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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2026

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:56:04 +0000

Debian LTS/ELTS

This was my hundred-forty-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

[DLA 4615-1] exim4 security update to fix one CVE related to information disclosure in combination with proxies.
[DLA 4616-1] haveged security update to fix one CVE related to local root privilege escalation.
[DLA 4618-1] gsasl security update to fix one CVE related to denial of service.
[DLA 4631-1] asterisk security update to fix 13 CVEs related to buffer under- or overflows, either on heap or on stack. Some are related to use-after-free or wrong processing of invalid or untrusted certificates.
[ELA-1747-1] gimp security update to fix three CVEs in Buster related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code if malformed PSP, JPEG 2000 or PSD files are opened.
[ELA-1748-1] gimp security update to fix two CVEs in Stretch related to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code if malformed PSP or PSD files are opened.
[ELA-1749-1] exim4 security update to fix one CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to information disclosure in combination with proxies.
[ELA-1750-1] gsasl security update to fix one CVEs in Buster and Stretch related to denial of service.

Besides fixing all CVEs of asterisk in Bullseye, I started to look at asterisk in other releases as well. Rather surprisingly asterisk is only part of Unstable and Bullseye. All other releases don’t include any version of asterisk at all. So first things first, besides some security related RC bugs, asterisk did not migrate due to RC-bugs in dahdi-linux. As I maintain osmocom-dahdi-linux (which supports less/other hardware), I looked at the open issues and after some rounds I could upload a new upstream version, fixed some bugs and resolved issues with piuparts. dahdi-linux meanwhile migrated to testing, job done!
As a next step I looked at the open CVEs. Some of them had been already fixed in previous uploads but had not been marked accordingly. So I fixed all remaining ones and sent a debdiff to the maintainer. Unfortunately there was some kind of overlap in our work and he ignored my debdiff but uploaded a new upstream version. Anyway, job done as well, no open security issues anymore. The only thing that hinders asterisk from migrating to testing is the reproducible build. So if anybody has some spare time …

Other things I worked on were the regression update of rsync. Some of the elven new patches need to be backported, but I am confidentially to finish this month. I already reviewed the rsync– uploads of Sylvain to Buster and Stretch, so I don’t expect any big hurdles here. I am also making progress to find the correct patches for hplip and cups.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded a new upstream versions:

… hplip to unstable to fix some bugs.

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Lomiri

This month new upstream versions of dozens of lomiri packages have been released and I uploaded lots of them to Debian. After they migrate to testing, I am also going to sync them to the Ubuntu PPA.

This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… indi-pentax to unstable. This is a package in contrib without autobuild and needed a new upload for the libraw transistion.
… c-munipack to unstable.
… supernovas to unstable (sponsored upload).

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… duktape to unstable.
… libcoap3 to unstable.

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… smstools to unstable.

misc

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… visam to unstable. There had been an RC bug due to two binaries with the same name but different functionality. Yes, it is in the policy but … (my mother forbade me to elaborate more on this)
… mailio to unstable.

Aigars Mahinovs: How to make a good group photo

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:30:00 +0000

Taking a good group photo consists of multiple aspects:

hardware
scouting
organization
preparation
execution
processing
publishing

I can say with confidence that nearly everything here comes from having failed to do these things right at least once, even on the latest attempts, so this is an ideal to reach towards, not something we expect to hit every time.

The Goal

The main goal of a big event group photo is capture both the moment itself and each individual person inside that moment.

We want people, who were not there to see all the people involved and get an impression of what it was like being there. It needs to show the breadth and depth of people that make up this group, this project.

And we want people who were there to be able to look back the next week, the next year or in ten years and remember - ah, yes, I was there, I was standing right there with this grin on my face next to this wonderful person and I was feeling great.

Hardware

Based on the goal we want to have high level photographic gear that is able to capture both a broad enough picture to encompass all the people and some of their surroundings to communicate the context (without undue distortions) and to deliver enough detail and resolution so that faces and facial expressions and underlying feelings of every single person in that group could be clearly seen and preserved.

To both capture the context and minimise distortion the final picture should be just a bit wider than normal human field of view. That is about 50mm for a full-frame camera or 35mm for a typical 1.6 crop camera. You can go a bit wider if there are no better alternatives (as detailed in the scouting section), but be prepared that corners of the image will be distorted and not really usable (but we can fix that in processing step). Or you can go to unusual aspect ratios, like we did in Debconf 10.

In the absence of a 100MP+ camera, you will need to be stitching together multiple frames to achieve resolution high enough to have enough pixels-per-face to see emotions clearly. This means that the photos you will actually be taking will be tighter than the overall field of view mentioned above. Still, a higher resolution camera body is preferable - nowadays 24MP-32MP cameras APS-C provide a good compromise between resolution and price, but 45-67MP full-frame cameras also exist on the market. Assume that we will be shooting in a bright environment, so most likely with quite low ISO settings, that means that high-ISO noise characteristics of more expensive cameras will not really play a role here. You will also not need very fast burst modes, even manual speed of one frame per second is sufficient.

You will also want to get as much detail as possible out of your lens, and this is the most important part. You can do amazing work in all other steps of the process and have a great camera too, but if you pair it with a lens that is not sharp, then the end result will be disappointing.

You want the lens that is sharpest corner-to-corner when stepped down to about f/8-f/11, that you can get for your system. You also want that lens to be about 85mm full-size sensor or 50mm for 1.6 crop size. Luckily that kind of range is also a great range for optical design and sharpest lenses are typically available in exactly these kinds of sizes. You absolutely want to have a fixed focal length lens, not a zoom lens. Even profession grade zoom lenses often deliver worse image quality compared to fixed lenses that cost less 1/10th of their price (when shooting in the same focal length). Newer design lenses are better than older lenses - optical design, coatings and precision manufacturing have advanced a lot over the decades. Retro look is great for mood, but not as good for actual resolution and clarity. You don't need to overpay for most expensive lenses because those often only improve image quality on lower F-stops. To encompass the whole group we will need to shoot at f/8 and in bright light, so the extra benefits of those f/1.2-capable super expensive lenses will not come into play here.

We will have no use for a flash here. A tripod will be too restrictive when rapidly repositioning the camera between different parts of the panorama shoot. But a monopod might help with stability - I have not tried that myself, however.

For my last photos I used a Canon EOS R7 (32.5MP) with Canon RF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens and considering an upgrade to Sigma 56mm f/1.4 DC DN for the next time.

Scouting

Scouting a good location for the group photo is another big chunk of a successful picture. The critical piece of the puzzle is lens-to-face distance. In order to keep everyone's face in-focus and have enough resolution on the farthest faces (without making nearest faces truly massive) we want to do everything possible to reduce the variance in lens-to-face distance - to reduce the difference in distance between closest and farthest face.

The most effective way to do that is to have the photographer climb higher. To see this in action on the Debconf photos, compare Debconf6 (very high camera position, group on level ground - good) to Debconf10 (camera not too high, group on stairs, still good) and to Debconf17 (camera could not get high enough and the group is on flat ground - not great). Even the Debconf25 photo was suboptimal from this perspective. The Debconf23 photo was a very good example from the recent years - good height and also the group was positioned in a semi-circle so there were no people directly in front and very near to the camera.

So you are looking for the highest point you could get to (even if that requires a special permission of key or a ladder) with a field large enough to fit the whole group comfortably. How to check that? Normally I simply take a photo from the top of the whole area and note down from there where the extreme corners of the group could be and still be fully seen in the shot - not blocked by trees, buildings and shadows. Then I go down and measure that space. Rule of thumb being - people in one horizontal line can stand 1 normal length step from each other and two horizontal lines can be half a step from each other vertically. So I can just measure a rough rectangle in steps, multiply the sides, multiply that by two and I have the rough number of people that can fit there for the photo.

Once you have a candidate location or two, it is important to check them at the same time-of-day as you plan to do the photo (see organization section for that). You want to make sure that the whole area of the group is in the same illumination - if half of the group is in the sun and half in a shadow, then you will be having a very bad time later. The absolute ideal positioning for the group photo is to have everyone be in shadow, but still have enough bright skies and bright buildings in front of the people to give good illumination of the faces. Worst you can do is have the sun be behind the people (so all the faces are really dark) and second worst is have the sun be directly in front of the group, so that the faces are very well illuminated, but everyone's eyes are closed because they are being blinded by the sun. And sometimes all you can do is pray for some light clouds to provide for even and dispersed light. Debconf23 was very lucky that way.

Another consideration is to how people are going to get to that place. You need to consider accessibility needs of people (it is ok, if it takes more effort or time, but it needs to be organized and communicated well in advance). And you need to consider how the big masses of people will be getting there - how to tell people where exactly it is and how to get there from various locations where people might be hanging out during the event?

Having an alternate location indoors might be necessary if the weather report for the next days is not sufficiently predictable. We had to use that contingency in Debconf9, for example.

Organization

It's hard to take a good group photo if half of the group does not show up or is too late, so this needs some organization to happen smoothly.

First of all you need to choose date and time for the photo. The photo does not take too much time from the schedule of the event and can be squeezed in after all the other events are already scheduled. In fact I prefer that as it allows you the flexibility of choosing the date based on weather conditions and time based on light and shadow conditions in potential photo spots. You don't want to choose the daytrip day as most people will be away and return times are not really predictable. You do not want to choose the morning after Cheese and Wine party for obvious reasons. First day and last two days are also sub-optimal as some people arrive late and some leave early for various personal reasons. Also you don't want it to happen just before Cheese and Wine either because then you'd have very little time and clarity to do the processing of the image on the same day.

For timing, the best way, in my experience, is to schedule the photo directly after the end of talk sessions before a meal break - lunch or dinner. Typically in the Debconf schedule there are 2-3 daily breaks planned, say for Debconf25 there was lunch, afternoon break and dinner. Talks are planned to end ~10 minutes before those breaks (and meals) begin, so for example, afternoon break starts at 16:00 and all talks in the previous block end at 15:50. In such a case just schedule the "Group photo" event from 15:50 to 16:05. This gives people the info to go there directly from the end of all talks and that they will have sufficient time for break/meal afterwards. Do not forget to specify the location (as exactly as possible) in that event entry and make sure to post it at least two days in advance. People often want to wear something specific for the photo and thus need to know about it in advance. This also makes sure that people do not make alternate food plans for that specific break and don't leave the venue.

Announce the date, time and the exact location as wide as possible, don't be shy. Announce and discuss mailing lists, IRC, Signal, Telegram, make sure the front desk knows in case anyone asks in-person, ... Check that it is again included in the announcements email on the day preceding the photo date.

When the date has arrived, it is a good idea to check in early with people with special mobility needs to make sure they know where to go, how to get there and how much time they will need to be able to get there on time.

As the final round of talks before the group photo is starting up, it is time to recruit "runners". I've had great success with this technique. The idea is pretty simple - for each room where people congregate (talk rooms, hacklabs, cafeteria, outside hackspace, front-desk, ...) go there and choose one person. You want to choose a person that you will recognise and remember among everyone else in the group, either because of who they are or what they are wearing, whatever works best for you. If they agree to help, instruct them to: "at end of talk, announce that the group photo happening now and the location, herd people towards the photo location, be the last person out, make sure there are no stragglers from this area behind you, when you arrive to the photo place I will assume that everyone else from this room is also now there, when you are there catch my attention and show this sign so I know for sure that it is all good and make sure that I did see it from you". With that sorted out all you will need to remember is how many runners you recruited and how many have reported in to figure out if everyone has now arrived or if we still have to wait for someone or some group.

Then you will only have one last point of organization left - shaping the crowd into a group. People will not know what your vision for the group photo is, so you will have to give clear and LOUD instructions on where people should not be standing. Use clear, large gestures to support your words. You want to compact the group, have the people that just joined in the last moment and are standing to the side come deeper in and join the crowd. Have any holes in the middle of the crowd filled in. Forming a semi-circle instead of a blob helps with averaging face-to-lens distances. Make sure people are not in unexpected shadows. Make sure carried objects, like umbrellas of flags do not cover the faces of other people. Take the time to look at everyone face to make sure there are no people hiding behind someone's shoulder - typically they are not aware that their face is in fact not really visible. If there are such people, call them out and point directly at them and encourage them to step forward, if they wish to do so. You are the only one seeing the final picture now and only you can correct it before capturing the moment. So a few extra seconds here are worth taking, even if 300+ people are standing in scorching heat and waiting on you.

When you are happy with what you are seeing, make sure to tell people clearly that you are now about to take the pictures and again remind them not to move and explicitly not to turn their heads to the side until you are done (this is the source of most of the extra work in processing). Be very loud and clear and make sure you have everyone's undivided attention before you start saying the important stuff.

When done - say so. There will be other groups that will want to also have a photo taken after the main group is a bit more dispersed, so don't run away. Typically at least the T-shirt group will want a picture and also all the organizers.

Final bit of organization during the group photo shooting itself is the sneaky self-insert. You may choose not to bother with it, or do it in the simplest way, like I did in Debconf6, but if you really want to blend in with the crowd, you need to have someone else take a photo of you in the exact same location at the same date and time from the same location. So you should already during shaping the crowd decide where you would fit in, it is easiest to blend in at the back of the crowd and to one or other side, so that it appears like you are just standing behind the shoulders of a couple peoples. Remember that spot - it is easiest if you stand in the exact same ground spot when your photo is taken. Just go down, recruit a volunteer to take your photo, make sure the settings are fixed to the same ones as for the group photo shots and have them take a handful of shots of you - one of you centered in the camera frame and a couple more with you more towards the corners of the frame. This distortion from being off-center in the frame may be important later.

Preparation

In addition to preparing the crowd for the photo, you also need to prepare yourself and the equipment. Make sure you have dusted your camera sensor and cleaned both inside and outside glass of your lens. It is usually a good idea to remove any filters from the lens. Install the hood, if that could help with blocking the sun flares. Make sure you have the right lens and that you have installed the right lens.

For fixed settings I typically shoot in JPEG with RAW being there more like an emergency backup. The extra dynamic range of RAW could be used, but it is really complex to do that in combination with image blending and it is hard to get right, so I prefer an all-JPEG workflow and fix the dynamic range in the scene itself, before shooting. For Canon I am using the Standard profile that boosts the color saturation and sharpness a bit as I just enjoy that look and find it hard to get anything significantly better from RAW data even with a lot of effort. In any case make sure you have enough space on the cards to take at least 100 images and that you have a full battery. Do not use high speed burst setting because it is then too easy to take too many pictures at the start of the sequence and be stuck with your camera still in "Busy" state writing big RAW files to slowish SD cards and not allowing you to finish the full picture rapidly.

You want to have the shutter speed at at least 1/100th of a second to prevent blur from both your hand movements and also from people in the shot moving around a bit (image stabilisation will not help you there). And you want to have the aperture to be around f/8 - lower apertures risk people in front or behind falling out of focus, make the lenses look less sharp. Higher apertures also start to become less sharp due to diffraction effects above f/8. ISO should stay as low as possible, ideally at ISO 100, but if there is not enough light then upping the ISO to 400 would be the first step that I would try to do and second would be decreasing the aperture to f/5.6. If there is too much light, then increasing the shutter speed should be the safe thing to do.

As people start to arrive into the shooting location - check the exposure and nail down the settings, ideally in manual mode. Consider that left side could be a bit lighter or darker than right side. Err on the side of making the picture a bit too dark as there is more depth to darkness before cut-off compared to clipping on the high end. However, do not trust the exposure detection, instead take a picture and look specifically at skin tones in faces of people that already are standing in the photo area. Faces are the key bit and the exposure needs to be adjusted just to the faces and ignore darker of lighter clothing. Do some test shots and find settings where faces look not too bright, but also not very dark and fix those settings in manual mode.

Now you are ready for the action. Shape the crowd, check the faces and the action can start!

Execution

During taking of the group photo you want to finish it fast, but at the same time you have to take the time to make it right. If you hurry too much under pressure, you risk being left with unusably blurry images and the whole effort wasted. Having already prepared and verified the manual settings makes it easier.

When you are taking pictures, you have to remain as still as possible - even at very high shutter speeds even slow hand movements are still bad for image quality. So think of the movement as of biathlon athlete shooting the very middle of five, very separate targets - take a burst, reframe, then steady up for a second and only then take the next burst. 3 frames per burst are sufficient. 90% of the time the very first photo of a burst will be best. As you move from frame to frame, aim for just a bit more than half-frame overlap. This will give the opportunity to skip frames if all is good, but also have backup coverage of every face in case of problems. Proceed systematically, I typically start off on the top left of the crowd, then go right until the end of the line, then shift down half a frame and go left until the end and repeat until I am done with the crowd.

After that it is very helpful to also immediately take photos of a "frame" around the whole crowd. Stitching process often distorts the frames in weird ways that leave holes in the resulting image that you can fill if you have a wide frame around the crowd. It is possible to compensate with creative cutouts in the final image (like Debconf9), but the more framing room you make, the more flexible you will be able to be with cropping of the final photo. The frame also gives you the opportunity to capture more of the context of the place and space.

As an example, Debconf25 group photo in the end consisted from 9 images + 1 for sick people + 1 for me. I ended up missing the framing shots for bottom left, top left and top right corners. To get there I took 68 images. And in some years it was more than a hundred.

Processing

This part might be less stressful than taking the pictures from intensity perspective, but it lasts longer. Depending on you luck, skill and perfectionism it can take anywhere from 3 to 9 hours of work to complete.

Before you start, however, you should first request things that you will need for other people. This can even be done before taking the actual group photo, but usually I forget. To finish the photo you will need three things:

good quality vector graphics of the current Debconf logo
good quality vector graphics of the next years Debconf logo (even if preliminary)
motto of the conference

The first two you should be able to get from the respective organizers. The motto is harder. I typically try to ask the current DPL to come up with something describing the current mood of the project or of the event, but it is rare that it is that easy. Most of the time I came up with something as I was editing the photo and reflecting on what was the mood, the feeling, the mojo of this conference and of this year was like. Bend that around a recognisable phrase or expression, make it a bit more insider-relevant and you are on the right path. Some years this was the hardest part.

