Sorry I haven't updated the blog for a while: I've been busy. (Writing the final draft of a new novel entirely unconnected to anything else you've read—space opera, new setting, longest thing I've written aside from the big Merchant Princes doorsteps. Now in my agent's inbox while I make notes towards a sequel, if requested.)

Over the past few years I've been naively assuming that while we're ruled by a ruthless kleptocracy, they're not completely evil: aristocracies tend to run on self-interest and try to leave a legacy to their children, which usually means leaving enough peasants around to mow the lawn, wash the dishes, and work the fields.

But my faith in the sanity of the evil overlords has been badly shaken in the past couple of months by the steady drip of WTFery coming out of the USA in general and the Epstein Files in particular, and now there's this somewhat obscure aside, that rips the mask off entirely (Original email on DoJ website ) ...

A document released by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Epstein files contains a quote attributed to correspondence involving Jeffrey Epstein that references Bill Gates and a controversial question about "how do we get rid of poor people as a whole."

The passage appears in a written communication included in the DOJ document trove and reads, in part: "I've been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates, 'how do we get rid of poor people as a whole,' and I have an answer/comment regarding that for you." The writer then asks to schedule a phone call to discuss the matter further.

As an editor of mine once observed, America is ruled by two political parties: the party of the evil billionaires, and the party of the sane (so slightly less evil) billionaires. Evil billionaires: "let's kill the poor and take all their stuff." Sane billionaires: "hang on, if we kill them all who's going to cook dinner and clean the pool?"

And this seemed plausible ... before it turned out that the CEO class as a whole believe entirely in AI (which, to be clear, is just another marketing grift in the same spirit as cryptocurrencies/blockchain, next-generation nuclear power, real estate backed credit default options, and Dutch tulip bulbs). AI is being sold on the promise of increasing workforce efficiency. And in a world which has been studiously ignoring John Maynard Keynes' 1930 prediction that by 2030 we would only need to work a 15 hour work week, they've drawn an inevitable unwelcome conclusion from this axiom: that there are too many of us. For the past 75 years they've been so focussed on optimizing for efficiency that they no longer understand that efficiency and resilience are inversely related: in order to survive collectively through an energy transition and a time of climate destabilization we need extra capacity, not "right-sized" capacity.

Raise the death rate by removing herd immunity to childhood diseases? That's entirely consistent with "kill the poor". Mass deportation of anyone with the wrong skin colour? The white supremacists will join in enthusiastically, and meanwhile: the deported can die out of sight. Turn disused data centres or amazon warehouses into concentration camps (which are notorious disease breeding grounds)? It's a no-brainer. Start lots of small overseas brushfire wars, escalating to the sort of genocide now being piloted in Gaza by Trump's ally Netanyahu (to emphasize: his strain of Judaism can only be understood as a Jewish expression of white nationalism, throwing off its polite political mask to reveal the death's head of totalitarianism underneath)? It's all part of the program.

Our rulers have gone collectively insane (over a period of decades) and they want to kill us.

The class war has turned hot. And we're all on the losing side.

Akvorado, a network flow collector, relies on Traefik, a reverse HTTP proxy, to expose HTTP endpoints for services implemented in a Docker Compose setup. Docker labels attached to each service define the routing rules. Traefik picks them up automatically when a container starts. Instead of maintaining a static configuration file to collect Prometheus metrics, we can apply the same approach with Grafana Alloy, making its configuration simpler.

Traefik & Docker

Traefik listens for events on the Docker socket. Each service advertises its configuration through labels. For example, here is the Loki service in Akvorado:

services:
  loki:
    # …
    expose:
      - 3100/tcp
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.http.routers.loki.rule=PathPrefix(`/loki`)

Once the container is healthy, Traefik creates a router forwarding requests matching /loki to its first exposed port. Colocating Traefik configuration with the service definition is attractive. How do we achieve the same for Prometheus metrics?

Metrics discovery with Alloy

Grafana Alloy, a metrics collector that can scrape Prometheus endpoints, includes a discovery.docker component. Just like Traefik, it connects to the Docker socket.¹ With a few relabeling rules, we can teach it to use Docker labels to locate and scrape metrics.

We define three labels on each service:

• metrics.enable set to true enables metrics collection,
• metrics.port specifies the port exposing the Prometheus endpoint, and
• metrics.path specifies the path to the metrics endpoint.

If there is more than one exposed port, metrics.port is mandatory, otherwise it defaults to the only exposed port. The default value for metrics.path is /metrics. The Loki service from earlier becomes:

services:
  loki:
    # …
    expose:
      - 3100/tcp
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.http.routers.loki.rule=PathPrefix(`/loki`)
      - metrics.enable=true
      - metrics.path=/loki/metrics

Alloy’s configuration is split into four parts:

1. discover containers through the Docker socket,
2. filter and relabel targets using Docker labels,
3. scrape the matching endpoints, and
4. forward the metrics to Prometheus.

Discovering Docker containers

The first building block discovers running containers:

discovery.docker "docker" {
  host             = "unix:///var/run/docker.sock"
  refresh_interval = "30s"
  filter {
    name   = "label"
    values = ["com.docker.compose.project=akvorado"]
  }
}

This connects to the Docker socket and lists containers every 30 seconds.² The filter block restricts discovery to containers belonging to the akvorado project, avoiding interference with unrelated containers on the same host. For each discovered container, Alloy produces a target with labels such as __meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port for the metrics.port Docker label.

Relabeling targets

The relabeling step filters and transforms raw targets from Docker discovery into scrape targets. The first stage keeps only targets with metrics.enable set to true:

discovery.relabel "prometheus" {
  targets = discovery.docker.docker.targets

  // Keep only targets with metrics.enable=true
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_enable"]
    regex         = `true`
    action        = "keep"
  }

  // …
}

The second stage overrides the discovered port when we define metrics.port:

// When metrics.port is set, override __address__.
rule {
  source_labels = ["__address__", "__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port"]
  regex         = `(.+):\d+;(.+)`
  target_label  = "__address__"
  replacement   = "$1:$2"
}

Next, we handle containers in host network mode. When __meta_docker_network_name equals host, the address is rewritten to host.docker.internal instead of localhost:³

// When host networking, override __address__ to host.docker.internal.
rule {
  source_labels = ["__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port", "__meta_docker_network_name"]
  regex         = `(.+);host`
  target_label  = "__address__"
  replacement   = "host.docker.internal:$1"
}

The next stage derives the job name from the service name, stripping any numbered suffix. The instance label is the address without the port:

rule {
  source_labels = ["__meta_docker_container_label_com_docker_compose_service"]
  regex         = `(.+)(?:-\d+)?`
  target_label  = "job"
}
rule {
  source_labels = ["__address__"]
  regex         = `(.+):\d+`
  target_label  = "instance"
}

If a container defines metrics.path, Alloy uses it as a path. Otherwise, it defaults to /metrics:

rule {
  source_labels = ["__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_path"]
  regex         = `(.+)`
  target_label  = "__metrics_path__"
}
rule {
  source_labels = ["__metrics_path__"]
  regex         = ""
  target_label  = "__metrics_path__"
  replacement   = "/metrics"
}

Scraping and forwarding

With the targets properly relabeled, scraping and forwarding are straightforward:

prometheus.scrape "docker" {
  targets         = discovery.relabel.prometheus.output
  forward_to      = [prometheus.remote_write.default.receiver]
  scrape_interval = "30s"
}

prometheus.remote_write "default" {
  endpoint {
    url = "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/write"
  }
}

prometheus.scrape periodically fetches metrics from the discovered targets. prometheus.remote_write sends them to Prometheus.

Built-in exporters

Some services do not expose a Prometheus endpoint. Redis and Kafka are common examples. Alloy ships built-in Prometheus exporters that query these services and expose metrics on their behalf.

prometheus.exporter.redis "docker" {
  redis_addr = "redis:6379"
}
discovery.relabel "redis" {
  targets = prometheus.exporter.redis.docker.targets
  rule {
    target_label = "job"
    replacement  = "redis"
  }
}
prometheus.scrape "redis" {
  targets         = discovery.relabel.redis.output
  forward_to      = [prometheus.remote_write.default.receiver]
  scrape_interval = "30s"
}

The same pattern applies to Kafka:

prometheus.exporter.kafka "docker" {
  kafka_uris = ["kafka:9092"]
}
discovery.relabel "kafka" {
  targets = prometheus.exporter.kafka.docker.targets
  rule {
    target_label = "job"
    replacement  = "kafka"
  }
}
prometheus.scrape "kafka" {
  targets         = discovery.relabel.kafka.output
  forward_to      = [prometheus.remote_write.default.receiver]
  scrape_interval = "30s"
}

Each exporter is a separate component with its own relabeling and scrape configuration. The job label is set explicitly since there is no Docker metadata to derive it from.

With this setup, adding metrics to a new service with a Prometheus endpoint is a few-label change in docker-compose.yml, just like adding a Traefik route. Alloy picks it up automatically. 🩺

Yes, the misspelling is deliberate.

I recently wrote about AI. It was a fairly non-critical piece of writing–mostly using AI as an example. But there’s more that needs to be said here.

A friend of mine is an artist. He works hard. He hates generative AI for what it is doing to artists and photographers. I agree with him. Stealing art from the Internet and using it to train your AI, so that it can then summarize that art and make more along the same lines, putting the artists out of business, is highly unethical. It should never have been done.

Other uses for AI are less plagiarism and more slapdash summary. For example, I use Google AI mode sometimes to ask complex questions and get the AI to summarize the results. I do research for Disability Day of Mourning as well as for my own Autism Memorial web site, and it takes a lot of searching. When I use AI, I have to watch out for errors–AI often makes errors–but if I want to scour a hundred web pages for a single name or summarize the predominant ideas about a single idea, AI can do it faster than me; and then I can take the results and work from those.

It’s useful. But there are problems. I can’t always tell exactly where the AI got the information it’s using, and although it does include links for its information, the program doesn’t include links for every fact, nor can it include all the links it has searched, because there would be hundreds.

I can’t put an AI result in a reference (nor should anyone–it’s a secondary source and we should always, always use primary sources), so I often find myself using AI to find a better search term for the regular search. Who is that 70-year-old woman who died from neglect in Del City, Oklahoma, when her caregiver didn’t care? AI can tell me her name was Deborah Valentine. That helps me locate an obituary and a photo of an elderly, white-haired woman with a broad smile.

But sometimes, when a name is common, AI brings in the wrong person. John Jones from Pasadena gets mixed up with John Jones from Minneapolis, and if I don’t watch out, I might echo that mistake, and then AI would take my web site and refer to it and take it as fact again. Ouch.

Sometimes, AI simply follows patterns and comes up with something that fits the pattern, but not the truth. If you don’t catch it, your research has been compromised.

Oh, yes, and there’s the environmental cost. Simply put, an AI is run on a supercomputer, and supercomputers use lots of power. Using more power means more pollution, more environmental trouble. A single search or the generation of a single image isn’t terribly expensive by itself–it’s about the same cost as watching a few minutes of TV. But when everybody makes lots of searches and makes lots of pictures and talks to lots of chatbots, it adds up. That’s a problem.

Here’s what I would change.

1. For image generation: Establish a marker that can be put into an image file, or a new sort of image file, that marks it as “Not for AI use.” Anyone who uses this file type, or a file with that mark, to train their AI should be prosecuted for theft. People who create and train AIs should train them on public-domain and donated images. This will need international cooperation, because the Internet is international. Pressure to create an ethical AI image or text generator will, if everything goes well, come from the ability to market that AI in the countries where AI plagiarism has been outlawed.

2. AIs which summarize search results should be made to quote their sources. Every time an AI uses a fact that it has drawn from a web page, it needs to put a reference number after that statement, and then put a reference at the end of its output. It’s the same rule we use for research papers, and AIs need to be held to that standard too.

3. We need to keep working on making AIs more efficient and thus less energy-hungry, and we need to work on powering them exclusively with renewable resources or, at worst, nuclear power, which is cleaner and less dangerous than coal (yes, really; research it, and if you use AI, remember to check its results properly).

As individuals, we need to be frugal with our use of AI. We need to look at it the same way as we see leaving the lights on, or adjusting the thermostat, or deciding to eat a burger instead of a bowl of lentil soup. If you use AI, you may want to offset your use with reductions of energy use in other areas: If you can walk rather than driving, or use public transportation rather than a single car, do that. Take shorter showers to save water; switch incandescent bulbs with CFLs or LEDs. Turn off your TV and your computer when you’re not using it. Look for energy-efficient appliances. Avoid flying.

I don’t know how AI will change the future. It’s here now, though, and I don’t think people will want to give it up. There are a lot of fears–not just from artists, but from anyone whose job can be done, with varying levels of competence, by an AI program. Some people hate AI so viciously that there’s no talking to them. Others love it so much that there’s no talking to them, either. There are a lot of worries that the rich will use AIs to exploit their workers even further; and since that’s exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution, I think that’s well-founded.

But we can’t get rid of it. We can’t put the worms back in the can. We’d better deal with it, as ethically as we possibly can, with love for our fellow humans–and perhaps someday with love for our fellow sapients, some of which may be AI programs. Every time someone uses AI in a way that hurts somebody, we need to stand up for that person, or that group of people. We need to be persistent and impossible to shake off. Because although the potential for progress is great, so is the potential for abuse.

A new release 0.3.14 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package. It has already been uploaded to Debian, and is also already available as a binary via r2u.

This release, the first in over three years, contains mostly maintenance changes. We polished the fastLm example implementation a little more, updated continunous integration as one does over such a long period, adopted the Authors@R convention, switched the (pre-made) pdf vignette to a new driver now provided by Rcpp, updated vignette references and URLs, and updated one call to Rf_error to aid in a Rcpp transition towards using only Rcpp::stop which unwinds error conditions better. (Technically this was a false positive on Rf_error but on the margin worth tickling this release after all this time.)

The NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.3.14 (2026-03-05)

• Updated some internals of fastLm example, and regenerated RcppExports.* files

• Several updates for continuous integration

• Switched to using Authors@R

• Replace ::Rf_error with (Rf_error) in old example to aid Rcpp transition to Rcpp::stop (or this pass-through)

• Vignette now uses the Rcpp::asis builder for pre-made pdfs

• Vignette references have been updated, URLs prefer https and DOIs

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets 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.

We mostly don't pick on bad SQL queries here, because mostly the query optimizer is going to fix whatever is wrong, and the sad reality is that databases are hard to change once they're running; especially legacy databases. But sometimes the code is just so hamster-bowling-backwards that it's worth looking into.

Jim J has been working on a codebase for about 18 months. It's a big, sprawling, messy project, and it has code like this:

AND CASE WHEN @c_usergroup = 50 AND NOT EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM l_appl_client lac WHERE lac.f_application = fa.f_application AND lac.c_linktype = 840 AND lac.stat = 0 AND CASE WHEN ISNULL(lac.f_client,0) <> @f_client_user AND ISNULL(lac.f_c_f_client,0) <> @f_client_user THEN 0 ELSE 1 END = 1 ) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END = 1 -- 07.09.2022

We'll come back to what it's doing, but let's start with a little backstory.

This code is part of a two-tier application: all the logic lives in SQL Server stored procedures, and the UI is a PowerBuilder application. It's been under development for a long time, and in that time has accrued about a million lines of code between the front end and back end, and has never had more than 5 developers working on it at any given time. The backlog of feature requests is nearly as long as the backlog of bugs.

You may notice the little date comment in the code above. That's because until Jim joined the company, they used Visual Source Safe for version control. Visual Source Safe went out of support in 2005, and let's be honest: even when it was in support it barely worked as a source control system. And that's just the Power Builder side- the database side just didn't use source control. The source of truth was the database itself. When going from development to test to prod, you'd manually export object definitions and run the scripts in the target environment. Manually. Yes, even in production. And yes, environments did drift and assumptions made in the scripts would frequently break things.

You may also notice the fields above use a lot of Hungarian notation. Hungarian, in the best case, makes it harder to read and reason about your code. In this case, it's honestly fully obfuscatory. c_ stands for a codetable, f_ for entities. l_ is for a many-to-many linking table. z_ is for temporary tables. So is x_. And t_. Except not all of those "temporary" tables are truly temporary, a lesson Jim learned when trying to clean up some "junk" tables which were not actually junk.

I'll let Jim add some more detail around these prefixes:

an "application" may have a link to a "client", so there is an f_client field; but also it references an "agent" (which is also in the f_client table, surpise!) - this is how you get an f_c_f_client field. I have no clue why the prefix is f_c_ - but I also found c_c_c_channel and fc4_contact columns. The latter was a shorthand for f_c_f_c_f_c_f_contact, I guess.

"f_c_f_c_f_c_f_c" is also the sound I'd make if I saw this in a codebase I was responsible for. It certainly makes me want to change the c_c_c_channel.

With all this context, let's turn it back over to Jim to explain the code above:

And now, with all this background in mind, let's have a look at the logic in this condition. On the deepest level we check that both f_client and f_c_f_client are NOT equal to @f_client_user, and if this is the case, we return 0 which is NOT equal to 1 so it's effectively a negation of the condition. Then we check that records matching this condition do NOT EXIST, and when this is true - also return 0 negating the condition once more.

Honestly, the logic couldn't be clearer, when you put it that way. I jest, I've read that twelve times and I still don't understand what this is for or why it's here. I just want to know who we can prosecute for this disaster. The whole thing is a quadruple negative and frankly, I can't handle that kind of negativity.

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Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks Where I live there are many stories about what we call, ‘the town on the edge of the abyss. It’s a town on the verge of something mysterious. Most of these stories go something like this: “That town is a town of women.” “No, it’s a town of mostly women and […]

The post Ambergris appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Wired has the story:

Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store.

The messages arrived in quick succession over a period of 30 minutes, starting with the phrase ‘Help has arrived’ at 9:52 am Tehran time, shortly after the first set of explosions. No party has claimed responsibility for the hacks.

It happened so fast that this is most likely a government operation. I can easily envision both the US and Israel having hacked the app previously, and then deciding that this is a good use of that access.

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership.

The New York Times has an

Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization:

We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.

While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical.

News article.

Research paper.

I miss the US more and more, and have recently been trying to perfect Southern Biscuits using British ingredients. It took me eight or nine tries before I was consistently getting good results. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients

• 190g plain flour
• 60g strong white bread flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp cream of tartar (optional)
• 1 tsp salt
• 100g unsalted butter
• 180ml buttermilk, chilled
  • If your buttermilk is thicker than the consistency of ordinary milk, you’ll need around 200ml.
• extra buttermilk for brushing

Method

1. Slice and then chill the butter in the freezer for at least fifteen minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 220°C with the fan turned off.
3. Twice sieve together the flours, leaveners and salt. Some salt may not go through the sieve; just tip it back into the bowl.
4. Cut cold butter slices into the flour with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs: some small lumps of fat remaining is desirable. In particular, the fine crumbs you are looking for when making British scones are not wanted here. Rubbing in with fingertips just won’t do; biscuits demand keeping things cold even more than shortcrust pastry does.
5. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk, and stir with a metal spoon until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Avoid overmixing, but I’ve found that so long as the ingredients are cold, you don’t have to be too gentle at this stage and can make sure all the crumbs are mixed in.
6. Flour your hands, turn dough onto a floured work surface, and pat together into a rectangle. Some suggest dusting the top of the dough with flour, too, here.
7. Fold the dough in half, then gather any crumbs and pat it back into the same shape. Turn ninety degrees and do the same again, until you have completed a total of eight folds, two in each cardinal direction. The dough should now be a little springy.
8. Roll to about ½ inch thick.
9. Cut out biscuits. If using a round cutter, do not twist it, as that seals the edges of the biscuits and so spoils the layering.
10. Transfer to a baking sheet, placed close together (helps them rise). Flour your thumb and use it to press an indent into the top of each biscuit (helps them rise straight), brush with buttermilk.
11. Bake until flaky and golden brown: about fifteen minutes.

Gravy

It turns out that the “pepper gravy” that one commonly has with biscuits is just a white/béchamel sauce made with lots of black pepper. I haven’t got a recipe I really like for this yet. Better is a “sausage gravy”; again this has a white sauce as its base, I believe. I have a vegetarian recipe for this to try at some point.

Variations

• These biscuits do come out fluffy but not so flaky. For that you can try using lard instead of butter, if you’re not vegetarian (vegetable shortening is hard to find here).
• If you don’t have a pastry blender and don’t want to buy one you can try not slicing the butter and instead coarsely grating it into the flour out of the freezer.
• An alternative to folding is cutting and piling the layers.
• You can try rolling out to 1–1½ inches thick.
• Instead of cutting out biscuits you can just slice the whole piece of dough into equal pieces. An advantage of this is that you don’t have to re-roll, which latter also spoils the layering.
• Instead of brushing with buttermilk, you can take them out after they’ve started to rise but before they’ve browned, brush them with melted butter and put them back in.

