rsync, but that estimate is incremental and therefore inaccurate unless you disable the incremental mode with --no-inc-recursive, but then you pay a huge up-front wait cost while the entire directory gets crawled.)

Extracting a process start time

First step is to gather data. Find the process start time. If you were unfortunate enough to forget to run date --iso-8601=seconds before starting, you can get a similar timestamp with stat(1) on the process tree in /proc with:

$ stat /proc/11232
  File: /proc/11232
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 1024   directory
Device: 0,21    Inode: 57021       Links: 9
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Modify: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Change: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
 Birth: -

So our start time is 2025-02-07 15:50:25, we shave off the nanoseconds there, they're below our precision noise floor.

If you're not dealing with an actual UNIX process, you need to figure out a start time: this can be a SQL query, a network request, whatever, exercise for the reader.

Saving a variable

This is optional, but for the sake of demonstration, let's save this as a variable:

> start="2025-02-07 15:50:25"

  save("2025-02-07T15:50:25"; start; Temporary; ; 1) =
  "2025-02-07T15:50:25"

Estimating data size

Next, estimate your data size. That will vary wildly with the job you're running: this can be anything: number of files, documents being processed, rows to be destroyed in a database, whatever. In this case, rsync tells me how many bytes it has transferred so far:

# rsync -ASHaXx --info=progress2 /srv/ /srv-zfs/
2.968.252.503.968  94%    7,63MB/s    6:04:58  xfr#464440, ir-chk=1000/982266)

Strip off the weird dots in there, because that will confuse qalculate, which will count this as:

  2.968252503968 bytes ≈ 2.968 B

Or, essentially, three bytes. We actually transferred almost 3TB here:

  2968252503968 bytes ≈ 2.968 TB

So let's use that. If you had the misfortune of making rsync silent, but were lucky enough to transfer entire partitions, you can use df (without -h! we want to be more precise here), in my case:

Filesystem              1K-blocks       Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_hdd-srv 7512681384 7258298036  179205040  98% /srv
tank/srv               7667173248 2870444032 4796729216  38% /srv-zfs

(Otherwise, of course, you use du -sh $DIRECTORY.)

Digression over bytes

Those are 1 K bytes which is actually (and rather unfortunately) Ki, or "kibibytes" (1024 bytes), not "kilobytes" (1000 bytes). Ugh.

> 2870444032 KiB

  2870444032 kibibytes ≈ 2.939 TB

> 2870444032 kB

  2870444032 kilobytes ≈ 2.870 TB

At this scale, those details matter quite a bit, we're talking about a 69GB (64GiB) difference here:

> 2870444032 KiB - 2870444032 kB

  (2870444032 kibibytes) − (2870444032 kilobytes) ≈ 68.89 GB

Anyways. Let's take 2968252503968 bytes as our current progress.

Our entire dataset is 7258298064 KiB, as seen above.

Solving a cross-multiplication

We have 3 out of four variables for our equation here, so we can already solve:

> (now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB) to h

  ((actual − start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes))

  x ≈ 59.24 h

The entire transfer will take about 60 hours to complete! Note that's not the time left, that is the total time.

To break this down step by step, we could calculate how long it has taken so far:

> now-start

  now − start ≈ 23 h + 53 min + 6.762 s

> now-start to s

  now − start ≈ 85987 s

... and do the cross-multiplication manually, it's basically:

x/(now-start) = (total/current)

so:

x = (total/current) * (now-start)

or, in Qalc:

> ((7258298064  kibibytes) / ( 2996538438607 bytes) ) *  85987 s

  ((7258298064 kibibytes) / (2996538438607 bytes)) × (85987 secondes) ≈
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.81 s

It's interesting it gives us different units here! Not sure why.

Now and built-in variables

The now here is actually a built-in variable:

> now

  now ≈ "2025-02-08T22:25:25"

There is a bewildering list of such variables, for example:

> uptime

  uptime = 5 d + 6 h + 34 min + 12.11 s

> golden

  golden ≈ 1.618

> exact

  golden = (√(5) + 1) / 2

Computing dates

In any case, yay! We know the transfer is going to take roughly 60 hours total, and we've already spent around 24h of that, so, we have 36h left.

But I did that all in my head, we can ask more of Qalc yet!

Let's make another variable, for that total estimated time:

> total=(now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB)

  save(((now − start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes)); total; Temporary; ; 1) ≈
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.22 s

And we can plug that into another formula with our start time to figure out when we'll be done!

> start+total

  start + total ≈ "2025-02-10T03:28:52"

> start+total-now

  start + total − now ≈ 1 d + 11 h + 34 min + 48.52 s

> start+total-now to h

  start + total − now ≈ 35 h + 34 min + 32.01 s

That transfer has ~1d left, or 35h24m32s, and should complete around 4 in the morning on February 10th.

But that's icing on top. I typically only do the cross-multiplication and calculate the remaining time in my head.

I mostly did the last bit to show Qalculate could compute dates and time differences, as long as you use ISO timestamps. Although it can also convert to and from UNIX timestamps, it cannot parse arbitrary date strings (yet?).

Other functionality

Qalculate can:

  • Plot graphs;
  • Use RPN input;
  • Do all sorts of algebraic, calculus, matrix, statistics, trigonometry functions (and more!);
  • ... and so much more!

I have a hard time finding things it cannot do. When I get there, I typically need to resort to programming code in Python, use a spreadsheet, and others will turn to more complete engines like Maple, Mathematica or R.

But for daily use, Qalculate is just fantastic.

And it's pink! Use it!

Gotchas

There are a couple of things that get me with Qalc, unfortunately.

Decimals precision

I mentioned set precision above:

> set precision 6
> 1/7

  1 / 7 ≈ 0.142857
> set precision 20
> pi

  pi ≈ 3.1415926535897932385

Fractional displays

But sometimes, I want fractional displays (obviously not for π because it is irrational). For example, sometimes I work in inches, and this would look better as a fraction:

> 8973/12

  8973 / 12 = 747.75

The trick here is to change the fraction setting, from the qalc(1) manual:

       fractions, fr (-1* = auto, 0 = off, 1 = exact, 2 = on, 3 = mixed, 4 =
       long, 5 = dual, 1/n)
               Determines how rational numbers are displayed (e.g. 5/4 = 1 + 1/4
               =  1.25).  'long' removes limits on the size of the numerator and
               denonimator.

Normally, this should be set to auto, so if you've changed it, change it back:

set fractions auto

Then you get the nice mixed output:

> 8973/12

  8973 / 12 = 747 + 3/4 = 747.75

The dual setting is also nice:

> set fractions dual

  747.75 = 2991/4 = 747 + 3/4 = 747.75

Strangely, I couldn't figure out how to get the same output in the graphical interface. The closest menu item is Mode > Rational Number Form.

Further reading and installation

This is just scratching the surface, the fine manual has more information, including more examples. There is also of course a qalc(1) manual page which also ships an excellent EXAMPLES section.

Qalculate is packaged for over 30 Linux distributions, but also ships packages for Windows and MacOS. There are third-party derivatives as well including a web version and an Android app.

Updates

Colin Watson liked this blog post and was inspired to write his own hacks, similar to what's here, but with extras, check it out!

28 January, 2026 06:38PM

hackergotchi for C.J. Adams-Collier

C.J. Adams-Collier

Part 2: Taming the Beast – Deep Dive into the Proxy-Aware GPU Initialization Action

Part
2: Taming the Beast – Deep Dive into the Proxy-Aware GPU Initialization
Action

In Part 1 of this series, we laid the network foundation for running
secure Dataproc clusters. Now, let’s zoom in on the core component
responsible for installing and configuring NVIDIA GPU drivers in this
restricted environment: the install_gpu_driver.sh script
from the GoogleCloudDataproc/initialization-actions
repository.

This isn’t just any installation script; it has been significantly
enhanced to handle the nuances of Secure Boot and to operate seamlessly
behind an HTTP/S proxy.

The
Challenge: Installing GPU Drivers Without Direct Internet

The install_gpu_driver.sh script needs to:

  1. Download NVIDIA drivers, CUDA toolkits, cuDNN, NCCL, etc.
  2. Potentially compile kernel modules.
  3. Install OS packages and dependencies.
  4. Configure the system for GPU workloads.

All of these steps traditionally require internet access, which is
blocked in our target environment. Additionally, for Secure Boot, any
newly compiled kernel modules must be signed.

Key Enhancements in
install_gpu_driver.sh

To address these challenges, the script incorporates several key
features:

  • Robust Proxy Handling (set_proxy
    function):     This function, also used in
    gce-proxy-setup.sh, is called early. It reads metadata like
    http-proxy, https-proxy, and
    http-proxy-pem-uri to configure:

    • System-wide environment variables (HTTP_PROXY,
      HTTPS_PROXY, NO_PROXY).
    • NO_PROXY is carefully set to include
      .google.com and .googleapis.com to allow
      direct access to Google APIs and services via Private Google Access,
      bypassing the SWP for these endpoints.
    • Package managers (apt, dnf).
    • curl and dirmngr (for GPG keys).
    • Java key stores.
    • Conda/Mamba configurations.
    • If http-proxy-pem-uri is provided, the proxy’s CA
      certificate is downloaded from GCS and installed into all relevant trust
      stores, and proxy URLs are adjusted to use HTTPS.

  • GCS Caching: To minimize reliance on the proxy
    for large, frequently used files, the script implements GCS caching.
    Before downloading large binaries like NVIDIA drivers or CUDA runfiles
    from the internet, it checks a predefined path in the
    dataproc-temp-bucket. If the file exists, it’s copied from
    GCS, saving time and reducing proxy load. If not found, it downloads
    through the proxy and then uploads to the cache for future use.

  • Proxy-Aware GPG Key Import: The script uses a
    custom import_gpg_keys function that fetches keys over
    HTTPS (through the proxy) rather than using the default HKP protocol,
    which often fails in restricted networks.

  • Resilient Conda/Mamba Environment Creation:
    Installing complex Conda environments with libraries like PyTorch,
    TensorFlow, and RAPIDS through a proxy can be fragile. The script
    includes:

    • Refined package lists for better dependency resolution.
    • Use of Mamba for speed, with a fallback to Conda.
    • GCS caching for the entire Conda pack, further speeding up
      subsequent builds or cluster node initializations.
    • Sentinel files to detect and purge corrupted or incomplete cache
      entries.

  • Secure Boot Signing Integration: While the main
    signing logic is part of the custom image build process (Part 3), the
    install_gpu_driver.sh script is designed to work in tandem
    with it. It ensures that when kernel modules are built (e.g., from
    NVIDIA’s open-gpu-kernel-modules), they are ready to be signed by the
    keys provided via metadata.

  • Deferred Configuration Mode: When the metadata
    invocation-type=custom-images is set (as is done in Part
    3), the script focuses on installing software and drivers, deferring
    Hadoop/Spark-specific configurations. These deferred steps are handled
    by a systemd service (dataproc-gpu-config.service) on the
    first boot of a cluster node created from the custom image.

Conclusion of Part 2

The install_gpu_driver.sh initialization action is more
than just an installer; it’s a carefully crafted tool designed to handle
the complexities of secure, proxied environments. Its robust proxy
support, GCS caching, and awareness of the custom image build lifecycle
make it a critical enabler.

In Part 3, we’ll see how the
GoogleCloudDataproc/custom-images repository uses this
initialization action as a customization script to build the Secure
Boot-ready images.

28 January, 2026 10:45AM by C.J. Collier

Dataproc GPUs, Secure Boot, & Proxies

Part
1: Building a Secure Network Foundation for Dataproc with GPUs &
SWP

Welcome to the first post in our series on running GPU-accelerated
Dataproc workloads in secure, enterprise-grade environments. Many
organizations need to operate within VPCs that have no direct internet
egress, instead routing all traffic through a Secure Web Proxy (SWP).
Additionally, security mandates often require the use of Shielded VMs
with Secure Boot enabled. This series will show you how to meet these
requirements for your Dataproc GPU clusters.

In this post, we’ll focus on laying the network foundation using
tools from the GoogleCloudDataproc/cloud-dataproc
repository.

The Challenge: Network
Isolation & Control

Before we can even think about custom images or GPU drivers, we need
a network environment that:

  1. Prevents direct internet access from Dataproc cluster nodes.
  2. Forces all egress traffic through a manageable and auditable
    SWP.
  3. Provides the necessary connectivity for Dataproc to function and for
    us to build images.

The Toolkit:
GoogleCloudDataproc/cloud-dataproc

To make setting up and tearing down these complex network
environments repeatable and consistent, we’ve developed a set of bash
scripts within the gcloud directory of the
cloud-dataproc repository. These scripts handle the
creation of VPCs, subnets, firewall rules, service accounts, and the
Secure Web Proxy itself.

Key Script:
bin/create-dpgce-private

This script is the cornerstone for creating the private, proxied
environment. It automates:

  • VPC and Subnet creation (for the cluster, SWP, and management).
  • Setup of Certificate Authority Service and Certificate Manager for
    SWP TLS interception.
  • Deployment of the SWP Gateway instance.
  • Configuration of a Gateway Security Policy to control egress.
  • Creation of necessary firewall rules.
  • Result: Cluster nodes in this VPC have NO default
    internet route and MUST use the SWP.

Configuration via env.json

While this script is in the cloud-dataproc repo, we’ve
designed it to be driven by a single env.json file that
will also be used by the custom-images scripts in Part 2.
This env.json should reside in your
custom-images repository clone.

Example env.json Snippet for
Networking:

{
  "PROJECT_ID": "YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID",
  "REGION": "YOUR_GCP_REGION",
  "ZONE": "YOUR_GCP_ZONE",
  "SUBNET": "main-subnet",
  "BUCKET": "YOUR_GCS_BUCKET",
  "TEMP_BUCKET": "YOUR_GCS_TEMP_BUCKET",
  "RANGE": "10.10.0.0/24",
  "PRIVATE_RANGE": "10.11.0.0/24",
  "SWP_RANGE": "10.12.0.0/24",
  "SWP_IP": "10.11.0.250",
  "SWP_PORT": "3128",
  "SWP_HOSTNAME": "swp.your.domain.com",
  "PROXY_CERT_GCS_PATH": "gs://YOUR_PROXY_CERT_BUCKET/proxy.cer"
}

Running the Setup:

# Assuming you have cloud-dataproc and custom-images cloned side-by-side
cd cloud-dataproc/gcloud
# Symlink to the env.json in custom-images
ln -sf ../../custom-images/env.json env.json
# Run the creation script, but don't create a cluster yet
bash bin/create-dpgce-private --no-create-cluster
cd ../../custom-images

Node
Configuration: The Metadata Startup Script

One of the key learnings from developing this solution was that the
proxy settings need to be applied to the Virtual Machines very early in
the boot process, even before the Dataproc agent starts. To achieve
this, we use a GCE metadata startup script.

The script startup_script/gce-proxy-setup.sh (from the
custom-images repository) is designed to be run on each
cluster node at boot. It reads metadata like http-proxy and
http-proxy-pem-uri to configure the OS environment, package
managers, and other tools to use the SWP.

Upload this script to your GCS bucket:

# Run from the custom-images repository root
gsutil cp startup_script/gce-proxy-setup.sh gs://$(jq -r .BUCKET env.json)/custom-image-deps/

We will specify this script in the
--metadata startup-script-url flag when creating the
Dataproc cluster in Part 4.

Conclusion of Part 1

With the cloud-dataproc scripts, we’ve laid the
groundwork by provisioning a secure VPC with controlled egress through
an SWP. We’ve also prepared the essential node-level proxy configuration
script in GCS.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll dive into the
install_gpu_driver.sh initialization action and how it’s
been adapted to thrive in this proxied world.

28 January, 2026 10:37AM by C.J. Collier

Sven Hoexter

Decrypt TLS Connection with wireshark and curl

With TLS 1.3 more parts of the handshake got encrypted (e.g. the certificate), but sometimes it's still helpful to look at the complete handshake.

curl uses the somewhat standardized env variable for the key log file called SSLKEYLOGFILE, which is also supported by Firefox and Chrome. wireshark hides the setting in the UI behind Edit -> Preferences -> Protocols -> TLS -> (Pre)-Master-Secret log filename which is uncomfortable to reach. Looking up the config setting in the Advanced settings one can learn that it's called internally tls.keylog_file. Thus we can set it up with:

sudo wireshark -o "tls.keylog_file:/home/sven/curl.keylog"

SSLKEYLOGFILE=/home/sven/curl.keylog curl -v https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace

Depending on the setup root might be unable to access the wayland session, that can be worked around by letting sudo keep the relevant env variables:

$ cat /etc/sudoers.d/wayland 
Defaults   env_keep += "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"
Defaults   env_keep += "WAYLAND_DISPLAY"

Or setup wireshark properly and use the wireshark group to be able to dump traffic. Might require a sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common.

Regarding curl: In some situations it could be desirable to force a specific older TLS version for testing, which requires a minimal and maximal version. E.g. to force TLS 1.2 only:

curl -v --tlsv1.2 --tls-max 1.2 https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace

28 January, 2026 10:32AM

January 27, 2026

hackergotchi for Daniel Pocock

Daniel Pocock

Amandine Jambert (EDPB/CNIL/FSFE), motive for lying, trust in blockchain and encryption

News reports have been reminding us on a regular basis that the Pentagon is limiting the support it provides to allies. European countries need to listen to President Trump and take defence more seriously, especially cybersecurity.

My advice to Dr Amandine "cryptie" Jambert is quite simple: if she wants to help Europe faces the challenges ahead, she needs to admit she was fooled by the FSFE misfits. More importantly, she needs to apologize to those people she fooled and recruited to join the same scam.

If Jambert feels bad, it's not because of harassment. It is because she was fooled and she has been used so effectively to fool others too. To clear her conscience, she needs to own up to that and apologize.

If she can't make this admission and apology in her own personal context, how can she be effective in her role as an expert in an office of the European Commission.

From the Catechism, paragraph 1847:

1847. "God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us." To receive his mercy, we must admit our faults. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

1849 Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as "an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law."

What this tells us is that when Jambert is unable to admit that she was fooled by the FSFE misfits because of her ego. Ego is frequently a factor in sinful behaviour.

The catechism goes on

1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God's law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart133 do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.

What this tells us is that when Jambert and I both became aware of the FSF/FSFE deception in 2017, our continued participation with full knowledge and complete consent would have become mortal sin. I understood and I quickly resigned. Why didn't Jambert?

Subject: FSF asking us to change our name II
Date: Tue, 23 May 2017 08:39:00 +0000
From: Matthias Kirschner <mk@fsfe.org>
To: ga@fsfeurope.org

Dear members,

as we wrote in our last mail we have again been approached by the FSF to
change our name. Below there is a summary of the situation as well as
the proposed next steps. Please let us know if you have any questions.
It is longer than I wished for, but we had several new people join the
GA since the last time we discussed this.

...

Look at the consequences for people who have been fooled by the FSFE misfits.

Subject: Re: Financial results 2016 online
Date: Tue, 23 May 2017 23:11:46 +0200
From: Reinhard Müller <reinhard@fsfe.org>
Organization: Free Software Foundation Europe
To: team@lists.fsfe.org

Hi, Max!

Am 2017-05-23 um 22:37 schrieb Max Mehl:
> This seems to be the first year
> with a turnover of more than 1 million Euros, right?

Not quite, at least not for my definition of the word "turnover" 🙂. It
would be more like 650k (the income), which is still the highest value
we ever had.

> It seems the non-Fellowship-donations have increased by more than 80%
> (which is a remarkable number!). Could you please elaborate why this is
> the case? Have there been single huge donations, or rather multiple
> medium donations? Are they connected to our legal work or something
> else?

In 2016, we received a significant sum from an inheritance where FSFE
was the principal heir. The deceased person stated very clearly in the
last will that FSFE is expected to not make much noise around this, and
we of course respected this.

We also received a significant one-time donation from Lars P Mathiassen
who is listed on our ThankGNUs page anyway.

...

These people ask us to trust them on serious issues such as electronic payments facilitated by blockchain and cryptocurrency. How can we trust Jambert's advice on those topics if she can't even recognize the confusion between FSF and the fake FSFE misfits?

Dr Amandine "cryptie" Jambert has a PhD in cryptography and a safe government job, previously at CNIL and now at the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).

What on earth is the motive for this woman and some associates to lie and attack my family when my father died?

Out of coincidence, Pierre-Elliott Bécue, of the French military cybersecurity office ANSSI obtained his PhD at the same university as Jambert only ten years later. Like Jambert, Bécue has also been observed attacking my family at the time when my father died and immediately after the conviction of the late Cardinal George Pell.

The previous blog went over the history of the lies, making it clear that Jambert has always had conflicts of interest.

Nonetheless, for any crime, it is always important to look at the motive in some detail.

Cryptography, in general, hopes to solve two main problems. Firstly, you want to make sure that messages are protected from eavesdropping. We call that encryption. Secondly, you want to make sure the person at the other end of the communications channel really is who they claim to be, that is authentication.

We often use the fictional characters Alice, Bob, Eve and Mallory to demonstrate these concepts with a diagram. Here, to help Jambert see it in these terms, I've overlaid Jambert, the real Richard Stallman and the fake FSFE president Matthias Kirschner on top of Alice, Bob & Mallory.

Amandine Jambert, cryptie, EDPB, CNIL, Richard Stallman, RMS, FSF, Matthias Kirschner, FSFE

 

In a technical sense, we have various ways to solve those encryption and authentication problems using advanced mathematics. The mathematics isn't important in this case.

Focus on the second part of the cryptography problem given above, the importance of verifying the authenticity of the person or organization you are corresponding with. In cryptography, our goal is to communicate with the real Bob, or in this case, the real Richard Stallman, founder of the real FSF.

According to my previous blog about Jambert's history, she was recruited to join the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) misfits in 2012. Was she one of many people who were fooled and believed we were joining the FSF and Dr Richard Stallman?

Should an expert in authenticating people be able to tell the difference between the FSF and the FSFE at the moment she was fooled to join the fake group, FSFE?

For five years from 2012 to 2017, Jambert may have been oblivious to the fact the FSFE misfits are not really part of the FSF. The FSF decided not to give a public warning so it is understandable that many people remained in the dark.

Nonetheless, when this issue was brought to our attention in 2017, in writing, we both became aware of it at the same time. Why was Jambert unable to understand this was a serious problem of identity/impersonation? People have communicated with, done voluntary work for and given money to the fake FSFE misfits believing it is a subsidiary or branch of the real FSF. From 2017, Jambert and I were both aware that people were being fooled.

I resigned from the FSFE in disgust in September 2018. Jambert stayed with the group until October 2023 and continues to associate with them in various ways.

Jambert's inability to comprehend and respond to this problem of authentication in the real world, even after I made public concerns about it, casts doubt over her own professional competence and her integrity. For example, in July 2018, she participated in the promotional video at Strasbourg to help the Germans recruit more French-speaking victims.

In parallel to this, we have the JuristGate scandal in Switzerland. For five years, the Swiss financial regulator, FINMA, appeared to be contemplating whether the company was a law office or an insurance office. During that time, professionals from other insurance companies and even a jurist from the Swiss police were fooled to quit their jobs and come and work for the rogue firm.

Why was the regulator unable to recognize it for what it was?

Back to Jambert, even if she doesn't care about being fooled by the Nigerian fraud, her attacks on my family are utterly selfish. As a member of the public service, why doesn't she take a moment to think about all the other victims of the fraud? How does Dr Richard Stallman feel when some other group is using his name to collect money from the public?

Jambert's lie has a motive. It looks like she is a woman in denial about her own incompetence, at least with respect to the FSF/FSFE dilemma, on matters of integrity, identity and authentication. As these concepts are fundamental to the practice of cryptography and e-commerce, she is lying to avoid answering further questions about her collusion in the FSF/FSFE deception.

As we are confronted with problems such as electronic cryptocurrency payments and artificial-intelligence generated videos, it is more vital than ever that professionals like Jambert need to show the highest level of integrity. Before she can help us with those challenges, she needs to come clean about the FSF/FSFE dilemma.

Things like this happen all the time and when we detect it, we have to be able to recognize what is going on and speak up. Look at the fake security company, Crypto AG that operated for decades in Switzerland. Now everybody knows it was really the CIA and BND.

It should be no big surprise that the FSFE misfits are just another scam.

In 2022, a woman from Lyon, France was tricked to quit the job she had held for seven years and go to work for an illegal legal insurance company in Geneva, Switzerland. Even the financial regulator, FINMA, knew about the illegal legal insurance company for up to five years but a series of tricks stopped them from shutting it down earlier.

Look at the analogous case of Dr Diana von Bidder-Senn, the mayor of Basel in Switzerland. Like Jambert, Diana von Bidder-Senn has a PhD in cybersecurity from the elite ETH Zurich. Yet she was unable to recognize that her own husband was being tricked by the social engineering attacks that have corrupted Debianism.

 
Subject: Re: condolences for Adrian
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:02:18 +0200
From: Diana von Bidder <diana@fortytwo.ch>
To: Stefano Zacchiroli <leader@debian.org>

Dear Stefano
Thank you for your wonderful mail! Yes Debian and people were very
important to Adrian. I was glad that he was not only sitting alone in
front of his computer but to know that there are people out there that
estimate him and are his friends even if most of you did not know each
other personally.
The way you describe him (empathy, calm, insight, ... - just the Adrian
I know) assures me on how good friends of Adrian are out there. And I
will always continue to think of this (in a good way!) when continuing
to use debian (which I became quite fond of because of Adrian).
It's a pity that he couldn't go to Banja Luca anymore which he did so
much look forward to. Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you
continue your good work.

- Diana

Her husband, Adrian von Bidder-Senn died on the very same day Carla and I got married. There appear to be many known victims in the Debian suicide cluster who were all tricked. They pretended that Debianism is a family but that is a trick. Read the detailed history of Adrian von Bidder-Senn's death on our wedding day.

27 January, 2026 09:00PM

FOSDEM 2026: democracy panel: FSFE uses women as stooges, gerrymander

In the previous blog about the FOSDEM democracy panel discussion, I looked at how GNOME misfits attacked the volunteer Sonny Piers.

What does an ideal community representative look like? Well, there isn't one. The overlords prefer to have stooges and puppets in the boards and committees.

Now we pull aside the skirt of the FSFE misfits and look at how two female employees were given voting rights. There are thousands of very talented female developers out there who will never be allowed to vote or speak.

Why do they put these two paid employees on the voting roll but there were over 1,500 Fellows doing voluntary work and making donations to the FSFE misfits and none of those Fellows can vote any more?

Subject: GA membership application
From: Polina Malaja <polina@fsfe.org>
Date: 06/10/2017, 17:23
To: Matthias Kirschner <mk@fsfe.org>

Dear Matthias,

I would like to apply for the FSFE's GA. Please see my application below.

Thank you in advance.

Kind regards,

Polina

--

# Application

I have been involved with the FSFE already for more than 2 years. During
this time, in addition to becoming a full-time staffer, I have become a
strong supporter of the Free Software movement in general. I fully
support the ideas behind openness, collaboration and Free culture (as in
free from restrictions to reuse ideas, mix and match for a greater
creativity and innovation, and not 'free' as in 'gratis') where Free
Software is one of the strongest and most crucial movements for the
modern society.

I can say that the time spent in the FSFE has greatly contributed to my
personal and professional growth in both legal and policy work, and I
would be delighted to participate in the discussions on the GA level
concerning the future of the FSFE. I believe I can bring in a point of
view of a non-technical Free Software supporter who is affiliated with
the movement from policy and legal perspective.

--
Polina Malaja - Policy Analyst - Legal Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe, Schoenhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin
Contact: t +49-30-27595290 | Blog: blogs.fsfe.org/polina
Your support enables our work (fsfe.org/join)

From: Ulrike Sliwinski
Date: October 2017
To: Matthias Kirschner <mk@fsfe.org>
Hi Matthias,

hereby I am applying to become a member of FSFE's General Assembly. Even
though I am neither very familiar with the technical sides of Free
Software nor with FSFE's political undertakings I am sure I can
contribute from FSFE's administrative perspective, e.g. being the person
who sees and distributes lots of incoming requests in our ticket system.

Another reason for the decision to become part of the General Assembly
is that all male staffers of FSFE are members but none of the female
staffers are. With my application I would also like to help to support
FSFE's public image in this regard.

Kind regards,
Ulrike
-- 
Ulrike Sliwinski, Office Manager
Out of office on Fridays.
Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin,+49-30-27595290.
Registered: Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030.
Your support enables our work (fsfe.org/join)

In the detailed history of Amandine "cryptie" Jambert, we looked at how Jambert eventually admitted that "harassment" rumours were a lie to cover up her conflict of interest.

As part of the analysis, we presented evidence that Jambert is not mentioned in any of the 20,000 copyright files in Debian because she isn't a developer either. None of the women granted voting rights by the FSFE misfits appear to have any authorship status under copyright law.

To make an analogy, under real estate law, the owners of buildings are the landlords and the people who live in the buildings are the tenants. Imagine if the tenants could form an association, keep all the rent for themselves and make decisions for the landlords. Imagine if the landlords were not allowed to vote or make decisions. It sounds absurd. But that is the very nature of these free software umbrella groups. It is people who write no code trying to make decisions on behalf of the people who do write the code.

Debian is one of the largest collections of free, open source software with over 20,000 packages. We can search the copyright notices of all 20,000 packages using the Debian search system and see if any of these women have any status or if they are just two more stooges:

Click here to search for Polina Malaja, from the FSFE misfits in the debian/copyright files:

Polina Malaja, Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries, CENTR, Debian, FSFE, copyright, license, groupie, president, cyberbully

 

Click here to search for Ulrike Sliwinski:

Ulrike Sliwinski, Debian, FSFE, copyright, license, groupie, cyberbully

 

Polina Malaja and domain name censorship facilitating plagiarism

Notice how Polina Malaja has gone to work for CENTR, Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries.

In recent times, people have sought to hide the identity of real Debian co-authors by censorsing/stealing domain names. This is basically a form of plagiarism.

Has Polina Malaja, with her job at CENTR, had some role in facilitating this plagiarism and obfuscating who the real authors are?

Copyright law is clear. The joint authors are entitled to speak and enjoy recognition for our work.

The manner in which Matthias Kirschner has granted voting rights to various women like this causes a lot of embarassment for all the women.

People should not be angry at me for simply disclosing the emails and revealing the truth about this corruption. If anybody is angry about this, look at the overlords who do the choosing.

In a blog about grooming, Queen Kwong puts it like this:

The Curse of Being Chosen

Not all abuse is obvious. It can look like praise. It can look like opportunity. ...

At nineteen, Cassie met Sean Combs. He was her boss, her label head, her mentor, and eventually, her boyfriend. According to her lawsuit, she was surveilled, isolated, coerced ... . But this isn't only a case of blatant violence. It's one of domination disguised as devotion. It's a portrayal оf how grooming conditions victims for escalating patterns of control and harm.

...

Being chosen is the oldest trick in the book.

Say what you will about Baby Reindeer, but it did something most shows avoid—it depicted the messy, convoluted truth about abuse. ...

...

Using women as stooges, giving these two women the power to vote so they can jump the queue, makes them feel "chosen". Many abuse victims have also spoken about feeling "chosen". It is just another form of exploitation because everybody realizes these women were not chosen for the quantity of code they shared.

What happens when women were not willing to be complicit and subservient for the overlords? Ask Susanne Eiswirt and Galia Mancheva and read the harrowing story of why Galia sued Matthias Kirschner and FSFE:

Even after my lawyer warned him to terminate all attempts to communicate with me and send someone else to pick up my work laptop, he came in person to my house, and was very irritated that I was not alone.

Read more about the FSFE misfits.

27 January, 2026 11:00AM

Elana Hashman

A beginner's guide to improving your digital security

In 2017, I led a series of workshops aimed at teaching beginners a better understanding of encryption, how the internet works, and their digital security. Nearly a decade later, there is still a great need to share reliable resources and guides on improving these skills.

I have worked professionally in computer security one way or another for well over a decade, at many major technology companies and in many open source software projects. There are many inaccurate and unreliable resources out there on this subject, put together by well-meaning people without a background in security, which can lead to sharing misinformation, exaggeration and fearmongering.

I hope that I can offer you a trusted, curated list of high impact things that you can do right now, using whichever vetted guide you prefer. In addition, I also include how long it should take, why you should do each task, and any limitations.

This guide is aimed at improving your personal security, and does not apply to your work-owned devices. Always assume your company can monitor all of your messages and activities on work devices.

What can I do to improve my security right away?

I put together this list in order of effort, easiest tasks first. You should be able to complete many of the low effort tasks in a single hour. The medium to high effort tasks are very much worth doing, but may take you a few days or even weeks to complete them.

Low effort (<15 minutes)

Upgrade your software to the latest versions

Why? I don't know anyone who hasn't complained about software updates breaking features, introducing bugs, and causing headaches. If it ain't broke, why upgrade, right? Well, alongside all of those annoying bugs and breaking changes, software updates also include security fixes, which will protect your device from being exploited by bad actors. Security issues can be found in software at any time, even software that's been available for many years and thought to be secure. You want to install these as soon as they are available.

Recommendation: Turn on automatic upgrades and always keep your devices as up-to-date as possible. If you have some software you know will not work if you upgrade it, at least be sure to upgrade your laptop and phone operating system (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) and web browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.). Do not use devices that do not receive security support (e.g. old Android or iPhones).

Guides:

Limitations: This will prevent someone from exploiting known security issues on your devices, but it won't help if your device was already compromised. If this is a concern, doing a factory reset, upgrade, and turning on automatic upgrades may help. This also won't protect against all types of attacks, but it is a necessary foundation.

Use Signal

Why? Signal is a trusted, vetted, secure messaging application that allows you to send end-to-end encrypted messages and make video/phone calls. This means that only you and your intended recipient can decrypt the messages and someone cannot intercept and read your messages, in contrast to texting (SMS) and other insecure forms of messaging. Other applications advertise themselves as end-to-end encrypted, but Signal provides the strongest protections.

Recommendation: I recommend installing the Signal app and using it! My mom loves that she can video call me on Wi-Fi on my Android phone. It also supports group chats. I use it as a secure alternative to texting (SMS) and other chat platforms. I also like Signal's "disappearing messages" feature which I enable by default because it automatically deletes messages after a certain period of time. This avoids your messages taking up too much storage.