For the panorama stitching I will describe the workflow that has served me good for years, but maybe there are better ways possible nowadays. Feel free to let me know!

First I would save all photos taken and select one sharpest photo from every burst. Next I would select the minimal number of photos that appear to be covering the entire crowd. The fewer images you use, the better in the end because the most quality problems crop up in the areas where photos are getting stitched together. Fewer seams leads to fewer issues.

Open Hugin (you will also need enblend and enfuse installed) and import your minimal set of images into it. Click the "Align" button and wait a while - the processor will be trying to figure out keypoints in each image and then try to match these points between the images to try to fit them all together into a single projection. To do that it will distort the images. This is the trial and error process part. You may need to add, remove or replace images to get the stitching to work or to work better. You may want to add more of the frame images to fill the ragged holes around the image.

After initial alignment, go to "Move/Drag" tab and move the image a bit up in the projected field of view and make it a bit more central visually. That will help a bit with the distortions in the near-by people and people in the corners of the image. In the "Crop" tab set the initial crop - leave it generous, you can always crop more in later steps. Do not be afraid of leaving in sizable chunks of black homes, empty skies or grass. All of that can be filled in later as well.

Go back to the "Assistant" tab and click "Create panorama". It is good enough to have JPEG output at 100% quality using exposure corrected low dynamic range output option. Make sure to check the "Keep intermediate images" option. This will not only generate the final, merged panorama, but also keep around the individual images after perspective correction and exposure blending steps. These are critical for fixing blending error in the next step.

You might need to go back a forth a few times with a different sets of source images, maybe adding some image between other two, maybe removing another to reach a better starting point. The key part to pay attention - how many ugly stitches are there in the image. Check every face, the blending algorithms do not recognise faces and sometimes try to stitch one face from two or more images creating very weird effects. They can be fixed in the next step, but it is rather hard manual work, so the fewer such faces are in the blended image, the less work you will have. In some years I've managed to find a combination where all faces were good and in other years I had to manually fix 13-15 faces.

Do not try to blend the extra pictures (like with you or with sick people) into the main panorama with Hugin - it will get very confused with the parts of the grass that it is able to see where other people were standing.

The next is the final processing in GIMP. Think of it like a large and complex project - do as much as possible in separate layers, save often.

Fixing wrongly stitched faces and also putting yourself into the photo are very similar activities in the end. Just the scale and the source differ. For yourself you just cut out yourself (upper torso is enough) from the separate photo. For corrupted face, choose one of two intermediate images that the Hugin created where the face is transformed, but not yet merged (with a different version of itself). In either case crop the photo to roughly the interesting size and put roughly in the right spot as a separate layer on top of the group photo background. Reduce the opacity of the small layer to 30-40% and zoom in to 400%. With that it is much simpler to position the layer with pixel precision. Then all you need to do is add a layer mask to this layer and paint it just right. Basically in layer mask black means transparent and white means non-transparent. So you need to just make everything that is you have white mask and everything that is not you have black mask. And smudge the border a bit with finger tool or blur to make the transition smoother. Easy to say. Hard to do. This is what takes most of the actual work hours in post-processing.

You might miss someone. I am sure Phill is just thrilled to see me in the very middle of the Debconf25 final picture .... But do try to fix them all.

Use large, sweeping geometric figures to cover up black holes, empty grass fields and other sub-optimal corner features. And then use that newly created free space to put in a large version of the logo of this years conference, decently sized motto and slightly smaller invitation to the next years conference.

Do not forget to add a copyright and license statement somewhere in the corner in smaller, but still well readable font. I am using a text like: "Photo by: Full Name, Email: fullemail@debian.org, License: GPLv2+ or CCv3-BY" This ensures that this image may be used in any press coverage (with basic attribution) and also can be included in any GPL-licensed software, if that ever comes up. The same statement is also in the metadata of the image file (see Image-Metadata-Edit metadata in GIMP) along with information that states that this is "Debian Developer Conference Group photo, City, Country, Year". Image->Image properties->Comment is another place where GIMP hides this EXIF information.

For ease of use, in addition to a full-resolution image it is also useful to make a lower resolution version that would still fit on a 4K screen at full resolution, so about 3840px wide. Some photo hosting services set other limits for image size as well, so it might be needed to scale the image down below 100Mpix to upload it to Google Photos, for example.

Publishing

So, it is finally 1AM and the group photo is ready! How do you push it out to people? Well, in all possible ways and places. Again - don't be shy, people do really want to see it.

Push it to whatever you use for your shared photos. Push it to Debconf shared git (note that this is GIT-LFS repo, make sure you know how to add content to the LFS specifically). All permanent links to that in GroupPhotosAll wiki. And then send those links to IRC, Signal, Telegram groups, debconf-announce mailing list. Publish it in your blog and push that to Debian Planet. Push it in Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. Send an email separately to Debconf orga team. And one to Debian Publicity Team so they can put it into the Debian Home Page and push via Debian micronews accounts.

And that is about it. Now you can go back to enjoying the rest of the conference. Or running around doing other things that you think need to be done. It's up to you. You did it. This moment will remain with people for a very long time. And you helped.

Questions? Feedback? Just ask here or here.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Player of Games

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 03:09:00 +0000

Review: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks

Series:	Culture #2
Publisher:	HarperPrism
Copyright:	1989
Printing:	February 1987
ISBN:	0-06-105356-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	295

The Player of Games is political space opera and the second book in the shared Culture setting. As with most Culture books, the reading order is not particularly important. It won the 1989 Locus Award for best science fiction novel and sometimes competes with Use of Weapons as the consensus best Culture novel.

This review is a re-read and yet another experiment in how to re-review a book. This time, I decided to write a full second review with substantial spoilers so that I can talk in more detail about the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, or just want to see how my thoughts have evolved from my first reading, see my original review from 2005.

Gurgeh plays games. He is probably the best strategy game player in the entirety of the galaxy-spanning Culture. He has written papers on game theory, won innumerable major championships, and is a celebrity in the circle of like-minded aficionados.

Gurgeh is also bored and in the middle of the Culture equivalent of a mid-life crisis. As the story opens, he's vaguely unsatisfied and adrift, unenthused by his normal activities, and searching vaguely for something that will break through his ennui. He is caught by surprise by the thrill he gets from a moment's misunderstanding in which an opponent suspects him of cheating, which sets him up to be (apparently) clumsily blackmailed by a deeply unpleasant drone named Mawhrin-Skel.

SPOILERS BELOW. If you have not read this book, consider stopping here and instead reading my original no spoiler review.

The first hundred pages of The Player of Games is a slow, somewhat plodding introduction to Gurgeh, his social circle, and life in (one part of) the Culture. I remember being fascinated by this part the first time I read this book. It was only the second Culture novel I read and the first set in the Culture proper, so the world-building underlying this odd post-scarcity utopia on a vast intelligent habitat with sentient drones, complex privacy rules, endless cocktail parties, and apparently directionless socialites was intriguingly unlike the other science fiction I was reading at the time. This time through, I have to admit I was less impressed.

Gurgeh is not very likable, and his desultory mid-life crisis is a little boring. None of his friends have enough depth to appear as more than side notes, in part because Gurgeh doesn't seem to care enough about any of them to make them interesting to the reader. I've since read seven other Culture novels, so Banks's cocktail parties hold less charm and I was impatient for the real action to begin.

These chapters are still important, though, because they establish how utterly average Gurgeh is. He has one unique talent, a deep affinity with and obsession with strategy games, and is otherwise a bit of a depressed narcissist with a few casual relationships, a friend that he barely confides in, and a comfortable and familiar life. He is not in any way a hero or a charismatic figure; he just happens to be exceptionally good at one thing, enough to make him famous among people who care about that one thing and probably unknown to anyone else apart from the occasional idly perused news headline. He is the Culture's equivalent of the world chess champion.

The Contact division of the Culture has a problem. The Empire of Azad in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is a nasty, expansionist culture of the sort that Contact would like to deal with before it causes broader problems. The Culture's normal approaches are thwarted by an unusual organizing principle: The empire is built around and takes its name from the game of Azad, a highly complex strategy game developed over thousands of years. Azad is the civil service exams, means of political and religious dispute resolution, selection mechanism for the emperor, and civic religion. Faced with that oddity, Contact turned to Special Circumstances, the Culture's more aggressive and less restrained way of dealing with tricky problems. Special Circumstances, in turn, needs someone who can learn how to play the game of Azad. They want Gurgeh to take a very long trip.

For all of Gurgeh's dissatisfaction, he's not impulsive enough to take a five year journey away from his life and everyone he knows just to play a novel game. Conveniently, Mawhrin-Skel's blackmail resolves this reluctance.

The game of Azad requires some suspension of disbelief. Banks provides a few glimpses at the mechanics of the game, but those details are insufficient to reconstruct the rules, and some of the claims made about its properties are improbable at best. The best mental model I could build for it is a strategy or simulation game built around units and territory control, with supplemental side games used to build up resources for the main boards, but it's more of a plot device and a set piece than a world-building invention. The significance of Azad the game is its role in society: The Empire of Azad believes they have constructed a game whose complexity so closely models reality that the skills required for success in the game are precisely the skills required for success in the empire.

The Empire of Azad is wrong, and this is one of the core themes of The Player of Games. As with many Culture novels, what Special Circumstances tells Gurgeh is, at best, incomplete. Gurgeh is a refutation of the basis of belief in Azad; this is why it is important thematically that he is an average, somewhat unlikable citizen of the Culture whose only special characteristic is skill at learning and playing games.

Azad is the myth of meritocracy given physical form as a game. It provides the anchor of the empire for the same reason that societies on Earth place enormous weight on standardized tests, capitalist success, or public debates. All societies face the problem of selecting good leaders and testing opposing beliefs, and all societies attempt to find some form of shortcut, some set of general principles, tests, or objective metrics used to select the best person via a process that people consider plausible and fair. The game of Azad is a paragon of apparently meritocratic process. No matter who you are or what your background is, if you excel at the game that, in theory, objectively tests your skills, you are given a position of power.

In practice, the Empire of Azad is not that naive. Manipulation outside of the game happens, only some players have the opportunity and resources to spend years learning the game at a deep level, and only their dominant sex truly stands a chance in games that matter. But neither is Azad's place in society a fiction. There is corruption around the edges, and a lot of people are filtered out before the games begin, but the highest echelons of society are true believers. The game does decide both rank and policy; Banks is arguing against a strong form of apparently working meritocracy.

Gurgeh represents a refutation of this meritocracy through the mechanism that breaks every supposed meritocracy: The map is not and cannot be the territory. Any objective evaluation criteria is necessarily separate from what it is trying to measure, and in that separation there is always an opportunity. Gurgeh has none of the background, training, or mindset expected for a player of Azad because he could not possibly care less about any of the things Azad represents to the Empire. What he has instead is a preternatural skill at games and vast experience with the most intricate strategy games the Culture, a much larger society, has been able to devise. He also has both the patience and the resources to devote himself entirely to learning a game for several years, and past experience in doing that with other games.

If Azad represents the civil service exams, Gurgeh is the person who has no interest in ruling but adores memorizing facts and taking tests. The theory behind the exams is that the skills to pass the exam only come with the correct mindset to do the job for which the exam is testing. Gurgeh is an existence proof that this is not always the case.

Banks also uses Azad to show another aspect of the failure of meritocracy: A society whose rulers are chosen through a competition takes on the shape of that competition. The Empire of Azad is run by the winners of competitive games, so the empire is a winner-take-all system of dominance and status hierarchy. Here, I think Banks lays the point on a little thick; the empire is an irredeemable hellhole of misogyny, sexual abuse, slavery, genocide, and military colonialism to a degree that is a bit hard to justify solely from the game. There is a beautiful turning point about two-thirds of the way through the book where Gurgeh's face is shoved into just how vile Azad society is and reconsiders his approach to the tournament as a result, and I think it may have been a bit stronger if the morality had been a little less blatant and absolute.

To the extent that Gurgeh has political beliefs, he represents a Culture flavor of soft liberalism. He has opinions about acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat people, but he grew up in a utopia and his opinions are mostly theoretical. When he sees just how vile people can be outside of that utopia, he is revolted and appalled and redoubles his efforts to fight that society in the only way he knows how, inside of a game. This part of the book follows the standard, if enjoyable, plot of a flawed but fundamentally decent person discovering a true injustice and becoming enraged at it.

In a lot of books, that would have been where the plot stops. Banks is doing something more subtle and more interesting, though. Gurgeh wipes the board with his next challenger, but that soft liberalism eventually proves inadequate. To learn the game of Azad and to play in the tournament, Gurgeh has been wrapping himself in Azad culture and its language, and in that frame of mind he is losing the climactic game of the book. It's only when he is pushed to think in Marain, the native language of the Culture, that he understands what is happening in the game and how to defeat Nicosar, the emperor.

This, on the surface, is a bit too close to the strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity to be entirely plausible, but such an objection would miss the point that Banks is making here. Marain is a construct, the product of considerable effort within the Culture to match language to the most nuance and complexity that brains can understand, and it is a language, one of the most social and collective artifacts a society can produce. Gurgeh is a remarkable individual with an impressive talent, but individual skill and achievement can only take him so far. The critical final piece is the support of societal infrastructure intentionally built and maintained to help him make better decisions.

Once I noticed that point, I saw it everywhere in the book. The empire repeatedly attempts to subvert or distract Gurgeh with drugs, pleasure, politics, or danger, and at each point there is some critical piece of Culture social infrastructure that blunts the attack. Illicit substances and forbidden vices are less tempting to someone for whom the illicit has been demystified by the Culture's gentler approach to rules and boundaries. Embedded biological mechanisms allow him to divert drugs so that they don't affect him. At first, it's easy to read this as an exercise of self-control, but on this re-read I saw how much behind-the-scenes infrastructure supports Gurgeh's ability to ignore temptation.

This social support notably does not take the form of some ideological principle or moral framework. Gurgeh is not a monk or an ascetic, as is obvious from the first third of the book, and he has no political ideology to speak of. He is a flawed person with a streak of danger-seeking and self-aggrandizement, which the Culture exploited to get him involved in Azad. But through a lot of hard work, technological and social, the Culture has given him a robust foundation and a set of mental and biological tools that make him remarkably hard to corrupt. The implication is that if Gurgeh has that support, so does every other member of the Culture. It's neither a religion or an ideology; it's well-maintained infrastructure, complex and nuanced and pragmatic, and composed of innumerable small solutions to specific problems.

I think the true climax of this book takes place the night before the final day of the game, in the tower meeting between Gurgeh and Nicosar. Gurgeh has realized that he's already won; there's nothing Nicosar can do to salvage the game. He's also seen that the game represents a cultural conflict and conversation between the Culture and Azad and he's overwhelmed by the beauty of that communication and sadness that the game is about to be over. Gurgeh's true passion is the game. It is doubtless easier for him to be magnanimous because he's winning, but he also loves the structure of the game itself and what two players can create in a sort of collaborative competition.

Gurgeh tries to express all of this to Nicosar. It is one of the most centrist liberal moments I've ever read in a novel, the pure essence of "reaching across the aisle" or "disagreeing agreeably." Gurgeh has seen something beautiful, something he's created with Nicosar, a moment of true communication, and he wants to share it. Surely Nicosar sees the same thing; surely now that he sees Gurgeh has won, he can appreciate the board structure, savor the moment, understand the transient beauty of a game that is about to end and how perfectly it captures the meeting of their different cultures. That moment does Gurgeh real credit. It's a rare sign of emotional and spiritual depth in a character who often seems superficial.

Nicosar meets this outreach with unhinged, furious contempt. He despises everything Gurgeh represents, everything the Culture is, and the next day he tries to kill Gurgeh on the board of the game.

It is a devastating critique of liberal tolerance, all the more so because Gurgeh's attitude and outreach is truly admirable. It is perhaps the most sympathetic moment that Gurgeh has in the entire book, the moment where the reader thinks "oh, I get it, I understand what he really cares about." Gurgeh assumes that Nicosar is not his position or culture, that they have made a moment of connection that transcends all the awful things he previously learned about the empire of Azad. That Nicosar, despite being the emperor of the society that is currently doing so many things Gurgeh finds repulsive, cannot be as bad as his society. And Nicosar considers that outreach to be weak, disgusting, and vile, and does everything that he can to destroy it.

One of the oddest twists of our current moment is the obsession that some billionaires have with stories that are moral arguments against exactly what those billionaires are currently doing. The most obvious example is Peter Thiel, who is obsessed with The Lord of the Rings and has devoted his life to becoming Saruman, a character who is notably not one of the protagonists. It's as if something in them recognizes the power of the story, but some deep shame or narcissism or simple aversion allows them to completely ignore what the story means.

Elon Musk is obsessed with the Culture novels. He names the SpaceX rockets following Culture Ship naming conventions and has claimed that one of his goals is to bring about a Culture-style utopia. And in 1989, years before anyone had ever heard of him, Banks cast him as the villain of The Player of Games. There is so much of Nicosar in Musk: the superficial charm, the limited brilliance (Nicosar is a very good Azad player), the ambition, the pride, and the vicious, spitting contempt for everything the Culture represents at every level deeper than superficial materialism. And Banks is as clear about his opinion of Nicosar as he is about anything in any Culture novel.

One of the oldest fictional answers to what a society does with people like Nicosar is the consequences of hubris. By being unable to accept defeat, by holding a vision of the world so tightly, they become brittle and unstable and bring about their own collapse. In a broad sense, that is what happens in The Player of Games with a bit of pushing from Special Circumstances. By the politics of the game, Nicosar had already won; the results of Gurgeh's earlier games had already been faked, the final game had no political consequences, and everyone who knew its true outcome could be disposed of. Gurgeh's win could have been covered up and ignored. But Nicosar could not endure the thought that he would be beaten by someone like Gurgeh, playing Azad the way that Gurgeh was playing it. Gurgeh had to be destroyed on the board of the game; Nicosar's pride did not allow any other outcome, even if it meant Nicosar's death.