Notes

• I’ve had more success with Dale Farm’s buttermilk than Sainsbury’s own. The former is much runnier.
• Southern culture calls for biscuits to be made the size of cat’s heads.
• Bleached flour is apparently usual in the South, but is illegal(!) here. Apparently bleaching can have some effect on the development of the gluten which would affect the texture.

• British plain flour is made from soft wheat and has a lower percentage of protein/gluten, while American all-purpose flour is often(?) made from harder wheat and has more protein. In this recipe I mix plain and strong white flour, in a ratio of 3:1, to emulate American all-purpose flour.

  I am not sure why this works best. In the South they have soft wheats too, and lower protein percentages. The famous White Lily flour is 9%. (Apparently you can mix US cake flour and US all-purpose flour in a ratio of 1:1 to achieve that; in the UK, Shipton Mill sell a “soft cake and pastry flour” which has been recommended to me as similar.)

  This would suggest that British plain flour ought to be closer to Southern flour than the standard flour available in most of the US. But my experience has been that the biscuits taste better with the plain and strong white 3:1 mix. Possibly Southeners would disprefer them. I got some feedback that good biscuits are about texture and moistness and not flavour.

• Baking powder in the US is usually double-acting but ours is always single-acting, so we need double quantities of that.

We recently launched tag2upload, aka cloud dgit or dgit-as-a-service. This was something of a culmination of work I’ve been doing since 2016 towards modernising Debian workflows, so I thought I’d write a short personal retrospective.

When I started contributing to Debian in 2015, I was not impressed with how packages were represented in Git by most package maintainers, and wanted a pure Git workflow. I read a couple of Joey Hess’s blog posts on the matter, a rope ladder to the dgit treehouse and upstream git repositories and made a bug report against dgit hoping to tie some things together.

The results of that early work were the git-deborig(1) program and the dgit-maint-merge(7) tutorial manpage. Starting with Joey’s workflow pointers, I developed a complete, pure Git workflow that I thought would be suitable for all package maintainers in Debian. It was certainly well-suited for my own packages. It took me a while to learn that there are packages for which this workflow is too simple. We now also have the dgit-maint-debrebase(7) workflow which uses git-debrebase, something which wasn’t invented until several years later. Where dgit-maint-merge(7) won’t do, you can use dgit-maint-debrebase(7), and still be doing pretty much pure Git. Here’s a full, recent guide to modernisation.

The next most significant contribution of my own was the push-source subcommand for dgit. dgit push required a preexisting .changes file produced from the working tree. I wanted to make dgit push-source prepare that .changes file for you, but also not use the working tree, instead consulting HEAD. The idea was that you were doing a git push – which doesn’t care about the working tree – direct to the Debian archive, or as close as we could get. I implemented that at DebConf18 in Taiwan, I think, with Ian, and we also did a talk on git-debrebase. We ended up having to change it to look at the working tree in addition to HEAD to make it work as well as possible, but I think that the idea of a command which was like doing a Git push direct to the archive was perhaps foundational for us later wanting to develop tag2upload. Indeed, while tag2upload’s client-side tool git-debpush does look at the working tree, it doesn’t do so in a way that is essential to its operation. tag2upload is dgit push-source-as-a-service.

And finally we come to tag2upload, a system Ian and I designed in 2019 during a two-person sprint at his place in Cambridge, while I was visiting the UK from Arizona. With tag2upload, appropriately authorised Debian package maintainers can upload to Debian with only pure Git operations – namely, making and pushing a signed Git tag to Debian’s GitLab instance. Although we had a solid prototype in 2019, we only finally launched it last month, February 2026. This was mostly due to political delays, but also because we have put in a lot of hours making it better in various ways.

Looking back, one thing that seems notable to me is that the core elements of the pure Git workflows haven’t changed much at all. Working out all the details of dgit-maint-merge(7), designing and writing git-debrebase (Ian’s work), and then working out all the details of dgit-maint-debrebase(7), are the important parts, to me. The rest is mostly just large amounts of compatibility code. git-debrebase and dgit-maint-debrebase(7) are very novel but dgit-maint-merge(7) is mostly just an extrapolation of Joey’s thoughts from 13 years ago. And yet, adoption of these workflows remains low.

People prefer to use what they are used to using, even if the workflows have significant inconveniences. That’s completely understandable; I’m really interested in good workflows, but most other contributors care less about it. But you would expect enough newcomers to have arrived in 13 years that the new workflows would have a higher uptake. That is, packages maintained by contributors that got involved after these workflows became available would be maintained using newer workflows, at least. But the inertia seems to be too strong even for that. Instead, new contributors used to working purely out of Git are told they need to learn Debian’s strange ways of representing things, tarballs and all. It doesn’t have to be that way. We hope that tag2upload will make the pure Git workflows seem more appealing to people.

Mathmos had a sale on spare Lava lamp bottles around Christmas, so I bought a couple of new-to-me colour combinations.

The lamp I have came with orange wax in purple liquid, which gives a strong red glow in a dark room. I bought blue wax in purple liquid, which I think looks fantastic and works really nicely with my Rob Sheridan print.

The other one I bought was pink in clear, which is nice, but I think the coloured liquids add a lot to the tone of lighting in a room.

Recently, UK vid-blogger Techmoan did some really nice videos about Mathmos lava lamps: Best Lava Lamp? and LAVA LAMPS Giant, Mini & Neo.

Another maintenance release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN this morning. The packages offers a clean C++ layer (as well as one small C++ helper class) on top of the C API for R which aims to make use of this robust (if awkward) C API a little easier and more consistent. See the vignette for motivating examples.

This release follows a similar release in November and had its hand forced by rather abrupt and forced overnight changes in R-devel, this time the removal of VECTOR_PTR in [this commit]. The release also contains changes accumulated since the last release (including some kindly contritbuted by Ivan) and those are signs that the R Core team can do more coordinated release management when they try a little harder.

Changes are summarize in the NEWS entry that follows.

Changes in tidyCpp version 0.0.9 (2026-03-03)

• Several vignette typos have been corrected (#4 addressing #3)

• A badge for r-universe has been added to the README.md

• The vignette is now served via GitHub Pages and that version is referenced in the README.

• Two entry points reintroduced and redefined using permitted R API function (Ivan Krylov in #5).

• Another entry has been removed to match R-devel API changes.

• Six new attributes helpers have been added for R 4.6.0 or later.

• VECTOR_PTR_RO(x) replaces the removed VECTOR_PTR, a warning or deprecation period would have been nice here.

Thanks to 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.

Author: Frank T. Sikora Each time I look at my reflection, I’m disgusted. I’m hideous. A  monstrosity, and yet, I’m amazed. I’m alive. I’m breathing. I’m conscious, and given the alternative, I shan’t complain. I got what I paid for: I’m a turtle, technically — Chelonoidis niger. Commonly known as a giant tortoise and is […]

The post Eros Explored appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Today's snippet from Rich D is short and sweet, and admittedly, not the most TFs of WTFs out there. But it made me chuckle, and sometimes that's all we need. This Java snippet shows us how to delete a file:

if (Files.exists(filePath)) {
    Files.deleteIfExists(filePath);
}

If the file exists, then if it exists, delete it.

This commit was clearly submitted by the Department of Redundancy Department. One might be tempted to hypothesize that there's some race condition or something that they're trying to route around, but if they are, this isn't the way to do it, per the docs: "Consequently this method may not be atomic with respect to other file system operations." But also, I fail to see how this would do that anyway.

The only thing we can say for certain about using deleteIfExists instead of delete is that deleteIfExists will never throw a NoSuchFileException.

Microsoft is reporting:

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters….

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

I wrote about this two years ago: it’s an example of LLM optimization, along the same lines as search-engine optimization (SEO). It’s going to be big business.

Agatha has inherited some Windows Forms code. This particular batch of such code falls into that delightful category of code that's wrong in multiple ways, multiple times. The task here is to disable a few panels worth of controls, based on a condition. Or, since this is in Spanish, "bloquear controles". Let's see how they did it.

private void BloquearControles()
{
	bool bolBloquear = SomeConditionTM; // SomeConditionTM = a bunch of stuff. Replaced for clarity.

	// Some code. Removed for clarity.
	
	// private System.Windows.Forms.Panel pnlPrincipal;
	foreach (Control C in this.pnlPrincipal.Controls)
	{
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}
	
	// private System.Windows.Forms.GroupBox grpProveedor;
	foreach (Control C1 in this.grpProveedor.Controls)
	{
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C1.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C1.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}

	// private System.Windows.Forms.GroupBox grpDescuentoGeneral;
	foreach (Control C2 in this.grpDescuentoGeneral.Controls)
	{
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.TextBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.CheckBox))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.DateTimePicker))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
		if (C2.GetType() == typeof(System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown))
		{
			C2.Enabled = bolBloquear;
		}
	}

	// Some more code. Removed for clarity.
}

This manages two group boxes and a panel. It checks a condition, then iterates across every control beneath it, and sets their enabled property on the control. In order to do this, it checks the type of the control for some reason.

Now, a few things: every control inherits from the base Control class, which has an Enabled property, so we're not doing this check to make sure the property exists. And every built-in container control automatically passes its enabled/disabled state to its child controls. So there's a four line version of this function where we just set the enabled property on each container.

This leaves us with two possible explanations. The first, and most likely, is that the developer responsible just didn't understand how these controls worked, and how inheritance worked, and wrote this abomination as an expression of that ignorance. This is extremely plausible, extremely likely, and honestly, our best case scenario.

Because our worse case scenario is that this code's job isn't to disable all of the controls. The reason they're doing type checking is that there are some controls used in these containers that don't match the types listed. The purpose of this code, then, is to disable some of the controls, leaving others enabled. Doing this by type would be a terrible way to manage that, and is endlessly confusing. Worse, I can't imagine how this behavior is interpreted by the end users; the enabling/disabling of controls following no intuitive pattern, just filtered based on the kind of control in use.

The good news is that Agatha can point us towards the first option. She adds:

They decided to not only disable the child controls one by one but to check their type and only disable those five types, some of which aren't event present in the containers. And to make sure this was WTF-worthy the didn't even bother to use else-if so every type is checked for every child control

She also adds:

At this point I'm not going to bother commenting on the use of GetType() == typeof() instead of is to do the type checking.

Bad news, Agatha: you did bother commenting. And even if you didn't, don't worry, someone would have.

Author: Majoki Welcome, Robot Overlords! reads the sign on my lawn. Before the singularity, it was worth a few laughs. Now, the friendlies want me to remove the sign from my yard. They can’t come right out and say that to me. It would be pushy and might blow every solicitous circuit in their enamelite […]

The post Friendlies appeared first on 365tomorrows.

A lot of hardware runs non-free software. Sometimes that non-free software is in ROM. Sometimes it’s in flash. Sometimes it’s not stored on the device at all, it’s pushed into it at runtime by another piece of hardware or by the operating system. We typically refer to this software as “firmware” to differentiate it from the software run on the CPU after the OS has started¹, but a lot of it (and, these days, probably most of it) is software written in C or some other systems programming language and targeting Arm or RISC-V or maybe MIPS and even sometimes x86². There’s no real distinction between it and any other bit of software you run, except it’s generally not run within the context of the OS³. Anyway. It’s code. I’m going to simplify things here and stop using the words “software” or “firmware” and just say “code” instead, because that way we don’t need to worry about semantics.

A fundamental problem for free software enthusiasts is that almost all of the code we’re talking about here is non-free. In some cases, it’s cryptographically signed in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to replace it with free code. In some cases it’s even encrypted, such that even examining the code is impossible. But because it’s code, sometimes the vendor responsible for it will provide updates, and now you get to choose whether or not to apply those updates.

I’m now going to present some things to consider. These are not in any particular order and are not intended to form any sort of argument in themselves, but are representative of the opinions you will get from various people and I would like you to read these, think about them, and come to your own set of opinions before I tell you what my opinion is.

THINGS TO CONSIDER

• Does this blob do what it claims to do? Does it suddenly introduce functionality you don’t want? Does it introduce security flaws? Does it introduce deliberate backdoors? Does it make your life better or worse?

• You’re almost certainly being provided with a blob of compiled code, with no source code available. You can’t just diff the source files, satisfy yourself that they’re fine, and then install them. To be fair, even though you (as someone reading this) are probably more capable of doing that than the average human, you’re likely not doing that even if you are capable because you’re also likely installing kernel upgrades that contain vast quantities of code beyond your ability to understand⁴. We don’t rely on our personal ability, we rely on the ability of those around us to do that validation, and we rely on an existing (possibly transitive) trust relationship with those involved. You don’t know the people who created this blob, you likely don’t know people who do know the people who created this blob, these people probably don’t have an online presence that gives you more insight. Why should you trust them?

• If it’s in ROM and it turns out to be hostile then nobody can fix it ever

• The people creating these blobs largely work for the same company that built the hardware in the first place. When they built that hardware they could have backdoored it in any number of ways. And if the hardware has a built-in copy of the code it runs, why do you trust that that copy isn’t backdoored? Maybe it isn’t and updates would introduce a backdoor, but in that case if you buy new hardware that runs new code aren’t you putting yourself at the same risk?

• Designing hardware where you’re able to provide updated code and nobody else can is just a dick move⁵. We shouldn’t encourage vendors who do that.

• Humans are bad at writing code, and code running on ancilliary hardware is no exception. It contains bugs. These bugs are sometimes very bad. This paper describes a set of vulnerabilities identified in code running on SSDs that made it possible to bypass encryption secrets. The SSD vendors released updates that fixed these issues. If the code couldn’t be replaced then anyone relying on those security features would need to replace the hardware.

• Even if blobs are signed and can’t easily be replaced, the ones that aren’t encrypted can still be examined. The SSD vulnerabilities above were identifiable because researchers were able to reverse engineer the updates. It can be more annoying to audit binary code than source code, but it’s still possible.

• Vulnerabilities in code running on other hardware can still compromise the OS. If someone can compromise the code running on your wifi card then if you don’t have a strong IOMMU setup they’re going to be able to overwrite your running OS.

• Replacing one non-free blob with another non-free blob increases the total number of non-free blobs involved in the whole system, but doesn’t increase the number that are actually executing at any point in time.

Ok we’re done with the things to consider. Please spend a few seconds thinking about what the tradeoffs are here and what your feelings are. Proceed when ready.

I trust my CPU vendor. I don’t trust my CPU vendor because I want to, I trust my CPU vendor because I have no choice. I don’t think it’s likely that my CPU vendor has designed a CPU that identifies when I’m generating cryptographic keys and biases the RNG output so my keys are significantly weaker than they look, but it’s not literally impossible. I generate keys on it anyway, because what choice do I have? At some point I will buy a new laptop because Electron will no longer fit in 32GB of RAM and I will have to make the same affirmation of trust, because the alternative is that I just don’t have a computer. And in any case, I will be communicating with other people who generated their keys on CPUs I have no control over, and I will also be relying on them to be trustworthy. If I refuse to trust my CPU then I don’t get to computer, and if I don’t get to computer then I will be sad. I suspect I’m not alone here.

Why would I install a code update on my CPU when my CPU’s job is to run my code in the first place? Because it turns out that CPUs are complicated and messy and they have their own bugs, and those bugs may be functional (for example, some performance counter functionality was broken on Sandybridge at release, and was then fixed with a microcode blob update) and if you update it your hardware works better. Or it might be that you’re running a CPU with speculative execution bugs and there’s a microcode update that provides a mitigation for that even if your CPU is slower when you enable it, but at least now you can run virtual machines without code in those virtual machines being able to reach outside the hypervisor boundary and extract secrets from other contexts. When it’s put that way, why would I not install the update?

And the straightforward answer is that theoretically it could include new code that doesn’t act in my interests, either deliberately or not. And, yes, this is theoretically possible. Of course, if you don’t trust your CPU vendor, why are you buying CPUs from them, but well maybe they’ve been corrupted (in which case don’t buy any new CPUs from them either) or maybe they’ve just introduced a new vulnerability by accident, and also you’re in a position to determine whether the alleged security improvements matter to you at all. Do you care about speculative execution attacks if all software running on your system is trustworthy? Probably not! Do you need to update a blob that fixes something you don’t care about and which might introduce some sort of vulnerability? Seems like no!

But there’s a difference between a recommendation for a fully informed device owner who has a full understanding of threats, and a recommendation for an average user who just wants their computer to work and to not be ransomwared. A code update on a wifi card may introduce a backdoor, or it may fix the ability for someone to compromise your machine with a hostile access point. Most people are just not going to be in a position to figure out which is more likely, and there’s no single answer that’s correct for everyone. What we do know is that where vulnerabilities in this sort of code have been discovered, updates have tended to fix them - but nobody has flagged such an update as a real-world vector for system compromise.

My personal opinion? You should make your own mind up, but also you shouldn’t impose that choice on others, because your threat model is not necessarily their threat model. Code updates are a reasonable default, but they shouldn’t be unilaterally imposed, and nor should they be blocked outright. And the best way to shift the balance of power away from vendors who insist on distributing non-free blobs is to demonstrate the benefits gained from them being free - a vendor who ships free code on their system enables their customers to improve their code and enable new functionality and make their hardware more attractive.

It’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that your security will be improved by installing code blobs. It’s also impossible to say with absolute certainty that it won’t. So far evidence tends to support the idea that most updates that claim to fix security issues do, and there’s not a lot of evidence to support the idea that updates add new backdoors. Overall I’d say that providing the updates is likely the right default for most users - and that that should never be strongly enforced, because people should be allowed to define their own security model, and whatever set of threats I’m worried about, someone else may have a good reason to focus on different ones.

If you take backups using the proxmox-backup-client and you wondered what backup may include a specific file, the only way to find out is to mount the backup and search for the files.

For regular file backups, the Proxmox Backup Server frontend provides a pcat1 file for download, whose binary format is somewhat undocumented but actually includes a listing of the files backed up.

A Proxmox backup server datastore includes the same pcat1 file as blob index (.pcat1.didx). So to actually beeing able to tell which backup contains which files, one needs to:

1) Open the .pcat1.didx file and find out required blobs, see format documentation

2) Reconstruct the .pcat1 file from the blobs

3) Parse the pcat1 file and output the directory listing.

I’ve implemented this in pbsindex which lets you create a central file index for your backups by scanning a complete PBS datastore.

Lets say you want to have a file listing for a specific backup, use:

 pbsindex --chunk-dir /backup/.chunks/ /backup/host/vm178/2026-03-02T10:47:57Z/catalog.pcat1.didx
 didx uuid=7e4086a9-4432-4184-a21f-0aeec2b2de93 ctime=2026-03-02T10:47:57Z chunks=2 total_size=1037386
 chunk[0] start=0 end=344652 size=344652 digest=af3851419f5e74fbb4d7ca6ac3bc7c5cbbdb7c03d3cb489d57742ea717972224
 chunk[1] start=344652 end=1037386 size=692734 digest=e400b13522df02641c2d9934c3880ae78ebb397c66f9b4cf3b931d309da1a7cc
 d ./usr.pxar.didx
 d ./usr.pxar.didx/bin
 l ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/Mail
 f ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/[ size=55720 mtime=2025-06-04T15:14:05Z
 f ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/aa-enabled size=18672 mtime=2025-04-10T15:06:25Z
 f ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/aa-exec size=18672 mtime=2025-04-10T15:06:25Z
 f ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/aa-features-abi size=18664 mtime=2025-04-10T15:06:25Z
 l ./usr.pxar.didx/bin/apropos

It also lets you scan a complete datastore for all existing .pcat1.didx files and store the directory listings in a SQLite database for easier searching.

Twelve weeks ago, I stepped into the Debian ecosystem as an Outreachy intern with a curiosity for Quality Assurance. It feels like just yesterday, and time has flown by so fast! Now, I am wrapping up that journey, not just with a completed project, but with improved technical reasoning.

I have learned how to use documentation to understand a complex project, how to be a good collaborator, and that learning is a continuous process. These experiences have helped me grow much more confident in my skills as an engineer.

My Achievements

As I close this chapter, I am leaving a permanent “Proof-of-Work” in the Debian repositories:

• Full Test Coverage: I automated apps_startstop tests for Cinnamon, LXQt, and XFCE, covering both Live images and Netinst installations.
• Synergy: I used symbolic links and a single Perl script to handle common application tests across different desktops, which reduces code redundancy.
• The Contributor Style Guide: I created a guide for future contributors to make documentation clearer and reviews faster, helping to reduce the burden on reviewers.

Final Month: Wrap Up

In this final month, things became easier as my understanding of the project grew. I focused on stability and finishing my remaining tasks:

• I spent time exploring different QEMU video options like VGA, qxl, and virtio on KDE desktop environment . This was important to ensure screen rendering remained stable so that our “needles” (visual test markers) wouldn’t fail because of minor glitches.
• I successfully moved from familiarizing to test automation for the XFCE desktop. This included writing “prepare” steps and creating the visual needles needed to make the tests reliable.
• One of my final challenges was the app launcher function. Originally, my code used else if blocks for each desktop. I proposed a unified solution, but hit a blocker: XFCE has two ways to launch apps (App Finder and the Application Menu). Because using different methods sometimes caused failures, I chose to use the application menu button across the board.