Guides:

Limitations: Signal is only able to protect your messages in transit. If someone has access to your phone or the phone of the person you sent messages to, they will still be able to read them. As a rule of thumb, if you don't want someone to read something, don't write it down! Meet in person or make an encrypted phone call where you will not be overheard. If you are talking to someone you don't know, assume your messages are as public as posting on social media.

Set passwords and turn on device encryption

Why? Passwords ensure that someone else can't unlock your device without your consent or knowledge. They also are required to turn on device encryption, which protects your information on your device from being accessed when it is locked. Biometric (fingerprint or face ID) locking provides some privacy, but your fingerprint or face ID can be used against your wishes, whereas if you are the only person who knows your password, only you can use it.

Recommendation: Always set passwords and have device encryption enabled in order to protect your personal privacy. It may be convenient to allow kids or family members access to an unlocked device, but anyone else can access it, too! Use strong passwords that cannot be guessed—avoid using names, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, or other public information. Using a password manager will make creating and managing passwords even easier. Disable biometric unlock, or at least know how to disable it. Most devices will enable disk encryption by default, but you should double-check.

Guides:

Limitations: If your device is unlocked, the password and encryption will provide no protections; the device must be locked for this to protect your privacy. It is possible, though unlikely, for someone to gain remote access to your device (for example through malware or stalkerware), which would bypass these protections. Some forensic tools are also sophisticated enough to work with physical access to a device that is turned on and locked, but not a device that is turned off/freshly powered on and encrypted. If you lose your password or disk encryption key, you may lose access to your device. For this reason, Windows and Apple laptops can make a cloud backup of your disk encryption key. However, a cloud backup can potentially be disclosed to law enforcement.

Install an ad blocker

Why? Online ad networks are often exploited to spread malware to unsuspecting visitors. If you've ever visited a regular website and suddenly seen an urgent, flashing pop-up claiming your device was hacked, it is often due to a bad ad. Blocking ads provides an additional layer of protection against these kinds of attacks.

Recommendation: I recommend everyone uses an ad blocker at all times. Not only are ads annoying and disruptive, but they can even result in your devices being compromised!

Guides:

Limitations: Sometimes the use of ad blockers can break functionality on websites, which can be annoying, but you can temporarily disable them to fix the problem. These may not be able to block all ads or all tracking, but they make browsing the web much more pleasant and lower risk! Some people might also be concerned that blocking ads might impact the revenue of their favourite websites or creators. In this case, I recommend either donating directly or sharing the site with a wider audience, but keep using the ad blocker for your safety.

Enable HTTPS-Only Mode

Why? The "S" in "HTTPS" stands for "secure". This feature, which can be enabled on your web browser, ensures that every time you visit a website, your connection is always end-to-end encrypted (just like when you use Signal!) This ensures that someone can't intercept what you search for, what pages on websites you visit, and any information you or the website share such as your banking details.

Recommendation: I recommend enabling this for everyone, though with improvements in web browser security and adoption of HTTPS over the years, your devices will often do this by default! There is a small risk you will encounter some websites that do not support HTTPS, usually older sites.

Guides:

Limitations: HTTPS protects the information on your connection to a website. It does not hide or protect the fact that you visited that website, only the information you accessed. If the website is malicious, HTTPS does not provide any protection. In certain settings, like when you use a work-managed computer that was set up for you, it can still be possible for your IT Department to see what you are browsing, even over an HTTPS connection, because they have administrator access to your computer and the network.

Medium to high effort (1+ hours)

These tasks require more effort but are worth the investment.

Set up a password manager

Why? It is not possible for a person to remember a unique password for every single website and app that they use. I have, as of writing, 556 passwords stored in my password manager. Password managers do three important things very well:

  1. They generate secure passwords with ease. You don't need to worry about getting your digits and special characters just right; the app will do it for you, and generate long, secure passwords.
  2. They remember all your passwords for you, and you just need to remember one password to access all of them. The most common reason people's accounts get hacked online is because they used the same password across multiple websites, and one of the websites had all their passwords leaked. When you use a unique password on every website, it doesn't matter if your password gets leaked!
  3. They autofill passwords based on the website you're visiting. This is important because it helps prevent you from getting phished. If you're tricked into visiting an evil lookalike site, your password manager will refuse to fill the password.

Recommendation: These benefits are extremely important, and setting up a password manager is often one of the most impactful things you can do for your digital security. However, they take time to get used to, and migrating all of your passwords into the app (and immediately changing them!) can take a few minutes at a time... over weeks. I recommend you prioritize the most important sites, such as your email accounts, banking/financial sites, and cellphone provider. This process will feel like a lot of work, but you will get to enjoy the benefits of never having to remember new passwords and the autofill functionality for websites. My recommended password manager is 1Password, but it stores passwords in the cloud and costs money. There are some good free options as well if cost is a concern. You can also use web browser- or OS-based password managers, but I do not prefer these.

Guides:

Limitations: Many people are concerned about the risk of using a password manager causing all of their passwords to be compromised. For this reason, it's very important to use a vetted, reputable password manager that has passed audits, such as 1Password or Bitwarden. It is also extremely important to choose a strong password to unlock your password manager. 1Password makes this easier by generating a secret to strengthen your unlock password, but I recommend using a long, memorable password in any case. Another risk is that if you forget your password manager's password, you will lose access to all your passwords. This is why I recommend 1Password, which has you set up an Emergency Kit to recover access to your account.

Set up two-factor authentication (2FA) for your accounts

Why? If your password is compromised in a website leak or due to a phishing attack, two-factor authentication will require a second piece of information to log in and potentially thwart the intruder. This provides you with an extra layer of security on your accounts.

Recommendation: You don't necessarily need to enable 2FA on every account, but prioritize enabling it on your most important accounts (email, banking, cellphone, etc.) There are typically a few different kinds: email-based (which is why your email account's security is so important), text message or SMS-based (which is why your cell phone account's security is so important), app-based, and hardware token-based. Email and text message 2FA are fine for most accounts. You may want to enable app- or hardware token-based 2FA for your most sensitive accounts.

Guides:

Limitations: The major limitation is that if you lose access to 2FA, you can be locked out of an account. This can happen if you're travelling abroad and can't access your usual cellphone number, if you break your phone and you don't have a backup of your authenticator app, or if you lose your hardware-based token. For this reason, many websites will provide you with "backup tokens"—you can print them out and store them in a secure location or use your password manager. I also recommend if you use an app, you choose one that will allow you to make secure backups, such as Ente. You are also limited by the types of 2FA a website supports; many don't support app- or hardware token-based 2FA.

Remove your information from data brokers

Why? This is a problem that mostly affects people in the US. It surprises many people that information from their credit reports and other public records is scraped and available (for free or at a low cost) online through "data broker" websites. I have shocked friends who didn't believe this was an issue by searching for their full names and within 5 minutes being able to show them their birthday, home address, and phone number. This is a serious privacy problem!

Recommendation: Opt out of any and all data broker websites to remove this information from the internet. This is especially important if you are at risk of being stalked or harassed.

Guides:

Limitations: It can take time for your information to be removed once you opt out, and unfortunately search engines may have cached your information for a while longer. This is also not a one-and-done process. New data brokers are constantly popping up and some may not properly honour your opt out, so you will need to check on a regular basis (perhaps once or twice a year) to make sure your data has been properly scrubbed. This also cannot prevent someone from directly searching public records to find your information, but that requires much more effort.

"Recommended security measures" I think beginners should avoid

We've covered a lot of tasks you should do, but I also think it's important to cover what not to do. I see many of these tools recommended to security beginners, and I think that's a mistake. For each tool, I will explain my reasoning around why I don't think you should use it, and the scenarios in which it might make sense to use.

"Secure email"

What is it? Many email providers, such as Proton Mail, advertise themselves as providing secure email. They are often recommended as a "more secure" alternative to typical email providers such as GMail.

What's the problem? Email is fundamentally insecure by design. The email specification (RFC-3207) states that any publicly available email server MUST NOT require the use of end-to-end encryption in transit. Email providers can of course provide additional security by encrypting their copies of your email, and providing you access to your email by HTTPS, but the messages themselves can always be sent without encryption. Some platforms such as Proton Mail advertise end-to-end encrypted emails so long as you email another Proton user. This is not truly email, but their own internal encrypted messaging platform that follows the email format.

What should I do instead? Use Signal to send encrypted messages. NEVER assume the contents of an email are secure.

Who should use it? I don't believe there are any major advantages to using a service such as this one. Even if you pay for a more "secure" email provider, the majority of your emails will still be delivered to people who don't. Additionally, while I don't use or necessarily recommend their service, Google offers an Advanced Protection Program for people who may be targeted by state-level actors.

PGP/GPG Encryption

What is it? PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") and GPG ("GNU Privacy Guard") are encryption and cryptographic signing software. They are often recommended to encrypt messages or email.

What's the problem? GPG is decades old and its usability has always been terrible. It is extremely easy to accidentally send a message that you thought was encrypted without encryption! The problems with PGP/GPG have been extensively documented.

What should I do instead? Use Signal to send encrypted messages. Again, NEVER use email for sensitive information.

Who should use it? Software developers who contribute to projects where there is a requirement to use GPG should continue to use it until an adequate alternative is available. Everyone else should live their lives in PGP-free bliss.

Installing a "secure" operating system (OS) on your phone

What is it? There are a number of self-installed operating systems for Android phones, such as GrapheneOS, that advertise as being "more secure" than using the version of the Android operating system provided by your phone manufacturer. They often remove core Google APIs and services to allow you to "de-Google" your phone.

What's the problem? These projects are relatively niche, and don't have nearly enough resourcing to be able to respond to the high levels of security pressure Android experiences (such as against the forensic tools I mentioned earlier). You may suddenly lose security support with no notice, as with CalyxOS. You need a high level of technical know-how and a lot of spare time to maintain your device with a custom operating system, which is not a reasonable expectation for the average person. By stripping all Google APIs such as Google Play Services, some useful apps can no longer function. And some law enforcement organizations have gone as far as accusing people who install GrapheneOS on Pixel phones to be engaging in criminal activity.

What should I do instead? For the best security on an Android device, use a phone manufactured by Google or Samsung (smaller manufacturers are more unreliable), or consider buying an iPhone. Make sure your device is receiving security updates and up-to-date.

Who should use it? These projects are great for tech enthusiasts who are interested in contributing to and developing them further. They can be used to give new life to old phones that are not receiving security or software updates. They are also great for people with an interest in free and open source software and digital autonomy. But these tools are not a good choice for a general audience, nor do they provide more practical security than using an up-to-date Google or Samsung Android phone.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) Services

What is it? A virtual private network or VPN service can provide you with a secure tunnel from your device to the location that the VPN operates. This means that if I am using my phone in Seattle connected to a VPN in Amsterdam, if I access a website, it appears to the website that my phone is located in Amsterdam.

What's the problem? VPN services are frequently advertised as providing security or protection from nefarious bad actors, or helping protect your privacy. These benefits are often far overstated, and there are predatory VPN providers that can actually be harmful. It costs money and resources to provide a VPN, so free VPN services are especially suspect. When you use a VPN, the VPN provider knows the websites you are visiting in order to provide you with the service. Free VPN providers may sell this data in order to cover the cost of providing the service, leaving you with less security and privacy. The average person does not have the knowledge to be able to determine if a VPN service is trustworthy or not. VPNs also don't provide any additional encryption benefits if you are already using HTTPS. They may provide a small amount of privacy benefit if you are connected to an untrusted network with an attacker.

What should I do instead? Always use HTTPS to access websites. Don't connect to untrusted internet providers—for example, use cellphone network data instead of a sketchy Wi-Fi access point. Your local neighbourhood coffee shop is probably fine.

Who should use it? There are three main use cases for VPNs. The first is to bypass geographic restrictions. A VPN will cause all of your web traffic to appear to be coming from another location. If you live in an area that has local internet censorship policies, you can use a VPN to access the internet from a location that lacks such policies. The second is if you know your internet service provider is actively hostile or malicious. A trusted VPN will protect the visibility of all your traffic, including which websites you visit, from your internet service provider, and the only thing they will be able to see is that you are accessing a VPN. The third use case is to access a network that isn't connected to the public internet, such as a corporate intranet. I strongly discourage the use of VPNs for "general-purpose security."

Tor

What is it? Tor, "The Onion Router", is a free and open source software project that provides anonymous networking. Unlike with a VPN, where the VPN provider knows who you are and what websites you are requesting, Tor's architecture makes it extremely difficult to determine who sent a request.

What's the problem? Tor is difficult to set up properly; similar to PGP-encrypted email, it is possible to accidentally not be connected to Tor and not know the difference. This usability has improved over the years, but Tor is still not a good tool for beginners to use. Due to the way Tor works, it is also extremely slow. If you have used cable or fiber internet, get ready to go back to dialup speeds. Tor also doesn't provide perfect privacy and without a strong understanding of its limitations, it can be possible to deanonymize someone despite using it. Additionally, many websites are able to detect connections from the Tor network and block them.

What should I do instead? If you want to use Tor to bypass censorship, it is often better to use a trusted VPN provider, particularly if you need high bandwidth (e.g. for streaming). If you want to use Tor to access a website anonymously, Tor itself might not be enough to protect you. For example, if you need to provide an email address or personal information, you can decline to provide accurate information and use a masked email address. A friend of mine once used the alias "Nunya Biznes" 🥸

Who should use it? Tor should only be used by people who are experienced users of security tools and understand its strengths and limitations. Tor also is best used on a purpose-built system, such as Tor Browser or Freedom of the Press Foundation's SecureDrop.

I want to learn more!

I hope you've found this guide to be a useful starting point. I always welcome folks reaching out to me with questions, though I might take a little bit of time to respond. You can always email me.

If there's enough interest, I might cover the following topics in a future post:

  • Threat modelling, which you can get started with by reading the EFF's or VCW's guides
  • Browser addons for privacy, which Consumer Reports has a tip for
  • Secure DNS, which you can read more about here

Stay safe out there! 🔒

27 January, 2026 02:00AM by Elana Hashman

January 24, 2026

hackergotchi for Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf

Finally some light for those who care about Debian on the Raspberry Pi

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel!

As I have said in this blog and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian Raspberry Pi images between late 2018 and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly care for it.

I even registered a GSoC project for it. I mentored Kurva Prashanth, who did good work on the vmdb2 scripts we use for the image generation — but in the end, was unable to push them to be built in Debian infrastructure. Maybe a different approach was needed! While I adopted the images as they were conceived by Michael Stapelberg, sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch and build a fresh approach.

So, I’m not yet pointing at a stable, proven release, but to a good promise. And I hope I’m not being pushy by making this public: in the #debian-raspberrypi channel, waldi has shared the images he has created with the Debian Cloud Team’s infrastructure.

So, right now, the images built so far support Raspberry Pi families 4 and 5 (notably, not the 500 computer I have, due to a missing Device Tree, but I’ll try to help figure that bit out… Anyway, p400/500/500+ systems are not that usual). Work is underway to get the 3B+ to boot (some hackery is needed, as it only understands MBR partition schemes, so creating a hybrid image seems to be needed).

Debian Cloud images for Raspberries

Sadly, I don’t think the effort will be extended to cover older, 32-bit-only systems (RPi 0, 1 and 2).

Anyway, as this effort stabilizes, I will phase out my (stale!) work on raspi.debian.net, and will redirect it to point at the new images.

Comments

Andrea Pappacoda tachi@d.o 2026-01-26 17:39:14 GMT+1

Are there any particular caveats compared to using the regular Raspberry Pi OS?

Are they documented anywhere?

Gunnar Wolf gwolf.blog@gwolf.org 2026-01-26 11:02:29 GMT-6

Well, the Raspberry Pi OS includes quite a bit of software that’s not packaged in Debian for various reasons — some of it because it’s non-free demo-ware, some of it because it’s RPiOS-specific configuration, some of it… I don’t care, I like running Debian wherever possible 😉

Andrea Pappacoda tachi@d.o 2026-01-26 18:20:24 GMT+1

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, sorry, I should’ve been more specific. I also just care about the Debian part. But: are there any hardware issues or unsupported stuff, like booting from an SSD (which I’m currently doing)?

Gunnar Wolf gwolf.blog@gwolf.org 2026-01-26 12:16:29 GMT-6

That’s… beyond my knowledge 😉 Although I can tell you that:

  • Raspberry Pi OS has hardware support as soon as their new boards hit the market. The ability to even boot a board can take over a year for the mainline Linux kernel (at least, it has, both in the cases of the 4 and the 5 families).

  • Also, sometimes some bits of hardware are not discovered by the Linux kernels even if the general family boots because they are not declared in the right place of the Device Tree (i.e. the wireless network interface in the 02W is in a different address than in the 3B+, or the 500 does not fully boot while the 5B now does). Usually it is a matter of “justâ€� declaring stuff in the right place, but it’s not a skill many of us have.

  • Also, many RPi “hatsâ€� ship with their own Device Tree overlays, and they cannot always be loaded on top of mainline kernels.

Andrea Pappacoda tachi@d.o 2026-01-26 19:31:55 GMT+1

That’s… beyond my knowledge 😉 Although I can tell you that:

Raspberry Pi OS has hardware support as soon as their new boards hit the market. The ability to even boot a board can take over a year for the mainline Linux kernel (at least, it has, both in the cases of the 4 and the 5 families).

Yeah, unfortunately I’m aware of that… I’ve also been trying to boot OpenBSD on my rpi5 out of curiosity, but been blocked by my somewhat unusual setup involving an NVMe SSD as the boot drive :/

Also, sometimes some bits of hardware are not discovered by the Linux kernels even if the general family boots because they are not declared in the right place of the Device Tree (i.e. the wireless network interface in the 02W is in a different address than in the 3B+, or the 500 does not fully boot while the 5B now does). Usually it is a matter of “just� declaring stuff in the right place, but it’s not a skill many of us have.

At some point in my life I had started reading a bit about device trees and stuff, but got distracted by other stuff before I could develop any familiarity with it. So I don’t have the skills either :)

Also, many RPi “hats� ship with their own Device Tree overlays, and they cannot always be loaded on top of mainline kernels.

I’m definitely not happy to hear this!

Guess I’ll have to try, and maybe report back once some page for these new builds materializes.

24 January, 2026 04:24PM

January 23, 2026

hackergotchi for Daniel Pocock

Daniel Pocock

Techrights judgment: Honourable Mrs Justice Collins Rice tricked by Matthew Garrett & Debian harassment (KB-2024-001270)

The Honourable Mrs Justice Collins Rice is a judge in the British High Court. In the British system, the High Court is actually the first level of the justice system for certain types of dispute. Cases can progress from there to the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and eventually the Privy Council.

Mrs Justice Collins Rice was secretary to the Leveson Inquiry in 2011-2012. That was the inquiry into the practices of the press, including some high profile violations of privacy. A lot of the work done by the inquiry and the British parliament has subsequently been circumvented by the rise of social control media.

I had a quick look over the judgment (KB-2024-001270) and wanted to make it easier for non-lawyers to understand what is really going on here. Very sadly, the courts tend to favour people who have lots of money to spend digging up dirt on their opponent and using expensive lawyers to regurgitate it as evidence.

The punishment in perspective

In 1973, Monsignor James William Murray abused a much younger woman who had been a patient in a psychiatric hospital. The woman only reported the abuse decades later after Monsignor Murray had become the Bishop for the city of Geelong. Monsignor Murray was given a $500 fine and returned to his duties as a Bishop. That was approximately £200 at the exchange rate in the year 2000.

In 2004, two girls went home with footballers Stephen Milne and Leigh Montana. One girl can't remember anything to complain about but the other went to the police. After ten years, in 2013, Milne made a guilty plea and was fined $15,000 without a conviction. That is approximately £8,000 based on the exchange rate from 2013.

In November 2025, Mrs Justice Collins Rice ordered the Techrights authors, Roy Schestowitz and Rianne Schestowitz, to pay £75,000 for an allegation of defaming Matthew Garrett from Debianism.

Am I the only person who is suspicious about the notion that Techrights commentary is worse than rape?

Trolling credentials

I don't have any legal expertise like Mrs Justice Collins Rice but when it comes to trolling, which is what Garrett was accused of, I'm the guy who used the WIPO UDRP to troll God and God gave me a response too.

I simply referred to the priest in the video as Father X.

He had been laying low for years. It looks like he retired immediately before the Royal Commission commenced interviewing people.

After my publication in the WIPO UDRP process, which had been forced upon me like a rape, the Archdiocese of Melbourne used the occasion of the Paris Olympics to put out a report reflecting on the role of said priest in Australian sport. His name was repeated in full multiple times in the report and in numerous social media posts linking to the report.

Around the same time, Instagram was used to publish a photo of the same priest with a senior government minister.

Having trolled God and got a response, I consider myself an expert on trolling and I declare Matthew Garrett is a troll.

Judge fooled

From the full judgment.

9. ... He told me that he and Mrs Schestowitz had taken a deliberate decision not to submit any evidence or call any witnesses, on financial grounds. ...

This tells us that the Techrights publishers were on the back foot from the outset. Their web sites don't have any advertising and they don't appear to generate any revenue. It looks like they are publishing as a hobby.

25 ... Garrett is chiefly accused of an online campaign of material which is (variously) criminal, illegal or offensive. The criminal matters alleged include cybercrime, hate crime, .... . Other illegal matters alleged include defamation, harassment and online abuse.
35 ... Garrett is accused of publishing a range of toxic or highly offensive online material

We found some real examples of Garrett being Garrett and published them below to jog everybody's memory and help Techrights prepare an appeal.

38 ... Garrett states that his reputation in England is both established, and 'immensely important' to him. Before 2009 he had worked for the University of Cambridge and had done other Cambridge-based work, starting by doing contract work and working for a tech start-up, before going on to work for Collabora (described as a private open-source software consulting company headquartered in Cambridge) and for Red Hat, a US company with a wholly-owned British subsidiary which had been his employer here.

Bigger ego means a bigger claim for compensation.... he demands special treatment because of his connection with the famous University of Cambridge. Look at the death of Chris Rutter from Clare College. Don't forget the even bigger scandal of Matthew Falder at Clare College, Cambridge.

In all the false rape accusations printed further down, Garrett is using a ucam.org University of Cambridge alumni email address to puff himself up and add weight to the libel he created.

Remember, Garrett's former employer IBM Red Hat has been found guilty of harassing me in the WIPO UDRP.

58. The authorship or control of these accounts has consistently been strenuously denied by Dr Garrett. ...
64. Sixth, one of the sockpuppet accounts on one occasion posted a short insult in the Irish language. Dr Garrett's evidence is that he does not speak Irish and would have been incapable of posting that insult.

Fact check: everybody has a bit of Irish in them (who said that?)

69. It is plain that the onslaught of sockpuppet trolling to which Mrs Schestowitz in particular was subjected was a truly appalling experience ....
71. It is also plain enough that Dr and Mrs Schestowitz have found it entirely straightforward to convince themselves that Dr Garrett was behind the trolling. But the task they have given themselves in pleading the truth defence in defamation proceedings is to establish or prove, on the balance of probabilities, that that is objectively true. And they have made that exceptionally difficult for themselves by advancing no evidence for it. I can only uphold a truth defence if I am given a sufficient evidential basis for doing so. I have looked hard ...

This is where their limited legal budget has seen them go to court with insufficient evidence. I found some evidence myself and published it below so people can see the truth about Garrett.

73. I found Dr Garrett in general a straightforward witness who gave a clear account of himself under sustained challenge in the witness box. I have been given no proper basis for rejecting his plain, unqualified and vehement denial that he ever had anything to do with the sockpuppet campaign against Dr and Mrs Schestowitz.

74. ... There is no such evidence he has threatened, abused or harassed anyone, or that he has espoused or promulgated repugnant and hateful views. ...

89. A defamation claimant in these circumstances is entitled to a judgment, and to remedies, which repudiate the publications complained of, vindicate his reputation, and restore his good name.

What about the good name of all the other people defamed by Debianism or social control media at large?

Garrett publishing defamation about Dr Jacob Appelbaum

There can be nothing worse than deliberately disparaging the bedroom manners of another man.

I previously demonstrated that Debianists had an active role in falsifying the harassment rumours against Dr Jacob Appelbaum.

As an aggravating factor, they have rehearsed these rumours and then taken it in turns to repeat them over and over again. The manner in which they use multiple people to reinforce the lie is itself a bit like gang rape. Garrett's participation in this type of group-based defamation and harassment campaign is far more serious than participation in a single sock-puppet account.

Here are some messages Garrett sent to one of the mailing lists. Notice how he sends them over and over again, that is an aggravating factor and tells us a lot about his true character.

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 09:18:55 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 05:56:45PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> What is really remarkable is that Debian ignored this evidence and began
> processing Lange's application to become a Debian Developer in the same
> week that they were expelling Jacob Appelbaum

...

Jake sexually assaulted and raped multiple people. Are you asserting that it was inappropriate for him to be removed from the NM process once Debian was made aware of this?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 09:53:31 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 10:28:24AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 31/08/2020 10:18, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 05:56:45PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> > 
> >> What is really remarkable is that Debian ignored this evidence and began
> >> processing Lange's application to become a Debian Developer in the same
> >> week that they were expelling Jacob Appelbaum
> > 
> > Jake sexually assaulted and raped multiple people. Are you asserting 
> > that it was inappropriate for him to be removed from the NM process once 
> > Debian was made aware of this?
> 
> Matthew, when you post an email like that without evidence it is hearsay
> and defamation.

The content of jacobappelbaum.net is literally not hearsay.

> The ball is in the court of the accusers.  Until they visit a police
> station, Jake is innocent until proven guilty, like every other man.

Jake has not been found legally guilty of rape or sexual assault. That does not mean that Jake did not commit rape or sexual assault. After all, nobody who you've accused of acting inappropriately has been found guilty of doing so in a court of law.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 18:31:24 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 11:12:36AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> Debian Community News is impartial and welcomes all sides of the story.

Except for the side of the story where people have described Jake's behaviour towards them, apparently.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:38:15 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 08:31:37PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 31/08/2020 19:31, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 11:12:36AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> > 
> >> Debian Community News is impartial and welcomes all sides of the story.
> > 
> > Except for the side of the story where people have described Jake's 
> > behaviour towards them, apparently.
> 
> Please see the earlier email: if those people sign witness statements,
> Debian Community News would publish them.

Have you signed witness statements regarding any of the accusations you've made?
 -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 20:22:26 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:01:00PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> We didn't witness the Daniel Lange incident so we don't know if it is
> true.

But you've reported on it anyway, despite there being no signed witness statement. Why will you not afford the stories of Jake's victims equal coverage?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 22:07:33 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:50:06PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 31/08/2020 21:22, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:01:00PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> > 
> >> We didn't witness the Daniel Lange incident so we don't know if it is
> >> true.
> > 
> > But you've reported on it anyway, despite there being no signed witness 
> > statement. Why will you not afford the stories of Jake's victims equal 
> > coverage?
> 
> If there are real victims out there, their voices are diluted by the
> falsified 3 cases, not by Debian Community News.

Why will you not afford the stories of Jake's victims equal coverage?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 23:25:14 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 12:12:43AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> On 31/08/2020 23:07, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:50:06PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 31/08/2020 21:22, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >>> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 09:01:00PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> We didn't witness the Daniel Lange incident so we don't know if it is
> >>>> true.
> >>>
> >>> But you've reported on it anyway, despite there being no signed witness 
> >>> statement. Why will you not afford the stories of Jake's victims equal 
> >>> coverage?
> >>
> >> If there are real victims out there, their voices are diluted by the
> >> falsified 3 cases, not by Debian Community News.
> > 
> > Why will you not afford the stories of Jake's victims equal coverage?
> 
> If you care about their best interests, is it better for them to have
> publicity in Debian Community News or to have a serious trial in a
> serious court?

When you refuse to present the victims' side of events, you are not acting in a neutral way. Why do you seek to defend a rapist while refusing to present the accusations?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Lange & Debian: DebConf, aggression towards volunteers
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 00:00:12 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 12:42:52AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> Defending a rapist from false accusations is not defending rape.

Are you claiming that the stories on jacobappelbaum.net are false?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 09:52:17 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 10:26:40AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> a) The different approaches taken to complaints about Appelbaum and
> Lange, even though both complaints arrived at the same time.

One of these complaints involved multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault. The other involved an accusation of aggressive and disrespectful behaviour. Do you believe that these things are equivalent?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 19:06:58 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 11:44:42AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 01/09/2020 10:52, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 10:26:40AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> > 
> >> a) The different approaches taken to complaints about Appelbaum and
> >> Lange, even though both complaints arrived at the same time.
> > 
> > One of these complaints involved multiple accusations of rape and sexual 
> > assault. The other involved an accusation of aggressive and 
> > disrespectful behaviour. Do you believe that these things are 
> > equivalent?
> 
> If one complaint is more serious than the other, does that make the
> complaint more true than the other?

Those are orthogonal. Do you believe it's unreasonable that complaints of different severity would have different outcomes?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 19:36:21 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 08:11:20PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 01/09/2020 20:06, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 11:44:42AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 01/09/2020 10:52, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 10:26:40AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> a) The different approaches taken to complaints about Appelbaum and
> >>>> Lange, even though both complaints arrived at the same time.
> >>>
> >>> One of these complaints involved multiple accusations of rape and sexual 
> >>> assault. The other involved an accusation of aggressive and 
> >>> disrespectful behaviour. Do you believe that these things are 
> >>> equivalent?
> >>
> >> If one complaint is more serious than the other, does that make the
> >> complaint more true than the other?
> > 
> > Those are orthogonal. Do you believe it's unreasonable that complaints 
> > of different severity would have different outcomes?
> 
> The difference between the outcomes is so vast that the moon could pass
> through the gap, hence the deeper analysis in today's blog

The difference between the accusations is also vast.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 19:54:38 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 08:40:53PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> There is one fact that is identical in both cases, Daniel Lange and
> Jacob Appelbaum are both innocent until proven guilty.

Nobody's asking for either of them to be imprisoned. Why do you believe that someone who has been credibly accused of multiple cases of rape or sexual assault is entitled to membership of a volunteer organisation?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2020 22:40:27 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 11:16:01PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> 
> 
> On 01/09/2020 20:54, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 08:40:53PM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> > 
> >> There is one fact that is identical in both cases, Daniel Lange and
> >> Jacob Appelbaum are both innocent until proven guilty.
> > 
> > Nobody's asking for either of them to be imprisoned. Why do you believe 
> > that someone who has been credibly accused of multiple cases of rape or 
> > sexual assault is entitled to membership of a volunteer organisation?
> 
> Why do you believe an anonymous doxing campaign has more credibility
> than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims that
> everybody is innocent until proven guilty?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist has not been found guilty in a court of law.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 00:48:17 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 06:02:19PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> quiliro <quiliro@riseup.net> writes:
> 
> > Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a 
> >> volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist 
> >> has not been found guilty in a court of law.
> > Are you aserting that Jacob Appelbaum is guilty or are you talking about
> > someone else? If you cannot prove something, it is a lie.
> Or rather, it is libel.

Have I been found guilty of libel?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 01:04:50 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 06:57:15PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 06:02:19PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> >> quiliro <quiliro@riseup.net> writes:
> >> 
> >> > Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> >> The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a 
> >> >> volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist 
> >> >> has not been found guilty in a court of law.
> >> > Are you aserting that Jacob Appelbaum is guilty or are you talking about
> >> > someone else? If you cannot prove something, it is a lie.
> >> Or rather, it is libel.
> >
> > Have I been found guilty of libel?
> 
> No. Are you? "If you cannot prove something, it is a lie." Do you comply?

Are you a court?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 00:40:21 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 05:59:46PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> > The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a 
> > volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist 
> > has not been found guilty in a court of law.
> Are you aserting that Jacob Appelbaum is guilty or are you talking about
> someone else? If you cannot prove something, it is a lie.

I am asserting that he's a rapist, an assertion that is backed up by an array of publicly available evidence.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 01:05:43 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 07:00:03PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 05:59:46PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> > The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a 
> >> > volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist 
> >> > has not been found guilty in a court of law.
> >> Are you aserting that Jacob Appelbaum is guilty or are you talking about
> >> someone else? If you cannot prove something, it is a lie.
> >
> > I am asserting that he's a rapist, an assertion that is backed up by an 
> > array of publicly available evidence.
> 
> You are backing it up by gossip. Nobody in that website is presenting
> their proof. They cannot not be held to their word. It is impossible to
> verify if they say the truth or if they lie.

Reporting of first hand experiences is not gossip.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 01:54:44 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 07:40:50PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 07:00:03PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> 
> >> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 05:59:46PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> >> >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> >> > The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not require that a 
> >> >> > volunteer organisation grant membership to a rapist, even if said rapist 
> >> >> > has not been found guilty in a court of law.
> >> >> Are you aserting that Jacob Appelbaum is guilty or are you talking about
> >> >> someone else? If you cannot prove something, it is a lie.
> >> >
> >> > I am asserting that he's a rapist, an assertion that is backed up by an 
> >> > array of publicly available evidence.
> >> 
> >> You are backing it up by gossip. Nobody in that website is presenting
> >> their proof. They cannot not be held to their word. It is impossible to
> >> verify if they say the truth or if they lie.
> >
> > Reporting of first hand experiences is not gossip.
> 
> If you believe what others say, that is your problem. I'd rather have
> proof.

How are you defining "proof" here?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2020 02:29:24 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sat, Sep 05, 2020 at 06:53:57PM -0500, quiliro wrote:

> Something that is "backed up by an array of publicly available
> evidence." This you have said. But you have not shown. A web page is not
> first hand testimonies.

Yes it is.

> The author is the only first hand testimony if it is verifiable. First 
> hand testimonies must not only be shown. Those testimonies must also 
> demonstrate that someone was penetrated sexually.

They do.

> That defines rape. Also, if someone says something, that does not mean 
> it is true. So proof is something much more complicated than what you 
> are presenting and requires much more verification.

So, again, what do you mean by "proof"? What do you need to see here?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2020 04:14:09 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sat, Sep 05, 2020 at 09:24:50PM -0500, quiliro wrote:

> A "yes it is"/"no it isn't" discussion will get us nowhere. In the end,
> no facts are in those words, just opinions. Unless you support with
> other evidence, I will not be convinced and will regard them as false
> accusations. I will drop it from now with you because you will not
> contribute anything useful.

What other evidence do you need? Why is your default to assume that these people are lying?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2020 20:24:47 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Sep 07, 2020 at 10:36:03AM -0500, quiliro wrote:

> There is no evidence of any rape. There are anonymous texts only that
> accuse him of it. Why asume Jake is lying, when he is the only one that
> is putting his name on it?