However, Special Circumstances didn't let hubris be the end of the story. In the climax of the book, the drone protecting Gurgeh also makes sure that Nicosar dies. There is a fig leaf of plausible deniability, but it's so obvious that even the unobservant Gurgeh sees through it immediately. It's hard to escape the feeling that was Banks's answer to what to do with people like Nicosar: They cannot live within society, because they will not live peacefully within society.

I enjoyed The Player of Games as much this time through as I did the first time, but for entirely different reasons. In my first read, I focused on the world-building of the Culture, the political machinations, and the concept of games as conversations between the players. This time, I was struck by the political commentary just below the surface. Special Circumstances wanted to resolve the problem of the Empire of Azad without a military conflict and occupation that would be long, brutal, expensive, and demoralizing. They found an answer that relied on the diversity of the Culture. A vast, utopian civilization in which people can pursue whatever interests make them happy produces innumerable microspecialized oddities, people with astonishing talents in some small field that only a tiny fraction of people care about. It produces, in other words, innumerable keys for locks that you may never encounter, but which are invaluable if you happen to stumble across that lock.

Gurgeh is not a hero. He is not a paragon of moral virtue, or even a charming charismatic, He is an entirely average member of an extraordinary society, the beneficiary of thousands of years of concerted effort at producing a robust, flexible foundation on which to raise robust, flexible citizens with a shared sense of basic morality. Those people, by themselves, do not solve all of life's problems; the structure of Special Circumstances and its willingness to bend rules in order to maintain them is the tension and deus ex machina in all of the Culture novels. But much of the strength of Special Circumstances is that it has an entire civilization of people like Gurgeh to draw upon when it needs them.

It has those people because the Culture comprehensively rejects competitive meritocracy, something that some readers of the Culture novels appear incapable of comprehending.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.4

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 01:57:00 +0000

This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.3, and the upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from ISC or my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.

For the full list of changes, see the INN 2.7.4 NEWS file.

As always, thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release and doing most of the maintenance work on INN!

Birger Schacht: Status update, June 2026

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:28:51 +0000

Uploaded wofi 1.5.3-1 to unstable
Uploaded wob 0.16-1 to unstable
Uploaded labwc 0.20.0-1 and 0.20.1-1 to unstable; these releases come with support for wlroots-0.20, which made labwc reenter testing
Uploaded swaylock 1.8.5-2 to unstable to make it use the common-auth directive of pam (seeh #1140096)
Uploaded swayimg 5.4-1 to unstable
Uploaded wayback 0.3-2 to unstable, which was waiting in experimental for a reupload and I had forgotten about it; also fixed a typo in wayback upstream
Uploaded xdg-desktop-portal-wlr 0.8.3-1 to unstable

The search app I was working on last month was still a focus in June. I refactored the data model a bit and made it simpler. I stumbled over the Python Koans and Koan 15: The Invisible Ink gave me the idea of using unicode normalization when indexing the items.

I released a couple of bug fix releases for the APIS framework, namely 0.64.2, 0.64.3 and 0.64.4. I also release 0.65.0 which is one step further in dropping support for the legacy apis_entities app. When the search module is merged it will give way for removing the last bits of the old cruft to be removed.

During a regular dependency update session I looked at the changes in the dal dependency. After a long time with no commits, the project suddenly had a lot of commits co-authored by Claude and then released a new major version with a regression. Given the state of the project, we decided to keep using the previous release for now and look into replacing the dependency with an HTMX based solution. I implemented a POC for one of the plugins we develop and it was actually pretty easy. I also managed to combine the autocomplete approach with a multi-select form field, based on this blog post.

In the PFP project I finally merged the stats endpoint which give statistics about the named graphs that are used as data sources.

Other

I attended BSidesVienna 0x7EA but it was on one of the hottest days this year so far so I left after a couple of talks.

Steinar H. Gunderson: An update on sesse@chromium.org

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:21:00 +0000

As previously mentioned, I am leaving Chrome; my last work day was yesterday. (Sorry to those with July 3rd off that I didn't get to say goodbye to!) But I'm staying in Google, on more internal projects :-)

After 1100+ commits it's hard to pick out one thing that I love the most; as a team, we launched a lot of (IMO) useful CSS features and fixed a lot of issues. But somehow, I keep on gravitating towards performance, and perhaps this commit is the one I will remember the most fondly; a couple hundred lines to speed up repeated attribute selectors a lot. (If you ever wonder who would be doing that; well, there's a fairly high chance that you have an extension injecting a stylesheet with a lot of a[href*="..."] rules…)

Upwards and onwards. Please write lean, clean CSS; I won't be there to save you from now on. :-)

Tim Retout: AWS Washington Summit 2026

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:40:45 +0000

I am somewhat jet-lagged, having returned from Washington DC just before the 250th anniversary celebrations which will be happening today. I was part of a delegation sent by my employer to the AWS Summit there this week, partly to kindle interactions between PA Consulting and Jacobs who have recently taken a 100% share in PA.

Much of our conference time was spent in meetings with AWS executives impressing the facts of the Jacobs/PA partnership upon them, and discussing plans to broaden our collaboration in different sectors. So I spent even less time than usual at conference keynotes, talks etc.

This was my first time to DC, and I did find some time to see some sights – unfortunately the White House is rather fenced off at the moment following the UFC match, but I did make it to the Capitol and the Washington Monument in the heat.

Last Sunday a select few of us attended the baseball in Baltimore – rather than the game, the thing that stood out for me was the military jets flying in formation over the stadium every few minutes, and the block-booked seats for the Navy in uniform, who were having a great time! This is obviously a hearts-and-minds thing, but it provides a stark contrast with the UK – I can’t think of a time I’ve seen uniformed military at the football (soccer) or cricket for example. Or Union Jacks flying at shopping centres.

Speaking of soccer, England just about beat DR Congo while I was out there, but it was a close-run thing as we were 1-0 down at half time. I can’t claim to be following the World Cup too closely, but I overheard comments (from US passers-by) that made clear it would have had a significant reputational impact on our standing in the world had we lost.

Another highlight for me was the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes, where I was able to get my fix of Anglican plainchant and four-part harmony for the week. At morning prayer, I noted they use “God save this land” rather than “God save the King” during the responses – I’ve since found other sources online that choose “God save the State”. It’s strange to think that the words of the BCP dating back to 1549/1662 are a point of continuity since well before the 1776 declaration of independence, and yet are still adapted and used in worship today.

Julian Andres Klode: The pandemic of incomplete OpenSSL error handling

jak@jak-linux.org (Julian Andres Klode) — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:54:22 +0000

Recently a person reported a bug in APT saying that TLS is failing on FIPS systems with MD5 errors, and suggested we call ERR_clear_error() around TLS operations.

Like any serious software engineer would do, I said No. Just because one component failed to handle its errors does not mean I can go around and discard all errors in another place - the program should have failed earlier (or discarded the error when it was determined to be safe).

Little did I know that people have for years been using this approach as a best practice: Codebases everywhere are littered with calls to ERR_clear_error() before performing TLS, and upstream themselves suggest to do just that.

This is a major, systemic, pandemic of incomplete error handling. We cannot just discard unrelated errors if they become inconvenient. The code that caused the error needs to be fixed to handle it.

This isn’t all. It seems many authors are not familiar with libraries using a stack of errors, and there is a second anti-pattern:

Call an OpenSSL operation, check the top-level error, and then discard all errors if deemed “not too bad”. This has the same problem: Unrelated errors get silently discarded.

I would strongly encourage everyone to inspect their code bases for any calls to ERR_clear_error() and whether they are safe or one of the bad patterns above (or maybe you find a new pattern). You may want to use error stack functionality ofERR_set_mark (https://docs.openssl.org/3.4/man3/ERR_set_mark/) to essentially “push” and “pop” an error context of your own as a guard around multiple OpenSSL operations.

To the OpenSSL authors, I would suggest not encouraging devastating security practices that fundamentally break any trust in software.

We need to do better than this.

Colin Watson: Free software activity in June 2026

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:38:46 +0000

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. Thanks to new sponsor @fernandocc17!

bugs.debian.org documentation

Sometimes I ask users to file bugs upstream themselves because I think they’d be better placed to have the ensuing discussion with the upstream maintainers directly rather than everything having to go through me. Of course sometimes they don’t want to do so, perhaps because it requires creating another account somewhere. Rarely, I’ve had people refuse to do this because the letter of the bug tracking system’s documentation seemed to tell them not to. Since I don’t believe that was the intention, I corrected this.

OpenSSH

I spent two and a half hours extensively revising debian/copyright so that lrc believes it to be in sync with the output of licensecheck. I’m unconvinced that this was remotely worth the mind-numbing effort - as far as I can tell, it makes no difference to the practical legal position, to policy compliance, or to any reasonable user - but the DFSG team increasingly seems to be objecting to any discrepancies here any time a package crosses their radar, so this was a pre-emptive measure to avoid problems with some upcoming trips through the NEW queue.

OpenSSL 4.0

I fielded a few of the OpenSSL 4.0 build failure bugs:

omniorb-dfsg (along with upgrading to 4.3.4)
openssh
yubihsm-shell

Python packaging

New upstream versions:

certipy
juptyer-server (fixing CVE-2025-61669, CVE-2026-35397, CVE-2026-40110, and CVE-2026-40934)
magicgui
pydantic
pydantic-core
pydantic-settings
pylint
pytest-rerunfailures (fixing a build failure with pytest 9.1)
python-certifi
python-django-celery-beat
python-numpy-groupies
python-packaging (aided by Debusine testing of reverse-dependencies)
python-pytest-run-parallel
python-pytest-unmagic
python-service-identity
python-tabulate
python-urllib3 (fixing CVE-2026-9375 and CVE-2026-44432)
python-watchfiles
python-yubihsm
responses
uncertainties

pytest 9.1 was uploaded to unstable this month, resulting in quite a few new build/test failure bugs. I tried to keep on top of as many of these as I could; most of them had one of a small number of similar causes.

Python 3.14 became the default Python version in unstable towards the end of the month, starting a transition. These usually involve quite a bit of work, and there’s much more to do, but I fixed a few things:

Other build/test failures:

Other bugs:

Rust packaging

New upstream versions:

rust-asn1 (needed by new python-cryptography)
rust-asn1-derive

Code reviews

buildbot: [INTL:sv] Swedish translation of debconf templates (merged and uploaded)
openssh: Support DPKG_ROOT (merged and uploaded)
openssh: Fix GSS C25519 server blob bounds check (merged and uploaded)
python-pyramid: CVE-2023-40587 Backport patch (merged and uploaded)

Other bits and pieces

Matthew Garrett: Securing agentic identity

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:38:23 +0000

As is the case for many people working in the security industry, the last few months of my life have been focused on dealing with people wanting to use LLMs everywhere. From an enterprise security perspective that’s not an inherent problem - what’s more of a problem is that people want those agents to have access to resources like their calendar and email and so on, and now we have somewhat non-deterministic agents that seem very enthusiastic to achieve what you asked whether that’s a good idea or not, and we’re combining this with credentials that give them access to sensitive data, and leaving those credentials on disk where they can be committed into git repos or exfiltrated to some other service to make use of them on the agent’s behalf or well just any other number of things, at which point your CEO’s email is suddenly readable by everyone and you’re having a bad day.

As I mentioned in my last post, pretty much every strong mechanism for keeping credentials in place is just not supported in the wider world. We can imagine a universe where agents use hardware (or at least hypervisor) backed certificates to obtain credentials and any that end up leaking are worthless as a result. But, sadly, that’s not an option for most people using existing identity providers. The state of the art is that you use the device code flow and a human authenticates and the token ends up back inside the agent environment and then it proceeds to do whatever it wants with it and you just hope that you wake up the next morning without an awful infoleak occurring.

(An aside: I do not like the device code flow as used in enterprise environments, and I never will. The identity provider doesn’t have a real opportuity to inspect the security posture of the system asking for the token, and as a result some identity providers will restrict tokens that are issued in this way. The common alternative of doing stuff using a more standard flow and having a redirect URI pointing at localhost works fine for local systems and is a pain for remote ones, even if you can commit crimes with SSH forwarding. I’m going to suggest something that I think is better, and you are free to disagree)

I’m not in a position to get every identity provider and service provider to change their security posture, so I’m somewhat stuck in terms of the tokens they’re willing to issue me - largely either JWTs or opaque access tokens, with no support for any mechanism of binding that token to an instance. The token that’s going to have to be provided to the remote service is something I have little influence over. But that doesn’t mean I can’t influence the token that lands inside the agent’s environment. I can issue a placeholder token to the agent, and force it to communicate via a proxy that swaps out the placeholder for the real thing. The worst the agent can do is exfiltrate the placeholder token, and as long as malicious actors don’t have access to that proxy, it doesn’t matter - nobody else can do anything with the placeholder.

This isn’t a terribly novel insight, and it seems like almost everybody has reinvented this on their own. But a lot of these implementations involve you somehow obtaining the real token in advance and then pasting that into something that generates a placeholder that you provide to your agent environment somehow, and it’s all a bit clunky and awkward, and it also means that you need to deal with something that keeps track of the mapping between placeholders and real tokens and oh no we’ve just invented a secret store, and if you want this to work at scale and reliably you’re just invented a high availability distributed secret store, and a lot of people who’ve read that are now shaking their heads and reaching for gin. Can we simplify this, and improve security at the same time? I think we can!

Remember when I said “as long as malicious actors don’t have access to that proxy, it doesn’t matter”? What if they do? What if they compromise one machine inside your environment and are then able to email a bunch of employees and convince their agents to send more tokens back to them and then delete the email before a human reads it? Now you have someone inside the wall with access to those tokens, and presumably with access to the proxy, and now they can be anyone whose agent was gullible enough to think sending them a token was a good idea. This isn’t good!

So, I thought for a while, and I came up with a new idea. We can have a broker service that obtains credentials for us. We can run that centrally, away from the agents. A client in an agentic environment can request a token, and that can result in a URL being generated and the user being directed to open a URL in a browser and authenticate. When the user authenticates, the authentication flow redirects the confirmation back via the broker, and the broker obtains the real auth token. The obvious thing to do now would be to return the auth token to the client in the agentic environment, but we don’t do that. Instead, we mint a new JWT, and add a new claim - one that contains an encrypted copy of the token. In the process we can copy over all the original claims, because those aren’t secret - and now even if the client inspects the token to figure out what access it has, it’ll get a correct answer. We sign the new token with our own signing key, and pass that back to the client. The client now has a legitimate JWT that is utterly useless, because the signature isn’t trusted by anyone other than us.

How does it use it? It makes an API request via a proxy, including the new token in the Authorization: header. The proxy verifies the signature on the token, and then decrypts the original token and swaps out the fake token for the real one. The remote API sees what it expects, and everyone is happy. There’s never a real token in the agentic environment, but also we don’t need to store anyting anywhere. The only state is the encryption keys, and those can be injected into the environment at startup. You need to scale? Just start more of these processes. You need to support multiple availability zones? Just start more of these processes in different places. No persistent data is ever held in the broker or the proxy. You don’t need to care about distributed databases or secret stores.

This felt wonderfully elegant and I felt smug about coming up with a better idea, and then I went to a bar earlier this week and sat down to read RFC 8705 and the guy next to me saw that over my shoulder and asked what I was reading and I explained why I was interested and we talked about agentic identity and then he mentioned that fly.io had something that sounded very similar and I read that and gosh yes it is very similar, so damn you fly.io for stealing my ideas 3 years before I even had them. Anyway. Now I need to do better.

Remember that there’s still a risk around anyone who has access to the proxy having access to the encrypted keys? We can remove that risk as well. It’s not uncommon for agentic environments to have an identity issued via something like SPIFFE, at which point they have a client certificate. You can probably guess where I’m going with this. If we require that an agent present a client cert to the broker when requesting a token, we can embed a representation of that client cert into the token we mint. The proxy can then require mTLS for the client connection, and can verify that the presented certificate matches the one represented in the token. If it does then whoever’s using the token has access to the private key associated with the environment it was issued to. If we then ensure that the private keys backing these certificates are either hardware or hypervisor backed, and as such tied to a specific instance, we now have a high degree of confidence that the token can only be used in its intended environment. Even if our identity provider doesn’t support RFC 8705, we can.

This is fairly straightforward where you’re using a platform where your identity provider is also the environment that’s consuming your tokens, and more annoying for third parties. The broker potentially needs some amount of third party vendor knowledge to make that work for everyone. This is even more the case where login isn’t via your identity provider (thanks, github), but none of this is insurmountable - just annoying. And where vendors issue opaque tokens rather than JWTs, this still isn’t a problem; we can just mint a new JWT that includes the opaque token as an encrypted claim, and include the same certificate binding. The opaque token ends up being the thing that’s presented to the third party, but only after we’ve verified the mTLS binding.

In an ideal world none of this would be necessary - someone would spin up a new agentic environment, a user would prove their identity, and a certificate embodying that identity would be issued to the environment with a private key that can’t be exfiltrated. That certificate would be sufficient to obtain new certificates associated with the same private key, and we could still bind that into mTLS identity. This would be much simpler, but browsers don’t support it, so it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Anyway. Even if we can’t have the best thing, we can do better than we are at the moment, and also it would be lovely if we could standardise on this rather than have everyone build their own thing. The end.

Joey Hess: no LLM code in dependencies

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:06:30 +0000

I've spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code. At least so far.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/

Needing to review a program's whole dependency tree on an ongoing basis is apparently what programming has come to?

I've found some real stinkers. Large LLM generated changes being reverted in the next release without any explanation. An incoherent 1489 line commit message with 10,000 lines of changes to a 26,000 LOC code base. A LLM prompt to copy code from another project that seems to have only avoided being copyright infringement due to luck.

I now have additional information about the quality of dependencies which will surely influence future decisions. As far as I can see, that's the only positive benefit of this work.

I realize that I am probably trying to hold back the tide at this point. That appears to be why Software Freedom Conservancy punted, and I doubt that the FSF will do any better.

As these dominos fall, I am reconsidering my participation in these communities. But I continue my work and support my users.