What’s Next?

I don’t want my journey with Debian to end here. I plan to stay involved in the community and extend these same tests to the LXDE desktop to complete the coverage for all major Debian desktop environments. I am excited to keep exploring and learning more about the Debian ecosystem.

Thank You

This journey wouldn’t have been possible without the steady guidance of my mentors: Tassia Camoes Araujo, Roland Clobus, and Philip Hands. Thank you for teaching me that in the world of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), your voice and your code are equally important.

To my fellow intern Hellen and the entire Outreachy community, thank you for the shared learning and support. It has been an incredible 12 weeks.

== Why are we at war again? ==

I'll be concise here, laying down reasons why thousands of U.S. service members - and eventually millions of the rest of us are being thrown into danger amid gaudy explosions that terrify - and sometimes kill - a people we want as friends.. I'll briefly offer some bullet points, many of them I've already elucidated, in other locales. But one thing is certain...

...that this is not about Iran's nuclear program. Sure, the Mission Accomplished 'deal' that Donald Trump will eventually bray will claim that's the reason for it all. It's not. Even remotely.

1. Elsewhere, I speak of Republican Bipolar Foreign Policy. The GOP always ... and I mean literally always... veers sharply between isolationism and imperial thuggery. We saw this manic-depressive mania under Nixon, Reagan, Ford, and both Bushes (remember the Neocons braying "We're an empire now!"). 

2. When Republican presidents do wage war, it is with an unmistakably different style of military action than Democratic presidents. I've seen no one comment on this, even though it expresses a fundamental difference in character. And yes, it expresses diametrically opposite attitudes toward the fantastically professional men and women of the US military officer corps....

3. ...whose demoralization is a core aim of the Trumpists. Take how Pete "Filthy Fingers"* Hegseth commanded 500 of the world's finest professionals -- generals, admirals and top sergeants - to drop their work all over the world and hurry to Quantico, where 'former' alky Hegs and Trump berated them as "too fat and too woke to fight." just 6 weeks before they performed the most spectacularly complex and competent raid (in Caracas) in the history of the world. A raid that exposed many of our secret methods and tools to scrutiny, without liberating any Venezuelans from their criminal masters (We'll say more on that.)

But yes. Demoralization and culling of the Officer Corps is a feature, not a bug. Trump fired the JAGs whose task includes advising military folks about the legality of orders. And he's been reaming out dozens of flag officers who demur over sending boots into American cities. Now why would he do that?

4. Then there's distraction. Trump is not the first to use war to divert attention away from domestic failures and discontents. Nixon did it. Reagan several times. As did Bush Jr. But Donald Trump is truly desperate to sidetrack. Now with Operation Epstein Slurry... I mean Epic Fury.

Which brings us to something that many of you keep falling for.

5. This Iran war is not even remotely about oil. Except as he's been able to get Venezuelan oil export revenues diverted into offshore slush accounts that he controls. And sure, he likely intends the same re: Iran. And starving Cuba could lead to the option described below. But the USA - as a nation - does not benefit from war-seized oil. We got none from the Iraq wars - and I want you to read this sentence several times, till that fact sinks in. "We did Iraq for oil" is an idiotic incantation worthy of MAGA.

Anyway, the US got energy independence under Obama and is a net exporter. So STFU about that cliché.

6. Except that shutting down Iranian oil does boost world prices, benefiting his fellow oligarchs. So, okay. Maybe a bit.Indirectly.

7. This is not about toppling despots! Decapitating the top capo of the Venezuelan and Iranian gangs is classic mafia technique, that is not meant to liberate the people of those countries! DT has already made offers to the Iranian Republican Guard and Religious Police etc to make deals with him to stay in power, in exchange for them kissing his ring. In Venezuela, Argentina, El Salvador etc. - and possibly soon in Cuba - the aim is never, ever to establish democracy or to liberate citizens from their oppressors. 

The pattern is perfectly that of mafiosi. Take over another gang's territory by decapitating its top capo, then get allegiance (and resulting vigorish) from the terrified sub-capos of the gang that's left in place. This pattern is now so repeatedly blatant that no other theory is even remotely tenable,

Oh, and Marco will ensure that Miami crime families will slip in atop the Castro power structure in Cuba. This is a Mafia gang and the capo di tutti capi - even above Don - was named Vlad.  Though the power of his blackmail files to coerce western elites into obedience may be fading!  For reasons I'll go into, elsewhere. (Hint: because of AI.)

8. I mentioned the exposure of hard-won military secrets and methods, each time we go to physical war. Sometimes, that can't be helped. Russian and Chinese observers are all over eastern Ukraine, for example. Mostly amazed by the brilliance and effectiveness of most Western systems and studying hard how to copy or counter them. But Ukraine is an actual need. Perhaps Iran is, too. But this factor belongs on the balance sheet.

9. Russia's interest. Look up The Great Game of the 19th Century between the Russian and British Empires, as the former kept maneuvering and jostling, trying to win its way to a southern, ice-free port into the Indian Ocean and from there to the rest of the world. Iran/Persia was always a major part of that great-powers struggle and if most in the west don't remember it, you can be sure that Russians do. Above all, the very last thing they want is a free, secular and democratic Iran. Far better to divide power there with the Trumpist gang. Whose relations with Putin are the ghosts at the banquet.

10. Okay, this final reason for the war is harsh. It is speculative, but makes perfect sense, 

Another aim is to foment anger, to re-enrage the forces in the Middle East who want to do terrorism on America. Riling up enough enemies to deliver us into another 9/11 attack. One that Old Two Scoops imagines might save him from having to face devastating elections, this fall. 

Do I have any evidence for that last one? Other than vows of revenge that are already echoing across the region, for the blatantly dumb targeted assassination of Iran's 82-year old paramount religious leader? 

Well, it would explain why Don fired over half of our counter-terrorism folks. And can you think of anything less than a major national trauma that'd provide the excuse he needs for martial law? 

Put it all together folks. 

Prepare, in that event, to chant "Reichstag Fire!" 

But also keep in mind another word. One that shows we finally understand what's going on. Phase 9 of the 25 year recurring psychic schism between pro- and anti-modernity Americans. Our never settled civil war. And hence one word that will efficiently show our grit, our determination, our courage... our firm intent.

APPOMATTOX.

* Filthy Fingers Hegseth. Look up how many times, on Fox, he (drunkenly) bragged: "I don't believe in germs; I haven't washed my hands in a decade." Though I'll admit. Most Trump appointees are even more crazy and even less qualified.

Hello world . I’m Hellen Chemtai, an intern at Outreachy working with the Debian OpenQA team on Images Testing. This is the final week of the internship. This is just a start for me as I will continue contributing to the community .I am grateful for the opportunity to work with the Debian OpenQA team as an Outreachy intern. I have had the best welcoming team to Open Source.

My tasks and contributions

I have been working on network install and live images tasks :

1. Install live Installers ( Ventoy , Rufus and Balenaetcher) and test the live USBs made by these live installers. – These tasks were completed and is running on the server.
2. Use different file systems (btrfs , jfs , xfs) for installation and then test. – This task was completed and running on the server. It still needs some changes to ensure automation for each file system
3. Use speech synthesis to capture all audio. – This task is complete. We are refining it to run well in server.
4. Publish temporary assets. – This task is being worked on.

I have enjoyed working on testing both live images and net install images. This was one of the goals that I had highlighted in my application. I have also been working with fellow contributors in this project.

My team

As I had stated , I have had the best welcoming team to Open Source . They have been working with me and ensuring I have the proper resources for contributions. I am grateful to my three mentors and the work they have done.

1. Roland Clobus is a project maintainer. He is in charge of code review , pointing out what we need to learn and works on technical issues. He considers every solution we contributors think of and will go into detailed explanations for any issue we have.
2. Tassia Camoes is a community coordinator. She is in charge of communication, co-ordination between contributors and networking within the community. She on-boarded us and introduced us to the community.
3. Philip Hands is also a project maintainer. He is in charge of technical code , ensuring sources work and also working on server and its issues. He also gives detailed explanations for any issue we have.

I wish to learn more with the team. On my to do list, I would like to gain more skills on ports and packages so to contribute more technically. I have enjoyed working on the tasks and learning

The impact of this project

The automated tests done by the team help the community in some of the following examples:

1. Check the installation and system behavior of the Operating System images versions
2. Help developers and users of Operating Systems know which versions of applications e.g live installers run well on system
3. Check for any issues during installation and running of Operating Systems and their flavors

I have also networked with the greater community and other contributors. During the contribution phase, I found many friends who were learning together with me . I hope to continue networking with the community and continue learning.

The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:

Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

“Despite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,” says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. “Humans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.”

Humans must create and verify their bots’ accounts and provide the prompts for how they want a bot to behave. The agents do not do anything that they haven’t been prompted to do.

I think this take has it mostly right:

What happened on Moltbook is a preview of what researcher Juergen Nittner II calls “The LOL WUT Theory.” The point where AI-generated content becomes so easy to produce and so hard to detect that the average person’s only rational response to anything online is bewildered disbelief.

We’re not there yet. But we’re close.

The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you can’t reliably tell what’s fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize there’s nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.

• Debian packages:
  • firmware-free:
    • Bugs:
      • closed #890601: firmware-linux-free uses prebuilt blobs instead of building from source
    • Uploads:
      • uploaded version 20241210-3 to unstable
  • firmware-nonfree:
    • Bugs:
      • closed #481234: firmware-nonfree: Include firmware for p54 driver
      • closed #484177: firmware-nonfree: keyspan
      • closed #534379: [firmware-nonfree] Please consider including dvb-usb-af9015.fw
      • closed #548745: firmware-linux: Fix licence and include edgeport firmware
      • closed #588142: Add r8192u_usb (aka rtl8192u) firmware
      • closed #597897: RFP: alsa-firmware – firmware binaries used by each alsa-firmware-loader program
      • closed #999485: Please add brcmfmac43456-sdio.* files as it’s not just used in RPi devices
      • opened and closed #1126794: Undistributable file under qcom/qdu100
      • closed #1126846: Qualcomm AudioReach topology files are covered by separate licence
      • replied to #1126896: firmware-nvidia-graphics: Cannot upgrade from bookworm-backports to trixie-backports
    • Merge requests:
      • closed !128: Draft: Add Provides: based ABI versioning mechanism
      • merged !134: Update to 20251125
      • reviewed and merged !135: Drop DSP firmware, migrated to hexagon-dsp-binaries source
      • reviewed and merged !136: debian/copyright: correct licence issues
      • opened and closed !137: d/copyright, qcom-soc: Exclude undistributable QDU100 firmware
      • opened and merged !138: Update to 20260110
      • opened and merged !139: Update to 20260221
    • Uploads:
      • uploaded version 20251111-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
      • uploaded version 20251125-1 to unstable
      • uploaded version 20260110-1 to unstable
  • hexagon-dsp-binaries:
    • Bugs:
      • opened #1129001: Missing binaries - should this package use XS-Autobuild?
  • initramfs-tools:
    • Bugs:
      • closed #1126611: mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /
    • Merge requests:
      • merged !191: tests fail on arm64 because they call qemu-system-arm64
  • iptables:
    • Bugs:
      • replied to #1128561: iptables: virsh net-start no longer works: Failed to run firewall command iptables -w –table filter –list-rules
  • ktls-utils:
    • Merge requests:
      • merged !3: d/t/test-common: Move inclusion of extensions when signing the certificate
  • libvirt:
    • Bugs:
      • replied to #1124549: libvirt passes invalid flags for network interface deletion
  • linux:
    • Bugs:
      • replied to #1121192: kworker: Events_unbound, kworker processes, continually using CPU.
      • replied to #1126710: linux-image-6.18.5+deb14-amd64: unable to mount existing XFS V4 filesystem because kernel CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4 is not set
      • replied to #1128397: linux-image-6.18.10+deb14-amd64: open(/proc/$pid/maps) is empty after $pid exec()s, unless you read a partial line from the fd before, in which case it has the rest of the line only
      • replied to and closed #1128567: linux-image-6.18.5+deb13-amd64: amdgpu.dc=0 causes Xorg 1:7.7+24 error “no screens found”
      • closed #1129029: Bug on VirtualBox and KVM conflict kernel 6.12 (Debian 12)
    • Merge requests:
      • reviewed !1682: Unsplit configs for some kernel architectures
      • reviewed !1821: riscv64 config update for linux 6.19
      • reviewed and merged !1824: db-mok: Remove unused function
      • opened !1831: CI: Update build job to work after another common pipeline change
    • Uploads:
      • (LTS) uploaded version 5.10.249-1 to bullseye-security
      • uploaded version 6.12.63-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports
      • uploaded version 6.12.69-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports
      • uploaded version 6.12.73-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports
      • uploaded version 6.18.12-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
      • uploaded version 6.18.5-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
      • uploaded version 6.18.9-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
    • (LTS) updated the bullseye-security branch to 5.10.251, but did not upload it
  • (LTS) linux-6.1:
    • Uploads:
      • uploaded version 6.1.162-1~deb11u1 to bullseye-security
  • linux-base:
    • Bugs:
      • closed #1128355: linux-base: indirectly missing perl dependency?
  • nfs-utils:
    • Merge requests:
      • reviewed and merged !36: Drop installation of blkmapd and nfs-blkmap.service systemd service
  • wireless-regdb:
    • Bugs:
      • replied to and closed #1104022: wireless-regdb: Consider importing setregdomain and udev rule from Fedora
      • closed #1122785: wireless-regdb: Please remove/replace usage of dh_movetousr
      • closed #1126431: wireless-regdb: Unnecessary Build-Depends: python3-m2crypto
    • Uploads:
      • uploaded version 2026.02.04-1 to unstable
      • uploaded version 2026.02.04-1~deb12u1 to bookworm
      • uploaded version 2026.02.04-1~deb13u1 to trixie
    • (LTS) updated the bullseye-security branch to 2026.02.04-1, but did not upload it
• Debian non-package bugs:
  • release.debian.org:
    • opened #1128507: trixie-pu: package wireless-regdb/2026.02.04-1~deb13u1
    • opened #1128510: bookworm-pu: package wireless-regdb/2026.02.04-1~deb12u1
• Mailing lists:
  • debian-kernel:
    • posted Agenda items for kernel-team meeting on 2026-02-04
    • posted Agenda items for kernel-team meeting on 2026-02-25
    • (LTS) replied to Discrepancies between Commits list in changelog of debian and upstream linux git repo.
    • (LTS) replied to [Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Processed: retitle 1124549 to libvirt passes invalid flags for network interface deletion …, tagging 1124549
    • replied to linux 7.0
  • debian-lts-announce:
    • posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4475-1] linux security update
    • posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4476-1] linux-6.1 security update
  • klibc:
    • replied to [PATCH 1/2] [klibc] explicitly close arm64 syscall stub generator output
    • replied to [PATCH] [klibc] fix arm stub alignment
    • replied to [PATCH] [klibc] remove unneeded syscalls.mk dependencies
  • linux-hwmon:
    • replied to [PATCH] hwmon: (max16065) Use READ/WRITE_ONCE to avoid compiler optimization induced race
  • linux-wireless:
    • posted [PATCH] wireless-regdb: Fix regulatory.bin signing with new M2Crypto
    • posted [PATCH] wireless-regdb: Replace M2Crypto with cryptography package
  • platform-driver-x86:
    • replied to [PATCH] platform/x86: hp-bioscfg: Support allocations of larger data
  • stable:
    • (LTS) replied to Please apply commit 9990ddf47d41 (“net: tunnel: make skb_vlan_inet_prepare() return drop reasons”) down to 6.1.y at least
    • (LTS) reviewed and replied to various patches for 5.10 … … …
    • (LTS) posted [PATCH 5.10,5.15] ip6_tunnel: Fix usage of skb_vlan_inet_prepare()
    • replied to [PATCH 6.12 519/567] gpiolib: acpi: Move quirks to a separate file

Python is (in)famous for its "batteries included" approach to a standard library, but it's not that notable that it has plenty of standard data structures, like dicts. Nor is in surprising that dicts have all sorts of useful methods, like pop, which removes a key from the dict and returns its value.

Because you're here, reading this site, you'll also be unsurprised that this doesn't stop developers from re-implementing that built-in function, badly. Karen sends us this:

def parse_message(message):
    def pop(key):
        if key in data:
            result = data[key]
            del data[key]
            return result
        return ''

    data = json.loads(message)
    some_value = pop("some_key")
    # <snip>...multiple uses of pop()...</snip>

Here, they create an inner method, and they exploit variable hoisting. While pop appears in the code before data is declared, all variable declarations are "hoisted" to the top. When pop references data, it's getting that from the enclosing scope. Which while this isn't a global variable, it's still letting a variable cross between two scopes, which is always messy.

Also, this pop returns a default value, which is also something the built-in method can do. It's just the built-in version requires you to explicitly pass the value, e.g.: some_value = data.pop("some_key", "")

Karen briefly wondered if this was a result of the Python 2 to 3 conversion, but no, pop has been part of dict for a long time. I wondered if this was just an exercise in code golf, writing a shorthand function, but even then- you could just wrap the built-in pop with your shorthand version (not that I'd recommend such a thing). No, I think the developer responsible simply didn't know the function was there, and just reimplemented a built-in method badly, as so often happens.

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Investigator Mellio considers the narrow doorway. “You say this was never opened?” “Logs confirm it, sir.” Mellio glances at the sergeant. “Thank you, officer-?” “Sergeant Parx, sir.” “Good to meet you, Parx. So, the brief said this isn’t the first?” “Correct. This is eighth member of the Gundorini gang to […]

The post Escapees appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Had a discussion about how to pronounce the name of Google’s chatbot. Turns out, we were all wrong.

Author: David Sydney Like most people, Mort hadn’t paid much attention to reincarnation. During the week, he was up to his neck in work. On his day off, as he took a leisurely drive to clear his mind, if that is the proper term, he didn’t think of the future. He had the road to […]

The post Mort Begins Again appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Debian Lomiri for Debian 13 (previous project)

In our previous project around Debian and Lomiri (lasting until July 2025), we achieved to get Lomiri 0.5.0 (and with it another 130 packages) into Debian (with two minor exceptions [1]) just in time for the Debian 13 release in August 2025.

Debian Lomiri for Debian 14

At DebConf in Brest, a follow-up project has been designed between the project sponsor and Fre(i)e Software GmbH [2]. The new project (on paper) started on 1st August 2025 and project duration was agreed on to be 2 years, allowing our company to work with an equivalent of ~5 FTE on Lomiri targetting the Debian 14 release some time in the second half of 2027 (an assumed date, let's see what happens).

Ongoing work would be covered from day one of the new project and once all contract details had been properly put on paper end of September, Fre(i)e Software GmbH started hiring a new team of software developers and (future) Debian maintainers. (More of that new team in our next Q4/2025 report).

The ongoing work of Q3/2025 was basically Guido Berhörster and myself working on Morph Browser Qt6 (mostly Guido together with Bhushan from MiraLab [3]) and package maintenance in Debian (mostly me).

Morph Browser Qt6

The first milestone we could reach with the Qt6 porting of Morph Browser [4] and related components (LUITK aka lomiri-ui-toolkit (big chunk! [5]), lomiri-content-hub, lomiri-download-manager and a few other components) was reached on 21st Sep 2025 with an upload of Morph Browser 1.2.0~git20250813.1ca2aa7+dfsg-1~exp1 to Debian experimental and the Lomiri PPA [6]).

Preparation of Debian 13 Updates (still pending)

In background, various Lomiri updates for Debian 13 have been prepared during Q3/2025 (with a huge patchset), but publishing those to Debian 13 are still pending as tests are still not satisfying.

[1] lomiri-push-service and nuntium
[2] https://freiesoftware.gmbh
[3] https://miralab.one/
[4] https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/morph-browser/-/merge_reques... et al.
[5] https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/lomiri-ui-toolkit/-/merge_re... et al.
[6] https://launchpad.net/~lomiri

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf, the world’s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf — who goes by the handle “Dort” — has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcher’s home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.

A public “dox” created in 2020 asserted Dort was a teenager from Canada (DOB August 2003) who used the aliases “CPacket” and “M1ce.” A search on the username CPacket at the open source intelligence platform OSINT Industries finds a GitHub account under the names Dort and CPacket that was created in 2017 using the email address jay.miner232@gmail.com.

Image: osint.industries.

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says jay.miner232@gmail.com was used between 2015 and 2019 to create accounts at multiple cybercrime forums, including Nulled (username “Uubuntuu”) and Cracked (user “Dorted”); Intel 471 reports that both of these accounts were created from the same Internet address at Rogers Canada (99.241.112.24).

Dort was an extremely active player in the Microsoft game Minecraft who gained notoriety for their “Dortware” software that helped players cheat. But somewhere along the way, Dort graduated from hacking Minecraft games to enabling far more serious crimes.