Written descriptions of events are literally evidence.
 > The person should not prove per is innocent. The accuser does not need
> to be open. But must show evidence beyond doubt of guilt.

That's the standard held in a court of law. But falsely accusing someone of rape is also a crime, and you seem willing to assert that Jake's victims are guilty of that.

> If you do not want to hang around him because you think it is probable
> he is guilty, that is understandable. Another thing is dragging others
> to take suspicions as irrefutable truth. If that was somone's attitude
> against you, they would think you have a hidden agenda in favour of
> someone who has interests against Jake. But even if there are thinks
> that look spooky in your acts, no one has not made that accusation
> against you because the evidence is not enough.

Daniel has repeatedly suggested that organisations that chose to cut ties with Jake acted inappropriately. Is it reasonable to question Daniel's motivations?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: expulsions vs Reproducible Builds
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2020 02:46:33 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Sep 07, 2020 at 05:47:14PM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 07, 2020 at 10:36:03AM -0500, quiliro wrote:
> >
> >> There is no evidence of any rape. There are anonymous texts only that
> >> accuse him of it. Why asume Jake is lying, when he is the only one that
> >> is putting his name on it?
> >
> > Written descriptions of events are literally evidence.
> 
> They are evidence that someone knows how to write, not that someone did
> something depicted in that text.

It might not be sufficient evidence to convince you, but that doesn't mean it's not evidence.
 > >> The person should not prove per is innocent. The accuser does not need
> >> to be open. But must show evidence beyond doubt of guilt.
> >
> > That's the standard held in a court of law. But falsely accusing someone 
> > of rape is also a crime, and you seem willing to assert that Jake's 
> > victims are guilty of that.
> 
> I cannot accuse anyone because all of them are aliases. The only one
> that has done that openly is you. I am not interested in accusing you. I
> am just interested in rescueing the name of a person that has done
> good...at least from what I have seen personally. RMS, Assange,
> Appelbaum look like victims. I cannot prove it. But they deserve to be
> held innocent until proved guilty...in my book.

You said that you would treat them as false accusations. That's not merely deciding that Jake is innocent until proven guilty, that's saying that you believe a set of people are guilty of breaking the law. To be clear, it is absolutely your right to believe that Jake's accusers are breaking the law! But you can't simultaneously say that you believe Jake is innocent until proven guilty while also saying that those who accuse him are guilty despite not having been proven so.

> >> If you do not want to hang around him because you think it is probable
> >> he is guilty, that is understandable. Another thing is dragging others
> >> to take suspicions as irrefutable truth. If that was somone's attitude
> >> against you, they would think you have a hidden agenda in favour of
> >> someone who has interests against Jake. But even if there are thinks
> >> that look spooky in your acts, no one has not made that accusation
> >> against you because the evidence is not enough.
> >
> > Daniel has repeatedly suggested that organisations that chose to cut 
> > ties with Jake acted inappropriately. Is it reasonable to question 
> > Daniel's motivations?
> 
> It is reasonable to have an opinion about it. His motivations are
> clear. He felt that FSFE was under bad leadership. He shows it.

What does that have to do with his repeated suggestions that it was inappropriate for Debian to cut ties with Jake?

> This thread has reached a point there is no more you have contributed to
> this discussion in the last few emails. There is enough evidence to
> conclude that you have no proof that a the crime was commited. I will
> not discuss any other thing about the topic unless there is credible
> evidence. I do not trust the direction you are taking this "yes it is /
> no it isn't" conversation. I feel your intentions are not clean and that
> you try to act against me. It looks as if you are trying trick me in
> several ways. I will not answer any more of your questions.

Despite asking you several times, you have failed to say what you would actually need to see in order to conclude that Jake is a rapist. What do you mean by "credible evidence"?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: NSA, GCHQ & Debian links, Jonathan Wiltshire, Tiger Computing?
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 22:01:06 +0000
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 08:56:06AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> On 27/10/2020 05:15, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 10:30:57PM +0100, Debian Community News Team wrote:
> >> Garfield is going to love this... Tiger Computing could be the link from
> >> GCHQ to Debian
> >>
> >> https://debian.community/jonathan-wiltshire-debian-falsified-harassment-claims-tiger-computing-gchq/
> > 
> > Could you walk us through this a little more clearly? Is the suggestion 
> > that GCHQ infiltrated DAM and that your expulsion from Debian was 
> > encouraged by individuals working for the British signal intelligence 
> > organisation?
> 
> Are you suggesting the individuals working for the British signal
> intelligence organisation are lazy and never thought of infiltrating
> Debian because they are busy doing crosswords?

If GCHQ wanted to infiltrate Debian then I have no doubt that they could do so. Are you asserting that they have done so?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Daniel Pocock censored at Techrights by its administrator
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:52:23 +0000
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 07:42:43PM +0100, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> If accusers are so certain that Jacob Appelbaum is a rapist, why do they
> spend so much time trying to censor web sites but in four years, not one
> accuser had time to visit a police station and file a report?

Does visiting a police station change whether or not something happened?

Subject: Re: Pentagon linked to RMS, Jacob Appelbaum plots through Debian
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2021 02:13:54 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sun, Apr 04, 2021 at 12:37:54AM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> Both RMS and Appelbaum cases... Pentagon, White House

Why do you keep defending a rapist?

Subject: Re: Pentagon linked to RMS, Jacob Appelbaum plots through Debian
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2021 18:38:22 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 10:54:02AM -0400, Robert Call (Bob) wrote:
> On Sun, 2021-04-04 at 02:13 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 04, 2021 at 12:37:54AM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> > > Both RMS and Appelbaum cases... Pentagon, White House
> > 
> > Why do you keep defending a rapist?
> >
> 
> Why do you continue to apply labels to people based on hearsay and the
> toxic mob? You nor anyone else has provided **any** compelling evidence
> that Appelbaum is a "rapist". 

Multiple people provided first hand accounts of his actions towards them.

Subject: Re: Pentagon linked to RMS, Jacob Appelbaum plots through Debian
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2021 22:05:12 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 04:04:43PM -0400, Robert Call (Bob) wrote:
> Again, it's hearsay until you've provided corroborating evidence that
> would back up such claims. You can assert the claim is true all you
> want but the burden of proof is on YOU! If you can't provide such
> evidence, I suggest you stop with these toxic games of telephone.

Such as https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/, an incident in which a third party was present and supports the telling of events? Or https://medium.com/@eqe/not-working-for-us-bff58e96c2ea, which also involves a witness supporting the account of one of his victims? If not, what sort of corroborating evidence are you looking for?

But on a side-note - why pick this specific topic to leap to someone's defence? Daniel's been engaging in a long-term harassment campaign against multiple volunteer contributors to Debian based on, well, zero evidence at all. Are you as angry about that?

Subject: Re: Pentagon linked to RMS, Jacob Appelbaum plots through Debian
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2021 12:12:40 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 01:09:17PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> Organizations need a process for evaluating incidents like this fairly
> and objectively.

What was your process for evaulating Jake's behaviour fairly and objectively? Why did you conclude that the accusations weren't sufficient for you to believe them?

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Sat, 29 May 2021 03:30:33 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: quiliro@riseup.net
CC: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:54:57PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:

> I mean that a community which was backing Richard Stallman and his quest
> of freedom is being programatically taken over by someone who opposes
> him and conflates his opinions with rape.  Yes, I believe that is you.
> I believe that people who do really care about freedom would handle the
> issue in a different way and would not support this puppety move from
> corporations.

I don't believe that I've ever conflated his opinions with rape? It's possible that I've been careless with wording at some point, but while I may disagree with Stallman on multiple points I wouldn't categorise any of those as amounting to sex crimes. I will say that I've spent extensive amounts of time working with him to attempt to help him understand why some of his behaviour hurts free software rather than helping it, and was only willing to take this step because I saw no other viable approach.

I also disagree with the claim that I've "taken over" this community in any way. As I said, I believe that functional representation of this community requires at least three people, and I've asked Daniel to give me access to the blog in order to broadcast an appeal for people who'd be willing to assist in that. I'm not proposing to unilaterally appoint people, but in the absence of anyone else who was willing to stand for election we clearly need to find some way to identify potential candidates.

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2021 21:43:55 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: quiliro@riseup.net
CC: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 03:02:38PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> > Where did I perform this conflation?
> 
> Sun, 4 Apr 2021 02:13:54 +0100 on this mailing list.

I was referring to Jake (hence "a rapist", meaning I was only talking about one of the people mentioned there). Sorry if I wasn't clear - I disagree with RMS on multiple topics, but I don't believe him to be a rapist or for his acts to be anywhere near as bad as Jake's.

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2021 04:23:15 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: quiliro@riseup.net
CC: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 09:15:20PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 03:02:38PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> > Where did I perform this conflation?
> >> 
> >> Sun, 4 Apr 2021 02:13:54 +0100 on this mailing list.
> >
> > I was referring to Jake (hence "a rapist", meaning I was only talking 
> > about one of the people mentioned there). Sorry if I wasn't clear - I 
> > disagree with RMS on multiple topics, but I don't believe him to be a 
> > rapist or for his acts to be anywhere near as bad as Jake's.
> 
> I do not see either as bad.  I am no one to judge them because I have no
> direct experience with any major problem with them.  I can only retrieve
> testimonies which I cannot evaluate the truth or circumstances which
> have surrounded the alleged hurt caused.  I only can see the direct
> benefit obtained by me from both of them: the free software movement and
> anonymity, respectively.

I can - Jake raped or sexually assaulted several people I know. No social benefit can be used to justify that.

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2021 03:38:24 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: quiliro@riseup.net
CC: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 08:36:27PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> > I can - Jake raped or sexually assaulted several people I know. No 
> > social benefit can be used to justify that.
> 
> I can't because I have no evidence.  The evidence you present is not
> convincing to me.

If I've seen evidence that's convincing to me, what is the appropriate way for me to describe Jake?

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2021 19:07:25 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: quiliro@riseup.net
CC: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Sun, Jun 06, 2021 at 12:18:46PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> 
> > On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 08:36:27PM -0500, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> >> > I can - Jake raped or sexually assaulted several people I know. No 
> >> > social benefit can be used to justify that.
> >> 
> >> I can't because I have no evidence.  The evidence you present is not
> >> convincing to me.
> >
> > If I've seen evidence that's convincing to me, what is the appropriate 
> > way for me to describe Jake?
> 
> The way you do it is appropriate for you.  How can I know what is
> appropriate for you?  Perhaps you meant to ask something else.

So there's nothing wrong with me calling Jake a rapist if I've seen evidence that convinces me that he's a rapist?

Subject: Re: Elections
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2021 07:16:16 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Reply-To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu
To: discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu

On Mon, Jun 07, 2021 at 07:24:08AM +0200, Debian Community News Team wrote:

> If Garrett and his Debian buddies were in that group watching an alleged
> rape, why did they just watch it without trying to stop it?

I wasn't?

On Ted Walther, prostitute defamation, drugs & Debian

Subject: Re: Ted Walther's Expulsion
Resent-Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 05:53:26 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 11:53:01 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 12:59:02AM -0500, martin f krafft wrote:

> People have almost stopped talking about it. Let's not revive it.
> This is my preferred strategy.

"Everyone" believes that Ted was kicked out because he brought a prostitute to dinner. Given the uncertainty about how true this is[1], I think making it publically clear that Ted was expelled because of a long-running pattern of disruptive and anti-social behaviour would be worthwhile.

[1] Especially since it often seems to be accompanied by "Ted threatened to kill prostitutes on planet", which appears to be demonstrably untrue. Ted did enough bad things that we can argue in favour of his expulsion without having to resort to that.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Events at the DebConf Dinner
Resent-Date: Mon,  5 Jun 2006 09:36:32 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 10:36:40 -0400
From: Micah Anderson <micah@debian.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
CC: debian-private@lists.debian.org



MJ Ray wrote:> I bring it up because there seemed a blind spot about other
> drugs which were probably present and maybe played some role
> in the described mess.  I'd hate to see a formal dinner where
> they were banned, but it seems important that DDs are aware of
> them and any future stewards can handle their effects humanely.
I don't know how people got onto the topic of speculating what drugs
various people were using at the debconf formal dinner, but it seems
really obtuse and highly speculative for no particular purpose than just
to blahblah for the fun of it. I find such a discussion about things
that were "probably present and maybe played some role" to be incredible
wastes of bandwidth.

If people want to discuss the potential variables of drugs, drink, red
meat, sleep, caffeine, altitude, synesthesia induced by the mariachis,
air quality affect, water, etc. please do it at your local pub with
friends, where speculative gossip belongs, rather than spewing it all
over my inbox like Montezuma's revenge.

micah

Subject: Re: Java, drugs and rock&roll
Resent-Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:04:08 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:03:56 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 03:55:23PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:

> I believe that such a behaviour has no place in debian, and is indeed of the
> kind of hatefull bashing of minorities and other such that is being discussed
> in these moments.

Discrimination against people who don't work well as part of a team is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's a minority that I'd rather didn't exist in Debian at all.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

Subject: Re: Java, drugs and rock&roll
Resent-Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:48:25 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:48:16 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 04:10:50PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:

> I posit that people starting expulsion process are part of that
> category.  If you prefer to get rid of people instead of working with
> them, you do no not work well as part of a team.

Are you suggesting that anyone who felt the project would be better off without Ted is unable to work well as part of a team?

It's an unfortunate fact that it is impossible to work with some people without making compromises that limit your own enjoyment of the activity. As an (extreme) example, the fact that my officemate is currently showing signs of extreme paranoia (to the extent of unplugging my computer and phone whenever I'm not in the office) makes it impossible to work with her. Is my willingness to start a formal complaints procedure against her a sign that I'm not a good team player?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org


Subject: Re: Java, drugs and rock&roll
Resent-Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 07:06:06 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:05:56 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 05:06:45PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 03:48:16PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > Are you suggesting that anyone who felt the project would be better off 
> > without Ted is unable to work well as part of a team?
> 
> There have been no expulsion process started against Jonathan, and the
> DAM still have not published their rationale for removing him, so
> no, I was not suggesting that.

Ok, let me rephrase the question. If I had started an expulsion process against Ted, would you have accused me of being unable to work well as part of a team?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org


Subject: Re: Release management and discussion
Resent-Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:53:48 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:53:43 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 12:03:30AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

>         I must be doing something right. My concerns about the
>  relationships and other intangibles (like reactions of payment to
>  some members making an effort [the scientific American recently had
>  the results of only rewarding one monkey with bananas when two were
>  required to pull them within reach]) have now been framed first as
>  childish temper tantrums, and now by the DPL as "religious" arguments,
>  neatly sidestepping actually facing the concerns I raised.

Dude, he was calling /me/ childish. I really don't think you can argue with him on that point.

(No, I've no idea why I'm still here either. I'm sure I'll stop getting these soon :) )
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org


Subject: Re: Release management
Resent-Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:34:30 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:34:20 +0100
From: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 06:18:48PM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> This is not about paying people. This is about paying the developers
> themselves. About splitting the developer base in two. About conflicts
> of interests.

Now that my resignation is pending, I'll just take the opportunity to say something I've wanted to for a long time:

Fuck you Joss. Fuck you vigorously with a chainsaw. Your continual whining and conspiracy theories have done more to encourage me to stab people to death than anyone else in recent history. I hope you have a miserable life that lasts longer than you want it to. And I mean that in the most sincere and honest manner possible. Should we ever come into contact socially, please do not attempt to initiate communication with me.

Love,
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org

If you have a real concern about abuse, don't waste time behaving like a sock puppet, go to the police

Pope Benedict died on 31 December 2022.

Cardinal George Pell appeared in news reports a few days later. They revealed he had been living in Rome after his acquittal and release from a prison in Australia.

One of the news reports directed me to the unredacted version of the dossier about the Archdiocese of Melbourne. It was fascinating reading through the minutes of the church's internal committees side-by-side with the evidence from debian-private (leaked) whisper network.

On 10 January 2023, I decided to drive across the Great St Bernard Pass to Italy and file a complaint with the Carabinieri.

The late Cardinal Pell died by the time I arrived back home that night.

If Garrett really knows something about abuse, why does he waste so much time on free software mailing lists acting like a sock puppet?

Incidentally, the Cardinals wear a Red Hat, a lot like Garrett's former employer, IBM Red Hat. The UDRP panel found that I am a victim of harassment and abuse by Garrett's former employer.

Police receipt and Great St Bernard tunnel receipt:

Cardinal George Pell, Enrico Zini

 

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

23 January, 2026 08:30PM

Nazi.Compare

Judgment: French army vanquishes German FSFE on Hitler's birthday, Microsoft contract dispute (1716711)

(1716711, 1804171) Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. vs. Le ministère des armées, Tribunal Administratif de Melun.

Hitler's birthday, 20 April, was a special occasion every year under the fascist dictatorship, on par with the King's Birthday in the Commonwealth. Incidentally, the British monarchy are really Germans.

We previously considered the fact that Debianists elected a German leader on Hitler's birthday and then they did exactly the same thing again the following year.

In 2017, the German FSFE misfits began a legal case against the French military. FSFE misfits disputed the French military's decision to sign a contract with Microsoft.

The case was eventually resolved in 2021 with a judgment against the Germans / FSFE misfits. For those who failed to notice at the time, the tribunal handed down the judgment on Hitler's birthday:

FSFE, judgment, France, military, microsoft

 

FSFE, judgment, France, military, microsoft

 

While the full name of the FSFE is Free Software Foundation Europe, internal statistics and mailing list traffic levels demonstrate that the majority of these people are Germans and they do not represent Europe at large, they only represent themselves.

Throughout the legal procedure and trial, an employee of the French government, Dr Amandine Jambert from CNIL was part of the internal mailing lists used for discussions at the FSFE. Was this a conflict of interest when the FSFE was taking legal action against her own employer?

In the email below, Jambert does not state her full name, she only uses the sockpuppet identity "Cryptie" and she does not have any email signature disclosing her position within an agency of the French state.

The FSFE misfits claim to be a peak body for Free Software activism in Europe. They claim to comply with Transparency International guidelines. As the saying goes, do as we say, not as we do.

In 2023, when Jambert resigned from the FSFE misfits, she finally admitted she has a conflict of interest, implicitly admitting that she lied about harassment to avoid facing a basic ethical question.

Subject: 	Re: Fwd: [April - Atelier] Open Bar : Une action en justice dans les tuyaux et DSI des Armées pro-microsoft
Date: 	Wed, 30 Aug 2017 13:15:58 +0200
From: 	Cryptie <cryptie@fsfe.org>
To: 	team@lists.fsfe.org, Hugo Roy <hugo@hugoroy.eu>, france@lists.fsfe.org



Hi all,

I think it would be a good idea to tell them what we did/ plan to do as, in France, they are those that could help us if we need.

Best,
Cryptie

Le 30 août 2017 13:12:00 GMT+02:00, Hugo Roy <hugo@hugoroy.eu> a écrit :



    Hi all,

    Important info: the company (Nexedi) will be represented by a lawyer
    that I know well, because he sucks.

    I think this makes it paramount that FSFE also sues, to ensure that
    things are done right and limit any damage that this guy may do.

    Matze: maybe you remember, I talked about this guy and how he miserably
    failed a lawsuit (on a similar topic against Microsoft) last year.


    On 2017-08-30 12:43, Hugo Roy wrote:

        Hi there,

        You will find attached an April internal mailing list relating
        to the
        Microsoft - French Ministry of Defense contract, about which
        FSFE sent
        a request for information (in the potentiality of a lawsuit).

        A company (Nexedi) is, apparently, going to sue over this too.

        Thinking about replying to April that FSFE is also thinking about a
        lawsuit and to keep April updated (and that we are happy to work
        with
        them, as usual). Thoughts?

        Best,
        Hugo

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Team mailing list
    Team@lists.fsfe.org
    https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/team


-- 
Envoyé de mon appareil Android avec K-9 Mail. Veuillez excuser ma brièveté.

Remember, in May 2018, the FSFE staff had an Extraordinary General Meeting without the developers present and they voted to remove the elections from the constitution of the association. They have not had a full election since 2017.

In July 2018, a few weeks after removing elections from the constitution, the German FSFE misfits went to RMLL in Strasbourg and they recorded a video of Jambert talking about democracy in French.

Amandine Jambert, cryptie, FSFE, balloons, RMLL, EDPB, CNIL, Strasbourg

 

Amandine Jambert, cryptie, FSFE, balloons, RMLL, EDPB, CNIL, Strasbourg

 

Read more about Nazi comparisons.

23 January, 2026 06:00PM

Swiss JuristGate

Judge Richard Oulevey (Grandcour Choeur, Tribunal Vaud) & Debian shaming abuse victims and witnesses

In 2021, a court in Poland convicted a paedophile and sent him to prison. The paedophile was described as a regional activist for the Civic Platform (PO) political party. When convicting the paedophile, the court made orders that his identity and conviction could not be published as it would compromise the privacy of the victims. The victims were the children of a politician from the same party as the offender.

Radio Szczecin is a public broadcaster under control of the right-wing party ruling in Poland. In December 2022, Radio Szczecin made a broadcast alleging that a cover-up had taken place. In the broadcast, they informed the audience that the victims were "the children of a well-known lawmaker", the very fact the judge had sought to protect.

After that, it wasn't long before people were able to identify the victims.

A few weeks later, one of the victims committed suicide.

In 2017, when I discovered evidence that diversity funding from open source software organizations had enabled wrongdoing in Albania, I told some of the women that I was watching these matters carefully. To show some empathy, I mentioned to the women the fact one of my cousins had received the choir scholarship at St Kevin's College, Toorak at the same time the late Cardinal Pell was the Archbishop of Melbourne. The choir scholarships are worth approximately three hundred thousand Australian dollars. Like the Outreachy internships, the scholarship has significant financial value and being a part of the St Kevin's community opens doors for people.

This is the point where the legal and ethical competance diverged significantly.

Cardinal Pell was convicted on 11 December 2018 and a few days later, on Christmas Eve, rogue Debianists used the debian-private whisper network to spread rumours about abuse. In fact, I've never even specified whether one of my cousins is the same person who made the complaint. There were hundreds of boys in the choir over the years.

By creating hysteria, they were following in the footsteps of Radio Szczecin. In the case of Debianism, it is even worse. One of the people spreading rumours about abuse, Joerg Jaspert, was elected as a parent representative for Dalbergschule school council in Fulda, Germany. If he is unable to handle private information about children then he is totally unsuitable for that position in a school.

The hysteria has identified a number of possible abuse victims in open source software communities and as long as they persist, they are forcing people to point to possible evidence that may identify people. They already forced public attention on the sixteen-year-old victims from Albania. Instead of learning from that mistake, they demanded more public shaming. Here is one of their legal documents where they demand a public humiliation of my family:

Walder Wyss, abuse, privacy, Switzerland

 

Yet look at the irony. The judge assigned to manage the case, Richard Oulevey, is also the president of a choir. The Grandcour Men's Choir, based in the Canton of Vaud, celebrated their 125th anniversary recently.

Richard Oulevey, Grandcour Men's Choir

 

Richard Oulevey, Grandcour Men's Choir

 

After the Pell prosecution, media reports went to great lengths to conceal the identities of choir members. Photos were published with all the faces obfuscated:

Richard Oulevey, Cardinal George Pell, Grandcour Men's Choir, St Patrick's, St Kevin's, choir

 

In Poland, the judge realized that the prosecution could lead to the identification of abuse victims and he ordered total secrecy about the identity of the offender. Exactly the same rules are used to impose secrecy in cases of incest and cases involving small villages, whether they occur in Poland, in Australia or in Switzerland. A recent example was the prosecution of a bakery owner in South Australia. During the 1980s, the baker/father recruited underage girls to live and work in a cult-like arrangement leading to pregnancies. Three babies were born within a period of seven months.

The case created enormous media interest but none of the news reports are able to publish the name of the village, the name of the business or the names of the people convicted. In other words, they are hiding the name of the paedophile to protect the identities of his thirteen children.

We have seen echoes of this behaviour in the open source software communities. The cases in Albania were not the only ones.

Look at how Debianists and the Outreachy program offer financial incentives to young transgender people, even in a voluntary environment where nobody else is allowed to receive payment.

Its time to hold a mirror up to the rogue Debianists themselves. Look at the case of Pauline Pommeret, who came from an elite high school to be groomed/indoctrinated in the Debian love nest at ENS Cachan / CRANS.

Pommeret eventually came and asked for Outreachy money, which is approximately double the amount of money offered to an ordinary male intern of the same age and experience level.

If judges in other jurisdictions have gone to great lengths to protect the privacy of people in proximity to abuse cases, why do the jurists and judges in Switzerland & Debian want to publicly identify and humiliate people?

Another one of the protagonists in the case is Axel Beckert from the university ETH Zurich university. How can these people be competant to handle private complaints from students when their first reaction is to take out their mobile phone and make a public statement about everything?

Debianists spent over $120,000 on legal fees to censor blogs like this but getting a gay judge with a transgender sister would be priceless. Or just more conflicts of interest.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

Please see the rest of the JuristGate reports.

23 January, 2026 06:00PM

Did judge with transgender sister & Debian conflict of interest help cover-up a death?

Most of the correspondance concerning the Debianism vendetta in the canton of Vaud was signed by Judge Richard Oulevey of the PLR Liberal Radical Party.

Did he have a conflict of interest?

One of the key issues in the Debianism dispute was the attempt to trick me to mentor Nicolas Dandrimont's partner. It appears that the partner of Dandrimont may be a transgender and the sister of Judge Oulevey is also a transgender, Zoé Frédérique Oulevey. By coincidence, Zoé is head of R&I Intellectual Property at Richemont.

The presence of multiple transgenders is significant. These people don't simply dress up as women. They want to know what it feels like to live like a woman and for some of them, they crave manipulating the protective instincts in other men. Just as they go to great effort with cosmetic surgery, they also spend a lot of effort practicing the victim routine. There are whole associations and web sites dedicated to the victimhood. They focus on how to be believed rather than how to be honest. It is hard and sometimes impossible to tell when these people are reporting a real case of harassment and when they are just role-playing victimhood.

One of the cyberbullies who started the legal harassment, which is called "abuse of process" if you'll excuse the pun, is Axel Beckert, who is the gay partner of a former colleague. It appears that Judge Richard Oulevey does not have a spouse. For those who know the extent to which LGBT vendettas have hurt healthy people around Debian, it is a disturbing thought but also quite rude to speculate without any other evidence that Debian somehow spent all that money to get a gay judge. The judge has not revealed anything about his love life or the extent to which all these people are mingling bodily fluids on the Swiss LGBT scene.

Axel Beckert, XTaran, Zoé Frédérique Oulevey, Pauline Pommeret, Maria Climent Pommeret, Alice Climent Pommeret, Alice Climent, Richard Oulevey, Martin Ebnoether, venty

 

In Australia, Melbourne newspaper The Age published a detailed report about groups like this who work together to humiliate their victims.

How a Melbourne seminary became the breeding ground for paedophile rings

Corpus Christi was where sexually repressed men could “act out” with each other, living double lives, then transfer their attentions to the most innocent in their flocks.

...

Fells alleges that he was the victim of a group of priests who formed part of a network of paedophiles coalescing around Corpus Christi in the mid-1970s. His first abuser was St Peter’s Clayton parish priest Ronald Pickering, who Fells claims molested him after a Sunday mass in the parish presbytery. A known paedophile, Pickering fled to England in 1993 after the Melbourne Archdiocese informed him about a victim’s complaint.

...

“Pickering got me first, then Vears, and then Ryan,” alleges Fells, who tried to take his own life after the seminary incident and still suffers from post-traumatic stress.

“They got me all right.”

Amnesty International published a report about the Swiss police using violence to "arrest" and sexually abuse Trevor Kitchen for his reports about financial corruption.

Trevor Kitchen, a 41-year-old British citizen resident in Switzerland, was arrested by police in Chiasso (canton of Ticino) on the morning of 25 December 1992 in connection with offences of defamation and insults against private individuals. In a letter addressed to the Head of the Federal Department of Justice and Police in Berne and to the Tribunal in Bellinzona (Ticino) on 3 June 1993 he alleged that two police officers arrested him in a bar in Chiasso and, after handcuffing him, accompanied him to their car in the street outside. They then bent him over the car and hit him around the head approximately seven times and carried out a body search during which his testicles were squeezed. He claimed he was then punched hard between the shoulder blades several times. He said he offered no resistance during the arrest.

He was then taken to a police station in Chiasso where he was questioned in Italian (a language he does not understand) and stated that during the questioning "The same policeman that arrested me came into the office to shout at me and hit me once again around the head. Another policeman forced me to remove all of my clothes. I was afraid that they would use physical force again; they continued to shout at me. The one policeman was pulling at my clothes and took my trouser belt off and removed my shoe laces. Now I stood in the middle of an office completely naked (for 10 minutes) with the door wide open and three policemen staring at me, one of the policemen put on a pair of rubber surgical gloves and instructed me to crouch into a position so that he could insert his fingers into my anus, I refused and they all became angry and started shouting and demonstrating to me the position which they wanted me to take, laughing, all were laughing, these police were having a good time. They pointed at my penis, making jokes, hurling abuse and insults at me, whilst I stood completely still and naked. Finally, when they finished laughing, one of the policemen threw my clothes onto the floor in front of me. I got dressed."

He was transferred to prison some hours later and in his letter claimed that during the night he started to experience severe pains in his chest, back and arms. He asked a prison guard if he could see a doctor but the request was refused and he claimed the guard kicked him. He was released on 30 December 1993. Medical reports indicated that since his release he had been experiencing recurrent pain in the area of his chest and right shoulder and had been receiving physiotherapy for an injury to the upper thoracic spine and his right shoulder girdle.

Debianist financial disclosures show they spent over $120,000 on legal fees. One overworked and unpaid volunteer, Abraham Raji, died at DebConf23 when they asked him to contribute his own money to the day trip.

Debian legal fees

 

Yet their Judge Oulevey, who got some money, admits trying to create an invalid judgment and then having to annul it:

Debian trademark, Richard Oulevey

 

Dare we say a group of gays, trannies and greens fathered a non-binary judgment? Or they simply fucked up?

Axel Beckert, XTaran, Zoé Frédérique Oulevey, Pauline Pommeret, Maria Climent Pommeret, Alice Climent Pommeret, Alice Climent, Richard Oulevey, Martin Ebnoether, venty

 

Fundamentally, while the LGBT community celebrates Pride, the Debianists celebrate shaming people. Look at their demand to publicly denounce my family after my father died:

Debian, denouncing people

 

Adolf Hitler did exactly the same thing. He insisted that every Jew had to wear a star on their chest, like a miniature judgment:

Israel, Jews, stars

 

One of the groundbreaking reports on this web site was the comparison of Debian and Swiss cover-ups to the barrister John Smyth QC in the Church of England. From a BBC report:

Smyth was confronted about his conduct after the report compiled by Rev Mark Ruston and Rev David Fletcher.

It found Smyth identified pupils from leading public schools including Winchester College and took them to his home near Winchester in Hampshire, where he carried out lashings with a garden cane in his shed.

Now look at the invalid document these German and Swiss nazis created together. 10 November is the anniversary of the Kristallnacht:

Debian, denouncing people

 

The report about John Smyth QC goes on:

Smyth is said to have subjected his victims to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

If you look at the way the Debianists attacked my family, they inflicted this on us and sustained these attacks ever since the death of my father. That is a level of intrusion that puts some of the rogue Debianists right up there with the paedophiles.

By chance, Judge Oulevey's father also died, giving us a list of family members. We can see that Judge Oulevey does not have a wife. As well as having the transgender sister Zoé Frédérique Oulevey, he has a brother, Xavier Oulevey who is also a jurist in the canton of Vaud. Clearly, conflicts of interest will arise every time his brother brings a case to the tribunal.

Michel Oulevey, Raymonde Oulevey-Chenuz, Richard Oulevey, Zoé Frédérique Oulevey, Christine Mayencourt, Xavier Oulevey, Laurence Oulevey, Jacques Oulevey, Ulla Oulevey, Cuérel, Dr Ratnam, Prof. Dufour, Fondation Prérisa, Lucens, Grandcour

 

On 1 November 2023, I was granted citizenship of Switzerland in the Canton of Vaud. When I look at these dirty men attacking my family after my father died, I see the behaviour of animals, not humans. It makes me question what it means to be a citizen of Switzerland, because I can't lower myself to be an animal like these men.

John Pocock

 

Why do these dirty men go to all this trouble to humiliate my family and I? Adrian von Bidder-Senn died on our wedding day. They don't want my presence to remind them that they may have some responsibility for those deaths. They couldn't care less about pushing more people to suicide if that is the price of covering up the last suicides.

The Bishop Accountability web site has a page about the experiences of Catholic whistleblowers and it is remarkably similar to what we see in free software "family" cults today:

Many of the individuals profiled below have experienced retaliation and grief in some form – defamation, job loss, career derailment, ostracization, pressure by superiors to admit to mental illness, and in at least one case, suicide.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

Please see the rest of the JuristGate reports.

23 January, 2026 06:00PM

hackergotchi for Daniel Pocock

Daniel Pocock

Rape investigation dropped: Will Fowles & ALP transgender deception

On 30 January 2024, news reports told us that the investigation into Will Fowles had been discontinued. The police did not find evidence of a crime.

After the police report, the Australian Labor Party commissioned a report from a lawyer, Fiona Forsyth KC, paid by the party, who told the party that the accusations are substantiated "on the balance of probabilities", despite the fact nobody saw anything. As the lawyer was paid by the political party, people should be very cautious to accept this. Somebody then leaked the report to newspapers and the discredited accusations were repeated in April 2025.

In mathematics, the "balance of probabilities" means anything in excess of fifty percent. However, lawyers don't have any system for measuring this type of accusation quantitatively. Nobody was in the room with these two people, the police haven't even confirmed if they were both in the same room and nobody else knows if they were in the same room either. When lawyers use this phrase, "balance of probabilities", in these circumstances, they are saying they can't be sure but they decided to favour one side over the other. In the world of engineering, when we construct a bridge or an airplane, it is not good enough to be fifty-one percent sure that the public are safe. We have to be 99.99999 percent sure that a bridge or airplane is safe before the public can use it.

In August 2024, news reports told us a 41-year-old "woman", asking for her true identity to be protected, had "broken her silence".

After the ALP's paid lawyer report was leaked, the "woman" making the accusation decided to reveal her identity. We now know it is Lucy Gunner who is both transgender (like the Zizians), the sister of former Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner and a prominent LGBT activist. Michael Gunner is also a member of the same political party. Lucy apparently left her job in the parliament and went to stay with her brother.