It may seem easy to prompt a LLM with

Add fourmolu config and restyled

neat

format a module

And commit the result and call yourself a 10xer. But please consider the broader impact of your actions. (In the above case, that project lost my further collaboration on it.)

Matthew Garrett: Preventing token theft

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:23:45 +0000

When you log into a service you’re given an authentication token. Each further request to the site includes that token, allowing the server to figure out who you are and ensuring that you have access to your data. Depending on site policy, this token may either be stored in memory (and so vanish if you restart your browser) or disk. The token is the proof of your identity. As far as the site is concerned, anyone with your token is you. These tokens may be traditional browser cookies, but they may also be stored in either site local storage or (if you’re not using a browser) in some other storage location.

In recent years we’ve seen infostealer malware (like LummaC2) gain the ability to exfiltrate user tokens, allowing attackers to gain access to the user’s data without needing to retain access to the user’s machine. This attack is viable even if the site has strong MFA requirements, so passkeys don’t help. Encrypting the tokens on disk doesn’t prevent the malware from scraping them out of the browser’s RAM or obtaining whatever key is used to encrypt them. This feels like a pretty hard problem to solve.

But that hasn’t stopped people from trying! Dirk Balfanz wrote an IETF draft describing a mechanism for using self-signed certificates for TLS authentication. This uses the mutual authentication feature of the TLS protocol that requires both sides prove their identity to each other. In regular TLS, the remote site presents a signed certificate that tells you who it is. When performing mutual authentication, you then present a certificate to the remote site telling it who you are. These client certificates are largely unused outside enterprise environments because they’re a huge pain to deploy. It’s not so much that this has sharp edges, it’s that it’s entirely made of sharp edges. Managing certificate deployment to your devices is hard. Browsers get confused if the certificates change under them. You have one certificate and it lives forever, so sites you present it to can track your identity. Users are prompted to choose a certificate to authenticate with, and if they pick the wrong one everything breaks and is hard to recover. I’ve deployed this and I did not have a good time.

But Balfanz’s idea was simple. Rather than require certificates to be deployed, browsers would simply generate a certificate on the fly. The goal wasn’t to prove the device or user’s identity in any global way - but it would associate a TLS session with a specific certificate. You could then, for example, include a hash of the certificate in the cookie, and if someone tried to use that cookie without presenting that certificate then the cookie could be rejected. If the browser used a hardware-backed private key for the certificate then it would be impossible for an attacker to steal it. Sure, you could still steal cookies, but you wouldn’t be able to use them.

This was written almost 15 years ago, and seems simple, elegant, and functional. It didn’t happen. Part of the reason for that is that, well, it wasn’t quite so simple. One problem was privacy related. Cookies are only sent after the TLS session is established, so anyone monitoring the network doesn’t know anything about the user identity. A naive implementation of this approach would have meant the client certificate being sent before session establishment, and now user identity can be tracked (no longer an issue if this was implemented on top of TLS 1.3, but this was a log time ago). This was avoided by reordering the client handshake, but that meant having to modify the TLS specification and implementations would have to be updated to support this. Another was that figuring out the granularity of the certificates was difficult. You’d want to use different certificates for every site to avoid them effectively becoming tracking cookies, but you need to provide the certificate before cookies are set, and you don’t know what origin the site is going to set in its cookies. If you generate a certificate for a.example.com and a different one for b.example.com, and a.example.com sets a cookie for *.example.com and includes the certificate you used for a.example.com, that cookie isn’t going to work on b.example.com and things are broken. This meant supporting it wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed - you’d need to ensure that your cookie scope was compatible with the certificate scope. You could probably make this work well enough by aligning it with the Public Suffix List, but there was still some risk of expectations not being aligned.

And, perhaps most importantly, TLS session resumption (replaced by pre-shared keys in TLS 1.3) somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise - clients store state that allows them to re-establish a TLS connection without performing certificate exchange (this reduces overhead if a connection gets interrupted or you switch to a new network or anything along those lines), and anyone in a position to steal cookies could steal that state as well.

The followup attempt was channel IDs. This simplified the implementation somewhat - rather than certificates, a raw public key would be sent, along with proof of possession of the private key in the form of a signature over a portion of the TLS handshake. This was required even in the event of session resumption, which avoided having to worry about theft of session secrets. The timing of the exchange was after the encrypted session had been established, so user identity couldn’t be leaked that way either. Cookies could then be bound to this identifier. Unfortunately it didn’t really deal with the problem of scoping keys in a way that would match cookie requirements, and the spec suggests that the right way of handling this is to scope keys to TLDs, which would enable user tracking across sites (Chrome’s implementation apparently restricted it to eTLD+1, which would match the third party cookie policy and avoid the tracking risk).

Chrome added support for this, but it was removed in early 2018. The discussion of some of the pain points in that message is interesting, explicitly calling out problems with connection coalescing across domains and the incompatibility with zero-RTT TLS1.3. The overall consensus at the time seems to be that trying to solve this entirely at the TLS layer has too many rough edges, and a different approach should be taken.

And so almost 7 years after the initial draft for origin bound certificates, we come to token binding. This ended up being a rather more complex endeavour, covering 3 different RFCs describing how it impacts TLS, how to incorporate it into HTTP, and how to manage all the various parties involved in the process. The short version is that it’s pretty similar to channel ID, except that there’s also a documented mechanism for allowing tokens to be bound to one party and consumed by another, avoiding any need for widely scoped keys. Token binding effectively solved all the issues in the original proposal, but at the cost of somewhat more complexity.

The RFC was finalised in October 2018. Chrome removed its (incomplete, draft) support for token binding in November 2018. Edge carried support until late 2024. Despite getting all the way through the RFC process, it’s functionally dead.

The process up until this point had been largely initiated by Google, with Microsoft contributing significantly to the token binding standards. The work had been focused on identifying a generic solution to the problem rather than tying it to any specific authentication flow. The next step was in a different direction - rather than trying to fix this for the entire internet, how about we try to fix it for OAuth?

RFC 8705 is titled “OAuth 2.0 Mutual-TLS Client Authentication and Certificate-Bound Access Tokens”. This is basically the 2011 approach, but (a) with an explicit definition of how the certificate should be incorporated into issued auth cookies, and (b) with a proviso that well uh if you’re going to use tokens issued by your IdP to authenticate to someone else then well you’re going to need to use the same cert for both. This is probably fine for the company-owned-laptop case where you’re actually fine with multiple sites being able to tie identities together (that’s kind of the point here!), and also works for “I am using an app and not a browser”, but doesn’t work for more generic scenarios. It also doesn’t seem to take the session resumption case into account at all? Support for RFC8705 seems poor, as far as I can tell of the big players only Auth0 implements it. In theory it works fine with self-signed client certs but in reality that’s going to be almost as difficult to support across multiple platforms as just issuing proper client certs in the first place, so deployment is going to be kind of a pain. But the good news is it doesn’t rely on any TLS extensions or custom browser behaviour, so at the client side it works fine with any browser.

Which brings us on to RFC 9449, “Demonstrating Proof of Possession”. This goes even further than RFC8705 in terms of reducing the burden of deployment - it works fine with existing browsers, and it doesn’t even require any certs. The client generates a keypair and provides the pubkey when requesting the cookie. The cookie contains the pubkey. Every request to the service now provides the cookie with the pubkey and also provides a signature over the URI and HTTP method. If the signature matches the pubkey in the token then clearly the signature came from the machine the token was issued to, and everything is good.

This does come with some downsides, though. The first is that it uses browser interfaces to generate the keys (typically crypto.subtle.generatekey()) and as far as I can tell there are no browsers that guarantee that that key is going to be generated in hardware even if it’s marked non-exportable, so anyone able to steal the cookies can also steal the keys. The second is that the signature only covers the URI and HTTP method, and not the message content or any other headers, so anyone able to exfiltrate a valid signature can replay it against the same URI with different message content. The recommended way to handle this is to reject any signatures that weren’t generated within the last few seconds, which is a wonderful additional way to allow clock skew to give you a Bad Day. And the third is that every single request has to be separately signed, which is not intrinsically a problem because computers are fast and have multiple cores, but if you’re trying to solve the first problem by sticking the key in a TPM then you’re dealing with something that’s slow and single threaded and that’s maybe acceptable if you’re using client certificates (because there’s going to be one signature per session and you can use the same session for multiple requests) but probably not if you’re dealing with a user opening a browser that restores previous tabs and each of those is a webapp that fires off 100 requests in parallel.

In case it wasn’t clear, I don’t like DPoP. It doesn’t feel like it actually solves the underlying problem that we see in the real world (malware running in a context where if it can grab the tokens it can grab the keys), it adds a massive amount of overhead, and it has baked in replay vulnerabilities. I don’t know why it exists and I’m incredibly suspicious of vendors telling me that it fixes my problems, because if they’re telling me that then I’m going to end up assuming that they either don’t understand my problems or they don’t understand their technology, and neither of those is good.

Still. Then we get to the thing that prompted me to write this - Chrome’s announcement that they had launched device-bound session credentials. This is interesting because it’s a Chrome feature that’s explicitly intended to counter on-device malware, which was one of the things that was out of scope in 2018 when token binding was being removed. Since this is entire web level it doesn’t have to be an RFC, and so is instead defined by W3C. I’m going to handwave all the complexity and say that it’s basically a way to register a public key when a cookie is issued, and then prove possession of the private key when it’s time to renew the cookie. By making the cookies shortlived and having support for rotating them in the background, user impact is basically zero and while it’s still possible for an attacker to exfiltrate and use a cookie they’ll only be able to do so for a short window before it needs to be refreshed - something the attacker can’t do, since they don’t have the private key. This avoids the DPoP overhead because you only need to do signing once per cookie per cookie lifetime, and not on every single request. I don’t like this due to the window where exfiltrated tokens can be used, but it feels like a strict improvement over the status quo. An extension called device-bound session credentials for enterprise allows pre-enrollment of device keys, so even though the actual runtime DBCE flow doesn’t involve certificates, certificates can be used for device registration in enterprise environments and you can make sure that auth cookies only go to trusted devices. Unfortunately this is Chrome-only, and so we’re going to need to wait for it to be backported to all the random app frameworks for it to have widespread support on mobile or for almost everyone’s desktop app that’s actually three websites in an Electron wrapper. Mozilla’s current position is that they’re not in favour of it, so I guess we’ll see where Safari lands in terms of broad uptake.

The last thing on my list is another client cert/OAuth binding, this one still in draft state at the time of writing. This one is aimed primarily at the use of agent-driven tooling, where you have something running in the background using a whole bunch of tools that are each acting on your behalf. Authenticating to all of them separately isn’t a fun time, but giving broadly scoped access tokens to a non-deterministic agent and trusting that it’ll never post them somewhere public also isn’t a fun time. The key distinction between it and RFC8705 is that it’s aimed at connections rather than sessions, which avoids the worries about session resumption. This is done with TLS Exporters, which in TLS 1.3 should be unique to the connection even over session resumption (TLS 1.2 may reuse some of the same key material for exporters over session resumption, so it’s recommended to enforce 1.3 for this). By providing a new signature alongside the cookie on every new connection, the client proves that it still has access to the private key. This is a very new spec and I haven’t had much time to work through it yet, but my naive understanding is that unlike RFC8705 this would require some additional client support to be able to regenerate the client signature on every TLS reconnection.

This doesn’t avoid all the problems that RFC8705 has, including how to scope certificates. For the agentic use case that probably doesn’t matter - all these tools are acting on behalf of the same user, it’s fine if all the sites involved know they’re the same user. But it doesn’t solve the general purpose user use case, and right now DBSC seems like the best we have there.

But. Part of me still wonders whether Dirk Balfanz’s approach was the right one. Yes, there’s risk associated with TLS session resumption, but in the worst case you could just switch that off for high risk setups. The cookie scope argument is real, and also in cases where it could violate privacy the site owner could already choose to broaden their cookie scope and violate your privacy, and in cases where it breaks things you could just not make use of it. The other problems are largely fixed by TLS 1.3, and then we’re just left with “Browsers handle client certificates badly” to which my answer is “Yes, and we should fix that anyway”.

Despite having a pretty good answer to this solution over a decade ago, the closest we have to actual deployment is something that offers strictly worse security guarantees. And tokens keep getting stolen, and compromises keep occurring, and for the most part people shrug and get on with things.

Valhalla's Things: A Pair of Hair Towel Wraps

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many months ago I had been ordering some furniture from IKEA¹ and on one of those orders I got tempted by a hair towel wrap: it mostly worked as an idea, but it was too short for my hair.

On the other hand, I had two old towels I wasn’t using, and a recently unpacked sewing machine.

I didn’t plan too much, I just put the STJÄRNBUSKE over the towel, cut, realized that the two pieces didn’t fit with right sides together, cut the second towel (I had planned to make two wraps, anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal), and started sewing by machine in what seemed like a reasonable procedure, taking notes and pictures.

The result was pretty good, and I started using it every time I washed my hair, but then I started to entertain the idea of shooting myself sewing the second one by hand for a video, but never found the time to actually doing it, and the pieces remained in the Pile for months, and months, and way more than a year.

Until one day I bought a meter of cotton cheesecloth (mostly because it was almost cheaper than buying a sample) and it felt like a good material to make a nicely looking head wrapper, to keep my hair out of the way when needed.

A couple months later, it was finally time to bring this project to the top of the list, and even if I was sewing two by hand it went pretty quickly: we had a weekend when it was too hot to do anything else, and by the end of it the wraps were done.

All that remained was finish writing the instructions for my FreeSoftWear patterns website <https://sewing-patterns.trueelena.org/contemporary_unisex/headwear/hair_towel_wrap/index.html>>, and having some pictures taken, and this project was done.

And now, on to documenting a few more things I’ve done lately, and to start working on the other projects I have added to the queue in the meantime.

small things. Like, you know, a kitchen :D↩︎

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in June 2026

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:39:27 +0000

This month’s work was dominated by the transition of Debian 12 “bookworm” to support by the LTS team, and by review of some large updates to Linux stable branches.

Linux 6.12 is currently available in bookworm-backports, but that suite will stop accepting uploads after the last bookworm point release. I updated some supporting packages in bookworm in preparation for adding Linux 6.12 there. I also prepared for the possibility that bookworm-backports would close earlier.

Since the LTS team is still also maintaining Debian 11 “bullseye” until August, I reviewed upstream changes for both Linux 5.10 and 6.1 stable branches and reported a number of regressions and other issues.

Debian packages:
- firmware-free:
  - Merge requests:
    - merged !11: Apply relevant changes from firmware-nonfree
- firmware-nonfree:
  - Bugs:
  - Merge requests:
    - merged !150: Update and remove obsolete package relations
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 20260519-1 to unstable
    - uploaded version 20260519-1~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
- kernel-wedge:
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 2.106~deb12u1 to bookworm-security
- linux:
  - Bugs:
    - closed #1128861: linux: when serving NFS, client attempts to lock served files fail with “No locks available”
    - replied to #1140461: spam wave of kernel: tpm tpm0: tpm_try_transmit: send(): error -62
  - Merge requests:
  - Uploads:
    - (LTS) uploaded version 6.12.94-1~bpo12+1 to bookworm-backports
    - uploaded version 7.0.12-2~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports
    - uploaded version 7.1~rc7-1~exp1 to experimental
  - (LTS) updated the bullseye-security branch to 5.10.259, but did not upload this version
  - (LTS) updated the bookworm-security branch to 6.1.176, but did not upload this version
- (LTS) linux-6.12:
  - prepared this backport package for bookworm-security, but did not upload it yet
- linux-base:
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 4.12.1~deb12u1 to bookworm-security
- wireless-regdb:
  - Merge requests:
    - opened and merged !8: Update to 2026.05.30
  - Uploads:
    - uploaded version 2026.05.30-1 to unstable
    - uploaded version 2026.05.30-1~deb12u1 to bookworm
    - uploaded version 2026.05.30-1~deb13u1 to trixie
Debian non-package bugs:
- release.debian.org:
  - opened and closed #1139579: trixie-pu: package wireless-regdb/2026.05.30-1~deb13u1
  - opened #1139581: trixie-pu: package wireless-regdb/2026.05.30-1~deb13u1
  - opened #1139582: bookworm-pu: package wireless-regdb/2026.05.30-1~deb12u1
Mailing lists:
- debian-backports:
  - (LTS) posted EOL for bookworm-backports
- debian-boot:
  - (LTS) posted and replied to Adding Linux 6.12 udebs for bookworm LTS
- debian-devel:
  - replied to Understanding CI in Salsa, timeouts and runners
- debian-kernel:
  - posted Agenda items for kernel-team meeting on 2026-06-10
- debian-lts:
  - posted and replied to Preparation for Linux 6.12 in bookworm
- debian-lts-announce:
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4627-1] kernel-wedge update
  - posted [SECURITY] [DLA 4628-1] linux-base update
- (LTS) stable:
  - reviewed >1000 patches included in 5.10.258-rc1, 5.10.259-rc1, and 6.1.176-rc1
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 210/589] spi: rockchip: fix controller deregistration
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 211/589] net/sched: sch_red: Replace direct dequeue call with peek and qdisc_dequeue_peeked
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 238/342] net: bridge: use a stable FDB dst snapshot in RCU readers
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 244/589] spi: topcliff-pch: fix use-after-free on unbind
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 245/589] cpuidle: powerpc: avoid double clear when breaking snooze
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 257/589] PCI/AER: Stop ruling out unbound devices as error source
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 263/589] media: uvcvideo: Enable VB2_DMABUF for metadata stream
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 267/589] media: rc: streamzap: Error handling in probe
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 274/589] drm/gem: Fix inconsistent plane dimension calculation in drm_gem_fb_init_with_funcs()
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 503/589] crypto: af_alg - Cap AEAD AD length to 0x80000000
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 035/342] batman-adv: tp_meter: fix race condition in send error reporting
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 036/342] batman-adv: tp_meter: avoid role confusion in tp_list
  - replied to [PATCH 5.10 310/342] usb: typec: ucsi: Dont update power_supply on power role change if not connected
  - replied to [PATCH 5.15 002/570] ip6_tunnel: Fix usage of skb_vlan_inet_prepare()
  - replied to [PATCH 5.15 299/411] ALSA: aloop: Fix peer runtime UAF during format-change stop
  - replied to [PATCH 5.15 323/411] spi: topcliff-pch: fix controller deregistration
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 011/522] tools/bootconfig: Cleanup bootconfig footer size calculations
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 033/522] net/sched: Revert “net/sched: Restrict conditions for adding duplicating netems to qdisc tree”
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 054/522] selftests/bpf: add generic BPF program tester-loader
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 064/522] selftests/bpf: S/iptables/iptables-legacy/ in the bpf_nf and xdp_synproxy test
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 208/522] net: Annotate sk->sk_write_space() for UDP SOCKMAP.
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 249/522] r8152: Block future register access if register access fails
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 337/522] arm64/mm: Enable batched TLB flush in unmap_hotplug_range()
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 342/522] thermal: core: Fix thermal zone governor cleanup issues
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 375/522] net: ipv4: stop checking crypto_ahash_alignmask
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 431/522] cgroup/cpuset: Reset DL migration state on can_attach() failure
  - replied to [PATCH 6.1 470/522] usb: musb: omap2430: Fix use-after-free in omap2430_probe()

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tl 0.0.2 on CRAN: First Update

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:02:00 +0000

The still-very-new logging package tl was just updated for the first time at CRAN. The tl package wraps the (also very new) rspdlite package to offer a lightweight and consistent logging interface from both R and C++ that enjoys being ‘tiny, fast, capable’ thanks to spdlite. With tl we follow the same idea that our spdl package introduced: a simple consistent interface via just the tl:: prefix and the appropropriate logging level. In other words tl::debug("Alert: foo now '{}'", foo) will work from both R and C++ (given a variable foo, and, in the case of C++, an extra semicolon) and log if the current level is ‘debug’ or higher, and skip logging if not.