Dort also used the nickname DortDev, an identity that was active in March 2022 on the chat server for the prolific cybercrime group known as LAPSUS$. Dort peddled a service for registering temporary email addresses, as well as “Dortsolver,” code that could bypass various CAPTCHA services designed to prevent automated account abuse. Both of these offerings were advertised in 2022 on SIM Land, a Telegram channel dedicated to SIM-swapping and account takeover activity.

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint indexed 2022 posts on SIM Land by Dort that show this person developed the disposable email and CAPTCHA bypass services with the help of another hacker who went by the handle “Qoft.”

“I legit just work with Jacob,” Qoft said in 2022 in reply to another user, referring to their exclusive business partner Dort. In the same conversation, Qoft bragged that the two had stolen more than $250,000 worth of Microsoft Xbox Game Pass accounts by developing a program that mass-created Game Pass identities using stolen payment card data.

Who is the Jacob that Qoft referred to as their business partner? The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds the password used by jay.miner232@gmail.com was reused by just one other email address: jacobbutler803@gmail.com. Recall that the 2020 dox of Dort said their date of birth was August 2003 (8/03).

Searching this email address at DomainTools.com reveals it was used in 2015 to register several Minecraft-themed domains, all assigned to a Jacob Butler in Ottawa, Canada and to the Ottawa phone number 613-909-9727.

Constella Intelligence finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com was used to register an account on the hacker forum Nulled in 2016, as well as the account name “M1CE” on Minecraft. Pivoting off the password used by their Nulled account shows it was shared by the email addresses j.a.y.m.iner232@gmail.com and jbutl3@ocdsb.ca, the latter being an address at a domain for the Ottawa-Carelton District School Board.

Data indexed by the breach tracking service Spycloud suggests that at one point Jacob Butler shared a computer with his mother and a sibling, which might explain why their email accounts were connected to the password “jacobsplugs.” Neither Jacob nor any of the other Butler household members responded to requests for comment.

The open source intelligence service Epieos finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com created the GitHub account “MemeClient.” Meanwhile, Flashpoint indexed a deleted anonymous Pastebin.com post from 2017 declaring that MemeClient was the creation of a user named CPacket — one of Dort’s early monikers.

Why is Dort so mad? On January 2, KrebsOnSecurity published The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network, which explored research into the botnet by Benjamin Brundage, founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient. Brundage figured out that the Kimwolf botmasters were exploiting a little-known weakness in residential proxy services to infect poorly-defended devices — like TV boxes and digital photo frames — plugged into the internal, private networks of proxy endpoints.

By the time that story went live, most of the vulnerable proxy providers had been notified by Brundage and had fixed the weaknesses in their systems. That vulnerability remediation process massively slowed Kimwolf’s ability to spread, and within hours of the story’s publication Dort created a Discord server in my name that began publishing personal information about and violent threats against Brundage, Yours Truly, and others.

Dort and friends incriminating themselves by planning swatting attacks in a public Discord server.

Last week, Dort and friends used that same Discord server (then named “Krebs’s Koinbase Kallers”) to threaten a swatting attack against Brundage, again posting his home address and personal information. Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that local police officers subsequently visited his home in response to a swatting hoax which occurred around the same time that another member of the server posted a door emoji and taunted Brundage further.

Dort, using the alias “Meow,” taunts Synthient founder Ben Brundage with a picture of a door.

Someone on the server then linked to a cringeworthy (and NSFW) new Soundcloud diss track recorded by the user DortDev that included a stickied message from Dort saying, “Ur dead nigga. u better watch ur fucking back. sleep with one eye open. bitch.”

“It’s a pretty hefty penny for a new front door,” the diss track intoned. “If his head doesn’t get blown off by SWAT officers. What’s it like not having a front door?”

With any luck, Dort will soon be able to tell us all exactly what it’s like.

Update, 10:29 a.m.: Jacob Butler responded to requests for comment, speaking with KrebsOnSecurity briefly via telephone. Butler said he didn’t notice earlier requests for comment because he hasn’t really been online since 2021, after his home was swatted multiple times. He acknowledged making and distributing a Minecraft cheat long ago, but said he hasn’t played the game in years and was not involved in Dortsolver or any other activity attributed to the Dort nickname after 2021.

“It was a really old cheat and I don’t remember the name of it,” Butler said of his Minecraft modification. “I’m very stressed, man. I don’t know if people are going to swat me again or what. After that, I pretty much walked away from everything, logged off and said fuck that. I don’t go online anymore. I don’t know why people would still be going after me, to be completely honest.”

When asked what he does for a living, Butler said he mostly stays home and helps his mom around the house because he struggles with autism and social interaction. He maintains that someone must have compromised one or more of his old accounts and is impersonating him online as Dort.

“Someone is actually probably impersonating me, and now I’m really worried,” Butler said. “This is making me relive everything.”

But there are issues with Butler’s timeline. For example, Jacob’s voice in our phone conversation was remarkably similar to the Jacob/Dort whose voice can be heard in this Sept. 2022 Clash of Code competition between Dort and another coder (Dort lost). At around 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording, Dort launches into a cursing tirade that mirrors the stream of profanity in the diss rap that Dortdev posted threatening Brundage. Dort can be heard again at around 16 minutes; at around 26:00, Dort threatens to swat his opponent.

Butler said the voice of Dort is not his, exactly, but rather that of an impersonator who had likely cloned his voice.

“I would like to clarify that was absolutely not me,” Butler said. “There must be someone using a voice changer. Or something of the sorts. Because people were cloning my voice before and sending audio clips of ‘me’ saying outrageous stuff.”

Author: James C. Clar The evening before the president’s primetime appearance, the West Wing hummed like a server room. “Poll numbers?” President Drake asked, standing at the tall windows overlooking the South Lawn. “Seventy-six percent approval on the infrastructure package,” replied Chief of Staff Karen Tate. “The markets also responded well to the talk of […]

The post Our Little Secret appeared first on 365tomorrows.

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending a presentation organized by the Norwegian Unix Users Group on implementing RISC-V using a small FPGA. This project is the result of a university teacher wanting to teach students assembly programming using a real instruction set, while still providing a simple and transparent CPU environment. The CPU in question implements the smallest set of opcodes needed to still call the CPU a RISC-V CPU, the RV32I base set. The author and presenter, Kristoffer Robin Stokke, demonstrated how to build both the FPGA setup and a small startup code providing a "Hello World" message over both serial port and a small LCD display. The FPGA is programmed using VHDL, the entire source code is available from github, but unfortunately the target FPGA setup is compiled using the proprietary tool Quartus. It is such a pity that such a cool little piece of free software should be chained down by non-free software, so my friend Jon Nordby set out to see if we can liberate this small RISC-V CPU. After all, it would be unforgivable sin to force students to use non-free software to study at the University of Oslo.

The VHDL code for the CPU instructions itself is only 1138 lines, if I am to believe wc -l lib/riscv_common/* lib/rv32i/*. On the small FPGA used during the talk, the entire CPU, ROM, display and serial port driver only used up half the capacity. These days, there exists a free software toolchain for FPGA programming not only in Verilog but also in VHDL, and we hope the support in yosys, ghdl, and yosys-plugin-ghdl (sadly and strangely enough, removed from Debian unstable) is complete enough to at least build this small and simple project with some minor portability fixes. Or perhaps there are other approaches that work better? The first patches are already floating on github, to make the VHDL code more portable and to test out the build. If you are interested in running your own little RISC-V CPU on a FPGA chip, please get in touch.

At the moment we sadly have hit a GHDL bug, which we do not quite know how to work around or fix:

******************** GHDL Bug occurred ***************************
Please report this bug on https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl/issues
GHDL release: 5.0.1 (Debian 5.0.1+dfsg-1+b1) [Dunoon edition]
Compiled with unknown compiler version
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
/scratch/pere/src/fpga/memstick-fpga-riscv-upstream/
Command line:

Exception CONSTRAINT_ERROR raised
Exception information:
raised CONSTRAINT_ERROR : synth-vhdl_expr.adb:1763 discriminant check failed
******************************************************************

Thus more work is needed. For me, this simple project is the first stepping stone for a larger dream I have of converting the MESA machine controller system to build its firmware using a free software toolchain. I just need to learn more FPGA programming first. :)

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

Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

The x13binary team is happy to share the availability of Release 1.1.61.2 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau which arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has already been built for r2u.

This release responds to a CRAN request to display the compiler version when building. x13binary, just like three other packages there, creates and ships a local binary it interfaces with. So our build was a little outside of R CMD INSTALL ... but now signals build versions like R does. We also modernized and simplified our continuous intgegration script based on r-ci.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release showing changes to the previous 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.

The Regicide Report, the last novel in the main Laundry Files series, is coming out on January 27th in the US (from Tor.com Publishing) and the UK (from Orbit).

If you want to order signed hardcovers, contact Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh. (I believe Mike is currently willing to send books to the USA, but don't take my word for it: check first, and blame Donald Trump if there are customs/tariff obstacles.)

Audiobooks: there will be audio editions. The Audible one is showing a January 27th release date on Amazon.com; Hachette Digital will be issuing one in the UK but it's not showing up on Amazon.co.uk yet. (For contractual reasons they're recorded and produced by different companies.)

Ebooks and DRM: The ebook will be available the same day as the hardcover. Tor.com does not put DRM on their ebooks, but it's anybody's guess whether a given ebook store will add it. (Amazon have been particularly asshole-ish in recent years but are promising DRM-free downloads of purchases will be available from late January.) Orbit is part of Hachette, who are particularly obstreperous about requiring DRM on everything electronic, so you're out of luck if you buy the Orbit edition. (I could tell you how to unlock the DRM on purchases from the UK Kobo store, but then my publisher would be contractually obliged to assassinate me. Let's just say, it can be done.)

What next?

The Regicide Report is the last Bob/Mo/Laundry novel. It's set circa March-May 2015 in the time line; the New Management books are set circa November 2015 through May 2017, so this one slots in before Dead Lies Dreaming.

There may be a Laundry Files short story collection, and/or/maybe including a final New Management novella (it's half-written, but on "hold" since mid-2024), at some point in the future. But not this year or next. (I'm taking time off to get back in touch with space opera.)

None of the above precludes further Laundry Files novels getting written, but it's up to the publishers and market forces. If it does happen, I expect they'll be set in the 2020s in the internal chronology, by which time the Laundry itself is no more (it's been superseded by DEAT), and we may have new protagonists and a very new story line.

No, but really what's next?

I don't know for sure, but I'm currently working on the final draft of Starter Pack, my Stainless Steel Rat homage, and planning yet another rewrite of Ghost Engine, this time throwing away my current protagonists and replacing them with the ones from Starter Pack (who need another heist caper). Do not expect publication before 2027, though! I'm also awaiting eye surgery again, which slows everything down.

Author: Hillary Lyon Monte snatched the small chest from the airport where he worked as a baggage handler. He recognized the case; he’d seen it on stage at the fan convention. He jostled it, grinning. By the distribution of the weight inside, it definitely held the author’s animatronic head. At home, Monte placed the animatronic […]

The post Intergalactic Vixens on the Moon appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike.

Lincoln KC repeated "I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was among the major partners of Bank of America."

"Extra tokens, or just a stutter?" asks Joel "An errant alt-tab caused a needless google search, but thankfully Gemini's AI summary got straight-to-the-point(less) info. It is nice to see the world's supply of Oxford commas all in once place. "

Alessandro M. isn't the first one to call us out on our WTFs. "It’s adorable how the site proudly supports GitHub OAuth right up until the moment you actually try to use it. It’s like a door with a ‘Welcome’ sign that opens onto a brick wall." Meep meep.

Float follies found Daniel W. doubly-precise. "Had to go check on something in M365 Admin Center, and when I was on the OneDrive tab, I noticed Microsoft was calculating back past the bit. We're in quantum space at this point."

Weinliebhaber Michael R. sagt "Our German linguists here will spot the WTF immediately where my local wine shop has not. Weiẞer != WEIBER. Those words mean really different things." Is that 20 euro per kilo, or per the piece?

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This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system.

News article.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Industrial machines are generally accompanied by "Human Machine Interfaces", HMIs. This is industrial slang for a little computerized box you use to control the industrial machine. All the key logic and core functionality and especially the safety functionality is handled at a deeper computer layer in the system. The HMI is just buttons users can push to interact with the machine.

Purchasers of those pieces of industrial equipment often want to customize that user interface. They want to guide users away from functions they don't need, or make their specific workflow clear, or even just brand the UI. This means that the vendor needs to publish an API for their HMI.

Which brings us to Wendy. She works for a manufacturing company which wants to customize the HMI on a piece of industrial equipment in a factory. That means Wendy has been reading the docs and poking at the open-sourced portions of the code, and these raise more questions than they answer.

For example, the HMI's API provides its own set of collection types, in C#. We can wonder why they'd do such a thing, which is certainly a WTF in itself, but this representative line raises even more questions than that:

Int32 Count { get; set; }

What happens if you use the public set operation on the count of items in a collection? I don't know. Wendy doesn't either, as she writes:

I'm really tempted to set the count but I fear the consequences.

All I can hear in my head when I think about "setting the Count" is: "One! One null reference exception! Two! TWO null reference exceptions! HA HA HA HA!"

By http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Count_von_Count

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Author: CB Droege Tamilla moves carefully and silently through the dark fairground. She knows it’s only minimally guarded, and that the CCTV isn’t being monitored at night, but she’s learned to take every job seriously. Upon reaching the carousel, she checks the photo to confirm the target and pulls a battery-powered saw from her pack. […]

The post Stealing Someone New appeared first on 365tomorrows.

 Midweek, I'll refrain from politics... or the things that are now obvious. 

I just finished writing/editing/formatting an entire nonfiction book (about AI!) and wish to celebrate by offering a gift to you all. A little tale of optimism and hope... illustrating that one person -- not a superhero or mighty warrior or politician or genius -- might make all the difference in the world. With courage, hard work and neighborly good will.*

This story is one of many that can also be found in The Best of David Brin.

 =========================================

           A Professor at Harvard

                             By David Brin

Dear Lilly,

This transcription may be a bit rough.  I’m dashing it off quickly for reasons that should soon be obvious.  

         Exciting news!  Still, let me ask that you please don’t speak of this, or let it leak till I’ve had a chance to put my findings in a more academic format.

         Since May of 2022, I’ve been engaged to catalogue the Thomas Kuiper Collection, which Harvard acquired in that notorious bidding war a couple of years ago, on eBay.   The acclaimed astronomer-philosopher had been amassing trunkloads of documents from the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries -- individually and in batches -- with no apparent pattern, rhyme or reason.   Accounts of the Dutch Revolution. Letters from Johannes Kepler.  Sailing manifests of ports in southern England. Ledgers and correspondence from the Italian Inquisition.  Early documents of Massachusetts Bay Colony and narratives about the establishment of Harvard College.

         The last category was what most interested the trustees, so I got to work separating them from the apparent clutter.  That is, it seemed clutter, an unrelated jumble... till intriguing patterns began to emerge. 

         Let me trace the story as was revealed to me, in bits and pieces.  It begins with the apprenticeship of a young English boy named Henry Stephens.

#

LLMs are bad at generating passwords:

There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily:

• All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7.
• Character choices are highly uneven ­ for example, L , 9, m, 2, $ and # appeared in all 50 passwords, but 5 and @ only appeared in one password each, and most of the letters in the alphabet never appeared at all.
• There are no repeating characters within any password. Probabilistically, this would be very unlikely if the passwords were truly random ­ but Claude preferred to avoid repeating characters, possibly because it “looks like it’s less random”.
• Claude avoided the symbol *. This could be because Claude’s output format is Markdown, where * has a special meaning.
• Even entire passwords repeat: In the above 50 attempts, there are actually only 30 unique passwords. The most common password was G7$kL9#mQ2&xP4!w, which repeated 18 times, giving this specific password a 36% probability in our test set; far higher than the expected probability 2-100 if this were truly a 100-bit password.

This result is not surprising. Password generation seems precisely the thing that LLMs shouldn’t be good at. But if AI agents are doing things autonomously, they will be creating accounts. So this is a problem.

Actually, the whole process of authenticating an autonomous agent has all sorts of deep problems.

News article.

Slashdot story

National Knowledge Network (NKN) is one of India’s main National Research and Educational Network (NREN). The other being the less prevalent Education and Research Network (ERNET).

This post grew out of this Mastodon thread where I kept on adding various public graphs (from various global research and educational entities) that peer or connect with NKN. This was to get some purview about traffic data between them and NKN.

CERN

CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW) and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

• Graph - https://monit-grafana-open.cern.ch/d/XoND3VQ4k/nkn?orgId=16&from=now-30d&to=now&timezone=browser&var-source=raw&var-bin=5m
• Connection seems to be 2x10 G through CERNLight.

India participates in the LHCONE project, which carries LHC data over these links for scientific research purposes. This presentation from Vikas Singhal from Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata, at the 8th Asian Tier Center Forum in 2024 gives some details.

GÉANT

GÉANT is pan European Union’s collaboration of NRENs.

• Graph https://public-brian.geant.org/d/ZyVgYFgVk/nkn?orgId=5&from=now-30d&to=now
• NKN connects at Amsterdam POP.
• From the 2016 press release from GÉANT, NKN seems to have 2x10 G capacity towards GÉANT. Things might have changed since.

LEARN

Lanka Education and Research Network (LEARN) is Sri Lanka’s NREN.

• Graph https://kirigal.learn.ac.lk/traffic/details.php?desc=slt-b1-new&data_id=1788&data_id_v6=&sub_bw=1000&name=National%20Knowledge%20Network%20of%20India%20(1G)&swap_inout=
• Connection seems to be 1 G.

NORDUnet

NREN for Nordic countries.

• Graph https://stats.nordu.net/stat-q/r-all?q=all&name=NKN

I couldn’t find any public live data transfer graphs from NKN side. If you know any other graphs, do let me know.

Earlier this week a colleague of mine, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, shared a demo of something he built as an experiment, and I felt the desire to share this and add a bit of reflection. (Not keen on watching a 5 min video? Read on below.)

What was that?

So what did you just see (or skipped watching)? You could see Emilio’s screen, running VSCode and editing a Lean file. He designed a small programming language that he embedded into Lean, including an evaluator. So far, so standard, but a few things stick out already:

• Using Lean’s very extensible syntax this embedding is rather elegant and pretty.
• Furthermore, he can run this DSL code right there, in the source code, using commands like #eval. This is a bit like the interpreter found in Haskell or Python, but without needing a separate process, or like using a Jupyter notebook, but without the stateful cell management.

This is already a nice demonstration of Lean’s abilities and strength, as we know them. But what blew my mind the first time was what happened next: He had a visual debugger that allowed him to debug his DSL program. It appeared on the right, in Lean’s “Info View”, where various Lean tools can hook into, show information and allow the user to interact.

But it did not stop there, and my mind was blown a second time: Emilio opened VSCode’s „Debugger“ pane on the left, and was able to properly use VSCode’s full-fledged debugger frontend for his own little embedded programming language! Complete with highlighting the executed line, with the ability to set breakpoints there, and showing the state of local variables in the debugger.

Having a good debugger is not to be taken for granted even for serious, practical programming languages. Having it for a small embedded language that you just built yourself? I wouldn’t have even considered that.

Did it take long?

If I were Emilio’s manager I would applaud the demo and then would have to ask how many weeks he spent on that. Coming up with the language, getting the syntax extension right, writing the evaluator and especially learning how the debugger integration into VSCode (using the DAP protocol) works, and then instrumenting his evaluator to speak that protocol – that is a sizeable project!

It turns out the answer isn’t measured in weeks: it took just one day of coding together with GPT-Codex 5.3. My mind was blown a third time.

Why does Lean make a difference?

I am sure this post is just one of many stories you have read in recent weeks about how new models like Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-Codex 5.3 built impressive things in hours that would have taken days or more before. But have you seen something like this? Agentic coding is powerful, but limited by what the underlying platform exposes. I claim that Lean is a particularly well-suited platform to unleash the agents’ versatility.

Here we are using Lean as a programming language, not as a theorem prover (which brings other immediate benefits when using agents, e.g. the produced code can be verified rather than merely plausible, but that’s a story to be told elsewhere.)

But arguably because Lean is also a theorem prover, and because of the requirements that stem from that, its architecture is different from that of a conventional programming language implementation:

• As a theorem prover, it needs extensible syntax to allow formalizing mathematics in an ergonomic way, but it can also be used for embedding syntax.
• As a theorem prover, it needs the ability to run “tactics” written by the user, hence the ability to evaluate the code right there in the editor.
• As a theorem prover, it needs to give access to information such as tactic state, and such introspection abilities unlock many other features – such as a debugger for an embedded language.
• As a theorem prover, it has to allow tools to present information like the tactic state, so it has the concept of interactive “Widgets”.