When Lucy Gunner decided to waive her privacy, the story was only reported in one newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's Herald Sun. This is a newspaper well known for paying people money for highly emotive stories. If you want to sell a story about anyone, you can contact them here and name your price.

I'm publishing this blog today at the same time as publishing the evidence that Nicolas Dandrimont's "girlfriend", the one who wanted to be paid some Outreachy money, appears to a transgender / Zizian too and he/she/they changed their name again and tried to wipe their history at exactly the same time the Debianists attacked my family and I in November 2021.

Lucy Gunner, Jill Pope, Luci White, Jenny Smith, Rainbow crossing, Darwin

 

This is one of those cases where the anonymity of victims raises the risk of injustice. When outsiders realize the extent to which all these people are connected to each other it suddenly becomes a lot easier to see there are multiple explanations for this crisis.

A news report from the Herald Sun tells us:

The pair became drunk at a Drink Victorian event hosted in the parliamentary precinct.

The Drink Victorian web site tells us:

This program is aimed at helping Victorians discover the world-class drinks talent to be found in their own backyard.

One of the most interesting comments Ms Gunner makes in her 2024 interview, while her identity and real biological gender were both hidden from the public:

The former staffer wants the government to provide an alternative pathway – separate to the criminal justice system – to deal with sexual assault complaints.

“I wish that there was another option,” she said.

She proposes a mediation system be set up through the public health system giving alleged victims and perpetrators an opportunity to meet and discuss their case without risk of incarceration.

“Obviously not all sexual assault victims would want to take this pathway, but when victims and perpetrators are known to each other, funnelling victims into the criminal justice system can create greater pain for both parties and less opportunity to heal.”

Lucy Gunner

 

When I saw those comments, it reminded me of the emails sent by Enrico Zini, Wouter Verhelst, Didier Raboud (Odyx, Liip SA) and others discussing the falsified accusations against Dr Jacob Appelbaum. Specifically, Raboud had told us:

Subject: Re: Jacob Appelbaum and harrassement
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2016 20:30:36 +0200
From: Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <odyx@debian.org>
To: Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>
CC: debian-private@lists.debian.org

Le samedi, 18 juin 2016, 18.41:22 Wouter Verhelst a écrit :

[ ... snip ... ]


Our current expulsion procedure doesn't really open the door for
"suspending" an account. Taking a temporary decision "pending the result
of the official investigation" implies putting things on hold either
way, likely forever, as it doesn't currently seem likely that there will
be an investigation, even less a result.

Our current expulsion procedure has a concept of timeframes though:
> Possible timeframes include one or more years and, in truly extreme
> cases, a lifetime expulsion, depending on the impact that the actions
> leading to this process may have had to the project.
> 
> If we set a time limit people are free to attempt to get back into the
> project after that time passed. They will need to go through full NM.

I trust DAM to do the right thing here, and don't expect them to decide
for a lifetime expulsion. I've come to think that a clear-cut expulsion
for $n years, leaving a possibility for later re-entry through our
normal mechanisms (NM) is vastly better for all involved parties than a
never-decided temporary suspension. In other words; I don't think
"suspending until there's an official decision on all allegations we've
heard" is doing Debian or Jacob a service, as this will stay pending
forever. Exclusion isn't (and shouldn't be) a light measure for us
(through DAM) to decide for; but we can also make it not indefinite, and
that's also a way for all of us to move on.

In that part of the thread, they acknowledge, like in the case of Will Fowles, there is nothing for a real police investigation but they want to make up a punishment anyway. In the end, they decided to punish him and now they had to make up a false narrative that sounds bad enough to retrospectively justify the punishment.

The thing that reveals the most about the lie are the words "leaving a possibility for later re-entry through our normal mechanisms (NM) is vastly better for all involved parties".

If Dr Appelbaum had really raped somebody, we wouldn't be planning his "re-entry" at the same time as trying to get him out. A real rape victim would never want to see the perpetrator again. The people who wrote these emails all seem to know they are not talking about a real rape, they are simply trying to create the illusion of rape with their underhanded conspiracy and Chinese whispers. The anti-Appelbaum defamation conspiracy was a social engineering attack on the entire open source ecosystem.

The stated aspirations of Lucy Gunner are eerily similar. She appears to be saying that instead of having a crime investigation, she would like to have some process where an LGBT person making an accusation can receive some validation and then continue interacting with the person they are accusing.

Being able to retrospectively change your mind about consent, after engaging in the act, after making a police report, is not the same as being able to forgive somebody. In the case of Alex Matters, text messages and voice messages sent by the woman revealed the whole thing was in her head. She gave consent and then after reading rumors on social media, she tried to retrospectively unconsent to everything they had already done together as a couple. Sky News interviewed Mr Matters and broadcast details of the text messages.

In the case of Will Fowles and the ALP, all we can confirm is that these people had drinks together.

Exclusive: Andreas Tille did not trust accusations against Dr Jacob Appelbaum

Andreas Tille wrote the message in 2016 and it received numerous replies from people who felt that Dr Appelbaum had been a victim of false accusations and bullying. There is a snobby set at large in Debian who like to make dramas and pretend they are experts on everything and everybody.

We saw the same phenomena with the Zizian murders. These people live in a bubble and they are preoccupied with the idea that LGBT is right and everybody else is wrong.

Human rights law says otherwise: everybody is innocent until proven guilty, whether we have a healthy lifestyle or not.

Subject: Re: What is true and what is false in accusations against Jacob Appelbaum
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:30:08 +0200
From: Patrick Matthäi <pmatthaei@debian.org>
To: Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>, Debian Private List <debian-private@lists.debian.org>


Am 13.08.2016 um 23:07 schrieb Andreas Tille:
> Hi folks,

Hi Andreas
>
> I just read this article
>
>    http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-08/jacob-appelbaum-rape-sexual-abuse-allegations
>
> I think that people who decided to expel Jacob had solid information
> from first person insight.  I have met Jakob at DebConf 15 in Heidelberg
> and I was quite sad to see him in a different light when we excluded him
> from Debian.  This article confused me even more since on one hand I
> personally do not subscribe to several things in this article but on the
> other hand I consider the "In doubt for the accused" principle violated.
>
> What do we in Debian really know about all this for sure?  Its not that
> I trust an article since its just in the news, but I never read any
> detailed information that has backed up our decision.

I already read the past e-mails about Jacob on private and did not
reacted on them, with a good reason..
WHO from our Debian community knows the truth except of Jacob (and/or
the maybe involved persons)? If most persons from here knew him as a
good person, is this relevant for the justice? Or is it relevant if he
was a troll..  We can watch the people only before their had!
I do not know what "discussing" this topic here will help to get new
information, it will just end in coursing.
I want to follow the german law, which says "not guilty till proven
otherwise". You are also german and I think this is a good law. Please
follow it also on this list.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.

23 January, 2026 06:00PM

Tom Silvagni appeal, secret baby, Sinful confession of Alannah Iaconis: condoms in text messages

After the public revelation that Tom Silvagni was convicted of abuse, many people remain less than certain about what is really true and false.

The woman making the accusation expressed outrage on social control media. The media reported her comments anonymously. Yet it feels unfair that the woman can use the media to spread her side of the story anonymously while the appeal is still in progress.

When her comments were reported, Channel 7 decided to show us footage of the young woman's feet as she was walking out of the court.

Tom Silvagni victim, Channel 7

 

In other words, while the media is obliged to protect the woman's identity, they are encouraging anybody who knows the two parties to ask questions and check facts on both sides of the case.

A lot of these disputes involve questions of politics, status and humiliations. If you look at the cases in the Debian suicide cluster, some of the men wrote complaints about being tricked to work as unpaid volunteers while fellow "volunteers" really got paid all along. Some of these people wrote about feeling humiliated just as victims of rape and abuse feel humiliated. Why did Adrian von Bidder-Senn die on our wedding day?

Most fans of Australian football are familiar with the long-running saga of Stephen Milne. The accusation against Milne was similar in many ways as it involved a party with two footballers and two women. Yet the Milne accusation is even more serious than the accusation against Tom. Milne was only given a penalty of $15,000 and he never spent one day in prison. Tom, on the other hand, has been given six years in prison. In these circumstances, it is only natural for people to ask why Tom has received inconsistent treatment from the justice system.

Tom's father Stephen Silvagni has a saint-like status in Australian football. The Silvagni name resonates like the name of Roger Federer in tennis or Tiger Woods in golf.

Tom's grandfather played two premierships with Carlton. Tom's father, Stephen, played over three hundred games with Carlton and then went to work in club management. But due to internal politics in the club, Stephen Silvagni resigned and went to work for rival club Saint Kilda.

This is ironic because St Kilda are simply known as the Saints but there is nothing Saint-like in what has been alleged. Yet the irony doesn't stop there. Looking at the official list of Australians proposed for Sainthood, we find none other than the legendary Dr John Billings.

The Catholic Church teaches us against the use of contraception and abortion. Nonetheless, Dr Billings developed and promoted the Billings Method for Natural Family Planning and it is the only method of contraception or "planned parenthood" that is endorsed by the Church. Every Pope in the last fifty years has given personal praise to the work of Dr Billings. Here is a news report on the Vatican web site:

Pope Francis upholds "Billings Revolution"

In a message to participants in the WOOMB International Congress Rome on the Billings Method, Pope Francis highlights its ongoing contribution to the understanding of human sexuality and to a fuller appreciation of the relational and procreative dimensions of the couple, saying that use of methods based on the natural rhythms of fertility should be encouraged.

and from the original text of the statement from Pope Francis:

John and Evelyn Billings conducted careful scientific research and developed a simple method, accessible to women and couples, for natural knowledge of fertility, offering them a valuable tool for the responsible management of procreative choices.

In fact, Dr Billings, who is on track to join the other Saints, as in heavenly saints rather than St-Kilda saints, is also a former student of Melbourne's Xavier College, just like my father and I and also the convicted Tom Silvagni.

At the end of year 12, we all received a yearbook from the school with a letter from our school captain. He tells us:

we always had the opportunity to accept or reject all that Xavier offered us

According to the report by the Daily Mail:

both Silvagni and Ms Iaconis testified that they distinctly recalled Mr LoGuidice entering their bedroom to ask for a condom, contradicting his account.

The Herald Sun goes even further, claiming there is a text message about the condoms.

A text message asking for a condom, a doctored Uber receipt and a dark bedroom in the luxury home of one of Melbourne's most famous families ...

The implication is that all of these wealthy families are spending vast amounts of money to send their sons and daughters to these schools and as soon as they graduate, they forget everything. If all four people in the house had been using condoms at some point during the party and they admitted that in court then all four of them have admitted what the church regards as a sin.

Social media has been full of links to stories about Tom Silvagni and Alannah Iaconis having a secret baby. Fact checking web sites are making rival claims that it is a hoax or clickbait.

In fact, if they had a secret baby then the reference to secrecy can only imply they put the baby up for adoption. In that case, there would be no news stories about the baby. Wealthy families have a lot of experience maintaining secrecy around such pregnancies. Therefore, we can not say the rumour is true and we can not say the rumour is a hoax either. It is what Donald Rumsfeld once described as one of the "unknown unknowns".

For Catholic families, every unborn baby is considered to be alive and this implies that every abortion is considered to be a murder. When very young women have an unplanned pregnancy, if they keep it totally secret they may be able to obtain an abortion on their own. However, if their parents or their school discover the pregnancy the girl will be encouraged to have the baby in secret and give it up for adoption. Therefore, the secret baby/adoption rumour is plausible and that is one reason it spreads easily on social control media.

A famous jurist William Blackstone makes the statement:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

With that in mind, it is important that people who support these football clubs are asking for evidence and asking for both sides of the story.

Carlton Football Club advertises open training sessions where fans can meet each other. They have a Run for Respect each year. The next one is on 8 February 2026. This provides a good place for fans of the club to ask questions.

Likewise, the Saints advertise open training sessions and community events where fans can meet in person and avoid the fake news on social control media.

23 January, 2026 06:00PM

January 22, 2026

hackergotchi for Steinar H. Gunderson

Steinar H. Gunderson

Rewriting Git merge history, part 2

In part 1, we discovered the problem of rewriting git history in the presence of nontrivial merges. Today, we'll discuss the workaround I chose.

As I previously mentioned, and as Julia Evans' excellent data model document explains, a git commit is just a snapshot of a tree (suitably deduplicated by means of content hashes), a commit message and a (possibly empty) set of parents. So fundamentally, we don't really need to mess with diffs; if we can make the changes we want directly to the tree (well, technically, make a new tree that looks like what we want, and a new commit using that tree), we're good. (Diffs in git are, generally, just git diff looking at two trees and trying to make sense of it. This has the unfortunate result that there is no solid way of representing a rename; there are heuristics, but if you rename a file and change it in the same commit, they may fail and stuff like git blame or git log may be broken, depending on flags. Gerrit doesn't even seem to understand a no-change copy.)

In earlier related cases, I've taken this to the extreme by simply hand-writing a commit using git commit-tree. Create exactly the state that you want by whatever means, commit it in some dummy commit and then use that commit's tree with some suitable commit message and parent(s); voila. But it doesn't help us with history; while we can fix up an older commit in exactly the way we'd like, we also need the latter commits to have our new fixed-up commit as parent.

Thus, enter git filter-branch. git filter-branch comes with a suitable set of warnings about eating your repository and being deprecated (I never really figured out its supposed replacement git filter-repo, so I won't talk much about it), but it's useful when all else fails.

In particular, git filter-branch allows you to do arbitrary changes to the tree of a series of commits, updating the parent commit IDs as rewrites happen. So if you can express your desired changes in a way that's better than “run the editor” (or if you're happy running the editor and making the same edit manually 300 times!), you can just run that command over all commits in the entire branch (forgive me for breaking lines a bit):

git filter-branch -f --tree-filter \
  '! [ -f src/cluster.cpp ] || sed -i "s/if (mi.rank != 0)/if (mi.rank != 0
    \&\& mi.rank == rank())/" src/cluster.cpp' \
  665155410753978998c8080c813da660fc64bbfe^..cluster-master

This is suitably terrible. Remember, if we only did this for one commit, the change wouldn't be there in the next one (git diff would show that it was immediately reverted), so filter-branch needs to do this over and over again, once for each commit (tree) in the branch. And I wanted multiple fixups, so I had a bunch of these; some of them were as simple as “copy this file from /tmp” and some were shell scripts that did things like running clang-format.

You can do similar things for commit messages; at some point, I figured I should write “cluster” (the official name for the branch) and not “cluster-master” (my local name) in the merge messages, so I could just do

git filter-branch \
  --commit-msg-filter 'sed s/cluster-master/cluster/g' \
  665155410753978998c8080c813da660fc64bbfe^..cluster-master

I also did a bunch of them to fix up my email address (GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL wasn't properly set), although I cannot honestly remember whether I used --env-filter or something else. Perhaps that was actually with git rebase and `-r --exec 'git commit --amend --no-edit --author …'` or similar. There are many ways to do ugly things. :-)

Eventually, I had the branch mostly in a state where I thought it would be ready for review, but after uploading to GitHub, one reviewer commented that some of my merges against master were commits that didn't exist in master. Huh? That's… surprising.

It took a fair bit of digging to figure out what had happened: git filter-branch had rewritten some commits that it didn't actually have to; the merge sources from upstream. This is normally harmless, since git hashes are deterministic, but these commits were signed by the author! And filter-branch (or perhaps fast-export, upon which it builds?) generally assumes that it can't sign stuff with other people's keys, so it just strips the signatures, deeming that better than having invalid ones sitting around. Now, of course, these commit signatures would still be valid since we didn't change anything, but evidently, filter-branch doesn't have any special code for that.

Removing an object like this (a “gpgsig” attribute, it seems) changes the commit hash, which is where the phantom commits came from. I couldn't get filter-branch to turn it off… but again, parents can be freely changed, diffs don't exist anyway. So I wrote a little script that took in parameters suitable for git commit-tree (mostly the parent list), rewrote known-bad parents to known-good parents, gave the script to git filter-branch --commit-filter, and that solved the problem. (I guess --parent-filter would also have worked; I don't think I saw it in the man page at the time.)

So, well, I won't claim this is an exercise in elegancy. (Perhaps my next adventure will be figuring out how this works in jj, which supposedly has conflicts as more of a first-class concept.) But it got the job done in a couple of hours after fighting with rebase for a long time, the PR was reviewed, and now the Stockfish cluster branch is a little bit more alive.

22 January, 2026 07:45AM

January 21, 2026

hackergotchi for Evgeni Golov

Evgeni Golov

Validating cloud-init configs without being root

Somehow this whole DevOps thing is all about generating the wildest things from some (usually equally wild) template.

And today we're gonna generate YAML from ERB, what could possibly go wrong?!

Well, actually, quite a lot, so one wants to validate the generated result before using it to break systems at scale.

The YAML we generate is a cloud-init cloud-config, and while checking that we generated a valid YAML document is easy (and we were already doing that), it would be much better if we could check that cloud-init can actually use it.

Enter cloud-init schema, or so I thought. Turns out running cloud-init schema is rather broken without root privileges, as it tries to load a ton of information from the running system. This seems like a bug (or multiple), as the data should not be required for the validation of the schema itself. I've not found a way to disable that behavior.

Luckily, I know Python.

Enter evgeni-knows-better-and-can-write-python:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
from cloudinit.config.schema import get_schema, validate_cloudconfig_file, SchemaValidationError

try:
    valid = validate_cloudconfig_file(config_path=sys.argv[1], schema=get_schema())
    if not valid:
        raise RuntimeError("Schema is not valid")
except (SchemaValidationError, RuntimeError) as e:
    print(e)
    sys.exit(1)

The canonical1 version if this lives in the Foreman git repo, so go there if you think this will ever receive any updates.

The hardest part was to understand thevalidate_cloudconfig_file API, as it will sometimes raise an SchemaValidationError, sometimes a RuntimeError and sometimes just return False. No idea why. But the above just turns it into a couple of printed lines and a non zero exit code, unless of course there are no problems, then you get peaceful silence.

  1. "canonical", not "Canonical" ↩

21 January, 2026 07:42PM by evgeni

January 19, 2026

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RApiDatetime 0.0.11 on CRAN: Micro-Maintenance

A new (micro) maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN, coming only a good week after the 0.0.10 release which itself had a two year gap to its predecessor release.

RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change.

This release adds a single (and ) around one variable as the rchk container and service by Tomas now flagged this. Which is … somewhat peculiar, as this is old code also ‘borrowed’ from R itself but no point arguing so I just added this.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.11 (2026-01-19)

  • Add PROTECT (and UNPROTECT) to appease rchk

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

19 January, 2026 11:21PM

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

FOSDEM 2026

I'm going to FOSDEM 2026!

I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act!

The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell.

Please recommend to me any interesting talks! Here's a few that caught my eye:

Debian/related:

Containers:

Research:

Other:

19 January, 2026 02:12PM

Craig Small

WordPress 6.9 for Debian

The Debian packages for WordPress version 6.9 were uploaded today. The upstream website says you can add notes and move graphics around, making for an easier and nicer editing experience.

I’m not personally sure about that, generally if things change to much people get annoyed but it seems at least the initial simple stuff has stayed the same.

19 January, 2026 09:57AM by dropbear

Russell Coker

Furilabs FLX1s

The Aim

I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1] which is a phone running a modified version of Debian. I want to have a phone that runs all apps that I control and can observe and debug. Android is very good for what it does and there are security focused forks of Android which have a lot of potential, but for my use a Debian phone is what I want.

The FLX1s is not going to be my ideal phone, I am evaluating it for use as a daily-driver until a phone that meets my ideal criteria is built. In this post I aim to provide information to potential users about what it can do, how it does it, and how to get the basic functions working. I also evaluate how well it meets my usage criteria.

I am not anywhere near an average user. I don’t think an average user would ever even see one unless a more technical relative showed one to them. So while this phone could be used by an average user I am not evaluating it on that basis. But of course the features of the GUI that make a phone usable for an average user will allow a developer to rapidly get past the beginning stages and into more complex stuff.

Features

The Furilabs FLX1s [1] is a phone that is designed to run FuriOS which is a slightly modified version of Debian. The purpose of this is to run Debian instead of Android on a phone. It has switches to disable camera, phone communication, and microphone (similar to the Librem 5) but the one to disable phone communication doesn’t turn off Wifi, the only other phone I know of with such switches is the Purism Librem 5.

It has a 720*1600 display which is only slightly better than the 720*1440 display in the Librem 5 and PinePhone Pro. This doesn’t compare well to the OnePlus 6 from early 2018 with 2280*1080 or the Note9 from late 2018 with 2960*1440 – which are both phones that I’ve run Debian on. The current price is $US499 which isn’t that good when compared to the latest Google Pixel series, a Pixel 10 costs $US649 and has a 2424*1080 display and it also has 12G of RAM while the FLX1s only has 8G. Another annoying thing is how rounded the corners are, it seems that round corners that cut off the content are a standard practice nowadays, in my collection of phones the latest one I found with hard right angles on the display was a Huawei Mate 10 Pro which was released in 2017. The corners are rounder than the Note 9, this annoys me because the screen is not high resolution by today’s standards so losing the corners matters.

The default installation is Phosh (the GNOME shell for phones) and it is very well configured. Based on my experience with older phone users I think I could give a phone with this configuration to a relative in the 70+ age range who has minimal computer knowledge and they would be happy with it. Additionally I could set it up to allow ssh login and instead of going through the phone support thing of trying to describe every GUI setting to click on based on a web page describing menus for the version of Android they are running I could just ssh in and run diff on the .config directory to find out what they changed. Furilabs have done a very good job of setting up the default configuration, while Debian developers deserve a lot of credit for packaging the apps the Furilabs people have chosen a good set of default apps to install to get it going and appear to have made some noteworthy changes to some of them.

Droidian

The OS is based on Android drivers (using the same techniques as Droidian [2]) and the storage device has the huge number of partitions you expect from Android as well as a 110G Ext4 filesystem for the main OS.

The first issue with the Droidian approach of using an Android kernel and containers for user space code to deal with drivers is that it doesn’t work that well. There are 3 D state processes (uninterrupteable sleep – which usually means a kernel bug if the process remains in that state) after booting and doing nothing special. My tests running Droidian on the Note 9 also had D state processes, in this case they are D state kernel threads (I can’t remember if the Note 9 had regular processes or kernel threads stuck in D state). It is possible for a system to have full functionality in spite of some kernel threads in D state but generally it’s a symptom of things not working as well as you would hope.

The design of Droidian is inherently fragile. You use a kernel and user space code from Android and then use Debian for the rest. You can’t do everything the Android way (with the full OS updates etc) and you also can’t do everything the Debian way. The TOW Boot functionality in the PinePhone Pro is really handy for recovery [3], it allows the internal storage to be accessed as a USB mass storage device. The full Android setup with ADB has some OK options for recovery, but part Android and part Debian has less options. While it probably is technically possible to do the same things in regard to OS repair and reinstall the fact that it’s different from most other devices means that fixes can’t be done in the same way.

Applications

GUI

The system uses Phosh and Phoc, the GNOME system for handheld devices. It’s a very different UI from Android, I prefer Android but it is usable with Phosh.

IM

Chatty works well for Jabber (XMPP) in my tests. It supports Matrix which I didn’t test because I don’t desire the same program doing Matrix and Jabber and because Matrix is a heavy protocol which establishes new security keys for each login so I don’t want to keep logging in on new applications.

Chatty also does SMS but I couldn’t test that without the SIM caddy.

I use Nheko for Matrix which has worked very well for me on desktops and laptops running Debian.

Email

I am currently using Geary for email. It works reasonably well but is lacking proper management of folders, so I can’t just subscribe to the important email on my phone so that bandwidth isn’t wasted on less important email (there is a GNOME gitlab issue about this – see the Debian Wiki page about Mobile apps [4]).

Music

Music playing isn’t a noteworthy thing for a desktop or laptop, but a good music player is important for phone use. The Lollypop music player generally does everything you expect along with support for all the encoding formats including FLAC0 – a major limitation of most Android music players seems to be lack of support for some of the common encoding formats. Lollypop has it’s controls for pause/play and going forward and backward one track on the lock screen.

Maps

The installed map program is gnome-maps which works reasonably well. It gets directions via the Graphhopper API [5]. One thing we really need is a FOSS replacement for Graphhopper in GNOME Maps.

Delivery and Unboxing

I received my FLX1s on the 13th of Jan [1]. I had paid for it on the 16th of Oct but hadn’t received the email with the confirmation link so the order had been put on hold. But after I contacted support about that on the 5th of Jan they rapidly got it to me which was good. They also gave me a free case and screen protector to apologise, I don’t usually use screen protectors but in this case it might be useful as the edges of the case don’t even extend 0.5mm above the screen. So if it falls face down the case won’t help much.

When I got it there was an open space at the bottom where the caddy for SIMs is supposed to be. So I couldn’t immediately test VoLTE functionality. The contact form on their web site wasn’t working when I tried to report that and the email for support was bouncing.

Bluetooth

As a test of Bluetooth I connected it to my Nissan LEAF which worked well for playing music and I connected it to several Bluetooth headphones. My Thinkpad running Debian/Trixie doesn’t connect to the LEAF and to headphones which have worked on previous laptops running Debian and Ubuntu. A friend’s laptop running Debian/Trixie also wouldn’t connect to the LEAF so I suspect a bug in Trixie, I need to spend more time investigating this.

Wifi

Currently 5GHz wifi doesn’t work, this is a software bug that the Furilabs people are working on. 2.4GHz wifi works fine. I haven’t tested running a hotspot due to being unable to get 4G working as they haven’t yet shipped me the SIM caddy.

Docking

This phone doesn’t support DP Alt-mode or Thunderbolt docking so it can’t drive an external monitor. This is disappointing, Samsung phones and tablets have supported such things since long before USB-C was invented. Samsung DeX is quite handy for Android devices and that type feature is much more useful on a device running Debian than on an Android device.

Camera

The camera works reasonably well on the FLX1s. Until recently for the Librem 5 the camera didn’t work and the camera on my PinePhone Pro currently doesn’t work. Here are samples of the regular camera and the selfie camera on the FLX1s and the Note 9. I think this shows that the camera is pretty decent. The selfie looks better and the front camera is worse for the relatively close photo of a laptop screen – taking photos of computer screens is an important part of my work but I can probably work around that.

I wasn’t assessing this camera t find out if it’s great, just to find out if I have the sorts of problems I had before and it just worked. The Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones has always had decent specs including good cameras. Even though the Note 9 is old comparing to it is a respectable performance. The lighting was poor for all photos.

FLX1s


Note 9


Power Use

In 93 minutes having the PinePhone Pro, Librem 5, and FLX1s online with open ssh sessions from my workstation the PinePhone Pro went from 100% battery to 26%, the Librem 5 went from 95% to 69%, and the FLX1s went from 100% to 99%. The battery discharge rate of them was reported as 3.0W, 2.6W, and 0.39W respectively. Based on having a 16.7Wh battery 93 minutes of use should have been close to 4% battery use, but in any case all measurements make it clear that the FLX1s will have a much longer battery life. Including the measurement of just putting my fingers on the phones and feeling the temperature (FLX1s felt cool and the others felt hot).

The PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 have an optional “Caffeine mode” which I enabled for this test, without that enabled the phone goes into a sleep state and disconnects from Wifi. So those phones would use much less power with caffeine mode enabled, but they also couldn’t get fast response to notifications etc. I found the option to enable a Caffeine mode switch on the FLX1s but the power use was reported as being the same both with and without it.

Charging

One problem I found with my phone is that in every case it takes 22 seconds to negotiate power. Even when using straight USB charging (no BC or PD) it doesn’t draw any current for 22 seconds. When I connect it it will stay at 5V and varying between 0W and 0.1W (current rounded off to zero) for 22 seconds or so and then start charging. After the 22 second display the phone will make the tick sound indicating that it’s charging and the power meter will measure that it’s drawing some current.

I added the table from my previous post about phone charging speed [6] with an extra row for the FLX1s. For charging from my PC USB ports the results were the worst ever, the port that does BC did not work at all it was looping trying to negotiate after a 22 second negotiation delay the port would turn off. The non-BC port gave only 2.4W which matches the 2.5W given by the spec for a “High-power device” which is what that port is designed to give. In a discussion on the Purism forum about the Librem5 charging speed one of their engineers told me that the reason why their phone would draw 2A from that port was because the cable was identifying itself as a USB-C port not a “High-power device” port. But for some reason out of the 7 phones I tested the FLX1s and the One Plus 6 are the only ones to limit themselves to what the port is apparently supposed to do. Also the One Plus 6 charges slowly on every power supply so I don’t know if it is obeying the spec or just sucking.

On a cheap AliExpress charger the FLX1s gets 5.9V and on a USB battery it gets 5.8V. Out of all 42 combinations of device and charger I tested these were the only ones to involve more than 5.1V but less than 9V. I welcome comments suggesting an explanation.

The case that I received has a hole for the USB-C connector that isn’t wide enough for the plastic surrounds on most of my USB-C cables (including the Dell dock). Also to make a connection requires a fairly deep insertion (deeper than the One Plus 6 or the Note 9). So without adjustment I have to take the case off to charge it. It’s no big deal to adjust the hole (I have done it with other cases) but it’s an annoyance.

Phone Top z640 Bottom Z640 Monitor Ali Charger Dell Dock Battery Best Worst
FLX1s FAIL 5.0V 0.49A 2.4W 4.8V 1.9A 9.0W 5.9V 1.8A 11W 4.8V 2.1A 10W 5.8V 2.1A 12W 5.8V 2.1A 12W 5.0V 0.49A 2.4W
Note9 4.8V 1.0A 5.2W 4.8V 1.6A 7.5W 4.9V 2.0A 9.5W 5.1V 1.9A 9.7W 4.8V 2.1A 10W 5.1V 2.1A 10W 5.1V 2.1A 10W 4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
Pixel 7 pro 4.9V 0.80A 4.2W 4.8V 1.2A 5.9W 9.1V 1.3A 12W 9.1V 1.2A 11W 4.9V 1.8A 8.7W 9.0V 1.3A 12W 9.1V 1.3A 12W 4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
Pixel 8 4.7V 1.2A 5.4W 4.7V 1.5A 7.2W 8.9V 2.1A 19W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.8V 2.3A 11.0W 9.1V 2.6A 24W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
PPP 4.7V 1.2A 6.0W 4.8V 1.3A 6.8W 4.9V 1.4A 6.6W 5.0V 1.2A 5.8W 4.9V 1.4A 5.9W 5.1V 1.2A 6.3W 4.8V 1.3A 6.8W 5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
Librem 5 4.4V 1.5A 6.7W 4.6V 2.0A 9.2W 4.8V 2.4A 11.2W 12V 0.48A 5.8W 5.0V 0.56A 2.7W 5.1V 2.0A 10W 4.8V 2.4A 11.2W 5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
OnePlus6 5.0V 0.51A 2.5W 5.0V 0.50A 2.5W 5.0V 0.81A 4.0W 5.0V 0.75A 3.7W 5.0V 0.77A 3.7W 5.0V 0.77A 3.9W 5.0V 0.81A 4.0W 5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
Best 4.4V 1.5A 6.7W 4.6V 2.0A 9.2W 8.9V 2.1A 19W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.8V 2.3A 11.0W 9.1V 2.6A 24W

Conclusion

The Furilabs support people are friendly and enthusiastic but my customer experience wasn’t ideal. It was good that they could quickly respond to my missing order status and the missing SIM caddy (which I still haven’t received but believe is in the mail) but it would be better if such things just didn’t happen.

The phone is quite user friendly and could be used by a novice.

I paid $US577 for the FLX1s which is $AU863 by today’s exchange rates. For comparison I could get a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro Fold for $891 from Kogan (the major Australian mail-order company for technology) or a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro XL for $842. The Pixel 9 series has security support until 2031 which is probably longer than you can expect a phone to be used without being broken. So a phone with a much higher resolution screen that’s only one generation behind the latest high end phones and is refurbished will cost less. For a brand new phone a Pixel 8 Pro which has security updates until 2030 costs $874 and a Pixel 9A which has security updates until 2032 costs $861.

Doing what the Furilabs people have done is not a small project. It’s a significant amount of work and the prices of their products need to cover that. I’m not saying that the prices are bad, just that economies of scale and the large quantity of older stock makes the older Google products quite good value for money. The new Pixel phones of the latest models are unreasonably expensive. The Pixel 10 is selling new from Google for $AU1,149 which I consider a ridiculous price that I would not pay given the market for used phones etc. If I had a choice of $1,149 or a “feature phone” I’d pay $1,149. But the FLX1s for $863 is a much better option for me. If all I had to choose from was a new Pixel 10 or a FLX1s for my parents I’d get them the FLX1s.

For a FOSS developer a FLX1s could be a mobile test and development system which could be lent to a relative when their main phone breaks and the replacement is on order. It seems to be fit for use as a commodity phone. Note that I give this review on the assumption that SMS and VoLTE will just work, I haven’t tested them yet.

The UI on the FLX1s is functional and easy enough for a new user while allowing an advanced user to do the things they desire. I prefer the Android style and the Plasma Mobile style is closer to Android than Phosh is, but changing it is something I can do later. Generally I think that the differences between UIs matter more when on a desktop environment that could be used for more complex tasks than on a phone which limits what can be done by the size of the screen.

I am comparing the FLX1s to Android phones on the basis of what technology is available. But most people who would consider buying this phone will compare it to the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 as they have similar uses. The FLX1s beats both those phones handily in terms of battery life and of having everything just work. But it has the most non free software of the three and the people who want the $2000 Librem 5 that’s entirely made in the US won’t want the FLX1s.

This isn’t the destination for Debian based phones, but it’s a good step on the way to it and I don’t think I’ll regret this purchase.

Related posts:

  1. Phone Charging Speeds With Debian/Trixie One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro...
  2. Pixel 6A I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my...
  3. More About the Librem 5 I concluded my previous post about the Purism Librem 5...

19 January, 2026 06:43AM by etbe

Vincent Bernat

RAID 5 with mixed-capacity disks on Linux

Standard RAID solutions waste space when disks have different sizes. Linux software RAID with LVM uses the full capacity of each disk and lets you grow storage by replacing one or two disks at a time.