This release adds a fallback when compilation does not use the (required) C++20 standard, expands the README and adds a initialization helper function reflecting a preferred default logging level from either an environment variable or a global option. We are also working on adding tl to an example package as a simple illustration, more on that hopefully soon.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2025-06-30)

Added badges to README now that package is on CRAN, add NEWS file

Condition the provided header on C++20 use, offer fallback

Add an exported initialization function picking up a logging level from either an environment variable or a global option, see '?init'

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

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

Joey Hess: big loads offgrid with a small battery (sidelined)

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:10:45 +0000

No matter that the hype cycle wants you to think, the renewable energy transition is the biggest thing happening in tech and it's happening faster and faster. Despite being neck deep in it personally with offgrid solar projects, most recently solar hot water, increasingly it becomes clear I'm watching from the sidelines.

In Australia, everyone gets 24 kwh of free daytime electric power now. That's without installing any solar panels of their own, the grid just has that much excess capacity. All it takes to save $thousands per year (and avoid emissions) is to schedule some big loads like the hot water heater and EV to charge during the day. To save more, drop in a home battery that charges for free and powers the home through the evening.

In Germany, a 2 kwh plug-in home battery costs $350 and the electric company will pay you $130 per year to plug it into your wall. There are similar offers throughout Europe.

In Cuba something something geopolitics, oil blockade, belt and road => suddenly 1GW of solar farms with another gigawatt on the way.

I'll soon visit South Carolina where with no subsidies whatsoever from a decidedly renewable-unfriendly government, it made sense for my dad's house to get a whole home battery and double the solar array. The resulting system will be able to power the well pump and probably also the whole geothermal HVAC system through the kind of month-long grid down events that happened in Hurricane Helene.

Myself, well, I've got a by modern standards small 4 kwh home battery that powers my house offgrid, and I've recently installed a heat pump hot water heater. That's after about a decade pondering what solution to use for solar hot water, to replace an aging and horrible propane instant water heater. I've in the past considered everything from evacuated tubes to special direct drive inverters to DC resistive MPTT dump loads. The solution turned out to be just a big enough solar array, and plugging in a 120v hot water heater that needs only 500 watts in heat pump mode. Plus a small amount of code to manage when it runs.

In the time I was thinking about that, economies of scale and tech improvements just wiped all those other possibilities off the map, it's not economical to install and maintain a separate evactuated tube heat collector when a pile of solar panels costs so little and when electric hot water has gotten more than 200% efficient.

I also recently completed my permanant EV charger installation, with a new inverter and conduit and proper wiring, and increased the car's charge rate to 2 kw. Eliminating the need to charge anywhere except at home except on road trips.

Coordinating when these two big loads run, to maximize solar production and ensure that the house battery is full at the end of the day was ... not hard at all actually? The car charger amps can be dialed up and down to match incoming solar power fairly well, and leave some room for the hot water heater. They both operate as more or less dump loads. More or less because neither one can be cycled on or off very fast (to avoid wear and tear on the car's contactor and the heat pump's compressor), so it makes sense to leave them on and skate through short cloudy sections of the day, as long as the house battery doesn't get too low.

How low is too low for the house battery? Depends on the time of day. The code it's currently using, which may get tweaked over winter:

    -- When the battery is charged enough to run major loads that may prevent
    -- charging it further.
    --
    -- This varies with the hour of day. Early in the day, the battery does not
    -- need to be as full to be considered well charged, since there is
    -- still plenty of time for it to charge up. Later in the day, with less
    -- time to charge, it needs to be more full.
    wellCharged :: Hour -> Percentage
    wellCharged (Hour hour)
            | hour < 9 = Percentage 90 -- night
            | pmhour <= 0 = Percentage 50
            | pmhour <= 1 = Percentage 60
            | pmhour <= 2 = Percentage 70
            | pmhour <= 3 = Percentage 80
            | pmhour <= 4 = Percentage 90
            | otherwise = Percentage 95
      where
            pmhour = hour - 12

More complicated is, what to do it there's solar power to run one or the other, but not both? This is starting to get into the territory of microgrids now, or of demand response programs, so there's a whole industry or three out there doing industry things geared at the kind of no-brainer solutions I mentioned earlier. From what I've gathered, all of them involve proprietary protocols and gear.

What I've done is to read the state of the hot water heater and car, and prioritize hot water over the car. Except, if the car is below 10% it urgently needs to charge.

And I found a really simple way to decide when to run the low-priority load: Just check if the house battery's current charge will be considered wellCharged in an hour. So if it's 2 pm, the battery needs to be 80% charged to run the lower-priority load, and if it dips below that, that load will turn off but the high-priority load will keep running down to 70% battery.

Unfortunately, getting any information out of my hot water heater relies on a vendor API server that is often down on weekends, and reverse engineered the web page of my EVSE[1] to control it, to say nothing of the nightmare of getting the car's state of charge from The Cloud.

Anyway, I'm pleased with having easily tweakable code and how far I've taken this offgrid, and everything I've learned doing so, but like I said, I'm clearly observing from the sidelines over here while the most significant thing for all of us is going on over there. You might appreciate my code or method, but you'll eventually be plugging in a home battery or signing up for a free daytime power tarrif from your electric company, or having professionals install a whole home system for climate resiliance.

So my question is, where does free software fit into all this? There are things like Home Assistant that do productize the kind of thing I'm doing enough to be useful more widely. But still niche. Meanwhile there are inverters and batteries that phone home to China, and every consumer facing install is either "use this device" or "integrate these 3 proprietary devices".

I don't think focusing on these negatives is really useful though, I'm more trying to understand where all this is going and then maybe get out ahead of it in some useful way with free software. Your thoughts welcome.

[1] Obviously OpenEVSE exists, but it didn't meet my needs hardware wise. And I could set my EVSE to use an OCPP server but it was easier to do the screen scraping than find an appropriate one, and I have the feeling I would not appreciate learning any more about OCPP, in the same way I really don't want to know a lot about web browsers' tag soup mode.

Russell Coker: Links June 2026

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:53:19 +0000

This is amusing, a flaw in the crypto-currency Zcash allowed generating Zcash from nothing and there’s no way to know if anyone did that [1].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus Magazine about corporate valuations and why companies claim SciFi technologies [2].

Charles Stross wrote an interesting retcon of James Bond [3].

Trakkr.ai has an intresting post comparing political bias in LLM models, the site has lots of other comparisons of models too [4].

Wouter Verhelst wrote a blog post about his tested usage of LLMs for code generation and the conclusions about what it will do to the FOSS development process, not a lot of new material but he put a lot of good ideas together in one place [5].

Here is the git repository for the programs used for the ssh-audit.com site, really good setup for checking ssh configuration [6].

The isaiprofitable.com site is periodically updated with the profit/loss totals for AI companies, no surprise that every company is losing money apart from NVidia and NVidia are investing in the other companies [7].

Elvira Bary wrote an informative article about Russia’s inability to build or design anything good [8]. Looks like we are at risk of another Chernobyl…

Lev Lafayette wrote an interesting blog post about the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer with over 10,000,000 cores [9].

Point Free wrote an interesting blog post about running the Gemma 4 LLM which is 25G of data at a usable speed on a Xeon system with DDR3 RAM and no GPU [10].

[1] https://tinyurl.com/2cxx2e6h
[2] https://tinyurl.com/2cxotle7
[3] https://tinyurl.com/2bgapt88
[4] https://trakkr.ai/bias
[5] https://tinyurl.com/22s2fome
[6] https://github.com/jtesta/ssh-audit
[7] https://isaiprofitable.com/
[8] https://tinyurl.com/26p4lkr4
[9] http://levlafayette.com/node/808
[10] https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/

Russell Coker: Dirty Clone and SE Linux

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:04:25 +0000

There is a new Linux kernel exploit out named Dirty Clone [1].

The first thing to do to exploit this is to create a container with a separate network namespace via one of the following commands:

unshare -Urn
bwrap --bind / / --unshare-user --unshare-net --uid 0 --gid 0 /bin/bash

The Jfrog people recommend “unshare -Urn” but I gave the Bubblewrap command as an option as it should work equally well and in some situations may be permitted when unshare isn’t.

The next step to exploiting it is to use the ip command to set the links up, below is what happens in a user session on a SE Linux system with user_t as the login domain:

# ip link set lo up
RTNETLINK answers: Operation not permitted

That will give an entry in /var/log/audit/audit.log like the following:

type=AVC msg=audit(1782818856.618:3610): avc:  denied  { net_admin } for  pid=1829 comm="ip" capability=12  scontext=user_u:user_r:user_t:s0 tcontext=user_u:user_r:user_t:s0 tclass=cap_userns permissive=0
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1782818856.618:3610): arch=c000003e syscall=46 success=yes exit=32 a0=3 a1=7ffebe5f9e50 a2=0 a3=0 items=0 ppid=1638 pid=1829 auid=0 uid=0 gid=1000 euid=0 suid=0 fsuid=0 egid=1000 sgid=1000 fsgid=1000 tty=pts0 ses=17 comm="ip" exe="/usr/bin/ip" subj=user_u:user_r:user_t:s0 key=(null)ARCH=x86_64 SYSCALL=sendmsg AUID="root" UID="root" GID="test" EUID="root" SUID="root" FSUID="root" EGID="test" SGID="test" FSGID="test"
type=PROCTITLE msg=audit(1782818856.618:3610): proctitle=6970006C696E6B00736574006C6F007570

Unlike previous exploits like Pintheft [2] this doesn’t require any really uncommon access to the kernel (unless you consider setting up IPSec to be really uncommon) and is allowed in many container setups.

Now on a system with the unconfined module removed (as described in the SE Linux Protection part of my post about Copy Fail [3]) the following domains have such access:

# sesearch -A -c cap_userns -p net_admin
allow container_engine_t container_engine_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow container_init_t container_init_t:cap_userns { chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner kill net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setgid setuid };
allow container_kvm_t container_kvm_t:cap_userns { chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner kill net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setgid setuid };
allow container_t container_t:cap_userns { chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner kill net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setgid setuid };
allow crio_t crio_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow dockerd_t dockerd_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow dockerd_user_t dockerd_user_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow init_t init_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_module sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow iptables_t iptables_t:cap_userns { net_admin net_raw };
allow podman_t podman_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow podman_user_t podman_user_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock ipc_owner kill lease linux_immutable mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setfcap setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_boot sys_chroot sys_nice sys_pacct sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource sys_time sys_tty_config };
allow spc_t spc_t:cap_userns { audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock kill mknod net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setgid setpcap setuid sys_admin sys_chroot sys_nice sys_ptrace sys_rawio sys_resource };
allow spc_user_t spc_user_t:cap_userns { chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner kill net_admin net_bind_service net_raw setgid setuid };
allow staff_bubblewrap_t staff_bubblewrap_t:cap_userns { dac_override net_admin setpcap sys_admin sys_ptrace };
allow sysadm_bubblewrap_t sysadm_bubblewrap_t:cap_userns { dac_override net_admin setpcap sys_admin sys_ptrace };
allow user_bubblewrap_t user_bubblewrap_t:cap_userns { dac_override net_admin setpcap sys_admin sys_ptrace };

Conclusion

It seems that SE Linux configured in the strict mode prevents this exploit in the most obvious use case. But with the range of container related domains that are granted such access it seems quite likely that some configurations and use cases will permit it.

Overall the protection that the standard policy for SE Linux can offer (in a non-default configuration) against net_admin access isn’t bad, but isn’t very good either.

I think this will be the first of many exploits based on cap_userns access and that we need to do some work in tightening the SE Linux access controls on such things. One possible way of doing this is to have a program run inside a container in a domain that has permissions such as net_admin to setup the container and not allow domain transitions from the regular programs run in the container (the actual work) to the domain used for network setup.

The increasing use of containers by applications is only going to make this problem worse. I think that what we need is something like Flatpak for the vast majority of desktop/phone applications with a container setup program that works with apps packaged in the distribution packaging method (not from Flathub). This is something I’m going to investigate for future blog posts.

Junichi Uekawa: So I learnt that last is now in wtmpdb.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:28:37 +0000

So I learnt that last is now in wtmpdb. But then journalctl --list-boots was the journald replacement.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 323 released

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 323. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Debian adds an extra "Flags:" line in the output of ocamlobjinfo via a
  patch, so adjust how we test OCaml to ensure cross-distribution
  compatibility. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#430)
* Update copyright years.

[ Michael Daniels ]
* Fix tests when using zipdetails version >= 4.006.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Daniel Baumann: Debian: Linux Vulnerability Mitigation (PACKET_EDIT_MEME.c)

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:42:49 +0000

The Linux local root exploit of today’s news is PACKET_EDIT_MEME.c [CVE-2026-46331] which is also known as pedit COW.

This vulnerability has been fixed as of linux 7.1~rc7, but also fixed in trixies 6.12.94-1 as well as testing/unstable 7.0.13-1. If you run an older or different kernel you might want to mitigate the vulnerability until you can update and reboot affected systems.

The vulnerability can be mitigated by unloading and blocking the act_pedit module, linux-vulnerability-mitigation as of 20260629-1 (uploaded to sid, trixie-fastforward-backports and people.debian.org/~daniel) does that automatically for you.

Russell Coker: Plaud

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:39:14 +0000

While watching a YouTube video I saw an advert for the Plaud AI Note Taker [1]. The Plaud device looks pretty good for what it does, taking notes and managing them, using some sort of LLM function to manage the notes. The devices all cost about $300 which is an amount that doesn’t seem unreasonable for someone who’s in a lot of meetings. One of the models is the “NotePin” that seems comparable to the Humane AI Pin I previously blogged about [2].

The business model for Plaud is based on only allowing 5 hours per month of free transcriptions, then charging $16.25/month for 20 hours per month and $33.33/month for unlimited use. That’s quite expensive for any serious use.

The number of people in the market for an audio recording system that automatically transcribes things may be greater than the number of people in the market for all the stuff that the Humane AI Pin did, but it still may not be enough to run a profitable business when competing with apps on mobile phones.

While the product does look decent it seems that they are making the same mistakes as the original Humane developers did, of wanting to lock it down as a subscription based service which reduces the usability of the device. If they had sold an Android hand-held computer with their own app pre-loaded and allowed the user to install a different app then it would have been much more usable. If they had sold Android devices designed for the note taking market and allowed people to choose their own apps to install then their products would have a much longer life expectancy.

The majority of Android devices in use are probably out of support but still working while the Humane AI pin can’t be used any more and at some time in the not too distant future the Plaud devices will also become unusable. People who buy devices like the Plaud seem to be unaware of the history of such things and the expected future for them. But possibly some people just consider $300 for a year of use to be an acceptable price. If someone wanted to purchase a new high end phone every year and sell their previous one they would probably have a net cost of about $500/year.

Maybe I should look for work with a company with an implausible AI based business plan. It would be fun developing such a device if you weren’t emotionally invested in the project. Just develop new technology, earn a heap of money, play with fun computers, and move on to the next thing when it collapses. Just like all the Internet companies about 25 years ago.

Russell Coker: Some GPU Stuff

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:22:09 +0000

After getting a HP Z4 G4 tower server/workstation to house my Intel Battlemage GPU [1] I’ve been playing around with some GPU stuff. For years I’ve been just buying GPUs based on the resolution and price and not bothering about anything else due to lack of ability to measure what cards are doing. The nvidia-smi program is really good for NVidia/CUDA setups but I hadn’t been aware of anything similar for AMD cards. As I prefer AMD cards for my workstations due to driver issues with NVidia that was a problem for me.

I’ve recently discovered that the program nvtop (Debian package nvtop) shows the GPU use of multiple GPU types, for me it’s worked on AMD and Intel discrete GPUs and shows some information on Intel integrated GPUs, I don’t have others convenient for testing at the moment. Currently BOINC has the Einstein@Home [2] project running on the HP Z4 G4 and it’s using between 66% and 100% of GPU compute power and 1.6G of GPU RAM. Using 100% GPU compute power allegedly takes 62W of power out of the 190W quoted TDP. I presume that the power use reported by nvtop is very inaccurate.