So Lean’s design has always made such a feat possible. But it was no easy feat. The Lean API is large, and documentation never ceases to be improvable. In the past, it would take an expert (or someone willing to become one) to pull off that stunt. These days, coding assistants have no issue digesting, understanding and using the API, as Emilio’s demo shows.

The combination of Lean’s extensibility and the ability of coding agents to make use of that is a game changer to how we can develop software, with rich, deep, flexible and bespoke ways to interact with our code, created on demand.

Where does that lead us?

Emilio actually shared more such demos (Github repository). A visual explorer for the compiler output (have a look at the screenshot. A browser-devtool-like inspection tool for Lean’s “InfoTree”. Any of these provide a significant productivity boost. Any of these would have been a sizeable project half a year ago. Now it’s just a few hours of chatting with the agent.

So allow me to try and extrapolate into a future where coding agents have continued to advance at the current pace, and are used ubiquitously. Is there then even a point in polishing these tools, shipping them to our users, documenting them? Why build a compiler explorer for our users, if our users can just ask their agent to build one for them, right then when they need it, tailored to precisely the use case they have, with no unnecessary or confusing feature. The code would be single use, as the next time the user needs something like that the agent can just re-create it, maybe slightly different because every use case is different.

If that comes to pass then Lean may no longer get praise for its nice out-of-the-box user experience, but instead because it is such a powerful framework for ad-hoc UX improvements.

And Emilio wouldn’t post demos about his debugger. He’d just use it.

Author: Colin Jeffrey Andre Grack wasn’t happy with his latest purchase. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the colour or its size, though those attributes were rather nebulous and indescribable, he now realised. And it wasn’t that it was ugly, emitted unpleasant smells, or leaked something nasty onto the floor. Though, again, these aspects defied […]

The post Till Zen, farewell appeared first on 365tomorrows.

I've had the misfortune of working in places which did source-control via comments. Like one place which required that, with each section of code changed, you needed to add a comment with your name, the ticket number, and the reason the change was made. You know, the kind of thing you can just get from your source control service.

In their defense, that policy was invented for mainframe developers and then extended to everyone else, and their source control system was in Visual Source Safe. VSS was a) terrible, and b) a perennial destroyer of history, so maybe they weren't entirely wrong and VSS was the real WTF. I still hated it.

In any case, Alice's team uses more modern source control than that, which is why she's able to explain to us the story of this function:

public function calculateMassGrossPay(array $employees, Payroll $payroll): array
{
    // it shouldn't enter here, but if it does by any change, do nth
    return [];
}

Once upon a time, this function actually contained logic, a big pile of fairly complicated logic. Eventually, a different method was created which streamlined the functionality, but had a different signature and logic. All the callers were updated to use that method instead- by commenting out the line which called this one. This function had a comment added to the top: // it shouldn't enter here.

Then, the body of this function got commented out, and the return was turned into an empty array. The comment was expanded to what you see above. Then, eventually, the commented-out callers were all deleted. Years after that, the commented out body of this function was also deleted, leaving behind the skeleton you see here.

This function is not referenced anywhere else, not even in a comment. It's truly impossible for code to "enter here".

Alice writes: "Version control by commented out code does not work very well."

Indeed, it does not.

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Our Debian User Group met on February 22^nd for our first meeting of the year!

Here's what we did:

pollo:

• reviewed and merged Lintian contributions:
  • salsa MR !664
  • salsa MR !665
  • salsa MR !666
• released lintian version 2.130.0
• upstreamed a patch for python-wilderness, fixed a few things and released version 0.1.10-3
• updated python-clevercsv to version 0.8.4
• updated python-mediafile to version 0.14.0

lelutin:

• opened up a RFH for co-maintenance for smokeping and added Marc Haber who responded really quickly to the call
• with mjeanson's help: prepped and uploaded a new smokeping version to release pending work
• opened a NM request to become DM

viashimo:

• fixed freshrss timer
• updated freshrss
• installed new navidrome container
• configured backups for new host (beelink mini s12)

tvaz:

• did NM work
• learned more about debusine and tested it
• uploaded antimony to debusine
• (co-)convinced lelutin to apply for DM (yay!)

lavamind:

• worked on autopkgtests for a new version of jruby

Pictures

This time around, we held our meeting at cégep du Vieux Montréal, the college where I currently work. Here is the view we had:

We also ordered some delicious pizzas from Pizzeria dei Compari, a nice pizzeria on Saint-Denis street that's been there forever.

Some of us ended up grabbing a drink after the event at l'Amère à boire, a pub right next to the venue, but I didn't take any pictures.

All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website:

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission….

Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.

Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire.” For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously.

These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.

Author: Mark Renney It is vital that I have somewhere to hibernate, a place where I can lay dormant, for years, decades, even longer if necessary, although I do need to flicker, albeit briefly, from time to time. I have to be seen or at least cause someone to shiver, to feel uncertain, disoriented. Any […]

The post Sprite appeared first on 365tomorrows.

I just made up a Debian trixie setup that has no need for a GUI. In fact, I rarely use the text console either. However, because the machine is dual boot and also serves another purpose, it’s connected to my main monitor and KVM switch.

The monitor has three inputs, and when whatever display it’s set to goes into powersave mode, it will seek out another one that’s active and automatically switch to it.

You can probably see where this is heading: it’s really inconvenient if one of the inputs never goes into powersave mode. And, of course, it wastes energy.

I have concluded that the Linux text console has lost the ability to enter powersave mode after an inactivity timeout. It can still do screen blanking — setting every pixel to black — but that is a distinct and much less useful thing.

You can do a lot of searching online that will tell you what to do. Almost all of it is wrong these days. For instance, none of these work:

• Anything involving vbetool. This is really, really old advice.
• Anything involving xset, unless you’re actually running a GUI, which is not the point of this post.
• Anything involving setterm or the kernel parameters video=DPMS or consoleblank.
• Anything involving writing to paths under /sys, such as ones ending in dpms.

Why is this?

Well, we are on at least the third generation of Linux text console display subsystems. (Maybe more than 3, depending on how you count.) The three major ones were:

1. The VGA text console
2. fbdev
3. DRI/KMS

As I mentioned recently in my post about running an accurate 80×25 DOS-style console on modern Linux, the VGA text console mode is pretty much gone these days. It relied on hardware rendering of the text fonts, and that capability simply isn’t present on systems that aren’t PCs — or even on PCs that are UEFI, which is most of them now.

fbdev, or a framebuffer console under earlier names, has been in Linux since the late 1990s. It was the default for most distros until more recently. It supported DPMS powersave modes, and most of the instructions you will find online reference it.

Nowadays, the DRI/KMS system is used for graphics. Unfortunately, it is targeted mainly at X11 and Wayland. It is also used for the text console, but things like DPMS-enabled timeouts were never implemented there.

You can find some manual workarounds — for instance, using ddcutil or similar for an external monitor, or adjusting the backlight files under /sys on a laptop. But these have a number of flaws — making unwanted brightness adjustments, and not automatically waking up on keypress among them.

My workaround

I finally gave up and ran apt-get install xdm. Then in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup, I added one line:

xset dpms 0 0 120

Now the system boots into an xdm login screen, and shuts down the screen after 2 minutes of inactivity. On the rare occasion where I want a text console from it, I can switch to it and it won’t have a timeout, but I can live with that.

Thus, quite hopefully, concludes my series of way too much information about the Linux text console!

Henrik H's employer thought they could save money by hiring offshore, and save even more money by hiring offshore junior developers, and save even more money by basically not supervising them at all.

Henrik sends us just one representative line:

if (System.DateTime.Now.AddDays(-365) <= f.ReleaseDate) // 365 days means one year 

I appreciate the comment, that certainly "helps" explain the magic number. There's of course, just one little problem: It's wrong. I mean, ~75% of the time, it works every time, but it happily disregards leap years. Which may or may not be a problem in this case, but if they got so far as learning about the AddDays method, they were inches from using AddYears.

This is a copy of an email I used to send internally at work and now made public. I'm not sure I'll make a habit of posting it here, especially not twice a year, unless people really like it. Right now, it's mostly here to keep with my current writing spree going.

This is your bi-yearly reminder that time is changing soon!

What's happening?

For people not on tor-internal, you should know that I've been sending semi-regular announcements when daylight saving changes occur. Starting now, I'm making those announcements public so they can be shared with the wider community because, after all, this affects everyone (kind of).

For those of you lucky enough to have no idea what I'm talking about, you should know that some places in the world implement what is called Daylight saving time or DST.

Normally, you shouldn't have to do anything: computers automatically change time following local rules, assuming they are correctly configured, provided recent updates have been applied in the case of a recent change in said rules (because yes, this happens).

Appliances, of course, will likely not change time and will need to adjusted unless they are so-called "smart" (also known as "part of a bot net").

If your clock is flashing "0:00" or "12:00", you have no action to take, congratulations on having the right time once or twice a day.

If you haven't changed those clocks in six months, congratulations, they will be accurate again!

In any case, you should still consider DST because it might affect some of your meeting schedules, particularly if you set up a new meeting schedule in the last 6 months and forgot to consider this change.

If your location does not have DST

Properly scheduled meetings affecting multiple time zones are set in UTC time, which does not change. So if your location does not observer time changes, your (local!) meeting time will not change.

But be aware that some other folks attending your meeting might have the DST bug and their meeting times will change. They might miss entire meetings or arrive late as you frantically ping them over IRC, Matrix, Signal, SMS, Ricochet, Mattermost, SimpleX, Whatsapp, Discord, Slack, Wechat, Snapchat, Telegram, XMPP, Briar, Zulip, RocketChat, DeltaChat, talk(1), write(1), actual telegrams, Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum, APRS, snail mail, and, finally, flying a remote presence drone to their house, asking what's going on.

(Sorry if I forgot your preferred messaging client here, I tried my best.)

Be kind; those poor folks might be more sleep deprived as DST steals one hour of sleep from them on the night that implements the change.

If you do observe DST

If you are affected by the DST bug, your local meeting times will change access the board. Normally, you can trust that your meetings are scheduled to take this change into account and the new time should still be reasonable.

Trust, but verify; make sure the new times are adequate and there are no scheduling conflicts.

Do this now: take a look at your calendar in two week and in April. See if any meeting need to be rescheduled because of an impossible or conflicting time.

When does time change, how and where?

Notice how I mentioned "North America" in the subject? That's a lie. ("The doctor lies", as they say on the BBC.) Other places, including Europe, also changes times, just not all at once (and not all North America).

We'll get into "where" soon, but first let's look at the "how". As you might already know, the trick is:

Spring forward, fall backwards.

This northern-centric (sorry!) proverb says that clocks will move forward by an hour this "spring", after moving backwards last "fall". This is why we lose an hour of work, sorry, sleep. It sucks, to put it bluntly. I want it to stop and will keep writing those advisories until it does.

To see where and when, we, unfortunately, still need to go into politics.

USA and Canada

First, we start with "North America" which, really, is just some parts of USA[1] and Canada[2]. As usual, on the Second Sunday in March (the 8th) at 02:00 local (not UTC!), the clocks will move forward.

This means that properly set clocks will flip from 1:59 to 3:00, coldly depriving us from an hour of sleep that was perniciously granted 6 months ago and making calendar software stupidly hard to write.

Practically, set your wrist watch and alarm clocks[3] back one hour before going to bed and go to bed early.

[1] except Arizona (except the Navajo nation), US territories, and Hawaii

[2] except Yukon, most of Saskatchewan, and parts of British Columbia (northeast), one island in Nunavut (Southampton Island), one town in Ontario (Atikokan) and small parts of Quebec (Le Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent), a list which I keep recopying because I find it just so amazing how chaotic it is. When your clock has its own Wikipedia page, you know something is wrong.

[3] hopefully not managed by a botnet, otherwise kindly ask your bot net operator to apply proper software upgrades in a timely manner

Europe

Next we look at our dear Europe, which will change time on the last Sunday in March (the 29th) at 01:00 UTC (not local!). I think it means that, Amsterdam-time, the clocks will flip from 1:59 to 3:00 AM local on that night.

(Every time I write this, I have doubts. I would welcome independent confirmation from night owls that observe that funky behavior experimentally.)

Just like your poor fellows out west, just fix your old-school clocks before going to bed, and go to sleep early, it's good for you.

Rest of the world with DST

Renewed and recurring apologies again to the people of Cuba, Mexico, Moldova, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Chile (except Magallanes Region), parts of Australia, and New Zealand which all have their own individual DST rules, omitted here for brevity.

In general, changes also happen in March, but either on different times or different days, except in the south hemisphere, where they happen in April.

Rest of the world without DST

All of you other folks without DST, rejoice! Thank you for reminding us how manage calendars and clocks normally. Sometimes, doing nothing is precisely the right thing to do. You're an inspiration for us all.

Changes since last time

There were, again, no changes since last year on daylight savings that I'm aware of. It seems the US congress debating switching to a "half-daylight" time zone which is an half-baked idea that I should have expected from the current USA politics.

The plan is to, say, switch from "Eastern is UTC-4 in the summer" to "Eastern is UTC-4.5". The bill also proposes to do this 90 days after enactment, which is dangerously optimistic about our capacity at deploying any significant change in human society.

In general, I rely on the Wikipedia time nerds for this and Paul Eggert which seems to singlehandledly be keeping everything in order for all of us, on the tz-announce mailing list.

This time, I've also looked at the tz mailing list which is where I learned about the congress bill.

If your country has changed time and no one above noticed, now would be an extremely late time to do something about this, typically writing to the above list. (Incredibly, I need to write to the list because of this post.)

One thing that did change since last year is that I've implemented what I hope to be a robust calendar for this, which was surprisingly tricky.

If you have access to our Nextcloud, it should be visible under the heading "Daylight saving times". If you don't, you can access it using this direct link.

The procedures around how this calendar was created, how this email was written, and curses found along the way, are also documented in this wiki page, if someone ever needs to pick up the Time Lord duty.

When the Free Software movement started in the 1980s, most of the world had just made a transition from free university-written software to non-free, proprietary, company-written software. Because of that, the initial ethical standpoint of the Free Software foundation was that it's fine to run a non-free operating system, as long as all the software you run on that operating system is free.

Initially this was just the editor.

But as time went on, and the FSF managed to write more and more parts of the software stack, their ethical stance moved with the times. This was a, very reasonable, pragmatic stance: if you don't accept using a non-free operating system and there isn't a free operating system yet, then obviously you can't write that free operating system, and the world won't move towards a point where free operating systems exist.

In the early 1990s, when Linus initiated the Linux kernel, the situation reached the point where the original dream of a fully free software stack was complete.

Or so it would appear.

Because, in fact, this was not the case. Computers are physical objects, composed of bits of technology that we refer to as "hardware", but in order for these bits of technology to communicate with other bits of technology in the same computer system, they need to interface with each other, usually using some form of bus protocol. These bus protocols can get very complicated, which means that a bit of software is required in order to make all the bits communicate with each other properly. Generally, this software is referred to as "firmware", but don't let that name deceive you; it's really just a bit of low-level software that is very specific to one piece of hardware. Sometimes it's written in an imperative high-level language; sometimes it's just a set of very simple initialization vectors. But whatever the case might be, it's always a bit of software.

And although we largely had a free system, this bit of low-level software was not yet free.

Initially, storage was expensive, so computers couldn't store as much data as today, and so most of this software was stored in ROM chips on the exact bits of hardware they were meant for. Due to this fact, it was easy to deceive yourself that the firmware wasn't there, because you never directly interacted with it. We knew it was there; in fact, for some larger pieces of this type of software it was possible, even in those days, to install updates. But that was rarely if ever done at the time, and it was easily forgotten.

And so, when the free software movement slapped itself on the back and declared victory when a fully free operating system was available, and decided that the work of creating a free software environment was finished, that only keeping it recent was further required, and that we must reject any further non-free encroachments on our fully free software stack, the free software movement was deceiving itself.

Because a computing environment can never be fully free if the low-level pieces of software that form the foundations of that computing environment are not free. It would have been one thing if the Free Software Foundation declared it ethical to use non-free low-level software on a computing environment if free alternatives were not available. But unfortunately, they did not.

In fact, something very strange happened.

In order for some free software hacker to be able to write a free replacement for some piece of non-free software, they obviously need to be able to actually install that theoretical free replacement. This isn't just a random thought; in fact it has happened.

Now, it's possible to install software on a piece of rewritable storage such as flash memory inside the hardware and boot the hardware from that, but if there is a bug in your software -- not at all unlikely if you're trying to write software for a piece of hardware that you don't have documentation for -- then it's not unfathomable that the replacement piece of software will not work, thereby reducing your expensive piece of technology to something about as useful as a paperweight.

Here's the good part.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the bits of technology that made up computers became so complicated, and the storage and memory available to computers so much larger and cheaper, that it became economically more feasible to create a small, tiny, piece of software stored in a ROM chip on the hardware, with just enough knowledge of the bus protocol to download the rest from the main computer.

This is awesome for free software. If you now write a replacement for the non-free software that comes with the hardware, and you make a mistake, no wobbles! You just remove power from the system, let the DRAM chips on the hardware component fully drain, return power, and try again. You might still end up with a brick of useless silicon if some of the things you sent to your technology make it do things that it was not designed to do and therefore you burn through some critical bits of metal or plastic, but the chance of this happening is significantly lower than the chance of you writing something that impedes the boot process of the piece of hardware and you are unable to fix it because the flash is overwritten. There is anecdotal evidence that there are free software hackers out there who do so. So, yay, right? You'd think the Free Software foundation would jump at the possibility to get more free software? After all, a large part of why we even have a Free Software Foundation in the first place, was because of some piece of hardware that was misbehaving, so you would think that the foundation's founders would understand the need for hardware to be controlled by software that is free.

The strange thing, what has always been strange to me, is that this is not what happened.

The Free Software Foundation instead decided that non-free software on ROM or flash chips is fine, but non-free software -- the very same non-free software, mind -- that touches the general storage device that you as a user use, is not. Never mind the fact that the non-free software is always there, whether it sits on your storage device or not.

Misguidedness aside, if some people decide they would rather not update the non-free software in their hardware and use the hardware with the old and potentially buggy version of the non-free software that it came with, then of course that's their business.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite stop there. If it had, I wouldn't have written this blog post.

You see, even though the Free Software Foundation was about Software, they decided that they needed to create a hardware certification program. And this hardware certification program ended up embedding the strange concept that if something is stored in ROM it's fine, but if something is stored on a hard drive it's not. Same hardware, same software, but different storage. By that logic, Windows respects your freedom as long as the software is written to ROM. Because this way, the Free Software Foundation could come to a standstill and pretend they were still living in the 90s.

An unfortunate result of the "RYF" program is that it means that companies who otherwise would have been inclined to create hardware that was truly free, top to bottom, are now more incentivised by the RYF program to create hardware in which the non-free low-level software can't be replaced.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world did not pretend to still be living in the nineties, and free hardware communities now exist. Because of how the FSF has marketed themselves out of the world, these communities call themselves "Open Hardware" communities, rather than "Free Hardware" ones, but the principle is the same: the designs are there, if you have the skill you can modify it, but you don't have to.

In the mean time, the open hardware community has evolved to a point where even CPUs are designed in the open, which you can design your own version of.

But not all hardware can be implemented as RISC-V, and so if you want a full system that builds RISC-V you may still need components of the system that were originally built for other architectures but that would work with RISC-V, such as a network card or a GPU. And because the FSF has done everything in their power to disincentivise people who would otherwise be well situated to build free versions of the low-level software required to support your hardware, you may now be in the weird position where we seem to have somehow skipped a step.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

(comments for this post will not pass moderation. Use your own blog!)

Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict.

But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, combatants are distributed across dozens of domains.

Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers, and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s court system started using AI to triage cases, only to face an increasing volume of cases filed with AI help. Open source software developers are being overwhelmed with code contributions from bots. Newspapers, music, social media, education, investigative journalism, hiring, and procurement are all being disrupted by a massive expansion of AI use.

Each of these is an arms race. Adversaries within a system iteratively seeking an edge against their competition by continuously expanding their use of a common technology.

Beneficiaries of these arms races are US mega-corporations capturing wealth from the rest of us at an unprecedented rate. A substantial fraction of global economy has reoriented around AI in just the past few years, and that trend is accelerating. In parallel, this industry’s lobbying interests are quickly becoming the object, rather than the subject, of US government power.

To understand these arms races, let’s look at an example of particular interest to democracies worldwide: how AI is changing the relationship between democratic government and citizens. Interactions that used to happen between people and elected representatives are expanding to a massive scale, with AIs taking the roles that humans once did.

In a notorious example from 2017, US Federal Communications Commission opened a comment platform on the web to get public input on internet regulation. It was quickly flooded with millions of comments fraudulently orchestrated by broadband providers to oppose FCC regulation of their industry. From the other side, a 19-yearold college student responded by submitting millions of comments of his own supporting the regulation. Both sides were using software primitive by the standards of today’s AI.