We start with four disks of equal size:

$ lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME TYPE  SIZE
vda  disk  101M
vdb  disk  101M
vdc  disk  101M
vdd  disk  101M

We create one partition on each of them:

$ sgdisk --zap-all --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vda
$ sgdisk --zap-all --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vdb
$ sgdisk --zap-all --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vdc
$ sgdisk --zap-all --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vdd
$ lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
NAME   TYPE  SIZE
vda    disk  101M
└─vda1 part  100M
vdb    disk  101M
└─vdb1 part  100M
vdc    disk  101M
└─vdc1 part  100M
vdd    disk  101M
└─vdd1 part  100M

We set up a RAID 5 device by assembling the four partitions:1

$ mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=raid5 --bitmap=internal --raid-devices=4 \
>   /dev/vda1 /dev/vdb1 /dev/vdc1 /dev/vdd1
$ lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
    NAME          TYPE    SIZE
    vda           disk    101M
┌┈▶ └─vda1        part    100M
┆   vdb           disk    101M
├┈▶ └─vdb1        part    100M
┆   vdc           disk    101M
├┈▶ └─vdc1        part    100M
┆   vdd           disk    101M
└┬▶ └─vdd1        part    100M
 └┈┈md0           raid5 292.5M
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdd1[4] vdc1[2] vdb1[1] vda1[0]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

We use LVM to create logical volumes on top of the RAID 5 device.

$ pvcreate /dev/md0
  Physical volume "/dev/md0" successfully created.
$ vgcreate data /dev/md0
  Volume group "data" successfully created
$ lvcreate -L 100m -n bits data
  Logical volume "bits" created.
$ lvcreate -L 100m -n pieces data
  Logical volume "pieces" created.
$ mkfs.ext4 -q /dev/data/bits
$ mkfs.ext4 -q /dev/data/pieces
$ lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
    NAME          TYPE    SIZE
    vda           disk    101M
┌┈▶ └─vda1        part    100M
┆   vdb           disk    101M
├┈▶ └─vdb1        part    100M
┆   vdc           disk    101M
├┈▶ └─vdc1        part    100M
┆   vdd           disk    101M
└┬▶ └─vdd1        part    100M
 └┈┈md0           raid5 292.5M
    ├─data-bits   lvm     100M
    └─data-pieces lvm     100M
$ vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  data   1   2   0 wz--n- 288.00m 88.00m

This gives us the following setup:

One RAID 5 device built from four partitions from four disks of equal capacity. The RAID device is part of an LVM volume group with two logical volumes.
RAID 5 setup with disks of equal capacity

We replace /dev/vda with a bigger disk. We add it back to the RAID 5 array after copying the partitions from /dev/vdb:

$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vdb1[1] vdd1[4] vdc1[2]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [_UUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ sgdisk --replicate=/dev/vda /dev/vdb
$ sgdisk --randomize-guids /dev/vda
$ mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/vda1
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vda1[5] vdb1[1] vdd1[4] vdc1[2]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

We do not use the additional capacity: this setup would not survive the loss of /dev/vda because we have no spare capacity. We need a second disk replacement, like /dev/vdb:

$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdc1[2]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ sgdisk --replicate=/dev/vdb /dev/vdc
$ sgdisk --randomize-guids /dev/vdb
$ mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/vdb1
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdb1[6] vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdc1[2]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

We create a new RAID 1 array by using the free space on /dev/vda and /dev/vdb:

$ sgdisk --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vda
$ sgdisk --new=0:0:0 -t 0:fd00 /dev/vdb
$ mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=raid1 --bitmap=internal --raid-devices=2 \
>   /dev/vda2 /dev/vdb2
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md1 : active raid1 vdb2[1] vda2[0]
      101312 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active raid5 vdb1[6] vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdc1[2]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

We add /dev/md1 to the volume group:

$ pvcreate /dev/md1
  Physical volume "/dev/md1" successfully created.
$ vgextend data /dev/md1
  Volume group "data" successfully extended
$ vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  data   2   2   0 wz--n- 384.00m 184.00m
$  lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
       NAME          TYPE    SIZE
       vda           disk    201M
   ┌┈▶ ├─vda1        part    100M
┌┈▶┆   └─vda2        part    100M
┆  ┆   vdb           disk    201M
┆  ├┈▶ ├─vdb1        part    100M
└┬▶┆   └─vdb2        part    100M
 └┈┆┈┈┈md1           raid1  98.9M
   ┆   vdc           disk    101M
   ├┈▶ └─vdc1        part    100M
   ┆   vdd           disk    101M
   └┬▶ └─vdd1        part    100M
    └┈┈md0           raid5 292.5M
       ├─data-bits   lvm     100M
       └─data-pieces lvm     100M

This gives us the following setup:2

One RAID 5 device built from four partitions and one RAID 1 device built from two partitions. The two last disks are smaller. The two RAID devices are part of a single LVM volume group.
Setup mixing both RAID 1 and RAID 5

We extend our capacity further by replacing /dev/vdc:

$ cat /proc/mdstat
md1 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 vda2[0] vdb2[1]
      101312 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UU_U]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ sgdisk --replicate=/dev/vdc /dev/vdb
$ sgdisk --randomize-guids /dev/vdc
$ mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/vdc1
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md1 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 vda2[0] vdb2[1]
      101312 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active raid5 vdc1[7] vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

Then, we convert /dev/md1 from RAID 1 to RAID 5:

$ mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 --add /dev/vdc2
mdadm: level of /dev/md1 changed to raid5
mdadm: added /dev/vdc2
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md1 : active raid5 vdc2[2] vda2[0] vdb2[1]
      202624 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active raid5 vdc1[7] vda1[5] vdd1[4] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ pvresize /dev/md1
$ vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  data   2   2   0 wz--n- 482.00m 282.00m

This gives us the following layout:

Two RAID 5 devices built from four disks of different sizes. The last disk is smaller and contains only one partition, while the others have two partitions: one for /dev/md0 and one for /dev/md1. The two RAID devices are part of a single LVM volume group.
RAID 5 setup with mixed-capacity disks using partitions and LVM

We further extend our capacity by replacing /dev/vdd:

$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vda1[5] vdc1[7] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md1 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vda2[0] vdc2[2] vdb2[1]
      202624 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ sgdisk --replicate=/dev/vdd /dev/vdc
$ sgdisk --randomize-guids /dev/vdd
$ mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/vdd1
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdd1[4] vda1[5] vdc1[7] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md1 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 vda2[0] vdc2[2] vdb2[1]
      202624 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

We grow the second RAID 5 array:

$ mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --raid-devices=4 --add /dev/vdd2
mdadm: added /dev/vdd2
$ cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid5 vdd1[4] vda1[5] vdc1[7] vdb1[6]
      299520 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md1 : active raid5 vdd2[3] vda2[0] vdc2[2] vdb2[1]
      303936 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
$ pvresize /dev/md1
$ vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  data   2   2   0 wz--n- 580.00m 380.00m
$ lsblk -Mo NAME,TYPE,SIZE
       NAME          TYPE    SIZE
       vda           disk    201M
   ┌┈▶ ├─vda1        part    100M
┌┈▶┆   └─vda2        part    100M
┆  ┆   vdb           disk    201M
┆  ├┈▶ ├─vdb1        part    100M
├┈▶┆   └─vdb2        part    100M
┆  ┆   vdc           disk    201M
┆  ├┈▶ ├─vdc1        part    100M
├┈▶┆   └─vdc2        part    100M
┆  ┆   vdd           disk    301M
┆  └┬▶ ├─vdd1        part    100M
└┬▶ ┆  └─vdd2        part    100M
 ┆  └┈┈md0           raid5 292.5M
 ┆     ├─data-bits   lvm     100M
 ┆     └─data-pieces lvm     100M
 └┈┈┈┈┈md1           raid5 296.8M

You can continue by replacing each disk one by one using the same steps. ♾️

  1. Write-intent bitmaps speed up recovery of the RAID array after a power failure by marking unsynchronized regions as dirty. They have an impact on performance, but I did not measure it myself. ↩︎

  2. In the lsblk output, /dev/md1 appears unused because the logical volumes do not use any space from it yet. Once you create more logical volumes or extend them, lsblk will reflect the usage. ↩︎

19 January, 2026 05:49AM by Vincent Bernat

Dima Kogan

mrcal 2.5 released!

mrcal 2.5 is out: the release notes. Once again, this is mostly a bug-fix release en route to the big new features coming in 3.0.

One cool thing is that these tools have now matured enough to no longer be considered experimental. They have been used with great success in lots of contexts across many different projects and organizations. Some highlights:

  • I've calibrated extremely wide lenses
  • and extremely narrow lenses
  • and joint systems containing many different kinds of lenses
  • with lots of cameras at the same time. The biggest single joint calibration I've done today had 10 cameras, but I'll almost certainly encounter bigger systems in the future
  • mrcal has been used to process both visible and thermal cameras
  • The new triangulated-feature capability has been used in a structure-from-motion context to compute the world geometry on-line.
  • mrcal has been used with weird experimental setups employing custom calibration objects and single-view solves
  • mrcal has calibrated joint camera-LIDAR systems
  • and joint camera-IMU systems
  • Lots of students use mrcal as part of PhotonVision, the toolkit used by teams in the FIRST Robotics Competition

Some of the above is new, and not yet fully polished and documented and tested, but it works.

In mrcal 2.5, most of the implementation of some new big features is written and committed, but it's still incomplete. The new stuff is there, but is lightly tested and documented. This will be completed eventually in mrcal 3.0:

  • Cross-reprojection uncertainty, to be able to perform full calibrations with a splined model and without a chessboard. mrcal-show-projection-uncertainty --method cross-reprojection-rrp-Jfp is available today, and works in the usual moving-chessboard-stationary camera case. Fully boardless coming later.
  • More general view of uncertainty and diffs. I want to support extrinsics-only and/or intrinsics computations-only in lots of scenarios. Uncertainty in point solves is already available in some conditions, for instance if the points are fixed. New mrcal-show-stereo-pair-diff tool reports an extrinsics+intrinsics diff between two calibrations of a stereo pair; experimental analyses/extrinsics-stability.py tool reports an extrinsics-only diff. These are in contrast to the intrinsics-only uncertainty and diffs in the existing mrcal-show-projection-diff and mrcal-show-projection-uncertainty tools. Some documentation in the uncertainty and differencing pages.
  • Implicit point solves, using the triangulation routines in the optimization cost function. Should produce much more efficient structure-from-motion solves. This is all the "triangulated-features" stuff. The cost function is primarily built around _mrcal_triangulated_error(). This is demoed in test/test-sfm-triangulated-points.py. And I've been using _mrcal_triangulated_error() in structure-from-motion implementations within other optimization routines.

mrcal is quite good already, and will be even better in the future. Try it today!

19 January, 2026 12:00AM by Dima Kogan

January 17, 2026

Simon Josefsson

Backup of S3 Objects Using rsnapshot

I’ve been using rsnapshot to take backups of around 10 servers and laptops for well over 15 years, and it is a remarkably reliable tool that has proven itself many times. Rsnapshot uses rsync over SSH and maintains a temporal hard-link file pool. Once rsnapshot is configured and running, on the backup server, you get a hardlink farm with directories like this for the remote server:

/backup/serverA.domain/.sync/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/daily.0/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/daily.1/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/daily.2/foo
...
/backup/serverA.domain/daily.6/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/weekly.0/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/weekly.1/foo
...
/backup/serverA.domain/monthly.0/foo
/backup/serverA.domain/monthly.1/foo
...
/backup/serverA.domain/yearly.0/foo

I can browse and rescue files easily, going back in time when needed.

The rsnapshot project README explains more, there is a long rsnapshot HOWTO although I usually find the rsnapshot man page the easiest to digest.

I have stored multi-TB Git-LFS data on GitLab.com for some time. The yearly renewal is coming up, and the price for Git-LFS storage on GitLab.com is now excessive (~$10.000/year). I have reworked my work-flow and finally migrated debdistget to only store Git-LFS stubs on GitLab.com and push the real files to S3 object storage. The cost for this is barely measurable, I have yet to run into the €25/month warning threshold.

But how do you backup stuff stored in S3?

For some time, my S3 backup solution has been to run the minio-client mirror command to download all S3 objects to my laptop, and rely on rsnapshot to keep backups of this. While 4TB NVME’s are relatively cheap, I’ve felt that this disk and network churn on my laptop is unsatisfactory for quite some time.

What is a better approach?

I find S3 hosting sites fairly unreliable by design. Only a couple of clicks in your web browser and you have dropped 100TB of data. Or by someone else who steal your plaintext-equivalent cookie. Thus, I haven’t really felt comfortable using any S3-based backup option. I prefer to self-host, although continously running a mirror job is not sufficient: if I accidentally drop the entire S3 object store, my mirror run will remove all files locally too.

The rsnapshot approach that allows going back in time and having data on self-managed servers feels superior to me.

What if we could use rsnapshot with a S3 client instead of rsync?

Someone else asked about this several years ago, and the suggestion was to use the fuse-based s3fs which sounded unreliable to me. After some experimentation, working around some hard-coded assumption in the rsnapshot implementation, I came up with a small configuration pattern and a wrapper tool to implement what I desired.

Here is my configuration snippet:

cmd_rsync    /backup/s3/s3rsync
rsync_short_args    -Q
rsync_long_args    --json --remove
lockfile    /backup/s3/rsnapshot.pid
snapshot_root    /backup/s3
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-gnuinos    ./debdistget-gnuinos
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-tacos  ./debdistget-tacos
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-diffos ./debdistget-diffos
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-pureos ./debdistget-pureos
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-kali   ./debdistget-kali
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-devuan ./debdistget-devuan
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-trisquel   ./debdistget-trisquel
backup    s3:://hetzner/debdistget-debian ./debdistget-debian

The idea is to save a backup of a couple of S3 buckets under /backup/s3/.

I have some scripts that take a complete rsnapshot.conf file and append my per-directory configuration so that this becomes a complete configuration. If you are curious how I roll this, backup-all invokes backup-one appending my rsnapshot.conf template with the snippet above.

The s3rsync wrapper script is the essential hack to convert rsnapshot’s rsync parameters into something that talks S3 and the script is as follows:

#!/bin/sh

set -eu

S3ARG=
for ARG in "$@"; do
    case $ARG in
    s3:://*) S3ARG="$S3ARG "$(echo $ARG | sed -e 's,s3:://,,');;
    -Q*) ;;
    *) S3ARG="$S3ARG $ARG";;
    esac
done

echo /backup/s3/mc mirror $S3ARG

exec /backup/s3/mc mirror $S3ARG

It uses the minio-client tool. I first tried s3cmd but its sync command read all files to compute MD5 checksums every time you invoke it, which is very slow. The mc mirror command is blazingly fast since it only compare mtime’s, just like rsync or git.

First you need to store credentials for your S3 bucket. These are stored in plaintext in ~/.mc/config.json which I find to be sloppy security practices, but I don’t know of any better way to do this. Replace AKEY and SKEY with your access token and secret token from your S3 provider:

/backup/s3/mc alias set hetzner AKEY SKEY

If I invoke a sync job for a fully synced up directory the output looks like this:

root@hamster /backup# /run/current-system/profile/bin/rsnapshot -c /backup/s3/rsnapshot.conf -V sync
Setting locale to POSIX "C"
echo 1443 > /backup/s3/rsnapshot.pid 
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-gnuinos \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-gnuinos 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-gnuinos /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-gnuinos
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-tacos \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-tacos 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-tacos /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-tacos
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-diffos \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-diffos 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-diffos /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-diffos
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-pureos \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-pureos 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-pureos /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-pureos
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-kali \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-kali 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-kali /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-kali
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-devuan \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-devuan 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-devuan /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-devuan
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-trisquel \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-trisquel 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-trisquel /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-trisquel
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
/backup/s3/s3rsync -Qv --json --remove s3:://hetzner/debdistget-debian \
    /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-debian 
/backup/s3/mc mirror --json --remove hetzner/debdistget-debian /backup/s3/.sync//debdistget-debian
{"status":"success","total":0,"transferred":0,"duration":0,"speed":0}
touch /backup/s3/.sync/ 
rm -f /backup/s3/rsnapshot.pid 
/run/current-system/profile/bin/logger -p user.info -t rsnapshot[1443] \
    /run/current-system/profile/bin/rsnapshot -c /backup/s3/rsnapshot.conf \
    -V sync: completed successfully 
root@hamster /backup#

You can tell from the paths that this machine runs Guix. This was the first production use of the Guix System for me, and the machine has been running since 2015 (with the occasional new hard drive). Before, I used rsnapshot on Debian, but some stable release of Debian dropped the rsnapshot package, paving the way for me to test Guix in production on a non-Internet exposed machine. Unfortunately, mc is not packaged in Guix, so you will have to install it from the MinIO Client GitHub page manually.

Running the daily rotation looks like this:

root@hamster /backup# /run/current-system/profile/bin/rsnapshot -c /backup/s3/rsnapshot.conf -V daily
Setting locale to POSIX "C"
echo 1549 > /backup/s3/rsnapshot.pid 
mv /backup/s3/daily.5/ /backup/s3/daily.6/ 
mv /backup/s3/daily.4/ /backup/s3/daily.5/ 
mv /backup/s3/daily.3/ /backup/s3/daily.4/ 
mv /backup/s3/daily.2/ /backup/s3/daily.3/ 
mv /backup/s3/daily.1/ /backup/s3/daily.2/ 
mv /backup/s3/daily.0/ /backup/s3/daily.1/ 
/run/current-system/profile/bin/cp -al /backup/s3/.sync /backup/s3/daily.0 
rm -f /backup/s3/rsnapshot.pid 
/run/current-system/profile/bin/logger -p user.info -t rsnapshot[1549] \
    /run/current-system/profile/bin/rsnapshot -c /backup/s3/rsnapshot.conf \
    -V daily: completed successfully 
root@hamster /backup#

Hopefully you will feel inspired to take backups of your S3 buckets now!

17 January, 2026 10:04PM by simon

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

Honest Jon's lightly-used Starships

No man’s Sky (or as it’s known in our house, "spaceship game") is a space exploration/sandbox game that was originally released 10 years ago. Back then I tried it on my brother‘s PS4 but I couldn’t get into it. In 2022 it launched for the Nintendo Switch1 and the game finally clicked for me.

I play it very casually. I mostly don’t play at all, except sometimes when there are time-limited “expeditions” running, which I find refreshing, and usually have some exclusives as a reward for play.

One of the many things you can do in the game is collect star ships. I started keeping a list of notable ones I’ve found, and I’ve decided to occasionally blog about them.

The Horizon Vector NX spaceship

The Horizon Vector NX is a small sporty ship that players on Nintendo Switch could claim within the first month or so after it launched. The colour scheme resembles the original “neon” switch controllers. Although the ship type occurs naturally in the game in other configurations, I think differently-painted wings are unique to this ship.

For most of the last 4 years, my copy of this ship was confined to the Switch, until November 2024, when they added cross-save capability to the game. I was then able to access the ship when playing on Linux (or Mac).

  1. The game runs very well natively on Mac, flawlessly on Steam for Linux, but struggles on the origins switch. It’s a marvel it runs there at all.↩

17 January, 2026 08:02PM

January 16, 2026

Swiss JuristGate

Luzern Lion Monument, Albanian Female Whistleblowers: Swiss jurists were cowards

In a previous post, we looked at how Debianists wanted to use Swiss police to find and arrest whisteblowers who use Proton Mail. As it turns out, the Swiss police had already arrested the Albanian female whisteblowers at Zurich airport in 2017.

After being released from custody, the whistleblowers visited the famous Lion monument in the city of Luzern.

This is Anisa Kuci and Kristi Progri from the famous Open Labs hackerspace in Albania, now working for GNOME Foundation:

Anisa Kuci, Kristi Progri, GNOME

 

In medieval times, Swiss guards were mercenaries who bravely offered protection to kings and queens in all the royal courts of Europe. Their role was similar to that of the Cuban guards assigned to protect the president of Venezuela.

Today, the only remaining Swiss guard unit protects the Pope in the Vatican. The other units were all disbanded.

The Lion monument honors 760 guards who lost their lives in the service of the French royal court. They were overrun by a much larger force, they held their ground only to be massacred during the French Revolution in 1792.

While the Swiss guards were commended for their bravery, Swiss jurists, such as those we examine on the JuristGate web site have been nothing but despicable cowards.

When the Software Freedom Institute was founded in 2021, IBM Red Hat was terrified and sent lawyerists to harass the Institute. The Institute had purchased Swiss legal protection insurance and immediately asks the Swiss jurists to help defend the Institute from IBM Red Hat. The Jurists were terrified and made up excuses, running away to hide behind the skirts of mother Helvetica:

Subject: 	Re: Fwd: Red Hat, Inc. v. Daniel Pocock / Software Freedom Institute SA - FA2201001980642 - Commencement - E-mail 3/3
Date: 	Fri, 18 Feb 2022 14:18:22 -0800
From: 	PT Partners <info@ptpartners.ch>
To: 	daniel@softwarefreedom.institute

Chère cliente, cher client, cher partenaire,

Votre message a bien été réceptionné. Nous vous répondrons aussi vite que possible. Suite à l'envoi de votre courriel, merci de ne pas écrire de mails supplémentaires jusqu'à la prise de contact de l'un de nos collaborateurs.

En raison des féries judiciaires, nos délais de réponse minimums sont suspendus. Nous vous reviendrons cependant au plus vite.

Cordialement,

-- 
Mathieu Parreaux
Associé

     Parreaux, Thiébaud & Partners
     Département juridique
     Avenue des Grandes Communes 8
     1213 Petit-Lancy
     022 342 38 94

Second response, four days later...

Subject: 	Re: Fwd: Red Hat, Inc. v. Daniel Pocock / Software Freedom Institute SA - FA2201001980642 - Commencement - E-mail 3/3
Date: 	Tue, 22 Feb 2022 06:39:55 -0800
From: 	Mathieu Parreaux <m.parreaux@ptpartners.ch>
To: 	daniel@softwarefreedom.institute

Bonjour,

Merci pour votre courriel. Je le traiterai aussi rapidement que possible. Mes délais de réponse sont de 1 à 3 jours ouvrables. Si vous êtes un client Platinum et que le cas est urgent, vous pouvez me joindre sur mon portable personnel.

Cordialement,

-- 
/     [L’excellence au travers des actes]/
/
/__ /    Mathieu Parreaux

      Managing Partner
      https://www.ptpartners.ch/

      Siège de Genève____
      Av. des Grandes-Communes 8
      1213 Petit-Lancy
      022 342 38 94

A skeleton response was prepared by the Institute and sent to the jurists to help them get started:

Subject: 	Re: Fwd: Red Hat, Inc. v. Daniel Pocock / Software Freedom Institute SA - FA2201001980642 - Commencement - E-mail 3/3
Date: 	Tue, 22 Feb 2022 16:01:54 +0100
From: 	Luc Zimmermann <l.zimmermann@ptpartners.ch>
To: 	Daniel Pocock <daniel@softwarefreedom.institute>
CC: 	PT Partners <info@ptpartners.ch>, Mathieu Parreaux <m.parreaux@ptpartners.ch>

Cher Monsieur,

Merci de votre message et ses annexes.

J'ai répondu audit message ce jour sur la chaîne d'e-mails principale/pertinente.

Avec mes sentiments dévoués,

/
/
/__ /    Luc Zimmermann

      Titulaire du brevet d'avocat
      https://www.ptpartners.ch/

      Siège de Genève____
      Avenue des Grandes-Communes 8
      1213 Petit-Lancy
      022 342 38 94

Le mar. 22 févr. 2022 à 15:39, Daniel Pocock  a écrit :


    Bonjour

    Ils demandent un réponse ce semaine, jusqu'à 28.02.2022

    J'ai trouvé quelque preuves et j'ai ecrit un skeleton du réponse,
    ci-joint

    Daniel

The following morning, Luc Zimmermann sends an excuse about not helping victims of UDRP harassment in Switzerland.

Subject: 	Re: Fwd: Red Hat, Inc. v. Daniel Pocock / Software Freedom Institute SA - FA2201001980642 - Commencement - E-mail 3/3
Date: 	Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:32:52 +0100
From: 	Luc Zimmermann <l.zimmermann@ptpartners.ch>
To: 	Daniel Pocock <daniel@softwarefreedom.institute>
CC: 	PT Partners <info@ptpartners.ch>, Mathieu Parreaux <m.parreaux@ptpartners.ch>

Cher Monsieur,

Merci de votre retour.

Je prends bonne note qu'il ne s'agit pas du même cas que celui pour lequel je vous ai adressé un e-mail séparé de réponse le 22.02.22 (à 16h01).

Nous prenons en charge des cas qui relèvent du droit suisse, p. ex. un litige à l'étranger qui a un for en Suisse et a pour droit applicable le droit suisse, de sorte que, comme dit, ici, nous ne pouvons entrer en matière.

Vous remerciant de votre compréhension, je vous prie d'agréer, cher Monsieur, mes salutations distinguées,

/
/

/__ /    Luc Zimmermann

      Titulaire du brevet d'avocat
      https://www.ptpartners.ch/

      Siège de Genève____
      Avenue des Grandes-Communes 8
      1213 Petit-Lancy
      022 342 38 94

The jurist who sent these excuses, Luc Zimmermann, is also a member of Le Centre (The Center) political party and he has a prominent role in the Geneva Municipal Council. The same political party has been linked to conflicts of interest in the prosecution of the Crans-Montana tragedy.

The Institute's director had to spend a whole Sunday preparing the response to the UDRP harassment on his own.

The legal panel ruled that the UDRP case was created for the purpose of harassing the Institute and it was an abuse of the administrative procedure.

In these circumstances, why were the Swiss jurists so cowardly?

In their marketing, they claim that no case is ever rejected.

Consider the irony: the cowardly jurists were unwilling to defend the UDRP case even though the Institute was on the right side of the law. Yet it was the jurists themselves who were usurping the reputation of the legendary Tissot boss Francois Thiébaud.

16 January, 2026 08:00PM

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppSpdlog 0.0.26 on CRAN: Another Microfix

Version 0.0.26 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN moments ago, and will be uploaded to Debian and built for r2u shortly. The (nice) documentation site has been refreshed too. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

Brian Ripley noticed an infelicity when building under C++20 which he is testing hard and fast. Sadly, this came a day late for yesterday’s upload of release 0.0.25 with another trivial fix so another incremental release was called for. We already accommodated C++20 and its use of std::format (in lieu of the included fmt::format) but had not turned it on unconditionally. We do so now, but offer an opt-out for those who prefer the previous build type.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.26 (2026-01-16)

  • Under C++20 or later, switch to using std::format to avoid a compiler nag that CRAN now complains about

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

16 January, 2026 02:26PM

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

Ye Gods

Via (I think) @mcc on the Fediverse, I learned of GetMusic: a sort-of "clearing house" for Free Bandcamp codes. I think the way it works is, some artists release a limited set of download codes for their albums in order to promote them, and GetMusic help them to keep track of that, and helps listeners to discover them.

GetMusic mail me occasionally, and once they highlighted an album The Arcane & Paranormal Earth which they described as "Post-Industrial in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound with shades of Aphex Twin, Autechre and assorted film music."

Well that description hooked me immediately but I missed out on the code. However, I sampled the album on Bandcamp directly a few times as well as a few of his others (Ye Gods is a side-project of Antoni Maiovvi, which itself is a pen-name) and liked them very much. I picked up the full collection of Ye Gods albums in one go for 30% off.

Here's a stand-out track:

On Earth by Ye Gods

So I guess this service works! Although I didn't actually get a free code in this instance, it promoted the artist, introduced me to something I really liked and drove a sale.

16 January, 2026 10:14AM

January 15, 2026

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppSpdlog 0.0.25 on CRAN: Microfix

Version 0.0.25 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN right now, and will be uploaded to Debian and built for r2u shortly along with a minimal refresh of the documentation site. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This release fixes a minuscule cosmetic issue from the previous release a week ago. We rely on two #defines that R sets to signal to spdlog that we are building in the R context (which matters for the R-specific logging sink, and picks up something Gabi added upon my suggestion at the very start of this package). But I use the same #defines to now check in Rcpp that we are building with R and, in this case, wrongly conclude R headers have already been installed so Rcpp (incorrectly) nags about that. The solution is to add two #undefine and proceed as normal (with Rcpp controlling and taking care of R header includion too) and that is what we do here. All good now, no nags from a false positive.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.25 (2026-01-15)

  • Ensure #define signaling R build (needed with spdlog) is unset before including R headers to not falsely triggering message from Rcpp

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

15 January, 2026 01:20PM

January 14, 2026

Swiss JuristGate

Milenium Crypto, Atreide Ventures SAS, Badra Fettache linked to Mathieu Elias Parreaux

Financial markets are undergoing rapid change at the moment and mum-and-dad investors are looking for advice and inspiration.

A Youtube channel has appeared using the name MileniumCrypto ( Youtube link) to help people. The channel publishes French language videos recorded by an anonymous male voice.

The channel has a link to a French web site, https://www.milenium-crypto.fr which links to another web site https://www.atreide-ventures.fr. That web site, in turn is associated with a French company using the name Atreide Ventures SAS (SIREN 931 427 561).

The company was founded in July 2024 using another French company, Hamilton Invest (SIREN 908 634 793) as a stooge director.

Hamilton Invest itself has a single director, Marlon (Sean) Hamilton-Bekhti, born in January 1990. Mr Hamilton-Bekhti is associated with at least seven French companies and two British companies Light Keys Conciergerie Limited and Lowlands Inc Limited. The British records at Companies House tell us he is a French citizen with a domicile in Switzerland.

There is another investment company with exactly the same name operating in Hong Kong and the Philipines. The web site https://atreidesventures.co/ has been registered since 5 October 2023. Their web site has a picture of their directors and they appear to be a completely different group of people. It looks like the French scam company has chosen to use the name of an existing business to obfuscate themselves behind the MileniumCrypto brand.

For the first nine months the business was trading, nobody sending investments to the company would have any way to know it was connected to the Parreaux community.

Approximately nine months later, in March 2025, the French Atreide Ventures SAS company removed the first stooge director Hamilton Invest and replaced it with Didier Simon René Parreaux, born January 1960.

We found him living in Thonex, Switzerland and linked to the company Hach Lange Sàrl. Here we found a photo of him. We presume he is related to Mathieu Elias Parreaux (bankrupt and banned), Hodan Parreaux-Hussein, Marla Sofia Parreaux and Arnaud Parreaux.

Didier Parreaux only remained as a director for three months. On 16 July 2025, he was removed and replaced by two new directors, Marla Sofia Parreaux and Badra Fettache, born in November 1973.

On 10 October 2025, the scam company Atreide Ventures SAS changed its business address from the French village of Gaillard, on the Swiss border, to the address 7 impasse Paquet-Merel, 69009, Lyon. Lyon is the global headquarters of Interpol.

The new address appears to be a residential building and the French residence of Madame Badra Fettache.

Badra Fettache has also operated a Swiss business, ASC Consulting in Geneva and more remarkably, when Mathieu Elias Parreaux became bankrupt, Badra took over control of one of his other companies, Polytek SA.

We found that Badra Fettache is also listed as a former employee of the city of Lyon.

Compare the man's voice in the milenium-crypto videos on Youtube to the recordings of Mathieu Parreaux on Radio Lac.

milenium-crypto is really Mathieu Parreaux asking more French victims to advance money into another Ponzi scheme.

On 24 October 2025, the French Autorité Marchés Financiers published an official warning about the web site atreide-ventures.fr.

Keen observers of the scandal watched all the videos and found a moment where Parreaux's desktop is visible and we can see his name there too.

Cryptocurrency is a great concept for specialists but for everybody else, it is simply a new way to get scammed. Beware.

Remember, Mathieu Elias Parreaux is a Swiss jurist and he started his previous business, Parreaux, Thiébaud & Partners while working as the greffier in the Tribunal of Monthey, Canton Valais.

The Swiss financial regulator knew about his activities for five years before they shut him down.

The French authorities have published a warning about his business but they did not shut the business down. The business is still trading and publishing videos every few days.

Please see the rest of the JuristGate reports.

14 January, 2026 10:30PM

Fancy Concept, Marla Sofia Parreaux & cryptocurrency scandals

The bankruptcy of Mathieu Parreaux published his date of birth (11 November 1992) and his home address at Allée des Roseaux 1, Châtelaine 1219, Switzerland. He is a Swiss citizen originating from the commune of La Brévine, Canton Neuchatel.

Searching the address in public business records, we find a sole trader using the business name Fancy Concept. The business is at the same address and the proprietor is Marla Sofia Parreaux. Marla's date of birth appears in another public business register as August 1997. Marla is also linked to addresses in France, in both Gaillard and Lyon Vaise, for a business Atreide Ventures SAS (931 427 561) which is a front for Milenium Crypto.

Based on these dates of birth, people have speculated whether Marla is the wife, sister or cousin of ringleader Mathieu Parreaux.

We could not find any public web site for Fancy Concept in Switzerland. We found various other businesses around Europe using exactly the same name, including Fancy Concept in Bari, Italy and Fancy Concept in Sterrebeek, Belgium.

What was the purpose of creating this business? Did the Parreaux community hope to benefit from the brand created by other businesses using the same generic name? Or did they hope to be obfuscated by the very generic name and the presence of many similar names in search results?

With a very generic business name like this, it could just as easily be selling women's products, cryptocurrencies or even both at the same time.

Mathieu Parreaux was subject to a bankruptcy procedure in 2023. Marla Parreaux began the new business Fancy Concept on 26 September 2024. Did this business provide a way for Mathieu Parreaux to continue trading under a business registered to his wife?

Atreide Ventures was created in France at almost exactly the same time but using other directors. Marla Parreaux was only added as a director in 2025. When Atreide Ventures was created, they stated the business objective:

Activités auxiliaires de services financiers et d'assurance

Translated to English, they state that Atreide Ventures provides auxiliary services for the finance and insurance industries. Yet FINMA's order from April 2023 bans Mathieu Parreaux from working in insurance.

Did Marla Parreaux even know that a business had been created in her name? Remember, Mathieu Parreaux and some of his jurist colleagues had also worked as greffier in the tribunal. He may have been able to use some mechanism to complete the business registration without Marla Parreaux being aware her name was used as a director.

While that seems far-fetched, remember they had fooled a woman in France to quit her old job and come and work for them immediately before FINMA shut down the whole scam.

Please see the rest of the JuristGate reports.

14 January, 2026 10:00PM

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppSimdJson 0.1.15 on CRAN: New Upstream, Some Maintenance

A brand new release 0.1.15 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.