A friend installed a LLM on that system and the libraries used for the LLM were sufficient that BOINC just started using the GPU.

On my workstation running an AMD “[Radeon RX 460/560D / Pro 450/455/460/555/555X/560/560X]” (actually R560) with 4G of GPU RAM I have mpv taking 1G of GPU RAM to play a FullHD video expanded to a full screen window on my 5120*2160 display. I also have about 2G used by the kwin_wayland process (the Wayland server for KDE). That doesn’t leave enough GPU RAM to allow Einstein@Home to use the GPU. When playing the FullHD video in question (which is 1.2G for 42 minutes – about 500KB/s) at 1.5* speed (a common playback speed I use) that takes about 30% of the compute power on my GPU.

I had installed the rocm-opencl-icd package on my workstation (with a 5120*2160 monitor) and restarted boinc-client.service which is all that’s needed to allow BOINC to use an AMD GPU. Then the screen started flickering as the Einstein process repeatedly core dumped which I initially assumed to be it’s reaction to not having enough GPU RAM available. On every core dump the screen flickered so it went through a process of dozens of screen flickers until it had caused a sufficient number of core dumps and BOINC gave up running that job.

Another annoyance is that the boincmgr program (the graphical program for managing BOINC systems) launches two webkit processes that each use about 400M of GPU RAM, so even if other things weren’t using all my GPU RAM the boincmgr process would stop the BOINC jobs from using the GPU. I shut down some of the programs that were using GPU RAM until there was 2G free and the BOINC process kept crashing so it seems that there is some other issue.

On another system with a 4K monitor there were Chrome and Chromium GPU process taking 1.1G and 500M of GPU RAM respectively and the KWin Wayland process was taking 1G of GPU RAM. So that’s well over half the GPU RAM for just browsers and Wayland. With programs like Kitty (terminal emulator) and Nheko (Matrix client) taking over 100M of GPU RAM it seems that 4G is the bare minimum for GPU RAM with modern software and a 4K or similar display.

I also noticed the kscreenlocker_greet process taking 440M of GPU RAM. I wonder if a hostile web server could make a web browser take more GPU RAM and starve the screenlocker of GPU RAM, could that allow forcing a screen lock operation to fail?

It seems that 4G is the minimum for modern systems, which isn’t necessarily a problem as GPUs that are capable of driving 4K displays tend to have no less than 4G. My local computer store has new GPUs with 4G starting at $120 but 12G seems to be the next option up which starts at about $400.

Ebay currently has a selection of AMD GPUs with 8G of RAM under $200. I’ve had some problems with the GPU in my workstation crashing as described in my previous post where I thought it was driver issues [3]. I now believe that there are hardware issues and will look into buying one of the cards with 8G.

Further Investigation

I need to determine which of the AMD GPUs that are currently going cheap on ebay are best. While my current PC has support for 150W PCIe power I’d rather something less power hungry than that. I have occasional issues of mpv reporting that my system is too slow for a video so slightly more compute power on the GPU would be good, but I think that every available option has significantly more compute power.

I need to find out what the relationship is between screen resolution and GPU memory. If I get an 8K display or an array of 4*4K displays (which is quite plausible as 27″ 4K displays go for $230 each) will I find 16G of GPU RAM as limiting as I find 4G now?

The nvtop program tracks PCIe data transfers for AMD GPUs, I haven’t yet seen more than 25MB/s and I need to do more tests to see what the maximum is. Running on an Intel Battlemage card nvtop doesn’t report PCIe data transfer speed which is a missing feature in either the driver or the program. I need to find out where the problem is and report a bug if someone hasn’t already done so.

The GPU RAM use of some applications seems excessive. 440M for a lockscreen? 100M+ for a terminal emulator? 320M for Thunderbird?

Steve McIntyre: It's dead, Jim!

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:33:00 +0000

I previously wrote about the upcoming UEFI CA rollover. Well, it's happened now - the old Microsoft UEFI CA from 2011 expired yesterday:

Third Party Marketplace Root (used for signing option ROMs and other software)

  Subject: C=US, ST=Washington, L=Redmond, O=Microsoft Corporation, CN=Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011
  Validity
    Not Before: Jun 27 21:22:45 2011 GMT
    Not After : Jun 27 21:32:45 2026 GMT

It's dead - it's not coming back...

The world doesn't seem to have ended yesterday, so I guess we did ok? :-)

How did we do?

After a lot of prodding behind the scenes, Debian and many other distributions managed to get new shim binaries dual-signed with both the old and new CAs. The members of the shim-review team did a sterling job with reviews in the last few weeks. Since I started pushing people in May, we've had 21 reviews accepted successfully - see here for the list. Great stuff! Microsoft have also been working quickly - many of those shim submissions were accepted and signed by Microsoft very quickly too, with a turnaround time of less than 1 day in some cases.

Not all of those signed shims have been published and used by the distros involved yet, but expect to see them in the wild in the coming weeks and months.

These binaries should be good for people to use for the foreseeable future, until either we need to do another CA rollover or (sadly, more likely) we find an issue in shim that necessitates a new release.

What's next?

We already have one of our new dual-signed shim binaries in place in Debian, in unstable and testing (Forky) right now. In a couple of weeks from now, we'll be rolling out very similar new dual-signed shim binaries in the next point releases for Debian 12 (bookworm) and Debian 13 (trixie). We'll also be upgrading fwupd in both those point releases, to make DB and KEK updates work better.

For more information about these updates, see https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot/CAChanges. For your own safety, validate that your systems are updated when possible. If you don't, they may fail to boot in future.

Jonathan McDowell: onak 0.6.5 released

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:44:00 +0000

I had intended that the next release of onak, my OpenPGP keyserver, would be 0.7.0, and include OpenPGP v6 support (RFC9580). However events conspired to make a 0.6.5 release a really good idea.

Firstly, I threw an LLM at the code base and asked it to review it. This isn’t intended to be a post about LLMs, but there’s a considerable amount of pressure at work to be “AI native”. I’m very much an “AI” sceptic, so I figured throwing it at a code base I know well might be an interesting exercise. It did find a bunch of embarrassing mistakes, but I don’t think there was anything earth shattering that a human reviewer wouldn’t have pulled me on. The problem is with a hobby project with a single user there’s no actual review of my work.

I also enabled GitHub’s security scanning. It mostly complained about format strings, and those were easy enough to fix up.

Next I threw AFLplusplus at the code. I’d previously tried American Fuzzy Lop, but not in some time. AFL++ found a whole bunch of places I should really have checked available buffer lengths and wasn’t doing so. It really is an incredibly easy tool to get up and running.

valgrind is also a tool I’ve used before, and rate highly. Thankfully it didn’t find anything in my testing this time.

Finally I threw a few more automated tests into the mix and discovered something has changed around dynamic linking such that the libonak symbols in the dynamic key database backends were using private copies, rather than the main binary. This caused problems with seeing the correct configuration settings in some instances.

All in all this release is not my proudest moment; a bunch of the issues fixed should never have made it to a release.

(Also, just to explicitly state it, all the actual code in this release was artisanly crafted by me, in vim. The only involvement of an LLM was for a review pass.)

Available locally or via GitHub.

0.6.5 - 27th June 2026

Lots of fixes/improvements around length checking

Added extra basic tests for maxpaths/sixdegrees/CGI

Correctly end transactions in the stacked backend

Ensure the file backend avoids stale key data on updates

Fix decoding of v2/3 signature creation times

Fix EdDSA signature parsing when r < 249 bits long

Fix migration of bools from old to new config style

Fix parsing of new config details for DB parameters

Fix problems with linking + dynamic backends

Fix RSA-SHA2-384 signature checking

Fix sixdegrees parsing of keyids with high bit set

Handle failures in maxpath more gracefully

Make new style config path match old path

Russ Allbery: Review: The Folded Sky

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 02:58:00 +0000

Review: The Folded Sky, by Elizabeth Bear

Series:	White Space #3
Publisher:	Saga Press
Copyright:	June 2025
ISBN:	1-6680-7812-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	483

The Folded Sky is a far-future space opera and a fairly direct sequel to Ancestral Night, but with a different protagonist. You do not need to have a vivid memory of the previous book to read this one. It is somewhere around Elizabeth Bear's 31st (!) novel, depending on how one counts and what one includes.

Sunyata Song is an archinformist, which is sort of an archaeologist, sort of a librarian, and sort of a historian. She recovers, decodes, and organizes information so that it can be preserved and made usefully available. As the book opens, she is, after an exceedingly long white space journey in an actively hostile ship with a (to Sunya at least) an atavistically off-putting crew, reaching her goal: a vast artifact that I won't describe further to avoid any spoilers for Ancestral Night. She is eager to get to work, an eagerness that is both heightened and made more anxious by the discovery that her academic rival and abusive ex has arrived before her. The pirate attack doesn't help, nor (at least at first) does the surprise appearance of her wife and kids.

The opening of this book is a lot of infodumping mixed with nearly stream-of-consciousness emotional dumping. The style shift in this series continues to surprise me; previously, Elizabeth Bear books avoided reader hand-holding to the point of bafflement if you weren't paying close attention. Not here. The Folded Sky takes the shift perhaps too far, and I almost stalled out at the start of this book when Sunya's near-constant self-conscious litany and analysis of fears and concerns started feeling like whining.

The book picks up considerably after the attempted murder.

About a third of the way through, The Folded Sky feels like it's settling into a recognizable subgenre of murder mystery except set in the far future with fascinating technology and aliens. There has been an attempted murder on a closed station besieged by pirates. There is a law enforcement officer present, but they don't have a lot of investigative experience. For various reasons, Sunya decides to start poking around while being conscious she has no idea what she's doing. The bumbling detective is a common trope, so I thought that was where the story was headed.

It is, sort of. There is a mystery and Sunya is involved in solving it. But that's only a small fraction of what's going on, and by the end of the book the plot has shifted firmly back to the genre of space opera, with a side note of family... drama is the wrong word. Whatever one would call a story about raising a rebellious teenager while trying very hard to not turn conflicts into actual drama.

I am fascinated by the characterization of this book. Sunya is something of an emotional mess, but Bear doesn't use that fact in the ways that I would normally expect. Similar to Ancestral Night, I finished this book thinking that The Folded Sky is primarily an examination of rightminding, but a more subtle one than the previous novel.

Rightminding is a central technology of the White Space series, and I suspect its intended thematic core. Humans in this civilization are equipped with near-universal implants that allow conscious manipulation of one's neurotransmitters and thus emotional state, either by the wearer or by a helpful nearby AI. The fox, the implant used to accomplish this, comes with some other features such as sensory recordings and the ability to load ayatanas (James White–style personality recordings to provide some bit of necessary expertise), but rightminding is its primary and most frequently-used function. It is the critical technology that allowed humans to break out of cycles of endless war and join the other peaceful inhabitants of the galaxy in a shared civilization.

The name is (intentionally, I assume) Orwellian because Bear knows that many readers, particularly those from the US who have been steeped in simplistic libertarian ideas, will find the idea profoundly creepy. (This was a major plot point in Grail.) This book is not the argument for the technology, though; Bear dealt with that in Ancestral Night. This book is a look at its practical messiness for a person who needs a lot of psychological support.

Sunya is anxious, prone to catastrophizing, hates surprises, has some PTSD-style symptoms around space habitats due to earlier trauma, and is also dealing with the unwelcome reappearance of her ex-girlfriend who stole her work. Her first-person narration tends towards insecurity and anxiety spirals, and in another book this might signal an unreliable narrator. In this book, though, there are no dramatic emotional revelations or backstory twists the way there were in Ancestral Night, and the resolution of her troubled relationship with her daughter only partly hinges on plot developments. Instead, Sunya muddles through, with a lot of self-analysis, help from her fox, and a great deal of support from her wife.

This makes it sounds like the emotional mess at the start of the book is left unresolved at the end, but that's not true at all. The muddling through works! Sunya keeps doing things that I thought were foreshadowing some catastrophe, but she knows herself better than the reader does. Bear largely avoids the sudden ruptures that are normally used to resolve emotional problems in fiction. Instead, Sunya spends a lot of time and energy working on her thinking and her relationships while trying to be ethical and useful, and those efforts slowly bear fruit.

I'm worried this makes the book sound boring; rest assured that it isn't. This emotional subplot is only an undercurrent in the novel, and the main plot has enough weird science, alien aliens, and space opera drama to satisfy my page-turning desires.

I'm focusing on the emotional arc in this review because I find it so unusual and so oddly compelling, particularly in retrospect. This is not how one normally does emotional development in a novel. Sunya's fox and rightminding aren't even the focus except when the pirates express their typical libertarian disgust for the idea. Rightminding is an entirely normal part of Sunya's life that she relies on. It doesn't solve all of her problems, but it gives her a foundation from which to tackle them in the slow and frustrating and inconsistent way that is required outside of novels, via a long series of small decisions to be the person she wants to be.

I think The Folded Sky will be more hit and miss for readers than the other books of this series. Sunya was, for me at least, a much harder character to like early in the book, and it takes quite a while for the plot to get going. But this is one of those books that I've not stopped thinking about since I finished it. I think it makes a fascinating pair with Ancestral Night. The first book makes the philosophical argument for rightminding, and this book shows the practical reality with all of its messiness. The Synarche has some significant flaws (including the status of AIs, which is another interesting subplot), but it's a workable system.

It feels rare to read a science fiction novel that shows this level of messiness without pairing it with an argument for radical change, and as frustrating as it was to read in places, I am intrigued by the overall effect. Sometimes acknowledging problems and working on them within an existing framework works.

Followed by a book tentatively titled Shipwreck Star that does not yet have a release date.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Jonathan Wiltshire: Streamlining Debian Updates with AI: The Stable Update Adviser

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:06:52 +0000

Please consider supporting my work in Debian and elsewhere through Liberapay.

Some months ago I started working on a small experiment: a specialised LLM assistant for Debian maintainers preparing proposed updates for stable and oldstable.

The aim is not to replace review by the Stable Release Managers, nor to automate away maintainer judgement. It is meant to be a pre-advice tool: something maintainers can use while they are still preparing a proposed update, before sending it to other people to review.

If you’ve uploaded to stable before you may have some experience with our acceptance criteria. Does the version sort correctly? Is the changelog clear enough? Is the delta focused? Are the patches documented? Are the right bugs or CVEs mentioned? Are they of sufficient severity? What is the risk to users of stable? Is there an ABI change hiding in the diff?

These are the sort of checks where a structured first pass can be useful, provided it is treated as advice rather than authority.

To explain what the tool does, what could be more appropriate in an AI age than to ask it?

Describe yourself and your abilities and limitations for a blog post.

It answers:

I’m Debian Stable Update Adviser, a specialised ChatGPT assistant for Debian maintainers preparing proposed updates for Debian stable and oldstable.

My main job is to review a single .debdiff and give practical, policy-aware feedback before a maintainer submits or uploads a proposed update. I focus on whether the update appears suitable for Debian stable or oldstable, especially under the Stable Release Managers’ expectations for minimal, targeted, low-risk changes.

I can inspect a debdiff for Debian changelog quality, including suite, version, bug references, CVE mentions, and rationale. I can check version correctness using Debian dpkg version semantics. I can review packaging changes under debian/, such as patches, maintscripts, symbols files, conffiles, Build-Depends, autopkgtests, and control metadata. I can also group upstream source changes into behavioural and non-behavioural categories, and flag areas that may carry regression risk.

My reports are intended to be concise and useful to maintainers. A typical review includes a quick summary, behavioural and non-behavioural change breakdown, mechanical policy checks, risk assessment, stable-policy checklist, acceptance likelihood, rationale, maintainer advice, and a clear conclusion.

My limitations are important. I cannot prove that a package builds, that tests pass, that the bug is fully fixed, or that the Stable Release Managers will accept the upload. I also do not replace maintainer judgment, archive review, autopkgtest results, reproducibility checks, or real-world upgrade testing. I can only review the provided debdiff and point out likely issues, risks, and improvements.

I also do not proceed without a valid debdiff. The whole point of my review is to assess the actual proposed delta, not to speculate from package names or bug descriptions alone.

In short, I act as a focused pre-review assistant for Debian stable and oldstable proposed updates: useful for catching policy, versioning, changelog, packaging, and regression-risk issues early, but not a substitute for the Debian review process itself.

That last point is an important one. This is not an oracle, and it is not part of the Debian archive machinery. It is a checklist with some language-model assistance, aimed at reading a debdiff and pointing out things that might be worth another look.

I know that commercial AI and LLM tools are not universally welcome in Debian. That is understandable. Debian depends on transparency, human responsibility, licensing clarity, and technical correctness. LLMs have obvious problems in all of those areas. They can be wrong, and worse, they can be wrong in a fluent and plausible way. They are impossible to reproduce and their training is opaque.

But I see this as a useful first pass for a maintainer who is unused to working in stable, and would benefit from a virtual mentor giving their proposal a quick check and reassurance. Perhaps they don’t have a more experienced co-maintainer to ask. Perhaps they are conscious that stable reviews are presently a two-man effort and want to avoid adding round trips to that load. Perhaps they just need some reassurance.

So despite my reservations I am today opening the adviser up for general use, and I’m interested in feedback about how it responds to real world proposals in various states. Most of the examples I have tested with already had a green light, so the value added by the adviser is limited. I would especially be interested in seeing a transcript alongside the submitted debdiff.

Try it out

I would dearly love to build this in a more Debian-ish environment, but for now I’m limited in resources and skill to do that (help is welcome). Until that’s a reality, you can try out the ChatGPT implementation: Debian Stable Update Adviser

Russ Allbery: Review: Platform Decay

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:23:00 +0000

Review: Platform Decay, by Martha Wells

Series:	Murderbot Diaries #8
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2026
ISBN:	1-250-82701-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	245

Platform Decay is the eighth book in the Murderbot science fiction series. You absolutely should not start here, but you also don't need to remember the specifics of the previous books.