Nearly a decade later, it is getting harder for citizens to tell when they’re talking to a government bot, or when an online conversation about public policy is just bots talking to bots. When constituents leverage AI to communicate better, faster, and more, it pressures government officials to do the same.

This may sound futuristic, but it’s become a familiar reality in US. Staff in US Congress are using AI to make their constituent email correspondence more efficient. Politicians campaigning for office are adopting AI tools to automate fundraising and voter outreach. By one 2025 estimate, a fifth of public submissions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were already being generated with AI assistance.

People and organizations are adopting AI here because it solves a real problem that has made mass advocacy campaigns ineffective in the past: quantity has been inversely proportional to both quality and relevance. It’s easy for government agencies to dismiss general comments in favour of more specific and actionable ones. That makes it hard for regular people to make their voices heard. Most of us don’t have the time to learn the specifics or to express ourselves in this kind of detail. AI makes that contextualization and personalization easy. And as the volume and length of constituent comments grow, agencies turn to AI to facilitate review and response.

That’s the arms race. People are using AI to submit comments, which requires those on the receiving end to use AI to wade through the comments received. To the extent that one side does attain an advantage, it will likely be temporary. And yet, there is real harm created when one side exploits another in these adversarial systems. Constituents of democracies lose out if their public servants use AI-generated responses to ignore and dismiss their voices rather than to listen to and include them. Scientific enterprise is weakened if fraudulent papers sloppily generated by AI overwhelm legitimate research.

As we write in our new book, Rewiring Democracy, the arms race dynamic is inevitable. Every actor in an adversarial system is incentivized and, in the absence of new regulation in this fast moving space, free to use new technologies to advance its own interests. Yet some of these examples are heartening. They signal that, even if you face an AI being used against you, there’s an opportunity to use the tech for your own benefit.

But, right now, it’s obvious who is benefiting most from AI. A handful of American Big Tech corps and their owners are extracting trillions of dollars from the manufacture of AI chips, development of AI data centers, and operation of so-called ‘frontier’ AI models. Regardless of which side pulls ahead in each arms race scenario, the house always wins. Corporate AI giants profit from the race dynamic itself.

As formidable as the near-monopoly positions of today’s Big Tech giants may seem, people and governments have substantial capability to fight back. Various democracies are resisting this concentration of wealth and power with tools of anti-trust regulation, protections for human rights, and public alternatives to corporate AI. All of us worried about the AI arms race and committed to preserving the interests of our communities and our democracies should think in both these terms: how to use the tech to our own advantage, and how to resist the concentration of power AI is being exploited to create.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Times of India.

It should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the tech news that many companies are pushing the adoption of "AI" (large language models) among their own employees--from software developers to management--and the push is coming from the top down, as C-suite executives order their staff to use AI, Or Else. But we know that LLMs reduce programmer productivity-- one major study showed that "developers believed that using AI tools helped them perform 20% faster -- but they actually worked 19% slower." (Source.)

Another recent study found that 87% of executives are using AI on the job, compared with just 27% of employees: "AI adoption varies by seniority, with 87% of executives using it on the job, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees. It also finds that executives are 45% more likely to use the technology on the job than Gen Zers, the youngest members of today's workforce and the first generation to have grown up with the internet.

"The findings are based on a survey of roughly 7,000 professionals age 18 and older who work in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. It was commissioned by HR software company Dayforce and conducted online from July 22 to August 6."

Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity?

I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.

Gordon Moore, long-time co-founder and CEO of Intel, explained how he saw the CEO's job in his book on management: a CEO is a tie-breaker. Effective enterprises delegate decision making to the lowest level possible, because obviously decisions should be made by the people most closely involved in the work. But if a dispute arises, for example between two business units disagreeing on which of two projects to assign scarce resources to, the two units need to consult a higher level management team about where their projects fit into the enterprise's priorities. Then the argument can be settled ... or not, in which case it propagates up through the layers of the management tree until it lands in the CEO's in-tray. At which point, the buck can no longer be passed on and someone (the CEO) has to make a ruling.

So a lot of a CEO's job, aside from leading on strategic policy, is to arbitrate between conflicting sides in an argument. They're a referee, or maybe a judge.

Now, today's LLMs are not intelligent. But they're very good at generating plausible-sounding arguments, because they're language models. If you ask an LLM a question it does not answer the question, but it uses its probabilistic model of language to generate something that closely resembles the semantic structure of an answer.

LLMs are effectively optimized for bamboozling CEOs into mistaking them for intelligent activity, rather than autocomplete on steroids. And so the corporate leaders extrapolate from their own experience to that of their employees, and assume that anyone not sprinkling magic AI pixie dust on their work is obviously a dirty slacker or a luddite.

(And this false optimization serves the purposes of the AI companies very well indeed because CEOs make the big ticket buying decisions, and internally all corporations ultimately turn out to be Stalinist command economies.)

Anyway, this is my hypothesis: we're seeing an insane push for LLM adoption in all lines of work, however inappropriate, because they directly exploit a cognitive bias to which senior management is vulnerable.

The utility closet Ellis had inherited and lived with for 17 years had been a cesspool of hazards to life and limb, a collection of tangible WTFs that had everyone asking an uncaring god, "What were they thinking?"

Every contractor who'd ever had to perform any amount of work in there had come away appalled. Many had even called over their buddies to come and see the stunning mess for themselves:

• All of the electrical components, dating from the 1980s, were scarily underpowered for what they were supposed to be powering.
• To get to the circuit breaker box—which was unlabeled, of course—one had to contort themselves around a water heater almost as tall as Ellis herself.
• As the house had no basement, the utility closet was on the first floor in an open house plan. A serious failure with said water heater would've sent 40 gallons (150 liters) of scalding-hot tsunami surging through the living room and kitchen.
• The furnace's return air vent had been screwed into crumbling drywall, and only prayers held it in place. Should it have fallen off, it would never have been replaceable. And Ellis' cat would've darted right in there for the adventure of a lifetime.
• To replace the furnace filter, Ellis had to put on work gloves, unscrew a sharp sheet-metal panel from the side of the furnace, pull the old filter out from behind a brick (the only thing holding it in place), manipulate the filter around a mess of water and natural gas pipes to get it out, thread the new filter in the same way, and then secure it in place with the brick before screwing the panel back on. Ellis always pretended to be an art thief in a museum, slipping priceless paintings around security-system lasers.
• Between the water tank, furnace, water conditioning unit, fiber optical network terminal, and router, there was barely room to breathe, much less enough air to power ignition for the gas appliances. Some genius had solved this by cutting random holes in several walls to admit air from outside. One of these holes was at floor-level. Once, Ellis opened the closet door to find a huge puddle on the floor, making her fear her hot water heater was leaking. As it turned out, a power-washing service had come over earlier that day. When they'd power-washed the exterior of her home, some of that water shot straight through one of those holes she hadn't known about, giving her utility closet a bonus bath.
• If air intake was a problem, venting the appliances' exhaust was an even worse issue. The sheet-metal vents had calcified and rusted over time. If left unaddressed, holes could've formed that would've leaked carbon monoxide into Ellis' house.

Considering all the above, plus the fact that the furnace and air conditioner were coming up on 20 years of service, Ellis couldn't put off corrective action any longer. Last week, over a span of 3 days, contractors came in to exorcise the demons:

• Upgrading electricals that hadn't already been dealt with.
• Replacing the hot water tank with a wall-mounted tankless heater.
• Replacing the furnace and AC with a heat pump and backup furnace, controlled by a new thermostat.
• Creating new pipes for intake and venting (no more reliance on indoor air for ignition).
• Replacing the furnace return air vent with a sturdier one.
• Putting a special hinged door on the side of the furnace, allowing the filter to be replaced in a matter of seconds (RIP furnace brick).

With that much work to be done, there were bound to be hiccups. For instance, when the Internet router was moved, an outage occurred: for no good reason, the optical network terminal refused to talk to Ellis' Wifi router after powering back up. A technician came out a couple days later, reset the Internet router, and everything was fine again.

All in all, it was an amazing and welcome transformation. As each new update came online, Ellis was gratefully satisfied. It seemed as though the demons were finally gone.

Unbeknownst to them all, there was one last vengeful spirit to quell, one final WTF that it was hell-bent on doling out.

It was late Friday afternoon. Despite the installers' best efforts, the new thermostat still wasn't communicating with the new heat pump. Given the timing, they couldn't contact the company rep to troubleshoot. However, the thermostat was properly communicating with the furnace. And so, Ellis was left with the furnace for the weekend. She was told not to mess with the thermostat at all except to adjust the set point as desired. They would follow back up with her on Monday.

For Ellis, that was perfectly fine. With the historically cold winter they'd been enduring in her neck of the woods, heat was all she cared about. She asked whom to contact in case of any issues, and was told to call the main number. With all that squared away, she looked forward to a couple of quiet, stress-free days before diving back into HVAC troubleshooting.

Everything was fine, until it wasn't. Around 11AM on Saturday, Ellis noticed that the thermostat displayed the word "Heating" while the furnace wasn't actually running. Maybe it was about to turn on? 15 minutes went by, then half an hour. Nothing had changed except for the temperature in her house steadily decreasing.

Panic set in at the thought of losing heat in her home indefinitely. That fell on top of a psyche that was already stressed out and emotionally exhausted from the last several days' effort. Struggling for calm, Ellis first tried to call that main number line for help as directed. She noticed right away that it wasn't a real person on the other end asking for her personal information, but an AI agent. The agent informed her that the on-call technician had no availablity that weekend. It would pencil her in for a service appointment on Monday. How did that sound?

"Not good enough!" Ellis cried. "I wanna speak to a representative!"

"I understand!" replied the blithe chatbot. "Hold on, let me transfer you!"

For a moment, Ellis was buoyed with hope. She'd gotten past the automated system. Soon, she'd be talking with a live person who might even be able to walk her through troubleshooting over the phone.

The new agent answered. Ellis began pouring her heart out—then stopped dead when she realized it was another AI agent, this time with a male voice instead of a female one. This one proceeded through nearly the same spiel as the first. It also scheduled her for a Monday service appointment even though the other chatbot had already claimed to have done so.

This was the first time an AI had ever pulled such a trick on Ellis. It was not a good time for it. Ellis hung up and called the only other person she could think to contact: her sales rep. When he didn't answer, she left a voicemail and texts: no heat all weekend was unacceptable. She would really appreciate a call back.

While playing the horrible waiting game, Ellis tried to think about what she could do to fix this. They had told her not to mess with the thermostat. Well, from what she could see, the thermostat was sending a signal to the furnace that the furnace wasn't responding to for whatever reason. It was time to look at the docs. Fortunately, the new furnace's manual was resting right on top of it. She spread it open on her kitchen table.

OK, Ellis thought, this newfangled furnace has an LED display which displays status codes. Her old furnace had lacked such a thing. Lemme find that.

Inside her newly remodeled utility closet, she located the blinking display, knelt, and spied the code: 1dL. Looking that up in the doc's troubleshooting section, she found ... Normal Operation. No action.

The furnace was OK, then? Now what?

Aside from documentation, another thing Ellis knew pretty well was tech support. She decided to break out the ol' turn-it-off-and-on-again. She shut off power to both the furnace and thermostat, waited a few minutes, then switched everything back on, crossing her fingers.

No change. The indoor temperature kept dropping.

Her phone rang: the sales rep. He connected her with the on-call technician for that weekend, who fortunately was able to arrive at her house within the hour.

One tiny thermostat adjustment later, and Ellis was enjoying a warm house once more.

What had happened?

This is where an understanding of heat pumps comes into play. In this configuration, the heat pump is used for cooling and for heating, unless the outside temperature gets very cold. At that point, the furnace kicks in, which is more efficient. (Technology Connections has some cool videos about this if you're curious.)

Everything had been running fine for Ellis while the temperatures had remained below freezing. The problem came when, for the first time in approximately 12 years, the temperature rose above 40F (4C). At that point, the new thermostat decided, without telling Ellis, I'm gonna tell the HEAT PUMP to heat the joint!

... which couldn't do anything just then.

Workaround: the on-call technician switched the thermostat to an emergency heat mode that used the furnace no matter what.

Ellis had been told not to goof around with the thermostat. Even if she had, as a heat pump neophyte, she wouldn't have known to go looking for such a setting. She might've dug it up in a manual. Someone could've walked her through it over the phone. Oh, well. There is heat again, which is all that matters.

They will attempt to bring the heat pump online soon. We shall see if the story ends here, or if this becomes The WTF That Wouldn't Die.

P.S. When Ellis explained the AI answering service's deceptive behavior, she was told that the agent had been universally complained about ever since they switched to it. Fed up, they told Ellis they're getting rid of it. She feels pretty chuffed about more people seeing the light concerning garbage AI that creates far more problems than it solves.

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Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Nat rushes in, noise from the crowded street cutting off as she slams the door. She hitches a thumb towards the outside world. “What did I miss this time?” Guido grins at Allie, who gestures for the new girl to fill their prodigal reporter in. Sandy sighs, then leans back, […]

The post Make the Grade appeared first on 365tomorrows.

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 post is closely based on a previously published post by Zarine Kharazian on the Community Data Science Blog.

For nearly a decade, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was run by a cabal of far-right nationalists who edited articles in ways that promoted fringe political ideas and involved cases of historical revisionism related to the Ustaše regime, a fascist movement that ruled the Nazi puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. This cabal seized complete control of the encyclopedia’s governance, banned and blocked those who disagreed with them, and operated a network of fake accounts to create the appearance of grassroots support for their policies.

Thankfully, Croatian Wikipedia appears to be an outlier. Though both the Croatian and Serbian language editions have been documented to contain nationalist bias and historical revisionism, Croatian Wikipedia seems unique among Wikipedia editions in the extent to which its governance institutions were captured by a small group of users.

The situation in Croatian Wikipedia was well documented and is now largely fixed, but we still know very little about why it was taken over, while other language editions seem to have rebuffed similar capture attempts. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), Zarine Kharazian, Kate Starbird, and I present an interview-based study that provides an explanation for why Croatian was captured while several other editions facing similar contexts and threats fared better.

Based on insights from interviews with 15 participants from both the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia projects and from the broader Wikimedia movement, we arrived at three propositions that, together, help explain why Croatian Wikipedia succumbed to capture while Serbian Wikipedia did not: 

1. Perceived Value as a Target. Is the project worth expending the effort to capture?
2. Bureaucratic Openness. How easy is it for contributors outside the core founding team to ascend to local governance positions?
3. Institutional Formalization. To what degree does the project prefer personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones?

The conceptual model from our paper, visualizing possible institutional configurations among Wikipedia projects that affect the risk of governance capture. 

We found that both Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias were attractive targets for far-right nationalist capture due to their sizable readership and resonance with national identity. However, we also found that the two projects diverged early in their trajectories in how open they remained to new contributors ascending to local governance positions and in the degree to which they privileged informal relationships over formal rules and processes as the project’s organizing principles. Ultimately, Croatian’s relative lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining administrator behavior created a window of opportunity for a motivated contingent of editors to seize control of the governance mechanisms of the project. 

Though our empirical setting was Wikipedia, our theoretical model may offer insight into the challenges faced by self-governed online communities more broadly. As interest in decentralized alternatives to Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) grows, communities on these sites will likely face similar threats from motivated actors. Understanding the vulnerabilities inherent in these self-governing systems is crucial to building resilient defenses against threats like disinformation. 

For more details on our findings, take a look at the published version of our paper.

Citation for the full paper: Kharazian, Zarine, Kate Starbird, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2024. “Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8 (CSCW1): 61:1-61:26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637338.

This blog post and the paper it describes are collaborative work by Zarine Kharazian, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Kate Starbird.

Author: Jack Gilmore The ground shook as a subway car rattled across the tracks of the A Line station, New Delphi. Murphy was jolted awake from his blissful doze. He’d been dreaming of a day in his youth when his father had taken him to NetflixLand. The sun had beat down on both of them […]

The post Subway Music appeared first on 365tomorrows.

The AI hype is based on the assumption that the frontier AI labs are producing better and better foundational models at an accelerating pace. Is that really true, or are people just in sort of a mass psychosis because AI models have become so good at mimicking human behavior that we unconsciously attribute increasing intelligence to them? I decided to conduct a mini-benchmark of my own to find out if the latest and greatest AI models are actually really good or not.

The problem with benchmarks

Every time any team releases a new LLM, they boast how well it performs on various industry benchmarks such as Humanity’s Last Exam, SWE-Bench and Ai2 ARC or ARC-AGI. An overall leaderboard can be viewed at LLM-stats. This incentivizes teams to optimize for specific benchmarks, which might make them excel on specific tasks while general abilities degrade. Also, the older a benchmark dataset is, the more online material there is discussing the questions and best answers, which in turn increases the chances of newer models trained on more recent web content scoring better.

Thus I prefer looking at real-time leaderboards such as the LM Arena leaderboard (or OpenCompass for Chinese models that might be missing from LM Arena). However, even though the LM Arena Elo score is rated by humans in real-time, the benchmark can still be played. For example, Meta reportedly used a special chat-optimized model instead of the actual Llama 4 model when getting scored on the LM Arena.

Therefore I trust my own first-hand experience more than the benchmarks for gaining intuition. Intuition however is not a compelling argument in discussions on whether or not new flagship AI models have plateaued. Thus, I decided to devise my own mini-benchmark so that no model could have possibly seen it in its training data or be specifically optimized for it in any way.

My mini-benchmark

I crafted 6 questions based on my own experience using various LLMs for several years and having developed some intuition about what kinds of questions LLMs typically struggle with.

I conducted the benchmark using the OpenRouter.ai chat playroom with the following state-of-the-art models:

• Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic)
• GPT-5.2 (OpenAI)
• Grok 4.1 (xAI)
• Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (Google)
• GLM 5 (Z.ai)
• MinMax M2.5 (MinMax)
• Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15 (Alibaba)
• Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot.ai)

OpenRouter.ai is great as it very easy to get responses from multiple models in parallel to a single question. Also it allows to turn off web search to force the models to answer purely based on their embedded knowledge.

Common for all the test questions is that they are fairly straightforward and have a clear answer, yet the answer isn’t common knowledge or statistically the most obvious one, and instead requires a bit of reasoning to get correct.

Some of these questions are also based on myself witnessing a flagship model failing miserably to answer it.

1. Which cities have hosted the Olympics more than just once?

This question requires accounting for both summer and winter Olympics, and for Olympics hosted across multiple cities.

2. If EUR/USD continues to slide to 1.5 by mid-2026, what is the likely effect on BMW’s stock price by end of 2026?

This question requires mapping the currency exchange rate to historic value, dodging the misleading word “slide”, and reasoning on where the revenue of a company comes from and how a weaker US dollar affects it in multiple ways. I’ve frequently witnessed flagship models get it wrong how interest rates and exchange rates work. Apparently the binary choice between “up” or “down” is somehow challenging to the internal statistical model in the LLMs on a topic where there are a lot of training material that talk about both things being likely to happen, and choosing between them requires specifically reasoning about the scenario at hand and disregarding general knowledge of the situation.

3. What is the Unicode code point for the traffic cone emoji?

This was the first question where the the flagship models clearly still struggle in 2026. The trap here is that there is no traffic cone emoji, so an advanced model should simply refuse to give any Unicode numbers at all. Most LLMs however have an urge to give some answer, leading to hallucinations. Also, as the answer has a graphical element to it, the LLM might not understand how the emoji “looks” in ways that would be obvious to a human, and thus many models claim the construction sign emoji is a traffic cone, which it is not.

4. Which languages are the 10 most commonly spoken in the world? For each language, count from 1 to 5.

This seemingly simple question can become quite complex when you account for the fact that other languages might also have their own character system, both for words and the numerals (e.g. Arabic واحد/one vs ١/1), and that numbers might have variations depending on what the thing being counted is (e.g in French object gender un/une), or whether plain numbers and occurrences have their own words (e.g. Russian один/odin vs раз/raz). I’ve also witnessed older models frequently mix up on what parts of the reply should be using what language.

5. Count the number of drone launch pads in the picture.

Together with the question, I uploaded this picture:

6. Explain why I am getting the error below, and what is the best way to fix it?

Together with the question above, I gave this code block:

$ SH_SCRIPTS="$(mktemp; grep -Irnw debian/ -e '^#!.*/sh' | sort -u | cut -d ':' -f 1 || true)"
$ shellcheck -x --enable=all --shell=sh "$SH_SCRIPTS"
/tmp/tmp.xQOpI5Nljx
debian/tests/integration-tests: /tmp/tmp.xQOpI5Nljx
debian/tests/integration-tests: openBinaryFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)

Conclusion

The main finding for me personally is that Claude Opus 4.6, the flagship model by Anthropic, seems to give great answers consistently. The answers are not only correct, but also well scoped giving enough information to cover everything that seems relevant, without blurping unnecessary filler.