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 instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version updates to the current 4.2.4 upstream release. It also updates the RcppExports.cpp file with ‘glue’ between C++ and R. We want move away from using Rf_error() (as Rcpp::stop() is generally preferable). Packages (such as this one) that are declaring an interface have an actual Rf_error() call generated in RcppExports.cpp which can protect which is what current Rcpp code generation does. Long story short, a minor internal reason.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.15 (2026-01-14)

  • simdjson was upgraded to version 4.2.4 (Dirk in #97

  • RcppExports.cpp was regenerated to aid a Rcpp transition

  • Standard maintenance updates for continuous integration and URLs

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

14 January, 2026 04:11PM

gunsales 0.1.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

An update to the gunsales package is now on CRAN. As in the last update nine years ago (!!), changes are mostly internal. An upcoming dplyr change requires a switch from the old and soon to-be-removed ‘underscored’ verb form; that was kindly addressed in an incoming pull request. We also updated the CI scripts a few times during this period as needed, and switched to using Authors@R, and refreshed and updated a number of URL references.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

14 January, 2026 11:21AM

hackergotchi for Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf

The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research

This post is an unpublished review for The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research

David Patterson does not need an introduction. Being the brain behind many of the inventions that shaped the computing industry (repeatedly) over the past 40 years, when he put forward an opinion article in Communications of the ACM targeting the current day political waves in the USA, I could not avoid choosing it to write this review.

Patterson worked for a a public university (University of California at Berkeley) between 1976 and 2016, and in this article he argues how government-funded academic research (GoFAR) allows for faster, more effective and freer development than private sector-funded research would, putting his own career milestones as an example of how public money that went to his research has easily been amplified by a factor of 10,000:1 for the country’s economy, and 1,000:1 particularly for the government.

Patterson illustrates this quoting five of the “home-run” research projects he started and pursued with government funding, eventually spinning them off as successful startups:

  • RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing): Microprocessor architecture that reduces the complexity and power consumption of CPUs, yielding much smaller and more efficient processors.
  • RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks): Patterson experimented with a way to present a series of independent hard drive units as if they were a single, larger one, leading to increases in capacity and reliability beyond what the industry could provide in single drives, for a fraction of the price.
  • NOW (Network Of Workstations): Introduced what we now know as computer clusters (in contrast of large-scale massively multiprocessed cache-coherent systems known as “supercomputers”), which nowadays power over 80% of the Top500 supercomputer list and are the computer platform of choice of practically all data centers.
  • RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Lab): Pursued the technology for data centers to be self-healing and self-managing, testing and pushing early cloud-scalability limits
  • ParLab (Parallel Computing Lab): Given the development of massively parallel processing inside even simple microprocessors, this lab explores how to improve designs of parallel software and hardware, presenting the ground works that proved that inherently parallel GPUs were better than CPUs at machine learning tasks. It also developed the RISC-V open instruction set architecture.

Patterson identifies principles for the projects he has led, that are specially compatible with the ways research works at universitary systems: Multidisciplinary teams, demonstrative usable artifacts, seven- to ten-year impact horizons, five-year sunset clauses (to create urgency and to lower opportunity costs), physical proximity of collaborators, and leadership followed on team success rather than individual recognition.

While it could be argued that it’s easy to point at Patterson’s work as a success example while he is by far not the average academic, the points he makes on how GoFAR research has been fundamental for the advance of science and technology, but also of biology, medicine, and several other fields are very clear.

14 January, 2026 12:29AM

January 13, 2026

hackergotchi for Steinar H. Gunderson

Steinar H. Gunderson

plocate 1.1.24 released

I've released version 1.1.24 of plocate, as usual dominated by small patches from external contributors. The changelog is below:

plocate 1.1.24, January 13th, 2026

  - Improve error handling on synchronous reads. Reported by
    Björn Försterling.

  - Remove ConditionACPower=true from the systemd unit file,
    to fix an issue where certain charging patterns prevent
    updatedb from ever running on laptops. Patch by Manfred Schwarb.

  - Add a new option --config-file for changing the path of
    updatedb.conf. Patch by Yehuda Bernáth.

As always, you can get it from the plocate page or your favourite Linux distribution (packages to Debian unstable are on their way up, others will surely follow soon).

13 January, 2026 10:57PM

hackergotchi for Thomas Lange

Thomas Lange

30.000 FAIme jobs created in 7 years

The number of FAIme jobs has reached 30.000. Yeah!
At the end of this November the FAIme web service for building customized ISOs turns 7 years old. It had reached 10.000 jobs in March 2021 and 20.000 jobs were reached in June 2023. A nice increase of the usage.

Here are some statistics for the jobs processed in 2024:

Type of jobs

3%     cloud image
11%     live ISO
86%     install ISO

Distribution

2%     bullseye
8%     trixie
12%     ubuntu 24.04
78%     bookworm

Misc

  • 18%   used a custom postinst script
  • 11%   provided their ssh pub key for passwordless root login
  • 50%   of the jobs didn't included a desktop environment at all, the others used GNOME, XFCE or KDE or the Ubuntu desktop the most.
  • The biggest ISO was a FAIme job which created a live ISO with a desktop and some additional packages This job took 30min to finish and the resulting ISO was 18G in size.

Execution Times

The cloud and live ISOs need more time for their creation because the FAIme server needs to unpack and install all packages. For the install ISO the packages are only downloaded. The amount of software packages also affects the build time. Every ISO is build in a VM on an old 6-core E5-1650 v2. Times given are calculated from the jobs of the past two weeks.

Job type     Avg     Max
install no desktop     1 min     2 min
install GNOME     2 min     5 min

The times for Ubuntu without and with desktop are one minute higher than those mentioned above.

Job type     Avg     Max
live no desktop     4 min     6 min
live GNOME     8 min     11 min

The times for cloud images are similar to live images.

A New Feature

For a few weeks now, the system has been showing the number of jobs ahead of you in the queue when you submit a job that cannot be processed immediately.

The Next Milestone

At the end of this years the FAI project will be 25 years old. If you have a success story of your FAI usage to share please post it to the linux-fai mailing list or send it to me. Do you know the FAI questionnaire ? A lot of reports are already available.

Here's an overview what happened in the past 20 years in the FAI project.

About FAIme

FAIme is the service for building your own customized ISO via a web interface. You can create an installation or live ISO or a cloud image. Several Debian releases can be selected and also Ubuntu server or Ubuntu desktop installation ISOs can be customized. Multiple options are available like selecting a desktop and the language, adding your own package list, choosing a partition layout, adding a user, choosing a backports kernel, adding a postinst script and some more.

13 January, 2026 02:23PM

Simon Josefsson

Debian Libre Live 13.3.0 is released!

Following up on my initial announcement about Debian Libre Live I am happy to report on continued progress and the release of Debian Libre Live version 13.3.0.

Since both this and the previous 13.2.0 release are based on the stable Debian trixie release, there really isn’t a lot of major changes but instead incremental minor progress for the installation process. Repeated installations has a tendency to reveal bugs, and we have resolved the apt sources list confusion for Calamares-based installations and a couple of other nits. This release is more polished and we are not aware of any known remaining issues with them (unlike for earlier versions which were released with known problems), although we conservatively regard the project as still in beta. A Debian Libre Live logo is needed before marking this as stable, any graphically talented takers? (Please base it on the Debian SVG upstream logo image.)

We provide GNOME, KDE, and XFCE desktop images, as well as text-only “standard” image, which match the regular Debian Live images with non-free software on them, but also provide a “slim” variant which is merely 750MB compared to the 1.9GB “standard” image. The slim image can still start a debian installer, and can still boot into a minimal live text-based system.

The GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktop images feature the Calamares installer, and we have performed testing on a variety of machines. The standard and slim images does not have a installer from the running live system, but all images support a boot menu entry to start the installer.

With this release we also extend our arm64 support to two tested platforms. The current list of successfully installed and supported systems now include the following hardware:

This is a very limited set of machines, but the diversity in CPUs and architecture should hopefully reflect well on a wide variety of commonly available machines. Several of these machines are crippled (usually GPU or WiFI) without adding non-free software, complain at your hardware vendor and adapt your use-cases and future purchases.

The images are as follows, with SHA256SUM checksums and GnuPG signature on the 13.3.0 release page.

Curious how the images were made? Fear not, for the Debian Libre Live project README has documentation, the run.sh script is short and the .gitlab-ci.yml CI/CD Pipeline definition file brief.

Happy Libre OS hacking!

13 January, 2026 01:53PM by simon

January 12, 2026

hackergotchi for Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf

Python Workout 2nd edition

This post is an unpublished review for Python Workout 2nd edition

Note: While I often post the reviews I write for Computing Reviews, this is a shorter review requested to me by Manning. They kindly invited me several months ago to be a reviewer for Python Workout, 2nd edition; after giving them my opinions, I am happy to widely recommend this book to interested readers.

Python is relatively an easy programming language to learn, allowing you to start coding pretty quickly. However, there’s a significant gap between being able to “throw code” in Python and truly mastering the language. To write efficient, maintainable code that’s easy for others to understand, practice is essential. And that’s often where many of us get stuck. This book begins by stating that it “is not designed to teach you Python (…) but rather to improve your understanding of Python and how to use it to solve problems.”

The author’s structure and writing style are very didactic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of the language: from the simplest (numbers, strings, lists) to the most challenging for beginners (iterators and generators), Lerner presents several problems for us to solve as examples, emphasizing the less obvious details of each aspect.

I was invited as a reviewer in the preprint version of the book. I am now very pleased to recommend it to all interested readers. The author presents a pleasant and easy-to-read text, with a wealth of content that I am sure will improve the Python skills of all its readers.

12 January, 2026 07:23PM

hackergotchi for Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Reducing the size of initramfs kernel images

In the past few years, the size of the kernel images in Debian have been steadily growing. I don't see this as a problem per se, but it has been causing me trouble, as my /boot partition has become too small to accommodate two kernel images at the same time.

Since I'm running Debian Unstable on my personal systems and keep them updated with unattended-upgrade, this meant each (frequent) kernel upgrade triggered an error like this one:

update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-6.17.11+deb14-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned
 error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This would in turn break the automated upgrade process and require me to manually delete the currently running kernel (which works, but isn't great) to complete the upgrade.

The "obvious" solution would have been to increase the size of my /boot partition to something larger than the default 456M. Since my systems use full-disk encryption and LVM, this isn't trivial and would have required me to play Tetris and swap files back and forth using another drive.

Another solution proposed by anarcat was to migrate to systemd-boot (I'm still using grub), use Unified Kernel Images (UKI) and merge the /boot and /boot/efi partitions. Since I already have a bunch of configurations using grub and I am not too keen on systemd taking over all the things on my computer, I was somewhat reluctant.

As my computers are all configured by Puppet, I could of course have done a complete system reinstallation, but again, this was somewhat more involved than what I wanted it to be.

After looking online for a while, I finally stumbled on this blog post by Neil Brown detailing how to shrink the size of the initramfs images. With MODULES=dep my images shrunk from 188M to 41M, fixing my issue. Thanks Neil!

I was somewhat worried removing kernel modules would break something on my systems, but so far, I only had to manually load the i2c_dev module, as I need it to manage my home monitor's brightness using ddcutil.

12 January, 2026 07:13PM by Louis-Philippe Véronneau

hackergotchi for Daniel Kahn Gillmor

Daniel Kahn Gillmor

AI as a Compression Problem

A recent article in The Atlantic makes the case that very large language models effectively contain much of the works they're trained on. This article is an attempt to popularize the insights in the recent academic paper Extracting books from production language models from Ahmed et al. The authors of the paper demonstrate convincingly that well-known copyrighted textual material can be extracted from the chatbot interfaces of popular commercial LLM services.

The Atlantic article cites a podcast quote about the Stable Diffusion AI image-generator model, saying "We took 100,000 gigabytes of images and compressed it to a two-gigabyte file that can re-create any of those and iterations of those". By analogy, this suggests we might think of LLMs (which work on text, not the images handled by Stable Diffusion) as a form of lossy textual compression.

The entire text of Moby Dick, the canonical Big American Novel is merely 1.2MiB uncompressed (and less than 0.4MiB losslessly compressed with bzip2 -9). It's not surprising to imagine that a model with hundreds of billions of parameters might contain copies of these works.

Warning: The next paragraph contains fuzzy math with no real concrete engineering practice behind it!

Consider a hypothetical model with 100 billion parameters, where each parameter is stored as a 16-bit floating point value. The model weights would take 200 GB of storage. If you were to fill the parameter space only with losslessly compressed copies of books like Moby Dick, you could still fit half a million books, more than anyone can read in a lifetime. And lossy compression is typically orders of magnitude less in size than lossless compression, so we're talking about millions of works effectively encoded, with the acceptance of some artifacts being injected in the output.

I first encountered this "compression" view of AI nearly three years ago, in Ted Chiang's insightful ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. I was suprised that The Atlantic article didn't cite Chiang's piece. If you haven't read Ted Chiang, i strongly recommend his work, and this piece is a great place to start.

Chiang aside, the more recent writing that focuses on the idea of compressed works being "contained" in the model weights seems to be used by people interested in wielding some sort of copyright claims against the AI companies that maintain or provide access to these models. There are many many problems with AI today, but attacking AI companies based on copyright concerns seems similar to going after Al Capone for tax evasion.

We should be much more concerned with the effect these projects have on cultural homogeneity, mental health, labor rights, privacy, and social control than whether they're violating copyright in some specific instance.

12 January, 2026 05:00AM by Daniel Kahn Gillmor

January 11, 2026

Russell Coker

Terminal Emulator Security

I just read this informative article on ANSI terminal security [1]. The author has written a tool named vt-houdini for testing for these issues [2]. They used to host an instance on their server but appear to have stopped it. When you run that tool you can ssh to the system in question and without needing a password you are connected and the server probes your terminal emulator for vulnerabilities. The versions of Kitty and Konsole in Debian/Trixie have just passed those tests on my system.

This will always be a potential security problem due to the purpose of a terminal emulator. A terminal emulator will often display untrusted data and often data which is known to come from hostile sources (EG logs of attempted attacks). So what could be done in this regard?

Memory Protection

Due to the complexity of terminal emulation there is the possibility of buffer overflows and other memory management issues that could be used to compromise the emulator.

The Fil-C compiler is an interesting project [3], it compiles existing C/C++ code with memory checks. It is reported to have no noticeable impact on the performance of the bash shell which sounds like a useful option to address some of these issues as shell security issues are connected to terminal security issues. The performance impact on a terminal emulator would be likely to be more noticeable. Also note that Fil-C compilation apparently requires compiling all libraries with it, this isn’t a problem for bash as the only libraries it uses nowadays are libtinfo and libc. The kitty terminal emulator doesn’t have many libraries but libpython is one of them, it’s an essential part of Kitty and it is a complex library to compile in a different way. Konsole has about 160 libraries and it isn’t plausible to recompile so many libraries at this time.

Choosing a terminal emulator that has a simpler design might help in this regard. Emulators that call libraries for 3D effects etc and native support for displaying in-line graphics have a much greater attack surface.

Access Control

A terminal emulator could be run in a container to prevent it from doing any damage if it is compromised. But the terminal emulator will have full control over the shell it runs and if the shell has access needed to allow commands like scp/rsync to do what is expected of them then that means that no useful level of containment is possible.

It would be possible to run a terminal emulator in a container for the purpose of connecting to an insecure or hostile system and not allow scp/rsync to/from any directory other than /tmp (or other directories to use for sharing files). You could run “exec ssh $SERVER” so the terminal emulator session ends when the ssh connection ends.

Conclusion

There aren’t good solutions to the problems of terminal emulation security. But testing every terminal emulator with vt-houdini and fuzzing the popular ones would be a good start.

Qubes level isolation will help things in some situations, but if you need to connect to a server with privileged access to read log files containing potentially hostile data (which is a common sysadmin use case) then there aren’t good options.

Related posts:

  1. Hello Kitty I’ve just discovered a new xterm replacement named Kitty [1]....
  2. Kitty and Mpv 6 months ago I switched to Kitty for terminal emulation...
  3. Kernel Security vs Uptime For best system security you want to apply kernel security...

11 January, 2026 03:46AM by etbe

January 09, 2026

Simon Josefsson

Debian Taco – Towards a GitSecDevOps Debian

One of my holiday projects was to understand and gain more trust in how Debian binaries are built, and as the holidays are coming to an end, I’d like to introduce a new research project called Debian Taco. I apparently need more holidays, because there are still more work to be done here, so at the end I’ll summarize some pending work.

Debian Taco, or TacOS, is a GitSecDevOps rebuild of Debian GNU/Linux.

The Debian Taco project publish rebuilt binary packages, package repository metadata (InRelease, Packages, etc), container images, cloud images and live images.

All packages are built from pristine source packages in the Debian archive. Debian Taco does not modify any Debian source code nor add or remove any packages found in Debian.

No servers are involved! Everything is built in GitLab pipelines and results are published through modern GitDevOps mechanism like GitLab Pages and S3 object storage. You can fork the individual projects below on GitLab.com and you will have your own Debian-derived OS available for tweaking. (Of course, at some level, servers are always involved, so this claim is a bit of hyperbole.)

Goals

The goal of TacOS is to be bit-by-bit identical with official Debian GNU/Linux, and until that has been completed, publish diffoscope output with differences.

The idea is to further categorize all artifact differences into one of the following categories:

1) An obvious bug in Debian. For example, if a package does not build reproducible.

2) An obvious bug in TacOS. For example, if our build environment does not manage to build a package.

3) Something else. This would be input for further research and consideration. This category also include things where it isn’t obvious if it is a bug in Debian or in TacOS. Known examples:

3A) Packages in TacOS are rebuilt the latest available source code, not the (potentially) older package that were used to build the Debian packages. This could lead to differences in the packages. These differences may be useful to analyze to identify supply-chain attacks. See some discussion about idempotent rebuilds.

Our packages are all built from source code, unless we have not yet managed to build something. In the latter situation, Debian Taco falls back and uses the official Debian artifact. This allows an incremental publication of Debian Taco that still is 100% complete without requiring that everything is rebuilt instantly. The goal is that everything should be rebuilt, and until that has been completed, publish a list of artifacts that we use verbatim from Debian.

Debian Taco Archive

The Debian Taco Archive project generate and publish the package archive (dists/tacos-trixie/InRelease, dists/tacos-trixie/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz, pool/* etc), similar to what is published at https://deb.debian.org/debian/.

The output of the Debian Taco Archive is available from https://debdistutils.gitlab.io/tacos/archive/.

Debian Taco Container Images

The Debian Taco Container Images project provide container images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64, arm64, ppc64el and riscv64 architectures.

These images allow quick and simple use of Debian Taco interactively, but makes it easy to deploy for container orchestration frameworks.

Debian Taco Cloud Images

The Debian Taco Cloud Images project provide cloud images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64, arm64, ppc64el and riscv64 architectures.

Launch and install Debian Taco for your cloud environment!

Debian Taco Live Images

The Debian Taco Live Images project provide live images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64 and arm64 architectures.

These images allows running Debian Taco on physical hardware (or virtual machines), and even installation for permanent use.

Debian Taco Build Images and Packages

Packages are built using debdistbuild, which was introduced in a blog about Build Debian in a GitLab Pipeline.

The first step is to prepare build images, which is done by the Debian Taco Build Images project. They are similar to the Debian Taco containers but have build-essential and debdistbuild installed on them.

Debdistbuild is launched in a per-architecture per-suite CI/CD project. Currently only trixie-amd64 is available. That project has built some essential early packages like base-files, debian-archive-keyring and hostname. They are stored in Git LFS backed by a S3 object storage. These packages were all built reproducibly. So this means Debian Taco is still 100% bit-by-bit identical to Debian, except for the renaming.

I’ve yet to launch a more massive wide-scale package rebuild until some outstanding issues have been resolved. I earlier rebuilt around 7000 packages from Trixie on amd64, so I know that the method easily scales.

Remaining work

Where is the diffoscope package outputs and list of package differences? For another holiday! Clearly this is an important remaining work item.

Another important outstanding issue is how to orchestrate launching the build of all packages. Clearly a list of packages is needed, and some trigger mechanism to understand when new packages are added to Debian.

One goal was to build packages from the tag2upload browse.dgit.debian.org archive, before checking the Debian Archive. This ought to be really simple to implement, but other matters came first.

GitLab or Codeberg?

Everything is written using basic POSIX /bin/sh shell scripts. Debian Taco uses the GitLab CI/CD Pipeline mechanism together with a Hetzner S3 object storage to serve packages. The scripts have only weak reliance on GitLab-specific principles, and were designed with the intention to support other platforms. I believe reliance on a particular CI/CD platform is a limitation, so I’d like to explore shipping Debian Taco through a Forgejo-based architecture, possibly via Codeberg as soon as I manage to deploy reliable Forgejo runners.

The important aspects that are required are:

1) Pipelines that can build and publish web sites similar to GitLab Pages. Codeberg has a pipeline mechanism. I’ve successfully used Codeberg Pages to publish the OATH Toolkit homepage homepage. Glueing this together seems feasible.

2) Container Registry. It seems Forgejo supports a Container Registry but I’ve not worked with it at Codeberg to understand if there are any limitations.

3) Package Registry. The Deban Taco live images are uploaded into a package registry, because they are too big for being served through GitLab Pages. It may be converted to using a Pages mechanism, or possibly through Release Artifacts if multi-GB artifacts are supported on other platforms.

I hope to continue this work and explaining more details in a series of posts, stay tuned!

09 January, 2026 04:33PM by simon

Russell Coker

LEAF ZE1 After 6 Months

About 6 months ago I got a Nissan LEAF ZE1 (2019 model) [1]. Generally it’s going well and I’m happy with most things about it.

One issue is that as there isn’t a lot of weight in the front with the batteries in the centre of the car the front wheels slip easily when accelerating. It’s a minor thing but a good reason for wanting AWD in an electric car.

When I got the car I got two charging devices, the one to charge from a regular 240V 10A power point (often referred to as a “granny charger”) and a cable with a special EV charging connector on each end. The cable with an EV connector on each end is designed for charging that’s faster than the “granny charger” but not as fast as the rapid chargers which have the cable connected to the supply so the cable temperature can be monitored and/or controlled. That cable can be used if you get a fast charger setup at your home (which I never plan to do) and apparently at some small hotels and other places with home-style EV charging. I’m considering just selling that cable on ebay as I don’t think I have any need to personally own a cable other than the “granny charger”.

The key fob for the LEAF has a battery installed, it’s either CR2032 or CR2025 – mine has CR2025. Some reports on the Internet suggest that you can stuff a CR2032 battery in anyway but that didn’t work for me as the thickness of the battery stopped some of the contacts from making a good connection. I think I could have got it going by putting some metal in between but the batteries aren’t expensive enough to make it worth the effort and risk. It would be nice if I could use batteries from my stockpile of CR2032 batteries that came from old PCs but I can afford to spend a few dollars on it.

My driveway is short and if I left the charger out it would be visible from the street and at risk of being stolen. I’m thinking of chaining the charger to a tree and having some sort of waterproof enclosure for it so I don’t have to go to the effort of taking it out of the boot every time I use it. Then I could also configure the car to only charge during the peak sunlight hours when the solar power my home feeds into the grid has a negative price (we have so much solar power that it’s causing grid problems).

The cruise control is a pain to use, so much so that I haven’t yet got it to work usefully ever. The features look good in the documentation but in practice it’s not as good as the Kia one I’ve used previously where I could just press one button to turn it on, another button to set the current speed as the cruise control speed, and then just have it work.

The electronic compass built in to the dash turned out to be surprisingly useful. I regret not gluing a compass to the dash of previous cars. One example is when I start google navigation for a journey and it says “go South on street X” and I need to know which direction is South so I don’t start in the wrong direction. Another example is when I know that I’m North of a major road that I need to take to get to my destination so I just need to go roughly South and that is enough to get me to a road I recognise.

In the past when there is a bird in the way I don’t do anything different, I keep driving at the same speed and rely on the bird to see me and move out of the way. Birds have faster reactions than humans and have evolved to move at the speeds cars travel on all roads other than freeways, also birds that are on roads are usually ones that have an eye in each side of their head so they can’t not see my car approaching. For decades this has worked, but recently a bird just stood on the road and got squashed. So I guess that I should honk when there’s birds on the road.

Generally everything about the car is fine and I’m happy to keep driving it.

Related posts:

  1. Leaf ZE1 I’ve just got a second hand Nissan LEAF. It’s not...
  2. Bad Product Comparisons and EVs When companies design products a major concern seems to be...
  3. Qi Phone Charging I have just bought a wireless phone charging system based...

09 January, 2026 03:32AM by etbe

January 08, 2026

Reproducible Builds

Reproducible Builds in December 2025

Welcome to the December 2025 from the Reproducible Builds project!

Our monthly reports outline what we’ve been up to over the past month, highlighting items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please see the Contribute page on our website.

  1. New orig-check service to validate Debian upstream tarballs
  2. Distribution work
  3. disorderfs updated to FUSE 3
  4. Mailing list updates
  5. Three new academic papers published
  6. Website updates
  7. Upstream patches

New orig-check service to validate Debian upstream tarballs

This month, Debian Developer Lucas Nussbaum announced the orig-check service, which attempts to automatically reproduce the generation upstream tarballs (ie. the “original source” component of a Debian source package), comparing that to the upstream tarball actually shipped with Debian.

As of the time of writing, it is possible for a Debian developer to upload a source archive that does not actually correspond to upstream’s version. Whilst this is not inherently malicious (it typically indicates some tooling/process issue), the very possibility that a maintainer’s version may differ potentially permits a maintainer to make (malicious) changes that would be misattributed to upstream.

This service therefore nicely complements the whatsrc.org service, which was reported in our reports for both April and August. The orig-check is dedicated to Lunar, who sadly passed away a year ago.


Distribution work

In Arch Linux this month, Robin Candau and Mark Hegreberg worked at making the Arch Linux WSL image bit-for-bit reproducible. Robin also shared some implementation details and future related work on our mailing list.

Continuing a series reported in these reports for March, April and July 2025 (etc.), Simon Josefsson has published another interesting article this month, itself a followup to a post Simon published in December 2024 regarding GNU Guix Container Images that are hosted on GitLab.

In Debian this month, Micha Lenk posted to the debian-backports-announce mailing list with the news that the Backports archive will now discard binaries generated and uploaded by maintainers: “The benefit is that all binary packages [will] get built by the Debian buildds before we distribute them within the archive.”

Felix Moessbauer of Siemens then filed a bug in the Debian bug tracker to signal their intention to package debsbom, a software bill of materials (SBOM) generator for distributions based on Debian. This generated a discussion on the bug inquiring about the output format as well as a question about how these SBOMs might be distributed.

Holger Levsen merged a number of significant changes written by Alper Nebi Yasak to the Debian Installer in order to improve its reproducibility. As noted in Alper’s merge request, “These are the reproducibility fixes I looked into before bookworm release, but was a bit afraid to send as it’s just before the release, because the things like the xorriso conversion changes the content of the files to try to make them reproducible.”

In addition, 76 reviews of Debian packages were added, 8 were updated and 27 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new different_package_content_when_built_with_nocheck issue type was added by Holger Levsen. […]

Arnout Engelen posted to our mailing list reporting that they successfully reproduced the NixOS minimal installation ISO for the 25.11 release without relying on a pre-compiled package archive, with more details on their blog.

Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another openSUSE monthly update for his work there.


disorderfs updated to FUSE 3

disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into system calls to reliably flush out reproducibility issues.

This month, however, Roland Clobus upgraded disorderfs* from FUSE 2 to FUSE 3 after its package automatically got removed from Debian testing. Some tests in Debian currently require disorderfs to make the Debian live images reproducible, although disorderfs is not a Debian-specific tool.


Mailing list updates

On our mailing list this month:

  • Luca Di Maio announced stampdalf, a “filesystem timestamp preservation” tool that wraps “arbitrary commands and ensures filesystem timestamp reproducibility”:

    stampdalf allows you to run any command that modifies files in a directory tree, then automatically resets all timestamps back to their original values. Any new files created during command execution are set to [the UNIX epoch] or a custom timestamp via SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

    The project’s GitHub page helpfully reveals that the project is “pronounced: stamp-dalf (stamp like time-stamp, dalf like Gandalf the wizard)” as “it’s a wizard of time and stamps”.)

  • Lastly, Reproducible Builds developer cen1 posted to our list announcing that “early/experimental/alpha” support for FreeBSD was added to rebuilderd. In their post, cen1 reports that the “initial builds are in progress and look quite decent”. cen1 also interestingly notes that “since the upstream is currently not technically reproducible I had to relax the bit-for-bit identical requirement of rebuilderd [—] I consider the pkg to be reproducible if the tar is content-identical (via diffoscope), ignoring timestamps and some of the manifest files.”.


Three new academic papers published

Yogya Gamage and Benoit Baudry of Université de Montréal, Canada together with Deepika Tiwari and Martin Monperrus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden published a paper on The Design Space of Lockfiles Across Package Managers:

Most package managers also generate a lockfile, which records the exact set of resolved dependency versions. Lockfiles are used to reduce build times; to verify the integrity of resolved packages; and to support build reproducibility across environments and time. Despite these beneficial features, developers often struggle with their maintenance, usage, and interpretation. In this study, we unveil the major challenges related to lockfiles, such that future researchers and engineers can address them. […]

A PDF of their paper is available online.

Benoit Baudry also posted an announcement to our mailing list, which generated a number of replies.


Betul Gokkaya, Leonardo Aniello and Basel Halak of the University of Southampton then published a paper on the A taxonomy of attacks, mitigations and risk assessment strategies within the software supply chain:

While existing studies primarily focus on software supply chain attacks’ prevention and detection methods, there is a need for a broad overview of attacks and comprehensive risk assessment for software supply chain security. This study conducts a systematic literature review to fill this gap. By analyzing 96 papers published between 2015-2023, we identified 19 distinct SSC attacks, including 6 novel attacks highlighted in recent studies. Additionally, we developed 25 specific security controls and established a precisely mapped taxonomy that transparently links each control to one or more specific attacks. […]

A PDF of the paper is available online via the article’s canonical page.


Aman Sharma and Martin Monperrus of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden along with Benoit Baudry of Université de Montréal, Canada published a paper this month on Causes and Canonicalization of Unreproducible Builds in Java. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

[Achieving] reproducibility at scale remains difficult, especially in Java, due to a range of non-deterministic factors and caveats in the build process. In this work, we focus on reproducibility in Java-based software, archetypal of enterprise applications. We introduce a conceptual framework for reproducible builds, we analyze a large dataset from Reproducible Central, and we develop a novel taxonomy of six root causes of unreproducibility. […]

A PDF of the paper is available online.


Website updates

Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month including:


Upstream patches

The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:



Finally, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

08 January, 2026 10:51PM

Dima Kogan

Meshroom packaged for Debian

Like the title says, I just packaged Meshroom (and all the adjacent dependencies) for Debian! This is a fancy photogrammetry toolkit that uses modern software development methods. "Modern" meaning that it has a multitude of dependencies that come from lots of disparate places, which make it impossible for a mere mortal to build the thing. The Linux "installer" is 13GB and probably is some sort of container, or something.

But now, if you have a Debian/sid box with the non-free repos enabled, you can 

sudo apt install meshroom

And then you can generate and 3D-print a life-size, geometrically-accurate statue of your cat. The colmap package does a similar thing, and has been in Debian for a while. I think it can't do as many things, but it's good to have both tools easily available.

These packages are all in contrib, because they depend on a number of non-free things, most notably CUDA.

This is currently in Debian/sid, but should be picked up by the downstream distros as they're released. The next noteworthy one is Ubuntu 26.04. Testing and feedback welcome.

08 January, 2026 03:34PM by Dima Kogan

Sven Hoexter

Moving from hexchat to Halloy

I'm not hanging around on IRC a lot these days, but when I do I used hexchat (and xchat before). Probably a bad habbit of clinging to what I got used to for the past 25 years. But in the light of the planned removal of GTK2, it felt like it was time to look for an alternative.

Halloy looked interesting, albeit not packaged for Debian. But upstream references a flatpak (another party I did not join so far), good enough to give it a try.

$ sudo apt install flatpak
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install org.squidowl.halloy
$ flatpak run org.squidowl.halloy

Configuration ends up at ~/.var/app/org.squidowl.halloy/config/halloy/config.toml, which I linked for convenience to ~/.halloy.toml.

Since I connect via ZNC in an odd old setup without those virtual networks, but several accounts, and of course never bothered to replace the self signed certificate, it requires some additional configuration to be able to connect. Each account gets its own servers.<foo> block like this:

[servers.bnc-oftc]
nickname = "my-znc-user-for-this-network"
server = "sven.stormbind.net"
dangerously_accept_invalid_certs = true
password = "mypasssowrd"
port = 4711
use_tls = true

Halloy has also a small ZNC guide.

I'm growing old, so a bigger font size is useful. Be aware that font changes require an application restart to take effect.

[font]
size = 16
family = "Noto Mono"

I also prefer the single-pane mode which could be copy & pasted as documented.

Works good enough for now. hexchat was also the last none wayland application I've been using (xlsclients output is finally empty).

08 January, 2026 10:35AM

January 07, 2026

hackergotchi for Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf

Artificial Intelligence • Play or break the deck

This post is an unpublished review for Artificial Intelligence • Play or break the deck

As a little disclaimer, I usually review books or articles written in English, and although I will offer this review to Computing Reviews as usual, it is likely it will not be published. The title of this book in Spanish is Inteligencia artificial: jugar o romper la baraja.

I was pointed at this book, published last October by Margarita Padilla García, a well known Free Software activist from Spain who has long worked on analyzing (and shaping) aspects of socio-technological change. As other books published by Traficantes de sueños, this book is published as Open Access, under a CC BY-NC license, and can be downloaded in full. I started casually looking at this book, with too long a backlog of material to read, but soon realized I could just not put it down: it completely captured me.

This book presents several aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI), written for a general, non-technical audience. Many books with a similar target have been published, but this one is quite unique; first of all, it is written in a personal, non-formal tone. Contrary to what’s usual in my reading, the author made the explicit decision not to fill the book with references to her sources (“because searching on Internet, it’s very easy to find things”), making the book easier to read linearly — a decision I somewhat regret, but recognize helps develop the author’s style.