As the story opens, Murderbot and a friend (the identity of whom is a spoiler for previous books) are infiltrating a Corporation Rim torus, a massive space station that encircles a mined-out planet. (Like most science fiction megastructures, this is more space than the plot really requires.) Murderbot's mission is to exfiltrate some of Dr. Mensah's family members who have become entangled in corporate shenanigans. The corporates are eager to get revenge for the events of System Collapse, not to mention the other times Preservation Station has upended corporate plans. Murderbot's job is to stop them.

The group, in addition to one of Dr. Mensah's partners, includes an older woman and a young child. Murderbot is analytical and of course not at all emotional about children, which is reliably a good time. Also, the older woman is gruff, stubborn, and thoroughly enjoyable.

There are, of course, complications that lead to picking up more children and going through rather more of the torus than Murderbot wanted to explore. Each section of the torus is run by a different corporation and has a different constructed environment and visual aesthetic, so there are a lot of opportunities for fights, daring escapes, and incidental trouble.

Also, well:

So I had installed a mental health module. I know, I was surprised I did it too.

After the events of System Collapse, University Medical decided that Murderbot needed a bit more metal health support.

The only reason I agreed to it was that the mental health module didn't actually try to adjust my processing or core programming or anything; it just monitored my organic neural tissue. When my neural tissue started to generate weird chemicals and whatever, it would ping me to "check in with my emotional state." Seriously, I could have coded that myself.

(I told Dr. Bharadwaj that, and she said, "Would you have ever coded that yourself?" which was totally unfair and also correct. I would never have done that.)

Speaking as someone whose neural tissue sometimes generates weird chemicals and whatever, I sympathize.

The specific form this module takes is periodic "emotion check" parentheticals throughout the narration, which I found utterly delightful.

I ran that through risk assessment and it produced the equivalent of a shrug.

(Emotion check: Shrug sigil right back at you, you piece of shit.)

This is otherwise an extended action movie sort of a book, much like several of the early novellas. There are no major political or interpersonal developments here and the usual cast (apart from Murderbot) is mostly absent. Instead, we get an extended, dangerous journey through a corporation-controlled habitat, mixed with Murderbot trying to interact with humans in a way that minimizes its annoyance while being hopefully reassuring. It's competence porn with awkward but surprisingly heartfelt emotional bonding, not that Murderbot in any way wants to bond or would appreciate that description.

I doubt this will be anyone's favorite entry into the series since there are none of the big reveals or major leaps of character development there have been in the past few books. But, like all Murderbot books, the narrative tone is wonderful and all of the small asides and little moments of character interaction are an utter delight. If you've gotten this far in the series, you know what I mean and you'll be as happy to read more of it as I was. There is a part of me that is hoping for some major plot development, and I always want to see more of ART (who has no significant role in this book), but Wells has the narrative style down so perfectly that I would read and enjoy a book about Murderbot doing just about anything.

If you're this far in the series, you probably don't need a review, and since this is an action-heavy adventure rather than a character growth novel, I don't have a lot more to add. There's a new short Murderbot novel out and you want to read it. Recommended to everyone who enjoys the series.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 322 released

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 322. This version includes the following changes:

[ Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek ]
* Add a local version of the (deprecated) os.path.commonprefix method.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tl-0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 01:50:00 +0000

A new small package of mine just hit CRAN. The tl package wraps the (also very new) rspdlite package (announced last week) to offer a lightweight and consistent logging interface from both R and C++ that is also ‘tiny, fast, capable’ thanks to rspdlite.

The rspdlite announcement is a good place to get a first glimpse at that package; the upstream spdlite repo has all the details (for the C++ side of things). With tl we follow the same idea that our spdl package introduced: a simple consistent interface via just the tl:: prefix and the appropropriate logging level. In other words tl::debug("Alert -- foo is at '{}'", foo) will work from both R and C++ (given a variable foo, and in the case of C++ an extra semicolon). Just give it a try, and see how it goes. The package is still young and small.

The NEWS entry for this release is also very simple and just announces that we have a release. More details are in the ChangeLog and the GitHub repo.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2025-06-17)

Initial CRAN upload

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.

Tim Retout: seL4 repo relationships

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:36:30 +0000

The seL4 organisation on GitHub uses git-repo to manage multiple source repositories, and so there are a large number of projects to get your head around when figuring out the ecosystem.

As an experiment, I have taken the various manifest files across the org, and constructed a graph based on how frequently each pair of repositories is mentioned in a manifest together. See below:

[This may render badly when syndicated outside of my blog; and also on small screens. And probably large screens. I’ve attempted to make sure there’s a non-JS fallback – on my site with JS enabled, if you hover over a node, it should highlight connected nodes.]

The colouring of the nodes is mostly manual; I experimented with graph clustering algorithms but have not found a satisfactory result so far. Still, some clusters are obvious:

Kernel – the seL4 microkernel proper. This often but not always co-exists with the main cluster of core libraries, but it is pulled away slightly by the verification and microkit manifests.
Verification – the verification repositories (l4v, HOL, graph-refine, polyml, isabelle) form a very distinct group. These are connected only to the seL4 microkernel itself, which is the only component formally verified.
Microkit – microkit is a newer operating system framework that does not use CAmkES, so stands apart from the rest of the pack. I chose to scope this work to the seL4 org, so the LionsOS ecosystem and sDDF which are maintained by Trustworthy Systems are not shown. Also not linked is rust-sel4, because this modern world isn’t using git-repo in the main to manage its repositories.
RefOS – I’d not come across refos before, but it appears to be an example OS from 2021 built on the seL4 kernel.

It’s quite hard to pull apart the CAmkES framework and the core libraries; there are definitely some which are more associated with VM management, but the overall shape of this co-occurence data is a messy ball in the middle with some outliers in orbit. One observation is that camkes is correctly identified as more peripheral than camkes-tool, which contains the actual core CAmkES code.

Reflecting on this approach, in hindsight I’m surprised that using co-occurences worked as well as it did – there was no attempt to actually inspect the code and find direct mentions of other code e.g. library header dependencies. As the newer microkit effort largely eschews git-repo, better results might be found by actually taking that more detailed approach, so that graph edges could represent real dependencies between two packages. Additionally, this could allow diving into the various libraries held in the different ’libs’ repos, to get a more granular graph of relationships between them.

However, I think I spent more time on making it possible to render graphviz graphs easily on my blog than actually gaining any insight into the codebase!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.4.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:18:00 +0000

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1282 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 47.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 697 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.4.0 upstream Armadillo release made on Thursday. We had run a complete reverse-dependency check leading up to it, asserting there were no issues with packages dependent on it. As it sometimes goes with that many packages involved, one CRAN package reported one test failure. And it turned out to be both unrelated and pre-existing. But sorting this out over one round of email delayed things by a day. And then I went cycling for a good cause so this announcement post comes a little later than usual. The package has also been updated for Debian, built for r2u, and by now also at CRAN for the different binary releases.

All changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.0-1 (2026-06-17)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.4.0 (Medium Roast Agave)

Added fill::nan, fill::pos_inf, fill::neg_inf as optional fill forms for the Mat class

Added .push_back() for appending elements to vectors

Faster handling of find() within .elem()

Faster element-wise min() and max()

Faster conv_to when element types of input and output objects are the same

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

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. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

Vasudev Kamath: Releasing debvulns: CLI for listing Debian vulnerabilities

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:06:00 +0000

Following up on my previous post, I have released the debvulns CLI. This utility uses the same parsing logic as the debsecan-mcp server but exposes the functionality directly via the command line.

Why a new CLI?

While Debian's native debsecan utility exists, it lacks modern output formats like JSON and CSV, and fails to expose a significant amount of metadata available in the Debian Security Team's daily snapshot.

Additionally, running a persistent Model Context Protocol (MCP) server introduces context window overhead. The manifests and tool descriptions required by the protocol consume tokens even when idle. For debsecan-mcp, the MCP Inspector utility shows an overhead of roughly 150 tokens.

By contrast, an LLM can parse a standard CLI help menu on-demand without permanently draining the context window. Integrating the CLI into a persistent agent workflow can be achieved via a skill file, allowing the LLM to leverage the tool without repeated discovery overhead.

What else is NEW?

During testing, I observed discrepancies between the output of debsecan-mcp/debvulns and native debsecan. Debugging with an LLM revealed a bug in the version comparison logic that caused debvulns to underreport vulnerabilities. This has been resolved.

The current interface supports structured formatting and customizable data backends:

usage: debvulns [-h] [-s {critical,high,medium,low,negligible}] [-f {json,csv}] [--sort-by {package,cve}] [--vuln-url VULN_URL] [--epss-url EPSS_URL] [--suite SUITE]
                [--cache-dir CACHE_DIR] [--no-cache] [-v]

debvulns - CLI Debian Vulnerabilities Tracker

options:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    -s, --severity {critical,high,medium,low,negligible}
                          Filter vulnerabilities by severity
    -f, --format {json,csv}
                          Output format (default: json)
    -sort-by {package,cve}
                          Sort vulnerabilities by 'package' or 'cve'
    --vuln-url VULN_URL   Custom URL or local path for Debian Security Tracker data
    --epss-url EPSS_URL   Custom URL or local path for EPSS scores data
    --suite SUITE         Debian suite name (e.g. bookworm, sid). Auto-detected by default.
    --cache-dir CACHE_DIR
                          Directory to cache fetched and parsed data (default: /var/cache/debvulns)
    --no-cache            Do not use cached data, force downloading and parsing
    -v, --verbose         Enable verbose debug logging (sent to stderr)

By allowing users to override data sources with local snapshots of the Debian Security Tracker and EPSS feeds, debvulns can run natively in airgapped environments.

What Next?

The next step is building a Prometheus exporter for this vulnerability data to streamline scanning and monitoring across data center infrastructure. Stay tuned.

Russell Coker: HP Z4 G4

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:01:27 +0000

In what is hopefully the conclusion of my hunt for a cheap tower server supporting REBAR [1] I have just bought a HP Z4 G4 with W-2125 CPU for $320.

Hardware

One interesting thing is that it has an adaptor from SATA power to 8 pin PCIe power. According to Wikipedia the 8 pin connector provides 150W at 12V [2]. According to Wikipedia SATA power cables include 3 12V pins each of which can deliver 1.5A [3] which is 54W. The system as I received it had a single SATA power plug connected so potentially 150W could be drawn from a connector designed for 54W. The first thing I did was to connect a second SATA power connector on the same cable so I could have connectors designed for a total of 108W supplying potentially 150W (and definitely more than 75W).

I found two versions of the specs for this system, this version seems to match what I bought as it references W-21xx CPUs [4] while this version matches what I would rather have with a W-22xx CPU [5]. The URL naming scheme implies that there are potentially at least a few other variants out there. So much for the “buy name brand and you can buy two systems with the same model and have them work the same” benefit you hope to get. Why don’t they just name them “G4.1”, “G4.2”, etc?

It seems that W-21xx and W-22xx CPUs are incompatible, so the W-2295 scoring 30,804 multithread and 2,634 single thread on passmark that I hoped to get isn’t an option [6].

The system is well designed for space efficiency, both it and the Z640 are 17cm wide but the Z4G4 allows my to close the lid with the Intel Battlemage card installed which doesn’t come close to fitting in a Z640. It has 8 DIMM sockets and with the ready availability of 32G DIMMS that allows 256G of RAM which is the maximum the motherboard supports. That compares well to the Z640 that only has 4 DIMM slots and the Z6G4 which only has 6.

The system supports a maximum RAM speed of DDR4-2666 which is better than the DDR4-2400 of the Z640 but less than the DDR4-2933 of the Z6G4.

The NVMe sockets on the motherboard are a convenient feature. Most systems I run need at most two NVMe devices so this saves a PCIe slot which is important when dealing with GPUs that take 2+ slots. Also for systems that don’t really need NVMe I can use some of the small NVMe devices that I have no other use for. 128G NVMe devices aren’t even worth selling and 256G will be of little use in the near future. So when I move to gen4 Z servers I can use up some of them without wasting slots.

Using the lesser socket LGA2066 in the Z4G4 is a minor annoyance, but for a single socket system 18 cores is probably enough.

The BIOS has an option for single-socket NUMA, which is basically locking cores in a single CPU to specific RAM channels. I enabled it but it did nothing presumably because I only have 2 DIMMs. When I get more DIMMs I’ll do some tests of that and compare it with NUMA on my Z840.

Variants

There are many different variants of the Z4G4 and the only way to recognise them is by the CPU not by any part number or serial number AFAIK. The first difference is between server grade CPUs (the W-2xxx CPUs) and desktop grade CPUs (the i7 and i9 CPUs). The systems with i7 and i9 CPUs don’t support ECC RAM which makes them less reliable, gives smaller limits for RAM

The below table compares the Z640 which is my current desktop PC with the Z4G4, Z6G4, and Z8G4 systems. For the latter 3 I have included multiple options for the parts that differ in different models in the same name series. The Z4G4 I have is an early one which only supports W-21xx CPUs which means a maximum RAM speed of 2666 and the best possible CPU would only be 15% faster than my Z640. I can only use this for ML stuff as it’s the only system I have with REBAR support (which works well).

	Z640 (1 socket)	Z4G4	Z6G4 (1 socket)	Z8G4
DIMM slots	4	8	6	24
Max DDR4 speed	2400	2666/2933	2666/2933	2666/2933
Max DIMM size	32G	64G	64G	64G/128G
System Max Ram	128G	512G	192G/384G	1.5T/3T
CPU Socket	LGA2011-3	LGA2066	LGA3647	LGA3647
Best CPU	E5-2699A v4	W-2195/W-2295	Platinum 8180/W-3275	Platinum 8180/8280
Motherboard NVMe	0	2	2	?

Conclusion

In my previous blog post I concluded that the next step up for me would be DDR5 systems [10]. But now some of the LGA3647 systems are appealing. The Z8G4 would be a decent upgrade from my current Z840 build server and should be affordable long before any two socket DDR5 system becomes affordable.

The Z4G4 doesn’t have any potential for useful upgrades. But for me it was a good cheap way to house a GPU that had already damaged the motherboard of one good system. If the Z4G4 has a PCIe slot break the way my Z840 did then it wouldn’t bother me a lot. It was annoying to discover how limited this variant of the Z4G4 is after buying it, but at that price I can’t complain.

A Z6G4 could be a nice workstation if I found one at a really low price. The only reason I’d seek one out is if I had a need for a desktop workstation with REBAR support, which seems unlikely.

Gunnar Wolf: systemd for Linux SysAdmins

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 02:07:54 +0000

This post is an unpublished review for systemd for Linux SysAdmins

systemd. Yes, in full lowercase. If there is ever a technology to cause controversy in the Linux world, this is it. Since its inception in 2010, systemd’s goals were set quite high — replacing the vital part in every Linux system that takes care of the system boot process. It quickly reached maturity, allowing its to be adopted as the main init system in most major distributions just five years later. But even given we are describing events that happened over a decade ago, systemd adoption still raises the temperature in any Linux-related discussion.

David Both’s comprehensive book tackles the “what”, the “why” and the “how” issues surrounding systemd. Carefully divided in 16 chapters, going from explaining the basics and some of the technical and political history behind the project to the different subsystems and aspects covered by systemd, its almost 450 pages can scare people away — but the text is written in a very clear, tutorial-like fashion, and while it can be read sequentially, cover-to-cover, the book is amenable for readers to pick a single aspect and jump straight to the relevant chapter.

One of the frequent criticisms the systemd project has received is that it aims to basically rewrite all of a Linux system, and just looking at this book’s index shows there is some truth to it. The first chapter is an introduction to the systemd project and a brief overview of its history (including the controversies around it), and the following four chapters deal about understanding and controlling the system boot process.

But that still leaves ten chapters to account for — they cover different aspects or sub-projects of systemd, such as time and date issues (synchronization, time specifications, and controlling repetitive tasks), understanding and leveraging the system journal that strongly departs from the old syslog system, network configuration and firewall management, system health and performance debugging — all of them, aspects that in the traditional Unix philosophy were managed by independent programs… And I can identify several systemd sub-projects not covered by this book!

We long-time Unix and Linux administrators took pride in how highly performant and stable systems were supported by the simplicity of our tools; systemd critics point out this massive project has absorbed dozens of individual tools, yielding corporate control over vast swaths of vital system tooling. Truth is… as a sysadmin myself, systemd is today one of my greatest allies.

I appreciate the author evaluates every component independently, including his personal evaluation of each — even stating he prefers working with the traditional programs in several areas.

If there is a criticism I must make about this book is that, although typographically it is well formed and taken care of, given it includes large amounts of console captures, having a maximum width below 70 characters means several lines are unnaturally cut short (and continued with odd indentations). I understand there is probably no “right” way to solve this, but it does affect the feeling of naturally reading the text.

Wouter Verhelst: Agentic coding and Free Software

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:09:21 +0000

Through work, I have paid license to windsurf (recently renamed to "devin"), an application for LLM-based (aka, "Agentic") development.

I hadn't been using it that much, but in an effort to more clearly understand how this whole AI development thing works, I decided to give it a closer look recently.

My conclusions:

In its current form, this whole LLM wave is problematic for multiple reasons. But ignoring that, and looking at the technology only, I can say that:

it is a paradigm shift;
it is, at the technological level, a positive evolution;
and it is a threat to free software.

Problems

Lest someone (incorrectly) assume that I am arguing in favour of the current state of affairs with regards to LLMs, let me state this first.

The way LLMs are built today is highly parasitic. Websites are downloaded in whole, at unsustainable rates, regardless of the consent of the people who made the original content. The result is predictable: servers get overloaded, server administrators attempt to implement various mitigations. Some of these mitigations work; some do, for a while; some are entirely useless. In actual fact, the mitigations are an arms race -- if too many people implement the same mitigation, then the people who try to build yet another LLM so they can extract rent will just try to work around the mitigation, eventually they will succeed, and you'll just have to come up with another mitigation. It's a bit like spam; you introduce regex-based spam filters, they introduce spelling mistakes, you introduce bayesian filters, they add a large batch of markov chain-generated semi-nonsense words made invisible by markup, you add filters to block emails with such markup, they move the text into an image. We have working mitigations today, but eventually we'll run out of ideas.