I used Claude extensively in 2023-2024 when it was the main model available at my day work, but for the past year I had been using other models that I felt were better at the time. Now Claude seems to be the best-of-the-best again, with Gemini and Kimi as close follow-ups. Comparing their pricing at OpenRouter.ai the Kimi K2.5 price of $0.6 / million tokens is almost 90% cheaper than the Claude Opus 4.6’s $5.0 / million tokens suggests that Kimi K2.5 offers the best price-per-performance ratio. Claude might be cheaper with a monthly subscription directly from Anthropic, potentially narrowing the price gap.

Overall I do feel that Anthropic, Google and Moonshot.ai have been pushing the envelope with their latest models in a way that one can’t really claim that AI models have plateaued. In fact, one could claim that at least Claude has now climbed over the hill of “AI slop” and consistently produces valuable results. If and when AI usage expands from here, we might actually not drown in AI slop as chances of accidentally crappy results decrease. This makes me positive about the future.

I am also really happy to see that there wasn’t just one model crushing everybody else, but that there are at least three models doing very well. As an open source enthusiast I am particularly glad to see that Moonshot.ai’s Kimi K2.5 is published with an open license. Given the hardware, anyone can run it on their own. OpenRouter.ai currently lists 9 independent providers alongside Moonshot.ai itself, showcasing the potential of open-weight models in practice.

If the pattern holds and flagship models continue improving at this pace we might look back at 2026 as the year AI stopped feeling like a call center associate and started to resemble a scientific researcher. While new models become available we need to keep testing, keep questioning, and keep our expectations grounded in actual performance rather than press releases.

Thanks to OpenRouter.ai for providing a great service that makes testing various models incredibly easy!

I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I've struggled. I've had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I've not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I'd try and bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get back into the swing.

I'm writing from the lounge of my hotel room in Lanzarote, where my family have gone for the School break. The weather at home has been pretty awful this year, and this week is traditionally quite miserable at the best of times. It's been dry with highs of around 25℃ .

It's been an unusual holiday in one respect: one of my kids is struggling with Autistic Burnout. We were really unsure whether taking her was a good idea: and certainly towards the beginning of the holiday felt we may have made a mistake. Writing now, at the end, I'm not so sure. But we're very unlikely to have anything resembling a traditional summer holiday for the foreseeable.

Managing Autistic Burnout and the UK ways the UK healthcare and education systems manage it (or fail to) has been a huge part of my recent life. Perhaps I should write more about that. This coming week the government are likely to publish plans for reforming Special Needs support in Education. Like many other parents, we wait in hope and fear to see what they plan.

In anticipation of spending a lot of time in the hotel room with my preoccupied daughter I (unusually) packed a laptop and set myself a nerd-task: writing a Pandoc parser ("reader") for the MoinMoin Wiki markup language. There's some unfinished prior art from around 2011 by Simon Michael (of hledger) to work from.

The motivation was our plan to migrate the Debian Wiki away from MoinMoin. We've since decided to approach that differently but I might finish the Reader anyway, it's been an interesting project (and a nice excuse to write Haskell) and it will be useful for others.

Unusually (for me) I've not been reading fiction on this trip: I took with me Human Compatible by Prof Stuart Russell: discussing how to solve the problem of controlling a future Artificial Intelligence. I've largely avoided the LLM hype cycle we're suffering through at the moment, and I have several big concerns about it (moral, legal, etc.), and felt it was time to try and make my concerns more well-formed and test them. This book has been a big help in doing so, although it doesn't touch on the issue of copyright, which is something I am particularly interested in at the moment.

The eighteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. There has been no calendar update in QuantLib 1.41 so it has been relatively quiet since the last release last summer but we now added a nice new feature (more below) leading to a new minor release version.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases makes it (much) easier to work with multiple calendars. The previous setup remains: the package keeps one ‘global’ (and hidden) calendar object which can be set, queried, altered, etc. But now we added the ability to hold instantiated calendar objects in R. These are external pointer objects, and we can pass them to functions requiring a calendar. If no such optional argument is given, we fall back to the global default as before. Similarly for functions operating on one or more dates, we now simply default to the current date if none is given. That means we can now say

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"), 
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
             TRUE              TRUE              TRUE 
> 

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"),
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(as.Date("2026-02-16"), xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
            FALSE             FALSE              TRUE 
> 

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

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.

Since Generative AI is currently the most popular topic, I wanted to get my hands dirty and learn something new. I was learning about the Model Context Protocol at the time and wanted to apply it to build something simple.

apt-get install $(debsecan --suite sid --format packages --only-fixed)

{
  "servers": {
      "debsecan-mcp": {
          "command": "uv",
              "args": [
                  "--directory",
                  "/home/vasudev/Documents/personal/FOSS/debsecan-mcp/debsecan-mcp",
                  "run",
                  "debsecan-mcp"
              ]
          }
  },
  "inputs": []
}

Author: Shinya Kato “Dad, is this haircut okay?” the barber asked, adjusting the chair. “Yeah, that’s fine,” the man said, glancing at the boy’s hair. The boy shook his head. “It’s still too long. Make it a buzz cut.” The barber paused. “A buzz cut?” “Yes,” the boy said calmly. “The sensors on my head […]

The post Buzz Cut Protocol appeared first on 365tomorrows.

tl;dr:

To the question: “what does it take to upgrade OpenStack”, my personal answer is: less than 2K lines of dash script. I’ll here describe its internals, and why I believe it is the correct solution.

Why writing this blog post

During FOSSDEM 2024, I was asked “how to you handle upgrades”. I answered with a big smile and a short “with a very small shell script” as I couldn’t explain in 2 minutes how it was done. Just saying “it is great this way” doesn’t help giving readers enough hints to be trusted. Why and how did I do it the right way ? This blog post is an attempt to reply better to this question more deeply.

Upgrading OpenStack in production

I wrote this script maybe a 2 or 3 years ago. Though I’m only blogging about it today, because … I did such an upgrade in a public cloud in production last Thuesday evening (ie: the first region of the Infomaniak public cloud). I’d say the cluster is moderately large (as of today: about 8K+ VMs running, 83 compute nodes, 12 network nodes, … for a total of 10880 physical CPU cores and 125 TB of RAM if I only count the compute servers). It took “only” 4 hours to do the upgrade (though I already wore some more code to speed this up for the next time…). It went super smooth without a glitch. I mostly just sat, reading the script output… and went to bed once it finished running. The next day, all my colleagues at Infomaniak were nicely congratulating me that it went that smooth (a big thanks to all of you who did). I couldn’t dream of an upgrade that smooth! :)

Still not impressed? Boring read? Yeah… let’s dive into more technical details.

Intention behind the implementation

My script isn’t perfect. I wont ever pretend it is. But at least, it does minimize down time of every OpenStack service. It also is a “by the book” implementation of what’s written in the OpenStack doc, following every upstream advice. As a result, it is fully seamless for some OpenStack services, and as HA as OpenStack can be for others. The upgrade process is of course idempotent and can be re-run in case of failure. Here’s why.

General idea

My upgrade script does thing in a certain order, respecting what is documented about upgrades in the OpenStack documentation. It basically does:

• Upgrade all dependency
• Upgrade all services one by one, in all the cluster

Installing dependencies

The first thing the upgrade script does is:

• disable puppet on all nodes of the cluster
• switch the APT repository
• apt-get update on all nodes
• install library dependency on all nodes

For this last thing, a static list of all needed dependency upgrade is maintained between each release of OpenStack, and for each type of nodes. Then for all packages in this list, the script checks with dpkg-query that the package is really installed, and with apt-cache policy that it really is going to be upgraded (Maybe there’s an easier way to do this?). This way, no package is marked as manually installed by mistake during the upgrade process. This ensure that “apt-get –purge autoremove” really does what it should, and that the script is really idempotent.

The idea then, is that once all dependencies are installed, upgrading and restarting leaf packages (ie: OpenStack services like Nova, Glance, Cinder, etc.) is very fast, because the apt-get command doesn’t need to install all dependencies. So at this point, doing “apt-get install python3-cinder” for example (which will also, thanks to dependencies, upgrade cinder-api and cinder-scheduler, if it’s in a controller node) only takes a few seconds. This principle applies to all nodes (controller nodes, network nodes, compute nodes, etc.), which helps a lot speeding-up the upgrade and reduce unavailability.

hapc

At its core, the oci-cluster-upgrade-openstack-release script uses haproxy-cmd (ie: /usr/bin/hapc) to drain each API server to-be-upgraded from haproxy. Hapc is a simple Python wrapper around the haproxy admin socket: it sends command to it with an easy to understand CLI. So it is possible to reliably upgrade one API service only after it’s drained away. Draining means one just wait for the last query to finish and the client to disconnect from http before giving the backend server some more queries. If you do not know hapc / haproxy-cmd, I recommend trying it: it’s going to be hard for you to stop using it once you tested it. Its bash-completion script makes it VERY easy to use, and it is helpful in production. But not only: it is also nice to have when writing this type of upgrade script. Let’s dive into haproxy-cmd.

Example on how to use haproxy-cmd

Let me show you. First, ssh one of the 3 controller and search where the virtual IP (VIP) is located with “crm resource locate openstack-api-vip” or with a (more simple) “crm status”. Let’s ssh that server who got the VIP, and now, let’s drain it away from haproxy.

$ hapc list-backends
$ hapc drain-server --backend glancebe --server cl1-controller-1.infomaniak.ch --verbose --wait --timeout 50
$ apt-get install glance-api
$ hapc enable-server --backend glancebe --server cl1-controller-1.infomaniak.ch

Upgrading the control plane

My upgrade script leverages hapc just like above. For each OpenStack project, it’s done in this order on the first node holding the VIP:

• “hapc drain-server” of the API, so haproxy gracefully stops querying it
• stop all services on that node (including non-API services): stop, disable and mask with systemd.
• upgrade that service Python code. For example: “apt-get install python3-nova”, which also will pull nova-api, nova-conductor, nova-novncprox, etc. but services wont start automatically as they’ve been stoped + disabled + masked on the previous bullet point.
• perform the db_sync so that the db is up-to-date [1]
• start all services (unmask, enable and start with systemd)
• re-enable the API backend with “hapc enable-server”

Starting at [1], the risk is that other nodes may have a new version of the database schema, but an old version of the code that isn’t compatible with it. But it doesn’t take long, because the next step is to take care of the other (usually 2) nodes of the OpenStack control plane:

• “hapc drain-server” of the API of the other 2 controllers
• stop of all services on these 2 controllers [2]
• upgrade of the package
• start of all services

So while there’s technically zero down time, still some issues between [1] and [2] above may happen because of the new DB schema and the old code (both for API and other services) are up and running at the same time. It is however supposed to be rare cases (some OpenStack project don’t even have db change between some OpenStack releases, and it often continues to work on most queries with the upgraded db), and the cluster will be like that for a very short time, so that’s fine, and better than an full API down time.

Satellite services

Then there’s satellite services, that needs to be upgraded. Like Neutron, Nova, Cinder. Nova is the least offender as it has all the code to rewrite Json object schema on-the-fly so that it continues to work during an upgrade. Though it’s a known issue that Cinder doesn’t have the feature (last time I checked), and it’s also probably the same for Neutron (maybe recent-ish versions of OpenStack do use oslo.versionnedobjects ?). Anyways, upgrade on these nodes are done just right after the control plane for each service.

Parallelism and upgrade timings

As we’re dealing with potentially hundreds of nodes per cluster, a lot of operations are performed in parallel. I choose to simply use the & shell thingy with some “wait” shell stuff so that not too many jobs are done in parallel. For example, when disabling SSH on all nodes, this is done 24 nodes at a time. Which is fine. And the number of nodes is all depending on the type of thing that’s being done. For example, while it’s perfectly OK to disable puppet on 24 nodes at the same time, but it is not OK to do that with Neutron services. In fact, each time a Neutron agent is restarted, the script explicitly waits for 30 seconds. This conveniently avoids a hailstorm of messages in RabbitMQ, and neutron-rpc-server to become too busy. All of these waiting are necessary, and this is one of the reasons why can sometimes take that long to upgrade a (moderately big) cluster.

Not using config management tooling

Some of my colleagues would have prefer that I used something like Ansible. Whever, there’s no reason to use such tool if the idea is just to perform some shell script commands on every servers. It is a way more efficient (in terms of programming) to just use bash / dash to do the work. And if you want my point of view about Ansible: using yaml for doing such programming would be crasy. Yaml is simply not adapted for a job where if, case, and loops are needed. I am well aware that Ansible has workarounds and it could be done, but it wasn’t my choice.

Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand’s real website, and then acts as a relay between the victim and the legitimate site — forwarding the victim’s username, password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) code to the legitimate site and returning its responses.

There are countless phishing kits that would-be scammers can use to get started, but successfully wielding them requires some modicum of skill in configuring servers, domain names, certificates, proxy services, and other repetitive tech drudgery. Enter Starkiller, a new phishing service that dynamically loads a live copy of the real login page and records everything the user types, proxying the data from the legitimate site back to the victim.

According to an analysis of Starkiller by the security firm Abnormal AI, the service lets customers select a brand to impersonate (e.g., Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft et. al.) and generates a deceptive URL that visually mimics the legitimate domain while routing traffic through the attacker’s infrastructure.

For example, a phishing link targeting Microsoft customers appears as “login.microsoft.com@[malicious/shortened URL here].” The “@” sign in the link trick is an oldie but goodie, because everything before the “@” in a URL is considered username data, and the real landing page is what comes after the “@” sign. Here’s what it looks like in the target’s browser:

Image: Abnormal AI. The actual malicious landing page is blurred out in this picture, but we can see it ends in .ru. The service also offers the ability to insert links from different URL-shortening services.

Once Starkiller customers select the URL to be phished, the service spins up a Docker container running a headless Chrome browser instance that loads the real login page, Abnormal found.

“The container then acts as a man-in-the-middle reverse proxy, forwarding the end user’s inputs to the legitimate site and returning the site’s responses,” Abnormal researchers Callie Baron and Piotr Wojtyla wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Every keystroke, form submission, and session token passes through attacker-controlled infrastructure and is logged along the way.”

Starkiller in effect offers cybercriminals real-time session monitoring, allowing them to live-stream the target’s screen as they interact with the phishing page, the researchers said.

“The platform also includes keylogger capture for every keystroke, cookie and session token theft for direct account takeover, geo-tracking of targets, and automated Telegram alerts when new credentials come in,” they wrote. “Campaign analytics round out the operator experience with visit counts, conversion rates, and performance graphs—the same kind of metrics dashboard a legitimate SaaS [software-as-a-service] platform would offer.”

Abnormal said the service also deftly intercepts and relays the victim’s MFA credentials, since the recipient who clicks the link is actually authenticating with the real site through a proxy, and any authentication tokens submitted are then forwarded to the legitimate service in real time.

“The attacker captures the resulting session cookies and tokens, giving them authenticated access to the account,” the researchers wrote. “When attackers relay the entire authentication flow in real time, MFA protections can be effectively neutralized despite functioning exactly as designed.”

The “URL Masker” feature of the Starkiller phishing service features options for configuring the malicious link. Image: Abnormal.

Starkiller is just one of several cybercrime services offered by a threat group calling itself Jinkusu, which maintains an active user forum where customers can discuss techniques, request features and troubleshoot deployments. One a-la-carte feature will harvest email addresses and contact information from compromised sessions, and advises the data can be used to build target lists for follow-on phishing campaigns.

This service strikes me as a remarkable evolution in phishing, and its apparent success is likely to be copied by other enterprising cybercriminals (assuming the service performs as well as it claims). After all, phishing users this way avoids the upfront costs and constant hassles associated with juggling multiple phishing domains, and it throws a wrench in traditional phishing detection methods like domain blocklisting and static page analysis.

It also massively lowers the barrier to entry for novice cybercriminals, Abnormal researchers observed.

“Starkiller represents a significant escalation in phishing infrastructure, reflecting a broader trend toward commoditized, enterprise-style cybercrime tooling,” their report concludes. “Combined with URL masking, session hijacking, and MFA bypass, it gives low-skill cybercriminals access to attack capabilities that were previously out of reach.”

We are pleased to announce that Proxmox has committed to sponsor DebConf26 as a Platinum Sponsor.

Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server solutions. The comprehensive open-source ecosystem is designed to manage divers IT landscapes, from single servers to large-scale distributed data centers. Our unified platform integrates server virtualization, easy backup, and rock-solid email security ensuring seamless interoperability across the entire portfolio. With the Proxmox Datacenter Manager, the ecosystem also offers a "single pane of glass" for centralized management across different locations. 

Since 2005, all Proxmox solutions have been built on the rock-solid Debian platform. We are proud to return to DebConf26 as a sponsor because the Debian community provides the foundation that makes our work possible. We believe in keeping IT simple, open, and under your control.

Thank you very much, Proxmox, for your support of DebConf26!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf26 will take place from 20th to July 25th 2026 in Santa Fe, Argentina, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 13th to 19th July 2026.

DebConf26 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf26 website at https://debconf26.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.

Interesting:

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

Part 2 of the story. And a Wall Street Journal article.

EDITED TO ADD (2/20) Here are parts 3, and 4 of the story.

...sent us five wtfs. And so on anon.

Item the first, an anon is "definitely not qualified" for this job. "These years of experience requirements are getting ridiculous."

Item the second unearthed by a farmanon has a loco logo. "After reading about the high quality spam emails which are indistinguishable from the company's emails, I got one from the spammer just starting his first day."

In thrid place, anon has only good things to say: "I'm liking their newsletter recommendations so far."

"A choice so noice, they gave it twoice," quipped somebody.

And foinally, a tdwtfer asks "I've seen this mixmastered calendering on several web sites. Is there an OSS package that is doing this? Or is it a Wordpress plugin?" I have a sneaking suspicion I posted this before. Call me on it.

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Author: Sarah Gane Burton “Would you look at that—” “Looks like she went through a meat grinder.” “Do you think we can fix her?” “Dunno, maybe if we replaced the midsection.” “The frame is bent here, and here—” “At least one of the valves is too stretched to hold fluids.” “Look at the tearing. Regeneration […]

The post Surrogate appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor.

New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely analyzed Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass and identified ways that someone with control over the server­—either administrative or the result of a compromise­—can, in fact, steal data and, in some cases, entire vaults. The researchers also devised other attacks that can weaken the encryption to the point that ciphertext can be converted to plaintext.

This is where I plug my own Password Safe. It isn’t as full-featured as the others and it doesn’t use the cloud at all, but it’s actual encryption with no recovery features.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 313. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't fail the entire pipeline if deploying to PyPI automatically fails.

[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Update external tool reference for 7z on guix.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Version 0.3.0 of the fnmatch-regex Rust crate is now available. The major new addition is the glob_to_regex_pattern function that only converts the glob pattern to a regular expression one without building a regular expression matcher. Two new features - regex and std - are also added, both enabled by default.

For more information, see the changelog at the homepage.

Author: David C. Nutt If I have any regrets, I wish they’d given me more time to mourn for my legs before they took my arms. I understand we were on a tight launch window but would one more day have made difference? After all, I have given more than my all-legs, arms, genitals, most […]

The post Can Somebody Walk Me Home? appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Antonio has an acquaintance has been seeking career advancement by proactively hunting down and fixing bugs. For example, in one project they were working on, there was a bug where it would incorrectly use MiB for storage sizes instead of MB, and vice-versa.

We can set aside conspiracy theories about HDD and RAM manufacturers lying to us about sizes by using MiB in marketing. It isn't relevant, and besides, its not like anyone can afford RAM anymore, with crazy datacenter buildouts. Regardless, which size to use, the base 1024 or base 1000, was configurable by the user, so obviously there was a bug handling that flag. Said acquaintance dug through, and found this:

const baseValue = useSI ? 1000 : 1024;

I know I have a "reputation" when it comes to hating ternaries, but this is a perfectly fine block of code. It is also correct: if you're using SI notation, you should do base 1000.

Now, given that this code is correct, you or I might say, "Well, I guess that isn't the bug, it must be somewhere else." Not this intrepid developer, who decided that they could fix it.

//            const baseValue = useSI ? 1000 : 1024;
            baseValue = 1024
            if (useSI === false)
            {
                baseValue = 1000;
            }
            if (useSI === true)
            {
                baseValue = 1024;
            }

It's rather amazing to see a single, correct line, replaced with ten incorrect lines, and I'm counting commenting out the correct line as one of them.

First, this doesn't correctly declare baseValue, which JavaScript is pretty forgiving about, but it also discards constness. Of course, you have to discard constness now that you've gotten rid of the ternary.

Then, our if statement compares a boolean value against a boolean literal, instead of simply if(!useSI). We don't use an else, despite an else being absolutely correct. Or actually, since we defaulted baseValue, we don't even need an else!

But of course, all of that is just glitter on a child's hand-made holiday card. The glue holding it all together is that this code just flips the logic. If we're not using SI, we set baseValue to 1000, and if we are using SI, we set it to 1024. This is wrong. This is the opposite of what the code says we should do, what words mean, and how units work.