The book has seven sections, dealing with different aspects of AI. They are the “Visions” (historical framing of the development of AI); “Spectacular” (why do we feel AI to be so disrupting, digging particularly into game engines and search space); “Strategies”, explaining how multilayer neural networks work and linking the various branches of historic AI together, arriving at Natural Language Processing; “On the inside”, tackling technical details such as algorithms, the importance of training data, bias, discrimination; “On the outside”, presenting several example AI implementations with socio-ethical implications; “Philosophy”, presenting the works of Marx, Heidegger and Simondon in their relation with AI, work, justice, ownership; and “Doing”, presenting aspects of social activism in relation to AI. Each part ends with yet another personal note: Margarita Padilla includes a letter to one of her friends related to said part.

Totalling 272 pages (A5, or roughly half-letter, format), this is a rather small book. I read it probably over a week. So, while this book does not provide lots of new information to me, the way how it was written, made it a very pleasing experience, and it will surely influence the way I understand or explain several concepts in this domain.

07 January, 2026 07:46PM

Thorsten Alteholz

My Debian Activities in December 2025

Debian LTS/ELTS

This was my hundred-thirty-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. (As the LTS- and ELTS-teams have been merged now, there is only one paragraph left for both activities.)

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

  • [cups] upload to unstable to fix an issue with the latest security upload
  • [libcoap3] uploaded to unstable to fix ten CVEs
  • [gcal] check whether security bug reports are really security bug reports (no, they are not and no CVEs have been issued yet)
  • [#1124284] trixie-pu for libcoap3 to fix ten CVEs in Trixie.
  • [#1121342] trixie-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and libcupsfilters uploaded.
  • [#1121391] trixie-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and cups-filter uploaded.
  • [#1121392] bookworm-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and cups-filter uploaded.
  • [#1121433] trixie-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and rlottie uploaded.
  • [#1121437] bookworm-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and rlottie uploaded.
  • [#1124284] trixie-pu bug; debdiff has been approved and libcoap3 uploaded.

I also tried to backport the libcoap3-patches to Bookworm, but I am afraid the changes would be too intrusive.

When I stumbled upon a comment for 7zip about “finding the patches might be a hard”, I couldn’t believe it. Well, Daniel was right and I didn’t find any.

Furthermore I worked on suricata, marked some CVEs as not-affected or ignored, and added some new patches. Unfortunately my allocated time was spent before I could do a new upload.

I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.

Last but not least I injected some packages for uploads to security-master.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

  • … cups to unstable.

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Lomiri

I started to contribute to Lomiri packages, which are part of the Debian UBports Team. As a first step I took care of failing CI pipelines and tried to fix them. A next step would be to package some new Applications.

This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

Debian Mobcom

Unfortunately I didn’t found any time to work on this topic.

misc

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

Last but not least, I wish (almost) everbody a Happy New Year and hope that you are able to stick to your New Year’s resolutions.

07 January, 2026 02:54PM by alteholz

January 06, 2026

Ingo Juergensmann

Outages on Nerdculture.de due to Ceph – Part 2

Last weekend I had “fun” with Ceph again on a Saturday evening. But let’s start at the beginning….

Before the weekend I announced a downtime/maintenance windows to upgrade PostgreSQL from v15 to v17 – because of the Debian upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie. After some tests with a cloned VM I decided use the quick path of pg_ugradecluster 15 main -v 17 -m upgrade –clone. As this would be my first time to upgrade PostgreSQL that way, I made several backups. In the end everything went smooth and the database is now on v17.

However, there was also a new Proxmox kernel and packages, so I also upgrade one Proxmox node and rebootet it. And then the issues began:

But before that I also encountered an issue with Redis for Mastodon. It complained about this: 

Unable to obtain the AOF file appendonly.aof.4398.base.rdb

Solution to this was to change redis configuration to autoappend no.

And then CephFS was unavailable again, complaining about laggy MDS or no MDS at all, which – of course – was totally wrong. I search for solutions and read many forum posts in the Proxmox forum, but nothing helped. I also read the official Ceph documentation. After a whole day offline for all of the services to my thousands of users, I somehow managed to get systemctl reset-failed mnt-pve-cephfs && systemctl start mnt-pve-cephfs again. Shortly before that I followed the advice in the Ceph docs for RADOS Health and there especially section about Troubleshooting Monitors.

In the end, I can’t say which step exactly did the trick that CephFS was working again. But as it seems, I will have one or two more chances to find out, because only one server out of three is currently updated.

Another issue during the downtime also was that one server crashed/rebooted and didn’t came back. It hang in the midst of an upgrade at the point of upgrade-grub. Usually it wouldn’t be a big deal: just go the IPMI website and reboot the server.

Nah! That’s too simple!

For some unknow reason the IPMI interfaces lost their DHCP leases: the DHCP server at the colocation was not serving IPs. So I opened a ticket, got some acknowledgement from the support but also a statement “maybe tomorrow or on Monday…”. Hmpf!

On Sunday evening I managed to bring back CephFS. As said: no idea what specific step did the trick. But the story continues: On Monday before lunch time the IPMI DHCP was working again and I could access the web interfaces again, logged in…. and was forcefully locked out again: 

Your session has timed out. You will need to open a new session

I hit the problem described here. But cold resetting the BMC didn’t work. So still no working web interface to deal with the issue. But on my phone I got “IPMIView” as app and that still worked and showed the KVM console. But what I saw there didn’t make me happy as well:

The reason for this is apparently the crash while running update-grub. Anyway, using the Grub bootloader and selecting an older kernel works fine. The server boots, Proxmox is showing the node as up and…. the working CephFS is stalled again! Fsck!

Rebooting the node or stopping Ceph on that node results immediatedly in a working CephFS again.

Currently I’m moving everything off of Ceph to the local disks of the two nodes. If everything is on local disks I can work on debugging CephFS without interrupting the service for the users (hopefully). But this also means that there will be no redundancy for Mastodon and mail.

When I have more detailled information about possible reasons and such, I may post to the Proxmox forum.

06 January, 2026 03:57PM by ij

January 05, 2026

hackergotchi for Matthew Garrett

Matthew Garrett

Not here

Hello! I am not posting here any more. You can find me here instead. Most Planets should be updated already (I've an MR open for Planet Gnome), but if you're subscribed to my feed directly please update it.

comment count unavailable comments

05 January, 2026 10:26PM

hackergotchi for Colin Watson

Colin Watson

Free software activity in December 2025

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.

Python packaging

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

Python 3.14 is now a supported version in unstable, and we’re working to get that into testing. As usual this is a pretty arduous effort because it requires going round and fixing lots of odds and ends across the whole ecosystem. We can deal with a fair number of problems by keeping up with upstream (see above), but there tends to be a long tail of packages whose upstreams are less active and where we need to chase them, or where problems only show up in Debian for one reason or another. I spent a lot of time working on this:

Fixes for pytest 9:

I filed lintian: Report Python egg-info files/directories to help us track the migration to pybuild-plugin-pyproject.

I did some work on dh-python: Normalize names in pydist lookups and pyproject plugin: Support headers (the latter of which allowed converting python-persistent and zope.proxy to pybuild-plugin-pyproject, although it needed a follow-up fix).

I fixed or helped to fix several other build/test failures:

Other bugs:

Other bits and pieces

Code reviews

05 January, 2026 01:08PM by Colin Watson

hackergotchi for Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

Debian welcomes Outreachy interns for December 2025-March 2026 round

Outreachy logo

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and as you might have already noticed, Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2025 - March 2026 round.

After a busy contribution phase and a competitive selection process, Hellen Chemtai Taylor and Isoken Ibizugbe are officially working as interns on Debian Images Testing with OpenQA for the past month, mentored by Tássia Camões Araújo, Roland Clobus and Philip Hands.

Congratulations and welcome Hellen Chemtai Taylor and Isoken Ibizugbe!

The team also congratulates all candidates for their valuable contributions, with special thanks to those who manage to continue participating as volunteers.

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help to improve Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blog posts (syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with the team at the debian-openqa matrix channel. For Outreachy matters, the programme admins can be reached on #debian-outreach IRC/matrix channel and mailing list.

05 January, 2026 09:00AM by Anupa Ann Joseph, Tássia Camões Araújo

Vincent Bernat

Using eBPF to load-balance traffic across UDP sockets with Go

Akvorado collects sFlow and IPFIX flows over UDP. Because UDP does not retransmit lost packets, it needs to process them quickly. Akvorado runs several workers listening to the same port. The kernel should load-balance received packets fairly between these workers. However, this does not work as expected. A couple of workers exhibit high packet loss:

$ curl -s 127.0.0.1:8080/api/v0/inlet/metrics \
> | sed -n s/akvorado_inlet_flow_input_udp_in_dropped//p
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="0"} 0
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="1"} 0
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="2"} 0
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="3"} 1.614933572278264e+15
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="4"} 0
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="5"} 0
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="6"} 9.59964121598348e+14
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="7"} 0

eBPF can help by implementing an alternate balancing algorithm. �

Options for load-balancing

There are three methods to load-balance UDP packets across workers:

  1. One worker receives the packets and dispatches them to the other workers.
  2. All workers share the same socket.
  3. Each worker has its own socket, listening to the same port, with the SO_REUSEPORT socket option.

SO_REUSEPORT option

Tom Hebert added the SO_REUSEPORT socket option in Linux 3.9. The cover letter for his patch series explains why this new option is better than the two existing ones from a performance point of view:

SO_REUSEPORT allows multiple listener sockets to be bound to the same port. […] Received packets are distributed to multiple sockets bound to the same port using a 4-tuple hash.

The motivating case for SO_RESUSEPORT in TCP would be something like a web server binding to port 80 running with multiple threads, where each thread might have it’s own listener socket. This could be done as an alternative to other models:

  1. have one listener thread which dispatches completed connections to workers, or
  2. accept on a single listener socket from multiple threads.

In case #1, the listener thread can easily become the bottleneck with high connection turn-over rate. In case #2, the proportion of connections accepted per thread tends to be uneven under high connection load. […] We have seen the disproportion to be as high as 3:1 ratio between thread accepting most connections and the one accepting the fewest. With SO_REUSEPORT the distribution is uniform.

The motivating case for SO_REUSEPORT in UDP would be something like a DNS server. An alternative would be to receive on the same socket from multiple threads. As in the case of TCP, the load across these threads tends to be disproportionate and we also see a lot of contection on the socket lock.

Akvorado uses the SO_REUSEPORT option to dispatch the packets across the workers. However, because the distribution uses a 4-tuple hash, a single socket handles all the flows from one exporter.

SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF option

In Linux 4.5, Craig Gallek added the SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF option to attach an eBPF program to select the target UDP socket. In Linux 4.6, he extended it to support TCP. The socket(7) manual page documents this mechanism:1

The BPF program must return an index between 0 and N-1 representing the socket which should receive the packet (where N is the number of sockets in the group). If the BPF program returns an invalid index, socket selection will fall back to the plain SO_REUSEPORT mechanism.

In Linux 4.19, Martin KaFai Lau added the BPF_PROG_TYPE_SK_REUSEPORT program type. Such an eBPF program selects the socket from a BPF_MAP_TYPE_REUSEPORT_ARRAY map instead. This new approach is more reliable when switching target sockets from one instance to another—for example, when upgrading, a new instance can add its sockets and remove the old ones.

Load-balancing with eBPF and Go

Altering the load-balancing algorithm for a group of sockets requires two steps:

  1. write and compile an eBPF program in C,2 and
  2. load it and attach it in Go.

eBPF program in C

A simple load-balancing algorithm is to randomly choose the destination socket. The kernel provides the bpf_get_prandom_u32() helper function to get a pseudo-random number.

volatile const __u32 num_sockets; // �

struct {
    __uint(type, BPF_MAP_TYPE_REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY);
    __type(key, __u32);
    __type(value, __u64);
    __uint(max_entries, 256);
} socket_map SEC(".maps"); // �

SEC("sk_reuseport")
int reuseport_balance_prog(struct sk_reuseport_md *reuse_md)
{
    __u32 index = bpf_get_prandom_u32() % num_sockets; // �
    bpf_sk_select_reuseport(reuse_md, &socket_map, &index, 0); // �
    return SK_PASS; // �
}

char _license[] SEC("license") = "GPL";

In �, we declare a volatile constant for the number of sockets in the group. We will initialize this constant before loading the eBPF program into the kernel. In �, we define the socket map. We will populate it with the socket file descriptors. In �, we randomly select the index of the target socket.3 In �, we invoke the bpf_sk_select_reuseport() helper to record our decision. Finally, in �, we accept the packet.

Header files

If you compile the C source with clang, you get errors due to missing headers. The recommended way to solve this is to generate a vmlinux.h file with bpftool:

$ bpftool btf dump file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux format c > vmlinux.h

Then, include the following headers:4

#include "vmlinux.h"
#include <bpf/bpf_helpers.h>

For my 6.17 kernel, the generated vmlinux.h is quite big: 2.7 MiB. Moreover, bpf/bpf_helpers.h is shipped with libbpf. This adds another dependency for users. As the eBPF program is quite small, I prefer to put the strict minimum in vmlinux.h by cherry-picking the definitions I need.

Compilation

The eBPF Library for Go ships bpf2go, a tool to compile eBPF programs and to generate some scaffolding code. We create a gen.go file with the following content:

package main

//go:generate go tool bpf2go -tags linux reuseport reuseport_kern.c

After running go generate ./..., we can inspect the resulting objects with readelf and llvm-objdump:

$ readelf -S reuseport_bpfeb.o
There are 14 section headers, starting at offset 0x840:
  [Nr] Name              Type             Address           Offset
[…]
  [ 3] sk_reuseport      PROGBITS         0000000000000000  00000040
  [ 6] .maps             PROGBITS         0000000000000000  000000c8
  [ 7] license           PROGBITS         0000000000000000  000000e8
[…]
$ llvm-objdump -S reuseport_bpfeb.o
reuseport_bpfeb.o:  file format elf64-bpf
Disassembly of section sk_reuseport:
0000000000000000 <reuseport_balance_prog>:
; {
       0:   bf 61 00 00 00 00 00 00     r6 = r1
;     __u32 index = bpf_get_prandom_u32() % num_sockets;
       1:   85 00 00 00 00 00 00 07     call 0x7
[…]

Usage from Go

Let’s set up 10 workers listening to the same port.5 Each socket enables the SO_REUSEPORT option before binding:6

var (
    err error
    fds []uintptr
    conns []*net.UDPConn
)
workers := 10
listenAddr := "127.0.0.1:0"
listenConfig := net.ListenConfig{
    Control: func(_, _ string, c syscall.RawConn) error {
        c.Control(func(fd uintptr) {
            err = unix.SetsockoptInt(int(fd), unix.SOL_SOCKET, unix.SO_REUSEPORT, 1)
            fds = append(fds, fd)
        })
        return err
    },
}
for range workers {
    pconn, err := listenConfig.ListenPacket(t.Context(), "udp", listenAddr)
    if err != nil {
        t.Fatalf("ListenPacket() error:\n%+v", err)
    }
    udpConn := pconn.(*net.UDPConn)
    listenAddr = udpConn.LocalAddr().String()
    conns = append(conns, udpConn)
}

The second step is to load the eBPF program, initialize the num_sockets variable, populate the socket map, and attach the program to the first socket.7

// Load the eBPF collection.
spec, err := loadReuseport()
if err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("loadVariables() error:\n%+v", err)
}

// Set "num_sockets" global variable to the number of file descriptors we will register
if err := spec.Variables["num_sockets"].Set(uint32(len(fds))); err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("NumSockets.Set() error:\n%+v", err)
}

// Load the map and the program into the kernel.
var objs reuseportObjects
if err := spec.LoadAndAssign(&objs, nil); err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("loadReuseportObjects() error:\n%+v", err)
}
t.Cleanup(func() { objs.Close() })

// Assign the file descriptors to the socket map.
for worker, fd := range fds {
    if err := objs.reuseportMaps.SocketMap.Put(uint32(worker), uint64(fd)); err != nil {
        t.Fatalf("SocketMap.Put() error:\n%+v", err)
    }
}

// Attach the eBPF program to the first socket.
socketFD := int(fds[0])
progFD := objs.reuseportPrograms.ReuseportBalanceProg.FD()
if err := unix.SetsockoptInt(socketFD, unix.SOL_SOCKET, unix.SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF, progFD); err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("SetsockoptInt() error:\n%+v", err)
}

We are now ready to process incoming packets. Each worker is a Go routine incrementing a counter for each received packet:8

var wg sync.WaitGroup
receivedPackets := make([]int, workers)
for worker := range workers {
    conn := conns[worker]
    packets := &receivedPackets[worker]
    wg.Go(func() {
        payload := make([]byte, 9000)
        for {
            if _, err := conn.Read(payload); err != nil {
                if errors.Is(err, net.ErrClosed) {
                    return
                }
                t.Logf("Read() error:\n%+v", err)
            }
            *packets++
        }
    })
}

Let’s send 1000 packets:

sentPackets := 1000
conn, err := net.Dial("udp", conns[0].LocalAddr().String())
if err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("Dial() error:\n%+v", err)
}
defer conn.Close()
for range sentPackets {
    if _, err := conn.Write([]byte("hello world!")); err != nil {
        t.Fatalf("Write() error:\n%+v", err)
    }
}

If we print the content of the receivedPackets array, we can check the balancing works as expected, with each worker getting about 100 packets:

=== RUN   TestUDPWorkerBalancing
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[0] = 107
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[1] = 92
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[2] = 99
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[3] = 105
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[4] = 107
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[5] = 96
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[6] = 102
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[7] = 105
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[8] = 99
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[9] = 88

    balancing_test.go:91: receivedPackets = 1000
    balancing_test.go:92: sentPackets     = 1000

Graceful restart

You can also use SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF to gracefully restart an application. A new instance of the application binds to the same address and prepare its own version of the socket map. Once it attaches the eBPF program to the first socket, the kernel steers incoming packets to this new instance. The old instance needs to drain the already received packets before shutting down.

To check we are not losing any packet, we spawn a Go routine to send as many packets as possible:

sentPackets := 0
notSentPackets := 0
done := make(chan bool)
conn, err := net.Dial("udp", conns1[0].LocalAddr().String())
if err != nil {
    t.Fatalf("Dial() error:\n%+v", err)
}
defer conn.Close()
go func() {
    for {
        if _, err := conn.Write([]byte("hello world!")); err != nil {
            notSentPackets++
        } else {
            sentPackets++
        }
        select {
        case <-done:
            return
        default:
        }
    }
}()

Then, while the Go routine runs, we start the second set of workers. Once they are running, they start receiving packets. If we gracefully stop the initial set of workers, not a single packet is lost!9

=== RUN   TestGracefulRestart
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[0] = 165
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[1] = 195
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[2] = 194
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[3] = 190
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[4] = 213
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[5] = 187
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[6] = 170
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[7] = 190
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[8] = 194
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[9] = 155

    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[0] = 1631
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[1] = 1582
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[2] = 1594
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[3] = 1611
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[4] = 1571
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[5] = 1660
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[6] = 1587
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[7] = 1605
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[8] = 1631
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[9] = 1689

    graceful_test.go:147: receivedPackets = 18014
    graceful_test.go:148: sentPackets     = 18014

Unfortunately, gracefully shutting down a UDP socket is not trivial in Go.10 Previously, we were terminating workers by closing their sockets. However, if we close them too soon, the application loses packets that were assigned to them but not yet processed. Before stopping, a worker needs to call conn.Read() until there are no more packets. A solution is to set a deadline for conn.Read() and check if we should stop the Go routine when the deadline is exceeded:

payload := make([]byte, 9000)
for {
    conn.SetReadDeadline(time.Now().Add(50 * time.Millisecond))
    if _, err := conn.Read(payload); err != nil {
        if errors.Is(err, os.ErrDeadlineExceeded) {
            select {
            case <-done:
                return
            default:
                continue
            }
        }
        t.Logf("Read() error:\n%+v", err)
    }
    *packets++
}

With TCP, this aspect is simpler: after enabling the net.ipv4.tcp_migrate_req sysctl, the kernel automatically migrates waiting connections to a random socket in the same group. Alternatively, eBPF can also control this migration. Both features are available since Linux 5.14.

Addendum

After implementing this strategy in Akvorado, all workers now drop packets! 😱

$ curl -s 127.0.0.1:8080/api/v0/inlet/metrics \
> | sed -n s/akvorado_inlet_flow_input_udp_in_dropped//p
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="0"} 838673
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="1"} 843675
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="2"} 837922
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="3"} 841443
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="4"} 840668
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="5"} 850274
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="6"} 835488
packets_total{listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="7"} 834479

The root cause is the default limit of 32 records for Kafka batch sizes. This limit is too low because the brokers have a large overhead when handling each batch: they need to ensure they persist correctly before acknowledging them. Increasing the limit to 4096 records fixes this issue.

While load-balancing incoming flows with eBPF remains useful, it did not solve the main issue. At least the even distribution of dropped packets helped identify the real bottleneck. 😅

  1. The current version of the manual page is incomplete and does not cover the evolution introduced in Linux 4.19. There is a pending patch about this. ↩�

  2. Rust is another option. However, the program we use is so trivial that it does not make sense to use Rust. ↩�

  3. As bpf_get_prandom_u32() returns a pseudo-random 32-bit unsigned value, this method exhibits a very slight bias towards the first indexes. This is unlikely to be worth fixing. ↩�

  4. Some examples include <linux/bpf.h> instead of "vmlinux.h". This makes your eBPF program dependent on the installed kernel headers. ↩�

  5. listenAddr is initially set to 127.0.0.1:0 to allocate a random port. After the first iteration, it is updated with the allocated port. ↩�

  6. This is the setupSockets() function in fixtures_test.go. ↩�

  7. This is the setupEBPF() function in fixtures_test.go. ↩�

  8. The complete code is in balancing_test.go ↩�

  9. The complete code is in graceful_test.go ↩�

  10. In C, we would poll() both the socket and a pipe used to signal for shutdown. When the second condition is triggered, we drain the socket by executing a series of non-blocking read() until we get EWOULDBLOCK. ↩�

05 January, 2026 08:51AM by Vincent Bernat

hackergotchi for Jonathan McDowell

Jonathan McDowell

Free Software Activities for 2025

Given we’ve entered a new year it’s time for my annual recap of my Free Software activities for the previous calendar year. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 + 2024.

Conferences

My first conference of the year was FOSDEM. I’d submitted a talk proposal about system attestation in production environments for the attestation devroom, but they had a lot of good submissions and mine was a bit more “this is how we do it” rather than “here’s some neat Free Software that does it”. I’m still trying to work out how to make some of the bits we do more open, but the problem is a lot of the neat stuff is about taking internal knowledge about what should be running and making sure that’s the case, and what you end up with if you abstract that is a toolkit that still needs a lot of work to get something useful.

I’d more luck at DebConf25 where I gave a talk (Don’t fear the TPM) trying to explain how TPMs could be useful in a Debian context. Naturally the comments section descended into a discussion about UEFI Secure Boot, which is a separate, if related, thing. DebConf also featured the usual catch up with fellow team members, hanging out with folk I hadn’t seen in ages, and generally feeling a bit more invigorated about Debian.

Other conferences I considered, but couldn’t justify, were All Systems Go! and the Linux Plumbers Conference. I’ve no doubt both would have had a bunch of interesting and relevant talks + discussions, but not enough this year.

I’m going to have to miss FOSDEM this year, due to travel later in the month, and I’m uncertain if I’m going to make DebConf (for a variety of reasons). That means I don’t have a Free Software conference planned for 2026. Ironically FOSSY moving away from Portland makes it a less appealing option (I have Portland friends it would be good to visit). Other than potential Debian MiniConfs, anything else European I should consider?

Debian

I continue to try and keep RetroArch in shape, with 1.22.2+dfsg-1 (and, shortly after, 1.22.2+dfsg-2 - git-buildpackage in trixie seems more strict about Build-Depends existing in the outside environment, and I keep forgetting I need Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Depends-Indep to be pretty much the same with a minimal Build-Depends that just has enough for the clean target) getting uploaded in December, and 1.20.0+dfsg-1, 1.20+dfsg-2 + 1.20+dfsg-3 all being uploaded earlier in the year. retroarch-assets had 1.20.0+dfsg-1 uploaded back in April. I need to find some time to get 1.22.0 packaged. libretro-snes9x got updated to 1.63+dfsg-1.

sdcc saw 4.5.0+dfsg-1, 4.5.0+dfsg-2, 4.5.0+dfsg-3 (I love major GCC upgrades) and 4.5.0-dfsg-4 uploads. There’s an outstanding bug around a LaTeX error building the manual, but this turns out to be a bug in the 2.5 RC for LyX. Huge credit to Tobias Quathamer for engaging with this, and Pavel Sanda + Jürgen Spitzmüller from the LyX upstream for figuring out the issue + a fix.

Pulseview saw 0.4.2-4 uploaded to fix issues with the GCC 15 + CMake upgrades. I should probably chase the sigrok upstream about new releases; I think there are a bunch of devices that have gained support in git without seeing a tagged release yet.

I did an Electronics Team upload for gputils 1.5.2-2 to fix compilation with GCC 15.

While I don’t do a lot with storage devices these days if I can help it I still pay a little bit of attention to sg3-utils. That resulted in 1.48-2 and 1.48-3 uploads in 2025.

libcli got a 1.10.7-3 upload to deal with the libcrypt-dev split out.

Finally I got more up-to-date versions of libtorrent (0.15.7-1) and rtorrent (also 0.15.7-1) uploaded to experimental. There’s a ppc64el build failure in libtorrent, but having asked on debian-powerpc this looks like a flaky test/code and I should probably go ahead and upload to unstable.

I sponsored some uploads for Michel Lind - the initial uploads of plymouth-theme-hot-dog, and the separated out pykdumpfile package.

Recognising the fact I wasn’t contributing in a useful fashion to the Data Protection Team I set about trying to resign in an orderly fashion - see Andreas’ call for volunteers that went out in the last week. Shout out to Enrico for pointing out in the past that we should gracefully step down from things we’re not actually managing to do, to avoid the perception it’s all fine and no one else needs to step up. Took me too long to act on it.

The Debian keyring team continues to operate smoothly, maintaining our monthly release cadence with a 3 month rotation ensuring all team members stay familiar with the process, and ensure their setups are still operational (especially important after Debian releases). I handled the 2025.03.23, 2025.06.24, 2025.06.27, 2025.09.18, 2025.12.08 + 2025.12.26 pushes.

Linux

TPM related fixes were the theme of my kernel contributions in 2025, all within a work context. Some were just cleanups, but several fixed real issues that were causing us issues. I’ve also tried to be more proactive about reviewing diffs in the TPM subsystem; it feels like a useful way to contribute, as well as making me more actively pay attention to what’s going on there.

Personal projects

I did some work on onak, my OpenPGP keyserver. That resulted in a 0.6.4 release, mainly driven by fixes for building with more recent CMake + GCC versions in Debian. I’ve got a set of changes that should add RFC9580 (v6) support, but there’s not a lot of test keys out there at present for making sure I’m handling things properly. Equally there’s a plan to remove Berkeley DB from Debian, which I’m completely down with, but that means I need a new primary backend. I’ve got a draft of LMDB support to replace that, but I need to go back and confirm I’ve got all the important bits implemented before publishing it and committing to a DB layout. I’d also like to add sqlite support as an option, but that needs some thought about trying to take proper advantage of its features, rather than just treating it as a key-value store.

(I know everyone likes to hate on OpenPGP these days, but I continue to be interested by the whole web-of-trust piece of it, which nothing else I’m aware of offers.)

That about wraps up 2025. Nothing particularly earth shaking in there, more a case of continuing to tread water on the various things I’m involved. I highly doubt 2026 will be much different, but I think that’s ok. I scratch my own itches, and if that helps out other folk too then that’s lovely, but not the primary goal.

05 January, 2026 07:57AM

Russell Coker

Phone Charging Speeds With Debian/Trixie

One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro (PPP) when I tried using it as a daily driver [1] was the charge speed, both slow charging and a bad ratio of charge speed to discharge speed. I also tried using a One Plus 6 (OP6) which had a better charge speed and battery life but I never got VoLTE to work [2] and VoLTE is a requirement for use in Australia and an increasing number of other countries. In my tests with the Librem 5 from Purism I had similar issues with charge speed [3].

What I want to do is get an acceptable ratio of charge time to use time for a free software phone. I don’t necessarily object to a phone that can’t last an 8 hour day on a charge, but I can’t use a phone that needs to be on charge for 4 hours during the day. For this part I’m testing the charge speed and will test the discharge speed when I have solved some issues with excessive CPU use.

I tested with a cheap USB power monitoring device that is inline between the power cable and the phone. The device has no method of export so I just watched it and when the numbers fluctuated I tried to estimate the average. I only give the results to two significant digits which is about all the accuracy that is available, as I copied the numbers separately the V*A might not exactly equal the W. I idly considered rounding off Voltages to the nearest Volt and current to the half amp but the way the PC USB ports have voltage drop at higher currents is interesting.

This post should be useful for people who want to try out FOSS phones but don’t want to buy the range of phones and chargers that I have bought.

Phones Tested

I have seen claims about improvements with charging speed on the Librem 5 with recent updates so I decided to compare a number of phones running Debian/Trixie as well as some Android phones. I’m comparing an old Samsung phone (which I tried running Droidian on but is now on Android) and a couple of Pixel phones with the three phones that I currently have running Debian for charging.

Chargers Tested

HP Z640

The Librem 5 had problems with charging on a port on the HP ML110 Gen9 I was using as a workstation. I have sold the ML110 and can’t repeat that exact test but I tested on the HP z640 that I use now. The z640 is a much better workstation (quieter and better support for audio and other desktop features) and is also sold as a workstation.

The z640 documentation says that of the front USB ports the top one can do “fast charge (up to 1.5A)” with “USB Battery Charging Specification 1.2”. The only phone that would draw 1.5A on that port was the Librem 5 but the computer would only supply 4.4V at that current which is poor. For every phone I tested the bottom port on the front (which apparently doesn’t have USB-BC or USB-PD) charged at least as fast as the top port and every phone other than the OP6 charged faster on the bottom port. The Librem 5 also had the fastest charge rate on the bottom port. So the rumours about the Librem 5 being updated to address the charge speed on PC ports seem to be correct.

The Wikipedia page about USB Hardware says that the only way to get more than 1.5A from a USB port while operating within specifications is via USB-PD so as USB 3.0 ports the bottom 3 ports should be limited to 5V at 0.9A for 4.5W. The Librem 5 takes 2.0A and the voltage drops to 4.6V so that gives 9.2W. This shows that the z640 doesn’t correctly limit power output and the Librem 5 will also take considerably more power than the specs allow. It would be really interesting to get a powerful PSU and see how much power a Librem 5 will take without negotiating USB-PD and it would also be interesting to see what happens when you short circuit a USB port in a HP z640. But I recommend not doing such tests on hardware you plan to keep using!

Of the phones I tested the only one that was within specifications on the bottom port of the z640 was the OP6. I think that is more about it just charging slowly in every test than conforming to specs.

Monitor

The next test target is my 5120*2160 Kogan monitor with a USB-C port [4]. This worked quite well and apart from being a few percent slower on the PPP it outperformed the PC ports for every device due to using USB-PD (the only way to get more than 5V) and due to just having a more powerful PSU that doesn’t have a voltage drop when more than 1A is drawn.

Ali Charger

The Ali Charger is a device that I bought from AliExpress is a 240W GaN charger supporting multiple USB-PD devices. I tested with the top USB-C port that can supply 100W to laptops.

The Librem 5 has charging going off repeatedly on the Ali charger and doesn’t charge properly. It’s also the only charger for which the Librem 5 requests a higher voltage than 5V, so it seems that the Librem 5 has some issues with USB-PD. It would be interesting to know why this problem happens, but I expect that a USB signal debugger is needed to find that out. On AliExpress USB 2.0 sniffers go for about $50 each and with a quick search I couldn’t see a USB 3.x or USB-C sniffer. So I’m not going to spend my own money on a sniffer, but if anyone in Melbourne Australia owns a sniffer and wants to visit me and try it out then let me know. I’ll also bring it to Everything Open 2026.

Generally the Ali charger was about the best charger from my collection apart from the case of the Librem 5.

Dell Dock

I got a number of free Dell WD15 (aka K17A) USB-C powered docks as they are obsolete. They have VGA ports among other connections and for the HDMI and DisplayPort ports it doesn’t support resolutions higher than FullHD if both ports are in use or 4K if a single port is in use. The resolutions aren’t directly relevant to the charging but it does indicate the age of the design.

The Dell dock seems to not support any voltages other than 5V for phones and 19V (20V requested) for laptops. Certainly not the 9V requested by the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 phones. I wonder if not supporting most fast charging speeds for phones was part of the reason why other people didn’t want those docks and I got some for free. I hope that the newer Dell docks support 9V, a phone running Samsung Dex will display 4K output on a Dell dock and can productively use a keyboard and mouse. Getting equivalent functionality to Dex working properly on Debian phones is something I’m interested in.

Battery

The “Battery” I tested with is a Chinese battery for charging phones and laptops, it’s allegedly capable of 67W USB-PD supply but so far all I’ve seen it supply is 20V 2.5A for my laptop. I bought the 67W battery just in case I need it for other laptops in future, the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I’m using now will charge from a 30W battery.

There seems to be an overall trend of the most shonky devices giving the best charging speeds. Dell and HP make quality gear although my tests show that some HP ports exceed specs. Kogan doesn’t make monitors, they just put their brand on something cheap. Buying one of the cheapest chargers from AliExpress and one of the cheaper batteries from China I don’t expect the highest quality and I am slightly relieved to have done enough tests with both of those that a fire now seems extremely unlikely. But it seems that the battery is one of the fastest charging devices I own and with the exception of the Librem 5 (which charges slowly on all ports and unreliably on several ports) the Ali charger is also one of the fastest ones. The Kogan monitor isn’t far behind.

Conclusion

Voltage and Age

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was released in 2018 as was the OP6. The PPP was first released in 2022 and the Librem 5 was first released in 2020, but I think they are both at a similar technology level to the Note 9 and OP6 as the companies that specialise in phones have a pipeline for bringing new features to market.

The Pixel phones are newer and support USB-PD voltage selection while the other phones either don’t support USB-PD or support it but only want 5V. Apart from the Librem 5 which wants a higher voltage but runs it at a low current and repeatedly disconnects.

Idle Power

One of the major problems I had in the past which prevented me from using a Debian phone as my daily driver is the ratio of idle power use to charging power. Now that the phones seem to charge faster if I can get the idle power use under control then it will be usable.