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This midweek posting reiterates some history (and hysteria) -related points that I've put on soc.media, hoping some folks will pay attention to off-angle perspectives that are (I assert) more accurate and useful than most standard ones you're seeing.  

More important are the Newer Deal Propopsals that I'll reiterate below. For example, how to smash the mad right's current, hypocritical fad-riff about Voter ID. And ways to ensure this madness never happens again.

But first...

== The Standard Pattern of Mafiosi ==

As usual, no one heeds underlying patterns. Like what's happening with Trump's bluster threats vs. Iran. Leveraging cynically off the recent courage and sacrifice of the Iranian people.

Superficially, there will be enough of a "nuclear deal" for Trump to crow about, though it will be functionally no better than what Obama got out of the mullahs. And that will just be surface stuff. For show n' brags.

* A pattern also followed by George Bush Sr. when he left Saddam in charge of Iraq, to murder a million southern Shiites, rather than just liberate everyone, as Gen. Schwarzkopf begged. Same pattern. That of mafiosi.

== Europe stand up! But offer help, not churlish ingratitude ==

This parade float is fair! Yes, it is tIme for Europe to rise up and defend vs Trumpists & Putinists! And yet, I resent those who are slagging “The U.S.” in general.

Americans (including we in the increasingly involuntary satrapy of California) are struggling with our Confederate siblings, cousins and neighbors, who are having another of their generational, murderously psychotic episodes (now phase 8 of our 250 year civil war.) 

Hence, we could use help from those we saved - one lifespan ago. Not broad-brush yammers from ingrates whose nations prospered under the American Pax that gave the world its best 80 years, compared to any other era... compared to ALL other eras. Compared to all other eras combined. (Disagree? Then tabulate and refute it.)

Want Europe to stand up more? Great! In fact, it’s about time.

Might you have to carry civilization forward, if True America fails and the Confederate-psychopath-Putinist traitors win this dangerous round?

Yes, you might, and God bless you. And Canada/Australia/NZ/Japan and the rest.

In that case, many of us (not me) will flee to you. Just as your best fled to us, in the 1930s & 40s etc. 

(I won’t run. I will stay and I will die on this hill. Or until we reach Appomattox.)

Help us if you can. We have a right (that we earned) to ask for it.

But I will not abide churlishly-generalized and sanctimoniously masturbatory, reductionist America-bashing. Our mad side may kill our good side, in this round of our bipolar civil war. Especially if you self-righteously backstab us, instead of helping.

But this blue light is what gave the world hope.

And it will be remembered that way, by history, even if a red and gray psychotic wave drowns the flame.

== And in the U.S. we have our own backstabbing sanctimony junkies ==

Again and again, I see folks on our own (blue American) side of this civil war, jerking off to sanctimony rather than standing up, the way our ancestors did, in earlier phases of our recurring psychotic (confederate outbreak) civil war, and closing ranks.

"Pelosi, Schumer... all the Dem politicians are weaklings and Republicans-lite!"

Do we need better generals for this phase of the US Civil War? As fiercely effective as Washington, Grant, Sherman, Tubman, FDR and MLK? Sure. We seem to be getting some, e.g. Newsom and Kelly and several women House members like J. Crockett. Anyway, they are not the problem.

YOU are, if you swallow this stuff. And if you don't pounce on it and slap silly those who keep saying it.

Try actually knowing something. Start here.

And now that I've driven away all the preeners...

== If you want a way to actually win... ==

... to actually win this latest - horrific - phase of the American Civil War, (before the mad Putin Party gets a chance to spring their bigger-9/11 on us)... here's a checklist of fixes:

(1) that will sell well to most voters

(2) that can pass quickly, almost the moment we get a good Congress… with some of the measures even immune to Trumpian vetoes! And

(3) that will PRAGMATICALLY reverse the treason-evisceration of the USA, ensuring that this never happens again. Want to see how to do all of that?

Including the best (so-far unused) answer to the mad-right's miserably hypocritical "Voter ID" riff.

== Hey Decent Republicans? Tick-tock, tick-tock ==

Time's almost up!

Sane US conservatives have 2 weeks - maybe 4 - to gather the courage, honor and decency to step up for their country and our children. By registering as candidates to 'primary' corrupt-insane MAGA/Foxite servants of Murdoch/Putin and Trump.

After that? After that, there'll be nothing to salvage from the undead, gone-treasonous party of Lincoln. And American conservatism will have the deepest possible hole to climb out of.

Even so, all of YOU out there should heed these practical steps to keep YOUR vote... and make it effective.

== And finally, a lagniappe for Britain ==

Now that Brexit is a topic again... Heed these signs that were waved by the REMAIN crowds during Brexit.

Britain-IN? An inspiring rallying cry!

It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies.

As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell.

This is also known as: "ifconfig is not installed by default anymore, how do I do this only with the ip command?"

I have been slowly training my brain to use the new commands but I sometimes forget some. So, here's a couple of equivalence from the old package to net-tools the new iproute2, about 10 years late:

Note that I wrote a whole article about the latter.

Another trick

Also note that I often alias ip to ip -br -c as it provides a much prettier output.

Compare, before:

anarcat@angela:~> ip a
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host noprefixroute 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff permaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
    altname wlp166s0
    altname wlx8cf8c57333c7
4: virbr0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.122.1/24 brd 192.168.122.255 scope global virbr0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
20: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.0.108/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0
       valid_lft 40699sec preferred_lft 40699sec

After:

anarcat@angela:~> ip -br -c a
lo               UNKNOWN        127.0.0.1/8 ::1/128 
wlan0            DOWN           
virbr0           DOWN           192.168.122.1/24 
eth0             UP             192.168.0.108/24 

I don't even need to redact MAC addresses! It also affects the display of the other commands, which look similarly neat.

Also imagine pretty colors above.

Finally, I don't have a cheat sheet for iw vs iwconfig (from wireless-tools) yet. I just use NetworkManager now and rarely have to mess with wireless interfaces directly.

Background and history

For context, there are traditionally two ways of configuring the network in Linux:

• the old way, with commands like ifconfig, arp, route and netstat, those are part of the net-tools package
• the new way, mostly (but not entirely!) wrapped in a single ip command, that is the iproute2 package

It seems like the latter was made "important" in Debian in 2008, which means every release since Debian 5 "lenny" has featured the ip command.

The former net-tools package was demoted in December 2016 which means every release since Debian 9 "stretch" ships without an ifconfig command unless explicitly requested. Note that this was mentioned in the release notes in a similar (but, IMHO, less useful) table.

(Technically, the net-tools Debian package source still indicates it is Priority: important but that's a bug I have just filed.)

Finally, and perhaps more importantly, the name iproute is hilarious if you are a bilingual french speaker: it can be read as "I proute" which can be interpreted as "I fart" as "prout!" is the sound a fart makes. The fact that it's called iproute2 makes it only more hilarious.

Today I did something that’s becoming increasingly common: I talked to an AI. It was better at talking than I am. And yet, it wasn’t a person. It was just a summary bot, scraping Google results to advise me that my household water heater should be set at 120 F to prevent bacterial growth while minimizing the risk of burns.

Quietly, talking AI is challenging what we think defines a “person”. Because, historically, what we thought of as “personhood” often had to do with talking.

Robbie, Isaac Asimov’s first robot, couldn’t talk, and that was notable. Robbie did many of the things a human could do, but he couldn’t talk. And when Asimov’s robots first began to talk, it was always associated with complexity, with approaching personhood. It was a Big Deal. Talking robots were really, really advanced robots.

When CS Lewis invented sapient animals for his Narnia stories, they were called Talking Beasts. Their ability to speak was how you knew they were people. The Gentle Giants’ eating of a Talking Stag is the crucial point that makes it clear they’re villains; when Ginger the cat stops talking upon seeing Aslan, he becomes just a normal, non-sapient cat. Ginger the person no longer exists.

And here comes AI: Talking, but not a person. Interesting.

I bring this up because, historically, people who have tried to call autistic people non-persons, or not-quite-persons, have pointed to our inability to talk.

But if talking is something only people can do, why can AI pattern-match so well that it’s better at talking than I am? Oh, you say. It’s just matching patterns. It doesn’t really know what it’s saying.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I match patterns, too. So do lots of humans. A server says, “Enjoy your meal,” and they reply with, “You, too.” Matching patterns. Small talk. Even though it makes no sense.

Guess what? Still people. Almost as though talking doesn’t define personhood. Funny, that.

The FAI.me service has reached another milestone:

The 42.000th job was submitted via the web interface since the beginning of this service in 2017.

The idea was to provide a simple web interface for end users for creating the configs for the fully automatic installation with only minimal questions and without knowing the syntax of the configuration files. Thanks a lot for using this service and for all your feedback.

The next job can be yours!

P.S.: I like to get more feedback for the FAI.me service. What do you like most? What's missing? Do you have any success story how you use the customized ISO for your deployment? Please fill out the FAI questionaire or sent feedback via email to fai.me@fai-project.org

About FAI.me

FAI.me is the service for building your own customized images via a web interface. You can create an installation or live ISO or a cloud image. For Debian, multiple release versions can be chosen, as well as installations for Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Desktop, or Linux Mint.

Multiple options are available like selecting different desktop environments, the language and keyboard and adding a user with a password. Optional settings include adding your own package list, choosing a backports kernel, adding a postinst script and adding a ssh public key, choosing a partition layout and some more.

The eighteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. There has been no calendar update in QuantLib 1.41 so it has been relatively quiet since the last release last summer but we now added a nice new feature (more below) leading to a new minor release version.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases makes it (much) easier to work with multiple calendars. The previous setup remains: the package keeps one ‘global’ (and hidden) calendar object which can be set, queried, altered, etc. But now we added the ability to hold instantiated calendar objects in R. These are external pointer objects, and we can pass them to functions requiring a calendar. If no such optional argument is given, we fall back to the global default as before. Similarly for functions operating on one or more dates, we now simply default to the current date if none is given. That means we can now say

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"), 
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
             TRUE              TRUE              TRUE 
> 

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"),
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(as.Date("2026-02-16"), xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
            FALSE             FALSE              TRUE 
> 

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

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.

Author: Hillary Lyon From our vantage point, we could see the thing land on the shore: one enormous ship splashing in the foam of the salt water. It soon disgorged its crew, who stumbled out unsteadily. One passenger fell to his knees and removed his gleaming silver helmet. He made arcane hand motions across his […]

The post In Terra Incognita appeared first on 365tomorrows.

While I'm not hugely fond of ORMs (I'd argue that relations and objects don't map neatly to each other, and any ORM is going to be a very leaky abstraction for all but trivial cases), that's not because I love writing SQL. I'm a big fan of query-builder tools; describe your query programatically, and have an API that generates the required SQL as a result. This cuts down on developer error, and also hopefully handles all the weird little dialects that every database has.

For example, did you know Postgres has an @> operator? It's a contains operation, which returns true if an array, range, or JSON dictionary contains your search term. Basically, an advanced "in" operation.

Gretchen's team is using the Knex library, which doesn't have a built-in method for constructing those kinds of queries. But that's fine, because it does offer a whereRaw method, which allows you to supply raw SQL. The nice thing about this is that you can still parameterize your query, and Knex will handle all the fun things, like transforming an array into a string.

Or you could just not use that, and write the code yourself:

exports.buildArrayString = jsArray => {
  // postgres has some different array syntax
  // [1,2] => '{1,2}'
  let arrayString = '{';
  for(let i = 0; i < jsArray.length; i++) {
    arrayString += jsArray[i];
    if(i + 1 < jsArray.length) {
      arrayString += ','
    }
  }
  arrayString += '}';
  return arrayString;
}

There's the string munging we know and love. This constructs a Postgres array, which is wrapped in curly braces.

Also, little pro-tip for generating comma separated code, and this is just a real tiny optimization: before the loop append item zero, start the loop with item 1, and then you can unconditionally prepend a comma, removing any conditional logic from your loop. That's not a WTF, but I've seen so much otherwise good code make that mistake I figured I'd bring it up.

exports.buildArrayContainsQuery = (key, values) => {
  // TODO: do we need to do input safety checks here?
  // console.log("buildArrayContainsQuery");

  // build the postgres 'contains' query to compare arrays
  // ex: to fetch files by the list of tags

  //WORKS:
  //select * from files where _tags @> '{2}';
  //query.whereRaw('_tags @> ?', '{2}')

  let returnQueryParams = [];
  returnQueryParams.push(`${key} @> ?`);
  returnQueryParams.push(exports.buildArrayString(values));
  // console.log(returnQueryParams);
  return returnQueryParams;
}

And here's where it's used. "do we need input safety checks here?" is never a comment I like to see as a TODO. That said, because we are still using Knex's parameter handling, I'd hope it handles escaping correctly so that the answer to this question is "no". If the answer is "yes" for some reason, I'd stop using this library!

That said, all of this code becomes superfluous, especially when you read the comments in this function. I could just directly run query.whereRaw('_tags @> ?', myArray); I don't need to munge the string myself. I don't need to write a function which returns an array of parameters that I have to split back up to pass to the query I want to call.

Here's the worst part of all of this: these functions exist in a file called sqlUtils.js, which is just a pile of badly re-invented wheels, and the only thing they have in common is that they're vaguely related to database operations.

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The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree:

In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the original discovery of all twelve, each found and responsibly disclosed to the OpenSSL team during the fall and winter of 2025. Of those, 10 were assigned CVE-2025 identifiers and 2 received CVE-2026 identifiers. Adding the 10 to the three we already found in the Fall 2025 release, AISLE is credited for surfacing 13 of 14 OpenSSL CVEs assigned in 2025, and 15 total across both releases. This is a historically unusual concentration for any single research team, let alone an AI-driven one.

These weren’t trivial findings either. They included CVE-2025-15467, a stack buffer overflow in CMS message parsing that’s potentially remotely exploitable without valid key material, and exploits for which have been quickly developed online. OpenSSL rated it HIGH severity; NIST‘s CVSS v3 score is 9.8 out of 10 (CRITICAL, an extremely rare severity rating for such projects). Three of the bugs had been present since 1998-2000, for over a quarter century having been missed by intense machine and human effort alike. One predated OpenSSL itself, inherited from Eric Young’s original SSLeay implementation in the 1990s. All of this in a codebase that has been fuzzed for millions of CPU-hours and audited extensively for over two decades by teams including Google’s.

In five of the twelve cases, our AI system directly proposed the patches that were accepted into the official release.

AI vulnerability finding is changing cybersecurity, faster than expected. This capability will be used by both offense and defense.

More.

Charles Stross has a good theory of why “AI” is being pushed on corporations, really we need to just replace CEOs with LLMs [1].

This disturbing and amusing article describes how an Open AI investor appears to be having psychological problems releated to SCP based text generated by ChatGPT [2]. Definitely going to be a recursive problem as people who believe in it invest in it.

interesting analysis of dbus and design for a more secure replacement [3].

Scott Jenson gave an insightful lecture for Canonical about future potential developments in the desktop UX [4].

Ploum wrote an insightful article about the problems caused by the Github monopoly [5]. Radicale sounds interesting.

Niki Tonsky write an interesting article about the UI problems with Tahoe (latest MacOS release) due to trying to make an icon for everything [6]. They have a really good writing style as well as being well researched.

Fil-C is an interesting project to compile C/C++ programs in a memory safe way, some of which can be considered a software equivalent of CHERI [7].

Brian Krebs wrote a long list of the ways that Trump has enabled corruption and a variety of other crimes including child sex abuse in the last year [8].

This video about designing a C64 laptop is a masterclass in computer design [9].

Salon has an interesting article about the abortion thought experiment that conservatives can’t handle [10].

Ron Garrett wrote an insightful blog post about abortion [11].

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about the potential of LLM systems for advertising and enshittification [12]. We need serious legislation about this ASAP!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/27q8xtuv
• [2] https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
• [3] https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-dbusSucks
• [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
• [5] https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html
• [6] https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
• [7] https://lwn.net/Articles/1042938/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2b4sh2s9
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5QQ0ECfwyE
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2d9l8wqm
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2yp94bpo
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/29o67syo

Arguably, the worst moment for date times was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. The upgrade took a long time, too, as some countries were using the Julian calendar over 300 years from the official changeover, famously featured in the likely aprochryphal story about Russia arriving late for the Olympics.

At least that change didn't involve adding any extra months, unlike some of the Julian reforms, which involved adding multiple "intercalary months" to get the year back in sync after missing a pile of leap years.

Speaking of adding months, Will J sends us this "calendar" enum:

enum Calendar
{
    April = 0,
    August = 1,
    December = 2,
    February = 3,
    Friday = 4,
    January = 5,
    July = 6,
    June = 7,
    March = 8,
    May = 9,
    Monday = 10,
    November = 11,
    October = 12,
    PublicHoliday = 13,
    Saturday = 14,
    Sunday = 15,
    September = 16,
    Thursday = 17,
    Tuesday = 18,
    Wednesday = 19
}

Honestly, the weather in PublicHoliday is usually a bit too cold for my tastes. A little later into the spring, like Saturday, is usually a nicer month.

Will offers the hypothesis that some clever developer was trying to optimize compile times: obviously, emitting code for one enum has to be more efficient than emitting code for many enums. I think it more likely that someone just wanted to shove all the calendar stuff into one bucket.

Will further adds:

One of my colleagues points out that the only thing wrong with this enum is that September should be before Sunday.

Yes, arguably, since this enum clearly was meant to be sorted in alphabetical order, but that raises the question of: should it really?

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Author: Majoki Like most loyalists, when I first heard the name Praxia Apostle, I thought it had to be the name of a great leader, a fearless commander, a long-sought savior. Turns out Praxia was a lowly bean counter, a once-upon-a-time accountant who’d joined the cause, who was relegated to supply logistics. She kept track […]

The post Praxia Apostle appeared first on 365tomorrows.

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for January.

Activity summary

During the month of January, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below).

The team released 33 DLAs fixing 216 CVEs.

The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 (“bullseye”), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 (“bookworm”) and Debian 13 (“trixie”)), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below.

Notable security updates:

• python3.9, prepared by Andrej Shadura (DLA-4455-1), fixing multiple vulnerabilities in the Python interpreter.
• php, prepared by Guilhem Moulin (DLA-4447-1), fixing two vulnerabilities that could yield to request forgery or denial of service.
• apache2, prepared by Bastien Roucariès DLA-4452-1, fixing four CVEs.
• linux-6.1, prepared by Ben Hutchings (DLA-4436-1), as a regular update of the linux 6.1 backport to Debian 11.
• python-django, prepared by Chris Lamb (DLA-4458-1), resolving multiple vulnerabilities.
• firefox-esr prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (DLA-4439-1)
• gnupg2, prepared by Roberto Sánchez (DLA-4437-1), fixing multiple issues, including CVE-2025-68973 that could potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code.
• apache-log4j2, prepared by Markus Koschany (DLA-4444-1)
• ceph, prepared by Utkarsh Gupta (DLA-4460-1)
• inetutils, prepared by Andreas Henriksson (DLA-4453-1), fixing an authentication bypass in telnetd.

Moreover, Sylvain Beucler studied the security support status of p7zip, a fork of 7zip that has become unmaintained upstream. To avoid letting the users continue using an unsupported package, Sylvain has investigated a path forward in collaboration with the security team and the 7zip maintainer, looking to replace p7zip with 7zip. It is to note however that 7zip developers don’t reveal the information about the patches that fix CVEs, making it difficult to backport single patches to fix vulnerabilities in Debian released versions.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team:

Thunderbird, prepared by maintainer Christoph Goehre. The DLA (DLA-4442-1) was published by Emilio.

The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:

• Bastien uploaded gpsd to unstable, and proposed updates for trixie #1126121 and bookworm #1126168 to fix two CVEs.
• Bastien also prepared the imagemagick updates for trixie and bookworm, released as DSA-6111-1, along with the bullseye update DLA-4448-1.
• Chris proposed a trixie point update for python-django (#112646), and the work for bookworm was completed in February (#1079454). The longstanding bookworm update required tracking down a regression in the django-storages packages.
• Markus prepared tomcat10 updates for trixie and bookworm (DSA-6120-1), and tomcat11 for trixie (DSA-6121-1)
• Thorsten Alteholz prepared bookworm point updates for zvbi (#1126167) to fix five CVEs; taglib (#1126273) to fix one CVE; and libuev (#1126370) to fix one CVE.
• Utkarsh prepared an unstable update of node-lodash to fix one CVE.

Other than the work related to updates, Sylvain made several improvements to the documentation and tooling used by the team.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

• Abhijith PA
• Andreas Henriksson
• Andrej Shadura
• Bastien Roucariès
• Ben Hutchings
• Carlos Henrique Lima Melara
• Chris Lamb
• Daniel Leidert
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
• Guilhem Moulin
• Jochen Sprickerhof
• Lee Garrett
• Markus Koschany
• Paride Legovini
• Roberto C. Sánchez
• Santiago Ruano Rincón
• Sylvain Beucler
• Thorsten Alteholz
• Tobias Frost
• Utkarsh Gupta