Currently the Librem 5 running Trixie is using 6% CPU time (24% of a core) while idle and the screen is off (but “Caffeine” mode is enabled so no deep sleep). On the PPP the CPU use varies from about 2% and 20% (12% to 120% of one core), this was mainly plasmashell and kwin_wayland. The OP6 has idle CPU use a bit under 1% CPU time which means a bit under 8% of one core.

The Librem 5 and PPP seem to have configuration issues with KDE Mobile and Pipewire that result in needless CPU use. With those issues addressed I might be able to make a Librem 5 or PPP a usable phone if I have a battery to charge it.

The OP6 is an interesting point of comparison as a Debian phone but is not a viable option as a daily driver due to problems with VoLTE and also some instability – it sometimes crashes or drops off Wifi.

The Librem 5 charges at 9.2W from a a PC that doesn’t obey specs and 10W from a battery. That’s a reasonable charge rate and the fact that it can request 12V (unsuccessfully) opens the possibility to potential higher charge rates in future. That could allow a reasonable ratio of charge time to use time.

The PPP has lower charging speeds then the Librem 5 but works more consistently as there was no charger I found that wouldn’t work well with it. This is useful for the common case of charging from a random device in the office. But the fact that the Librem 5 takes 10W from the battery while the PPP only takes 6.3W would be an issue if using the phone while charging.

Now I know the charge rates for different scenarios I can work on getting the phones to use significantly less power than that on average.

Specifics for a Usable Phone

The 57W battery or something equivalent is something I think I will always need to have around when using a PPP or Librem 5 as a daily driver.

The ability to charge fast while at a desk is also an important criteria. The charge speed of my home PC is good in that regard and the charge speed of my monitor is even better. Getting something equivalent at a desktop of an office I work in is a possibility.

Improving the Debian distribution for phones is necessary. That’s something I plan to work on although the code is complex and in many cases I’ll have to just file upstream bug reports.

I have also ordered a FuriLabs FLX1s [5] which I believe will be better in some ways. I will blog about it when it arrives.

Phone Top z640 Bottom Z640 Monitor Ali Charger Dell Dock Battery Best Worst
Note9 4.8V 1.0A 5.2W 4.8V 1.6A 7.5W 4.9V 2.0A 9.5W 5.1V 1.9A 9.7W 4.8V 2.1A 10W 5.1V 2.1A 10W 5.1V 2.1A 10W 4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
Pixel 7 pro 4.9V 0.80A 4.2W 4.8V 1.2A 5.9W 9.1V 1.3A 12W 9.1V 1.2A 11W 4.9V 1.8A 8.7W 9.0V 1.3A 12W 9.1V 1.3A 12W 4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
Pixel 8 4.7V 1.2A 5.4W 4.7V 1.5A 7.2W 8.9V 2.1A 19W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.8V 2.3A 11.0W 9.1V 2.6A 24W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
PPP 4.7V 1.2A 6.0W 4.8V 1.3A 6.8W 4.9V 1.4A 6.6W 5.0V 1.2A 5.8W 4.9V 1.4A 5.9W 5.1V 1.2A 6.3W 4.8V 1.3A 6.8W 5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
Librem 5 4.4V 1.5A 6.7W 4.6V 2.0A 9.2W 4.8V 2.4A 11.2W 12V 0.48A 5.8W 5.0V 0.56A 2.7W 5.1V 2.0A 10W 4.8V 2.4A 11.2W 5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
OnePlus6 5.0V 0.51A 2.5W 5.0V 0.50A 2.5W 5.0V 0.81A 4.0W 5.0V 0.75A 3.7W 5.0V 0.77A 3.7W 5.0V 0.77A 3.9W 5.0V 0.81A 4.0W 5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
Best 4.4V 1.5A 6.7W 4.6V 2.0A 9.2W 8.9V 2.1A 19W 9.1V 2.7A 24W 4.8V 2.3A 11.0W 9.1V 2.6A 24W

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05 January, 2026 07:21AM by etbe

January 03, 2026

Joerg Jaspert

AI Shit, go away; iocaine to the rescue

As a lot of people do, I have some content that is reachable using webbrowsers. There is the password manager Vaultwarden, an instance of Immich, ForgeJo for some personal git repos, my blog and some other random pages here and there.

All of this never had been a problem, running a webserver is a relatively simple task, no matter if you use apache2 , nginx or any of the other possibilities. And the things mentioned above bring their own daemon to serve the users.

AI crap

And then some idiot somewhere had the idea to ignore every law, every copyright and every normal behaviour and run some shit AI bot. And more idiots followed. And now we have more AI bots than humans generating traffic.

And those AI shit crawlers do not respect any limits. robots.txt, slow servers, anything to keep your meager little site up and alive? Them idiots throw more resources onto them to steal content. No sense at all.

iocaine to the rescue

So them AI bros want to ignore everything and just fetch the whole internet? Without any consideration if thats even wanted? Or legal? There are people who dislike this. I am one of them, but there are some who got annoyed enough to develop tools to fight the AI craziness. One of those tools is iocaine - it says about itself that it is The deadliest poison known to AI.

Feed AI bots sh*t

So you want content? You do not accept any Go away? Then here is content. It is crap, but appearently you don’t care. So have fun.

What iocaine does is (cite from their webpage) “not made for making the Crawlers go away. It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and keep them off of upstream resources”.

That is, instead of the expensive webapp using a lot of resources that are basically wasted for nothing, iocaine generates a small static page (with some links back to itself, so the crawler shit stays happy). Which takes a hell of a lot less resource than any fullblown app.

iocaine setup

The website has a https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/documentation/, it is not hard to setup. Still, I had to adjust some things for my setup, as I use [Caddy Docker Proxy}([https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy) nowadays and wanted to keep the config within the docker setup, that is, within the labels.

Caddy container

So my container setup for the caddy itself contains the following extra lines:

    labels:
      caddy_0.email: email@example.com
      caddy_1: (iocaine)
      caddy_1.0_@read: method GET HEAD
      caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy: "@read iocaine:42069"
      "caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy.@fallback": "status 421"
      caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy.handle_response: "@fallback"

This will be translated to the following Caddy config snippet:

(iocaine) {
        @read method GET HEAD
        reverse_proxy @read iocaine:42069 {
                @fallback status 421
                handle_response @fallback
        }
}

Any container that should be protected by iocaine

All the containers that are “behind” the Caddy reverse proxy can now get protected by iocaine with just one more line in their docker-compose.yaml. So now we have

   labels:
      caddy: service.example.com
      caddy.reverse_proxy: "{{upstreams 3000}}"
      caddy.import: iocaine

which translates to

service.example.com {
        import iocaine
        reverse_proxy 172.18.0.6:3000
}

So with one simple extra label for the docker container I have iocaine activated.

Result? ByeBye (most) AI Bots

Looking at the services that got hammered most from those crap bots - deploying this iocaine container and telling Caddy about it solved the problem for me. 98% of the requests from the bots now go to iocaine and no longer hog resources in the actual services.

I wish it wouldn’t be neccessary to run such tools. But as long as we have shitheads doing the AI hype there is no hope. I wish they all would end up in Jail for all their various stealing they do. And someone with a little more brain left would set things up sensibly, then the AI thing could maybe turn out something good and useful.

But currently it is all crap.

03 January, 2026 01:23PM

hackergotchi for Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Wikipedia

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some “older” published projects. This particular post is closely based on a previously published post by Nate TeBlunthuis from the Community Data Science Blog.

Many online platforms are adopting AI and machine learning as a tool to maintain order and high-quality information in the face of massive influxes of user-generated content. Of course, AI algorithms can be inaccurate, biased, or unfair. How do signals from AI predictions shape the fairness of online content moderation? How can we measure an algorithmic flagging system’s effects?

In our paper published at CSCW, Nate TeBlunthuis, together with myself and Aaron Halfaker, analyzed the RCFilters system: an add-on to Wikipedia that highlights and filters edits that a machine learning algorithm called ORES identifies as likely to be damaging to Wikipedia. This system has been deployed on large Wikipedia language editions and is similar to other algorithmic flagging systems that are becoming increasingly widespread. Our work measures the causal effect of being flagged in the RCFilters user interface.

Screenshot of Wikipedia edit metadata on Special:RecentChanges with RCFilters enabled. Highlighted edits with a colored circle to the left side of other metadata are flagged by ORES. Different circle and highlight colors (white, yellow, orange, and red in the figure) correspond to different levels of confidence that the edit is damaging. RCFilters does not specifically flag edits by new accounts or unregistered editors, but does support filtering changes by editor types.

Our work takes advantage of the fact that RCFilters, like many algorithmic flagging systems, create discontinuities in the relationship between the probability that a moderator should take action and whether a moderator actually does. This happens because the output of machine learning systems like ORES is typically a continuous score (in RCFilters, an estimated probability that a Wikipedia edit is damaging), while the flags (in RCFilters, the yellow, orange, or red highlights) are either on or off and are triggered when the score crosses some arbitrary threshold. As a result, edits slightly above the threshold are both more visible to moderators and appear more likely to be damaging than edits slightly below. Even though edits on either side of the threshold have virtually the same likelihood of truly being damaging, the flagged edits are substantially more likely to be reverted. This fact lets us use a method called regression discontinuity to make causal estimates of the effect of being flagged in RCFilters.

Charts showing the probability that an edit will be reverted as a function of ORES scores in the neighborhood of the discontinuous threshold that triggers the RCfilters flag. The jump in the increase in reversion chances is larger for registered editors compared to unregistered editors at both thresholds.

To understand how this system may affect the fairness of Wikipedia moderation, we estimate the effects of flagging on edits on different groups of editors. Comparing the magnitude of these estimates lets us measure how flagging is associated with several different definitions of fairness. Surprisingly, we found evidence that these flags improved fairness for categories of editors that have been widely perceived as troublesome—particularly unregistered (anonymous) editors. This occurred because flagging has a much stronger effect on edits by the registered than on edits by the unregistered.

We believe that our results are driven by the fact that algorithmic flags are especially helpful for finding damage that can’t be easily detected otherwise. Wikipedia moderators can see the editor’s registration status in the recent changes, watchlists, and edit history. Because unregistered editors are often troublesome, Wikipedia moderators’ attention is often focused on their contributions, with or without algorithmic flags. Algorithmic flags make damage by registered editors (in addition to unregistered editors) much more detectable to moderators and so help moderators focus on damage overall, not just damage by suspicious editors. As a result, the algorithmic flagging system decreases the bias that moderators have against unregistered editors.

This finding is particularly surprising because the ORES algorithm we analyzed was itself demonstrably biased against unregistered editors (i.e., the algorithm tended to greatly overestimate the probability that edits by these editors were damaging). Despite the fact that the algorithms were biased, their introduction could still lead to less biased outcomes overall.

Our work shows that although it is important to design predictive algorithms to avoid such biases, it is equally important to study fairness at the level of the broader sociotechnical system. Since we first published a preprint of our paper, a follow-up piece by Leijie Wang and Haiyi Zhu replicated much of our work and showed that differences between different Wikipedia communities may be another important factor driving the effect of the system. Overall, this work suggests that social signals and social context can interact with algorithmic signals, and together these can influence behavior in important and unexpected ways.

The full citation for the paper is: TeBlunthuis, Nathan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Aaron Halfaker. 2021. “Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW): 56:1-56:27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449130.

We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analysis and compile the paper itself.

03 January, 2026 12:34PM by Benjamin Mako Hill

Russ Allbery

Review: Challenges of the Deeps

Review: Challenges of the Deeps, by Ryk E. Spoor

Series: Arenaverse #3
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: March 2017
ISBN: 1-62579-564-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 438

Challenges of the Deeps is the third book in the throwback space opera Arenaverse series. It is a direct sequel to Spheres of Influence, but Spoor provides a substantial recap of the previous volumes for those who did not read the series in close succession (thank you!).

Ariane has stabilized humanity's position in the Arena with yet another improbable victory. (If this is a spoiler for previous volumes, so was telling you the genre of the book.) Now is a good opportunity to fulfill the promise humanity made to their ally Orphan: accompaniment on a journey into the uncharted deeps of the Arena for reasons that Orphan refuses to explain in advance. Her experienced crew provide multiple options to serve as acting Leader of Humanity until she gets back. What can go wrong?

The conceit of this series is that as soon as a species achieves warp drive technology, their ships are instead transported into the vast extradimensional structure of the Arena where a godlike entity controls the laws of nature and enforces a formal conflict resolution process that looks alternatingly like a sporting event, a dueling code, and technology-capped total war. Each inhabitable system in the real universe seems to correspond to an Arena sphere, but the space between them is breathable atmosphere filled with often-massive storms.

In other words, this is an airship adventure as written by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Sort of. There is an adventure, and there are a lot of airships (although they fight mostly like spaceships), but much of the action involves tense mental and physical sparring with a previously unknown Arena power with unclear motives.

My general experience with this series is that I find the Arena concept fascinating and want to read more about it, Spoor finds his much-less-original Hyperion Project in the backstory of the characters more fascinating and wants to write about that, and we reach a sort of indirect, grumbling (on my part) truce where I eagerly wait for more revelations about the Arena and roll my eyes at the Hyperion stuff. Talking about Hyperion in detail is probably a spoiler for at least the first book, but I will say that it's an excuse to embed versions of literary characters into the story and works about as well as most such excuses (not very). The characters in question are an E.E. "Doc" Smith mash-up, a Monkey King mash-up, and a number of other characters that are obviously references to something but for whom I lack enough hints to place (which is frustrating).

Thankfully we get far less human politics and a decent amount of Arena world-building in this installment. Hyperion plays a role, but mostly as foreshadowing for the next volume and the cause of a surprising interaction with Arena rules. One of the interesting wrinkles of this series is that humanity have an odd edge against the other civilizations in part because we're borderline insane sociopaths from the perspective of the established powers. That's an old science fiction trope, but I prefer it to the Campbell-style belief in inherent human superiority.

Old science fiction tropes are what you need to be in the mood for to enjoy this series. This is an unapologetic and intentional throwback to early pulp: individuals who can be trusted with the entire future of humanity because they're just that moral, super-science, psychic warfare, and even coruscating beams that would make E.E. "Doc" Smith proud. It's an occasionally glorious but mostly silly pile of technobabble, but Spoor takes advantage of the weird, constructed nature of the Arena to provide more complex rules than competitive superlatives.

The trick is that while this is certainly science fiction pulp, it's also a sort of isekai novel. There's a lot of anime and manga influence just beneath the surface. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me before reading this series that melodramatic anime and old SF pulps have substantial aesthetic overlap, but of course they do. I loved the Star Blazers translated anime that I watched as a kid precisely because it had the sort of dramatic set pieces that make the Lensman novels so much fun.

There is a bit too much Wu Kong in this book for me (although the character is growing on me a little), and some of the maneuvering around the mysterious new Arena actor drags on longer than was ideal, but the climax is great stuff if you're in the mood for dramatic pulp adventure. The politics do not bear close examination and the writing is serviceable at best, but something about this series is just fun. I liked this book much better than Spheres of Influence, although I wish Spoor would stop being so coy about the nature of the Arena and give us more substantial revelations. I'm also now tempted to re-read Lensman, which is probably a horrible idea. (Spoor leaves the sexism out of his modern pulp.)

If you got through Spheres of Influence with your curiosity about the Arena intact, consider this one when you're in the mood for modern pulp, although don't expect any huge revelations. It's not the best-written book, but it sits squarely in the center of a genre and mood that's otherwise a bit hard to find.

Followed by the Kickstarter-funded Shadows of Hyperion, which sadly looks like it's going to concentrate on the Hyperion Project again. I will probably pick that up... eventually.

Rating: 6 out of 10

03 January, 2026 05:23AM

hackergotchi for Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Louis-Philippe Véronneau

2025 — A Musical Retrospective

2026 already! The winter weather here has really been beautiful and I always enjoy this time of year. Writing this yearly musical retrospective has now become a beloved tradition of mine1 and I enjoy retracing the year's various events through albums I listened to and concerts I went to.

Albums

In 2025, I added 141 new albums to my collection, around 60% more than last year's haul. I think this might have been too much? I feel like I didn't have time to properly enjoy all of them and as such, I decided to slow down my acquisition spree sometimes in early December, around the time I normally do the complete opposite.

This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. Most of the other albums I bought as CDs and ripped them.

Try to Win - Stay True
Shotcallers - Tales of Urban Tribes
Lutèce Borgia - Long Live Summer
Lutèce Borgia - Choose
Senza Frontiere - Nonce futuro senza mémoria
Self Control - Self Control Session #19 -5-23
Maldita - Un Mundo En Demencia
Bambu - They’re Burning the Boats
Paradise Lost - Ascension
Krigsgrav - Stormcaller
Nobro - Live Your Truth Shred Some Gnar
Nobro - Sick Hustle
Balm Squad - Dark Times album
Corrigan Fest - La victoire en chantant
The Planet Smashers - Attack of the Planet Smashers
Extraña humana - Bailando en la oscuridad
Ben Prunty - FTL - Lost Ship EP
Faze - Big Upsetter
Faze - Struggling to Enjoy Ourselves While the World Slowly Implodes
Faze - Songs by Faze
Faze - Content
Blackbraid - Blackbraid III
UZU أوزو - À qui la liberté- لمن الحريّة ؟
Vulgaires Machins - Contempler l'abîme
The Planet Smashers - On the Dancefloor
Self Control - Still... Can't Bring Us Down
Propagandhi - At Peace
Propagandhi - Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes
Propagandhi - Potemkin City Limits
Propagandhi - Failed States
Rogue Steady Orchestra - Fehlstaat
Balm Squad - Point of No Return
Calva Louise - Edge of the Abyss
Fallujah - Xenotaph
Impureza - Alcázares
Propagandhi - Supporting Caste
Phantom Spell - Immortal's Requiem
In Mourning - The Immortal
Davaï! - Première Pression
22 Longs Riffs - Contre Courant
Insania - The Great Apocalypse
Phantom Spell - Heather & Hearth
Tenaz - Existencia Individual
Béton Armé - Renaissance
Messa - The Spin
Jo Corbeau - Yeba Aïoli
Jo Corbeau - Roi des rois
Lord Kossity - Everlord
Mo'Kalamity - Deeper Revolution
Mo'Kalamity - Freedom of Soul
Mo'Kalamity - Warriors of Light
Mo'Kalamity - Shine
Death Proof - Parallel World
Death Proof - Haunted
Death Proof - Do What You Want
The Buzzers - Cutting It Close
The Buzzers - Bloody Minded EP
Fuerza Bruta - Somos El Mal
Total Nada - Aquí y Ahora
Regress 86 - Primitive Stomp
Petrol Girls - Talk of Violence
Petrol Girls - Baby
Achigan - Les procès condamnés
Atomic Threat - Nuke You
Atomic Threat - Atomic Threat
Atomic Threat - Nuke Us
Les Ordures Ioniques - Se soûlagent
Les Ordures Ioniques - Je m'en viens soûl
Les Ordures Ioniques - Les Ordures Ioniques
Nephylim - Circuition
Fighting Chance - … Thus Hopes Fades
Capable! - Brûle Brûle Brûle \ Hot-dog chicane
Strength Thru Oi!
Oi! Oi! That's Yer Lot!
Carry On Oi
Oi! The Album
Tulaviok - Dèche à la Ch'touille
Tulaviok - Q-Sec
The Abyssinians - Satta Amasagana
Evil Conduct - Sorry... No
Grima - Nightside
Lambrini Girls - You're Welcome
Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out
Dead Pioneers - Dead Pioneers
Dead Pioneers - PO$T AMERICAN
Havukruunu - Tavastland
Mitch Murder - Then Again
Polyrhythmics - Filter System
Ultra Razzia - Ultra Razzia - Armistice Split
The Uncouth - S\T
Ain't Right - Pils Session #21
Kardashev - The Baring of Shadows
Fucked Up - Hidden World
Fucked Up - Epics in Minutes
Liberty & Justice - Empire Down Split
Liberty & Justice - Locked In
Liberty & Justice - Top of the Scrapheap
AUS!Funkt - My Way - Interception
AUS!Funkt - That's a Fact
Dynamite Express - Dynamite Express
Mortier - L'Ennui
Union Thugs - Pils Session #16
Jag Arreola - Unmasked
Le Matos - Turbo Kid Original Game Soundtrack
Union Thugs - Coup de Grisou
BLEMISH - Pils Session #23
The Halo Effect - March of the Unheard
Polyrhythmics - Man from the Future
Crachat - Fille Poupée
Over the Hill - Older, Not Wiser
Taxi Girls - Rainy
Taxi Girls - Coming Up Roses
Brass Lip - vol 2
Brass Lip - vol 1
The Prowlers - On the Run
Ain't Right - Careful What You Wish For
Stranglehold - Trouble
Stranglehold - Stranglehold
Béton Armé - Collection
Flatfoot 56 - Toil
Flatfoot 56 - Blackthorn
Blitz - Voice of a Generation
Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Ultra Razzia - Ultra Razzia
Force Majeure - Force Majeure
Alternate Action - Thin Line
Saturday Night Satan - All Things Black
Alternate Action - Violent Crime EP
The Stress - The War Has Just Begun
The Stress - Never Die
The Stress - More Than You'll Ever Be
Spleen - ll
Spleen - Demo
Ultra Razzia - Collection
Big Boss - Skinhead revenge
Battery March - Boston Eats Its Young \ Futur pour eux EP
Workers Comp - Demo
Khassarat - How Many More Must Perish in the Pursuit of Hope?
Huntsmen - The Dry Land
Julie Christmas - Ridiculous and Full of Blood
Gaerea - Coma
Kanonenfieber - Die Urkatastrophe

Concerts

In 2025, I went to the following 25 (!!) concerts:

  • January 17th: Uzu, Young Blades, She came to quit, Fever Visions
  • February 1st: Over the Hill, Jail, Mortier, Ain't Right
  • February 7th: Béton Armé, Mulchulation II, Ooz
  • February 15th: The Prowlers, Ultra Razzia, Sistema de Muerte, Trauma Bond
  • February 28th: Francbâtards
  • March 28th: Conflit Majeur, to Even Exist, Crachat
  • April 12th: Jetsam, Mortier, NIIVI, Canette
  • April 26th-27th (Montreal Oi! Fest 2025): The Buzzers, Bad Terms, Sons of Pride, Liberty and Justice, Flafoot 56, The Beltones, Mortier, Street Code, The Stress, Alternate Action
  • May 1st: Bauxite, Atomic threat, the 351's
  • May 30th: Uzu, Tenaz, Extraña Humana, Sistema de muerte
  • June 7th: Ordures Ioniques, Tulaviok, Fucking Raymonds, Voyou
  • June 18th: Tiken Jah Fakoly
  • June 21st: Saïan Supa Celebration
  • June 26th: Taxi Girls, Death Proof, Laura Krieg
  • July 4th: Frente Cumbiero
  • July 12th: Montreal's Big Fiesta DJ Set
  • August 16th: Guerilla Poubelle
  • September 11th: No Suicide Act, Mortier
  • September 20th: Hors Contrôle, Union Thugs, Barricade Mentale
  • October 20th: Ezra Furman, The Golden Dregs
  • October 24th: Overbass, Hommage à Bérurier Noir, Self Control, Vermin Kaos
  • November 6th: Béton Armé, Faze, Slash Need, Chain Block
  • November 28th (Blood Moon Ritual 2025): Bhatt, Channeler, Pyrocene Death Cult, Masse d'Armes
  • December 13th (Stomp Records' 30th Anniversary Bash): The Planet Smashers, The Flatliners, Wine Lips, The Anti-Queens, Crash ton rock

Although I haven't touched metalfinder's code in a good while, my instance still works very well and I get the occasional match when a big-name artist in my collection comes in town. Most the venues that advertise on Bandsintown are tied to Ticketmaster though, which means most underground artists (i.e. most of the music I listen to) end up playing elsewhere.

As such, shout out again to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there.

See you all in 2026!

  1. see the 2022, 2023 and 2024 entries ↩

03 January, 2026 05:00AM by Louis-Philippe Véronneau

January 02, 2026

hackergotchi for Joachim Breitner

Joachim Breitner

Seemingly impossible programs in Lean

In 2007, Martin Escardo wrote a often-read blog post about “Seemingly impossible functional programs”. One such seemingly impossible function is find, which takes a predicate on infinite sequences of bits, and returns an infinite sequence for which that predicate hold (unless the predicate is just always false, in which case it returns some arbitrary sequence).

Inspired by conversations with and experiments by Massin Guerdi at the dinner of LeaningIn 2025 in Berlin (yes, this blog post has been in my pipeline for far too long), I wanted to play around these concepts in Lean.

Let’s represent infinite sequences of bits as functions from Nat to Bit, and give them a nice name, and some basic functionality, including a binary operator for consing an element to the front:

import Mathlib.Data.Nat.Find

abbrev Bit := Bool

def Cantor : Type := Nat → Bit

def Cantor.head (a : Cantor) : Bit := a 0

def Cantor.tail (a : Cantor) : Cantor := fun i => a (i + 1)

@[simp, grind] def Cantor.cons (x : Bit) (a : Cantor) : Cantor
  | 0 => x
  | i+1 => a i

infix:60 " # " => Cantor.cons

With this in place, we can write Escardo’s function in Lean. His blog post discusses a few variants; I’ll focus on just one of them:

mutual
  partial def forsome (p : Cantor → Bool) : Bool :=
    p (find p)

  partial def find (p : Cantor → Bool) : Cantor :=
    have b := forsome (fun a => p (true # a))
    (b # find (fun a => p (b # a)))
end

We define find together with forsome, which checks if the predicate p holds for any sequence. Using that find sets the first element of the result to true if there exists a squence starting with true, else to false, and then tries to find the rest of the sequence.

It is a bit of a brian twiter that this code works, but it does:

def fifth_false : Cantor → Bool := fun a => not (a 5)

/-- info: [true, true, true, true, true, false, true, true, true, true] -/
#guard_msgs in
#eval List.ofFn (fun (i : Fin 10) => find fifth_false i)

Of course, in Lean we don’t just want to define these functions, but we want to prove that they do what we expect them to do.

Above we defined them as partial functions, even though we hope that they are not actually partial: The partial keyword means that we don’t have to do a termination proof, but also that we cannot prove anything about these functions.

So can we convince Lean that these functions are total after all? We can, but it’s a bit of a puzzle, and we have to adjust the definitions.

First of all, these “seemingly impossible functions” are only possible because we assume that the predicate we pass to it, p, is computable and total. This is where the whole magic comes from, and I recommend to read Escardo’s blog posts and papers for more on this fascinating topic. In particular, you will learn that a predicate on Cantor that is computable and total necessarily only looks at some initial fragment of the sequence. The length of that prefix is called the “modulus”. So if we hope to prove termination of find and forsome, we have to restrict their argument p to only such computable predicates.

To that end I introduce HasModulus and the subtype of predicates on Cantor that have such a modulus:

-- Extensional (!) modulus of uniform continuity
def HasModulus (p : Cantor → α) := ∃ n, ∀ a b : Cantor, (∀ i < n, a i = b i) → p a = p b

@[ext] structure CantorPred where
  pred : Cantor → Bool
  hasModulus : HasModulus pred

The modulus of such a predicate is now the least prefix lenght that determines the predicate. In particular, if the modulus is zero, the predicate is constant:

namespace CantorPred

variable (p : CantorPred)

noncomputable def modulus : Nat :=
  open Classical in Nat.find p.hasModulus

theorem eq_of_modulus : ∀a b : Cantor, (∀ i < p.modulus, a i = b i) → p a = p b := by
  open Classical in
  unfold modulus
  exact Nat.find_spec p.hasModulus

theorem eq_of_modulus_eq_0 (hm : p.modulus = 0) : ∀ a b, p a = p b := by
  intro a b
  apply p.eq_of_modulus
  simp [hm]

Because we want to work with CantorPred and not Cantor → Bool I have to define some operations on that new type; in particular the “cons element before predicate” operation that we saw above in find:

def comp_cons (b : Bit) : CantorPred where
  pred := fun a => p (b # a)
  hasModulus := by
    obtain ⟨n, h_n⟩ := p.hasModulus
    cases n with
    | zero => exists 0; grind
    | succ m =>
      exists m
      intro a b heq
      simp
      apply h_n
      intro i hi
      cases i
      · rfl
      · grind

@[simp, grind =] theorem comp_cons_pred (x : Bit) (a : Cantor) :
  (p.comp_cons x) a = p (x # a) := rfl

For this operation we know that the modulus decreases (if it wasn’t already zero):

theorem comp_cons_modulus (x : Bit) :
    (p.comp_cons x).modulus ≤ p.modulus - 1 := by
  open Classical in
  apply Nat.find_le
  intro a b hab
  apply p.eq_of_modulus
  cases hh : p.modulus
  · simp
  · intro i hi
    cases i
    · grind
    · grind
grind_pattern comp_cons_modulus => (p.comp_cons x).modulus

We can rewrite the find function above to use these operations:

mutual
  partial def forsome (p : CantorPred) : Bool := p (find p)

  partial def find (p : CantorPred) : Cantor := fun i =>
    have b := forsome (p.comp_cons true)
    (b # find (p.comp_cons b)) i
end

I have also eta-expanded the Cantor function returned by find; there is now a fun i => … i around the body. We’ll shortly see why that is needed.

Now have everything in place to attempt a termination proof. Before we do that proof, we could step back and try to come up with an informal termination argument.

  • The recursive call from forsome to find doesn’t decrease any argument at all. This is ok if all calls from find to forsome are decreasing.

  • The recursive call from find to find decreases the index i as the recursive call is behind the Cantor.cons operation that shifts the index. Good.

  • The recursive call from find to forsome decreases the modulus of the argument p, if it wasn’t already zero.

    But if was zero, it does not decrease it! But if it zero, then the call from forsome to find doesn’t actually need to call find, because then p doesn’t look at its argument.

We can express all this reasoning as a termination measure in the form of a lexicographic triple. The 0 and 1 in the middle component mean that for zero modulus, we can call forsome from find “for free”.

mutual
  def forsome (p : CantorPred) : Bool := p (find p)
  termination_by (p.modulus, if p.modulus = 0 then 0 else 1, 0)
  decreasing_by grind

  def find (p : CantorPred) : Cantor := fun i =>
    have b := forsome (p.comp_cons true)
    (b # find (p.comp_cons b)) i
  termination_by i => (p.modulus, if p.modulus = 0 then 1 else 0, i)
  decreasing_by all_goals grind
end

The termination proof doesn’t go through just yet: Lean is not able to see that (_ # p) i will call p with i - 1, and it does not see that p (find p) only uses find p if the modulus of p is non-zero. We can use the wf_preprocess feature to tell it about that:

The following theorem replaces a call to p f, where p is a function parameter, with the slightly more complex but provably equivalent expression on the right, where the call to f is no in the else branch of an if-then-else and thus has ¬p.modulus = 0 in scope:

@[wf_preprocess]
theorem coe_wf (p : CantorPred) :
    (wfParam p) f = p (if _ : p.modulus = 0 then fun _ => false else f) := by
  split
  next h => apply p.eq_of_modulus_eq_0 h
  next => rfl

And similarly we replace (_ # p) i with a variant that extend the context with information on how p is called:

def cantor_cons' (x : Bit) (i : Nat) (a : ∀ j, j + 1 = i → Bit) : Bit :=
  match i with
  | 0 => x
  | j + 1 => a j (by grind)

@[wf_preprocess] theorem cantor_cons_congr (b : Bit) (a : Cantor) (i : Nat) :
  (b # a) i = cantor_cons' b i (fun j _ => a j) := by cases i <;> rfl

After these declarations, the above definition of forsome and find goes through!

It remains to now prove that they do what they should, by a simple induction on the modulus of p:

@[simp, grind =] theorem tail_cons_eq (a : Cantor) : (x # a).tail = a := by
  funext i; simp [Cantor.tail, Cantor.cons]

@[simp, grind =] theorem head_cons_tail_eq (a : Cantor) : a.head # a.tail = a := by
  funext i; cases i <;> rfl

theorem find_correct (p : CantorPred) (h_exists : ∃ a, p a) : p (find p) := by
  by_cases h0 : p.modulus = 0
  · obtain ⟨a, h_a⟩ := h_exists
    rw [← h_a]
    apply p.eq_of_modulus_eq_0 h0
  · rw [find.eq_unfold, forsome.eq_unfold]
    dsimp -zeta
    extract_lets b
    change p (_ # _)
    by_cases htrue : ∃ a, p (true # a)
    next =>
      have := find_correct (p.comp_cons true) htrue
      grind
    next =>
      have : b = false := by grind
      clear_value b; subst b
      have hfalse : ∃ a, p (false # a) := by
        obtain ⟨a, h_a⟩ := h_exists
        cases h : a.head
        · exists Cantor.tail a
          grind
        · exfalso
          apply htrue
          exists Cantor.tail a
          grind
      clear h_exists
      exact find_correct (p.comp_cons false) hfalse
termination_by p.modulus
decreasing_by all_goals grind

theorem forsome_correct (p : CantorPred) :
    forsome p ↔ (∃ a, p a) where
  mp hfind := by unfold forsome at hfind; exists find p
  mpr hex := by unfold forsome; exact find_correct p hex

This is pretty nice! However there is more to do. For example, Escardo has a “massively faster” variant of find that we can implement as a partial function in Lean:

def findBit (p : Bit → Bool) : Bit :=
  if p false then false else true

def branch (x : Bit) (l r : Cantor) : Cantor :=
  fun n =>
    if n = 0      then x
    else if 2 ∣ n then r ((n - 2) / 2)
                  else l ((n - 1) / 2)

mutual
  partial def forsome (p : Cantor -> Bool) : Bool :=
    p (find p)

  partial def find (p : Cantor -> Bool) : Cantor :=
    let x := findBit (fun x => forsome (fun l => forsome (fun r => p (branch x l r))))
    let l := find (fun l => forsome (fun r => p (branch x l r)))
    let r := find (fun r => p (branch x l r))
    branch x l r
end

But can we get this past Lean’s termination checker? In order to prove that the modulus of p is decreasing, we’d have to know that, for example, find (fun r => p (branch x l r)) is behaving nicely. Unforunately, it is rather hard to do termination proof for a function that relies on the behaviour of the function itself.

So I’ll leave this open as a future exercise.

I have dumped the code for this post at https://github.com/nomeata/lean-cantor.

02 January, 2026 02:30PM by Joachim Breitner (mail@joachim-breitner.de)

hackergotchi for Ben Hutchings

Ben Hutchings