LLMs glob up everything they can while ignoring the license of the source material. The people who push those LLMs claim that pushing the source material through the machine learning algorithms makes the output of the algorithm distinct enough from the source material that the license no longer applies; I'm not so sure that this is true. I guess the New York Times v OpenAI lawsuit will teach us some of the answer to that question here, but even so the ethical questions about "is it OK to bring down another server just so we can download the internet for another for-pay LLM" are still open. And regardless of what the law states, my opinion on "you're using my copyleft code to generate code under a different license" is not something you might like if you agree with the rent seekers' opinion on the subject.

That all being said and true, the technology works. You can have a "conversation" with an LLM that resembles a human one. If you pass it some data, you can use plain english to ask it questions about that data, which is a lot easier than to ask it about that in a formal way. You can request it to generate some code, and it will generate something that looks like what you need and that will be mostly correct for like 95% of the time.

Now, yes, 95% of the time is not 100% of the time, and no, you can't ask it to "write me a piece of software that implements this 300-page requirements document and get back to me when you're done", because it will fail, and you won't know where it has failed, and you'll take it into production and expect everything to be fine because it won't and this one minor logic bug will cause half your servers to spin and consume credits with your infrastructure provider with nothing to show for it.

But that doesn't mean you can't use an LLM to build a large piece of software. It just means you have to understand the LLMs limitations and strenghts, and use them correctly.

Here's what an LLM is good at:

Generating plausible text
Interpreting text to figure out what a plausible meaning or summary of that text is
Giving vague indications as to what the probable context of a given body of text is.

It turns out that that's enough to use the LLM to build a reliable piece of software, provided you do it right.

Paradigm shift

An LLM can generate text by the truckful. The generated text could be code. Given a good enough LLM, the generated text might even run and do something useful.

You can try to blindly run the code, and if it doesn't run correctly, you can paste the error message to the LLM, and it can tell you what went wrong and how you could possibly fix it. This creates a feedback loop: you ask it for an amount of code, you run the code, you receive an error, you tell it that the code is problematic and give it the error message, it makes changes to the code, now you have something that at least no longer fails at startup.

If you ask it to add tests to make sure that your code acts as per your specification, now you get an error if and when the code doesn't act as per your specification. Or, well, at least not as per the part of the specification that was correctly turned into a unit test by the LLM.

LLMs have a context window, so if the error message is pasted in the same conversation as where the code was generated, it is able to reuse the earlier prompts to refine how it should interpret the error message that you received.

You can't really paste the source code of an entire application into the prompt of your LLM, that would quickly overrun its context window. But LLMs also allow you to provide some form of background information -- a document, say -- on which you ask it to reason. It will interpret that document, but doing so uses less of the LLMs context window. So providing the LLM with your application's source code as background information can help it understand better how your code interacts. This is especially helpful if you only provide the LLM the background information relevant to the actual question.

So now if you are able to:

Create background context with your application's source code
Have the LLM generate a first draft of your requested change, plus the tests to make sure it works
Compile (if applicable) the generated code (and tests) and run said tests
Return any error messages to the LLM with a request to correct the error

Then the combination of "getting it 95% right off the bat" and the above feedback loop means you can generate syntactically correct code, that probably does what you need, in minutes.

I say "probably" for a reason. There are going to be cases where you specify a request without a number of details (because they are implied), and the LLM will get most of those details right but just not implement the one bit because it's an automaton and it doesn't think. Or you will ask it to make sure that two bits of the application look exactly the same, without specifying that they must act the same, now and in the future, and it will just generate the same block of code twice and then in a future change it will change one but not the other.

But if you review the changes, and you have experience as a programmer, you will be able to spot most cases where the LLM got it wrong. And so it's possible, if not necessarily easy at first, to use an LLM to generate mostly correct code.

There are certain places where "mostly correct" code is not desireable. But equally, there are also cases where, "mostly correct" is good enough.

After all, most of the software you run today -- the bits of it that weren't, yet, generated by an LLM -- is only "mostly correct", too, because to err is human and we all make mistakes. If not, there wouldn't be any CVEs and your software would never do anything wrong.

Now, doing the feedback loop described above is certainly something you could do manually. You could open an account on one of the LLM websites, upload the source code of your application, ask it to generate some new feature, download the newly generated feature, run it, and then copy/paste any error messages back into the LLM.

But that's a lot of manual work of the type that computers are pretty good at. So that's what the "windsurf" tool helps you with: you run it inside your IDE -- either a VSCode-based tool that you download from their website which comes with their product preinstalled, or a separate JetBrains plugin that you can install. You can then open your entire relevant codebase in a workspace in your IDE. You then ask the LLM, through the IDE, to generate a new feature in your codebase, and to also generate the test while it's at it. It will use a mixture of LLM interpretation and non-LLM functionality to scoop out the relevant bits of your codebase to send to the LLM as background information, will send it your prompt, will download the generated code and patch or create files, will compile (if required) and run the newly generated code and tests, and will refine the generated code if the tests produce any errors. All mostly automatic; by default, running anything requires explicit confirmation. You can turn that off completely (probably not a good idea), or you can give it a whitelist of things that you don't want to confirm (perhaps OK), and the tool also passes standing instructions to the LLM to never generate any command that deletes a file (which, like with any LLM, can be overridden, but it requires you to be very stubborn and to use more credits than you'd probably like).

All this put together means you can build something without writing any piece of code, provided you do it right.

A technically positive evolution

Don't go and say, "here's a 300-page document, read it and write whatever the document says". It will get it wrong, it will write a massive test suite that it will only run at the end, it will choke itself up trying to interpret the massive amount of failures it encounters, it will fill up its context window and it will start to forget some of the requirements. That won't work.

But what you can do -- what I did, in fact -- is this.

First, create an empty workspace. Don't put any code in it.

Then, tell the LLM to generate a backend framework using technology X and a frontend framework using technology Y that initially only says "hello, world". Also add tests to it, and run the tests.

It will do that. You'll not get much, but it will work.

Then, ask it to add some UI elements. A login page, perhaps. A navigation bar. Small things. Most of it doesn't have to be functional -- but tests must be there for the bits that are, and have it run the tests and evaluate the results.

Rinse, repeat, until you have a working application.

Importantly, in between the steps, you should also run the application yourself and see if the change was implemented correctly. Sometimes it won't be. Sometimes there will be a subtle bug -- I at one point had a the application hang after a few minutes. Sometimes you tell it that there's a subtle bug, and it will discover it more quickly than you could, and it will fix it, and in implementing the fix it will uncover another bug, and then you have to fix that one -- the fix it came up with for the hang was to move something to an async process on the server, which caused the application to start spinning while trying to create hundreds of async jobs (this is when I realized that the hang was a deadlock due to some part of the codebase doing something that indirectly triggered itself). Sometimes it will try to fix the bug you tell it about, and you'll see that it's going off on a tangent that has nothing to do with what you're seeing. It's important to keep an eye on what it's doing, so you can guide it back on track when that happens -- when I told it about the hang, it started investigating the part of the code which sends out emails, thinking that it could hang while waiting for sendmail to finish, but the hang was happening when the application was idle, not when it was sending out emails, and only when I told it about it happening when it was idle did it find the deadlock.

So it's not a fully automatic process, and it needs to be guided by someone who knows what they're doing. But if that is the case, you can come up with something that works. I spent evenings and breaks for about a week, and I managed to create a working application which, had I written it by hand, would have taken me a few months of full-time work to come up with. And I now have a side project, fully complete and working, that I had been thinking about doing for more than a decade, but never got around to actually doing, because of all the work that would be involved and I just didn't see myself having the time for.

It's not perfect code. But it's mostly good enough, and it will perform the job it needs to. And it looks far slicker than most of the side projects I've done in the past, because in the past I would prioritize between implementing new features or making something look slick, and I would decide that the new feature was more important because it's only for me and there's only me and nobody cares if it looks good or not and I don't have three weeks to come up with something that looks better. But here, I found myself sometimes spending 10 minutes writing a prompt with instructions on making things look better. Because what's 10 minutes when you just spent an hour writing down and refining specifications for functionality and tests?

There are a number of other things in which an LLM can help a programmer.

For instance.

I received a bug report recently in a project I'm paid to maintain that I couldn't make heads or tails of. I opened the source code in my windsurf IDE, pasted the bug report in the prompt, and then requested the tool to analyze the source code and the associated logs and tell me how the described behavior could be happening. It turned out that I had overlooked something, but with the help of the tool, I found the bug in minutes.

I was trying to understand a particular part of a large codebase that I didn't really grasp very well. I loaded the codebase in the tool, and asked it to explain to me how a particular action is performed by the code. I requested specific functions and line numbers. I now have a far better understanding of how the code works, and will be able to write that patch that I've been wanting to write for years -- without using the LLM.

I have been struggling for, literally, years with understanding why another tool that I maintain was misbehaving in a particular way but only in Firefox. I opened the codebase in Firefox, explained the buggy behavior in plain English, and asked it to explain how this could be happening. It picked up some obscure corner case behavior of ffmpeg and mp4 containers that I was not aware of and that perfectly explained why things were misbehaving in the way that they were.

At the same time, there are limitations. Giving an LLM a codebase that was originally generated by an LLM (either the same one or another one) seems to work well. Giving it a codebase that was written by a human and expecting it to correctly update it seems to be more error-prone. I did one or two of those as a trial, and it is more problematic than anything.

An LLM is also not intelligent, notwithstanding the popular term of "Artificial Intelligence". On multiple occasions, I've asked it to write a test case for some code that was not set up to do so; and rather than suggesting a refactor is required, it would instead copy the code that needed to be tested and then test the copy, rather than the original. The tool has made multiple similar errors. I have sometimes people describe agentic coding as "similar to interacting with junior programmers", but that is not the case. A junior programmer will either fill in the gaps in your specifications, or ask for clarification when something seems off. The LLM will not do that; it will do what you ask, exactly that and nothing more. If you missed a corner case in your specification, then all bets are off.

I remember learning about programming language generations in college. A first-generation language is "machine code", a second-generation language is "assembler", a third-generation language is any high-level language such as C, Perl, or Pascal. I've forgotten what set a 3rd-generation language apart from a 4th-generation language. But I remember the definition they gave me for a 5th-generation language: "you tell the computer what to do, and it will do it". At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. Nobody could ever write something like that.

But it's here.

And it's a threat to free software.

A threat to free software?

Yes.

There is the obvious part where most of the well-known LLMs are non-free software. I mean, there are some "open source" LLM models. The windsurf tool that I used doesn't allow you to use them (directly), but they're there. There are also open source applications that implement what the windsurf editor does. So it's definitely possible to work like this without resorting to non-free software and non-free services, even though the non-free LLMs might be a bit ahead of the curve of the free ones. But that's not what I mean.

And there is also the obvious thing which I mentioned earlier in this post, which is that the people who try to build LLMs are doing it in unethical, disgusting ways, causing downtimes and disregarding licenses for whatever they can get their grubby hands on. Ideally we wouldn't be in that situation, and ideally this wouldn't be a problem, but we are where we are.

And there's the obvious thing where the OSI sold itself out and declared that a machine learning program can be open source even when the very things it was built from -- the training data -- is not available. That's a major issue that the free software community needs to fight against, but there's not really anything that that is a threat to free software. You just build your own, free software, LLM, and you're done.

The actual threat is in funding and developer support.

Most large businesses do not care about free-as-in-freedom software. They like the free-as-in-beer part, and they appreciate that the free-as-in-freedom bits can make the software more customizable. They are (mostly) happy to do sponsorships of the free-as-in-freedom projects that they use if that means their free-as-in-beer usage of the software gets improved.

But why would you care about all that when you can just generate the code you need, rather than interacting with an open source community that may or may not care about your business's interests?

Where to go from here

Although I think the moral and environmental issues with LLMs are real and problematic, given the experiments I did I am not convinced that the concept of interacting with a computer system in natural language and to use it to generate code is necessarily deficient. There are pitfalls, but they can be managed. It is possible to use such a system to create throwaway, proof-of-concept type "good enough" code bases. It can be used to interpret code bases and to understand bug reports.

I believe that the major issue with LLMs has to do with that saying about hammers and nails:

If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

LLMs are an outgrowth of machine learning, pushed by large corporations. These large corporations have a lot of money. If all you have is money, then every problem can be fixed by throwing more money at it. The initial language models were promising but not (yet) good enough, and it seemed that one way in which they could be improved was to increase the scale of the statistics: throw more hardware (and thus money) at it, and rather than improving the efficiency of the models, just scale up.

Scaling up is something that megacorporations are very good at. It's only a money problem, after all. Does that mean that "scaling up" is the only way to improve the models, though? I'm not convinced.

Some hardware, such as most modern Apple and Samsung devices, ship with accelerator hardware for machine learning algorithms. There are some models that are small enough to be able to run on these devices. I don't see why it should not be possible to create a small(er) language model that can do some useful part of the above-described use cases; if not locally, then at least on a server that one can run on-prem rather than requiring that you pay rent to one of the LLM companies.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has published an aspirational statement on machine learning-assisted programming that, I think, gets a lot right. It's not quite a definition, but it's something to keep in mind.

Perhaps that's the way forward?

More questions than answers at this point, anyway.

Junichi Uekawa: looking for last.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:30:53 +0000

looking for last. I realized it's gone. what's my replacement?

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rincón)

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Activity summary

During the month of May, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below).

The team released 56 DLAs fixing 877 CVEs.

May was a much busier month than usual, especially due to the disclosed vulnerabilities on linux regarding Local Privilege Escalation (LPE), that included public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits. These reports of course impacted Debian as a whole, and the situation warrants a special mention to the Kernel Team, especially Ben Hutching and Salvatore Bonaccorso, who faced the pace and released linux packages on a weekly basis. On the LTS side, the Front Desk team also triaged a significant flow of high severity CVEs.

It is also important to note that Debian 12 (“bookworm”) will be handed over to the LTS Team on June 11th. If you benefit from Debian, especially during the full 5-year lifecycle, please consider subscribing as a sponsor of Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/.

Moreover, Debian 11 (“bullseye”) will reach the end of the Debian LTS period on August 31st. After that, Freexian will continue the security support under the Extended LTS offer.

The team published several notable updates:

As mentioned above, several exploitable LPE vulnerabilities in linux were published during May. Ben released the following DLAs for the Debian LTS versions:
- DLA 4560-1 for linux (5.10)
- DLA 4561-1 for linux-6.1
- DLA 4572-1 for linux (5.10)
- DLA 4574-1 for linux-6.1
- DLA 4587-1 for linux (5.10)
- DLA 4588-1 for linux-6.1
- DLA 4606-1 for linux (5.10)
- DLA 4607-1 for linux-6.1
exim update (DLA-4580-1), prepared by Thorsten, to address a vulnerability that may result in remote code execution.
gnutls28 update (DLA-4595-1) by Guilhem Moulin, fixes several vulnerabilities that may result in execution of arbitrary code, information leak, authentication bypass, among other impacts.
krb5 updates released as DLA-4603-1, fixing two vulnerabilities that may yield to a denial of service. Updated prepared by Emmanuel Arias
lemonldap-ng (DLA-4602-1), released by Abhijith PA, fixing multiple vulnerabilities
Two imagemagick updates (DLA-4559-1 and DLA-4609-1), prepared by Bastien Roucariès, fixing several vulnerabilities
openjdk-11 and openjdk-17 updates (DLA-4566-1 and DLA-4565-1), both prepared by Emilio, to fix seven vulnerabilities.
php7.4 update (DLA-4586-1) to fix six vulnerabilities that could result in remote code execution, information disclosure or denial of service. Update prepared by Guilhem Moulin.
python3.9 update (DLA-4583-1), prepared by Arnaud Rebillout, addressing multiple vulnerabilities.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team:

We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:

Colin Watson prepared an OpenSSH update, that was released by Santiago as DLA-4584-1.
Thomas Goirand handled a keystone update, whose advisory was done by Santiago and released as DLA-4611-1.
Christopher Obbard kindly prepared a sentry-python update, released as DLA-4612-1.
Christoph Goehre made two thunderbird updates (DLA-4562-1 and DLA-4582-1). As is customary, Emilio released the advisories.

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

Andreas proposed a firewalld update for bookworm to fix a local issue that may result in bypass control rules.
Andreas proposed atril updates for trixie and bookworm.
Arnaud did a python3.11 upload for bookworm.
Arnaud proposed libarchive updates for trixie and bookworm.
Arnaud completed the systemd update for bookworm.
Bastien completed the uploads of gpsd for bookworm. He also did an upload of apache2 for bookworm.
Emmanuel uploaded updates of libexif for trixie and bookworm
Jochen Sprickerhof prepared pyjwt update for trixie and bookworm, released as DSA-6259-1.
Lukas Märdian prepared trixie and bookworm updates for nghttp2, released as DSA-6266-1.
Markus prepared updates of tomcat11 and tomcat10, released as DSA-6329-1 (for trixie) and DSA-6328-1 (for trixie and bookworm), respectively.
Continuing the work to replace the unmaintained p7zip fork with 7zip, Sylvain prepared trixie and bookworm updates of 7zip.
Thorsten completed the uploads of zvbi, taglib and libuev to bookworm and did an upload of libcoap3 for wtrixie.
Tobi prepared libpng1.6 updates for trixie and bookworm, released as DSA-6263-1.

Moreover, thanks to our partnership with Catalyst, it has been possible to extend the support for Samba 4.17, the version shipped with Debian 12. In May, several vulnerabilities were disclosed, and their patches were prepared by Catalyst. For Debian 12, the update was prepared by the Samba maintainer and released as DSA-6297-1.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors

Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

Platinum sponsors:
- Toshiba Corporation (for 128 months)
- Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 96 months)
- VyOS Inc (for 61 months)
Gold sponsors:
- F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (for 139 months)
- CONET Deutschland GmbH (for 122 months)
- University of Oxford (for 78 months)
- EDF SA (for 50 months)
- Dataport AöR (for 25 months)
- CERN (for 23 months)
Silver sponsors:
- Domeneshop AS (for 143 months)
- Nantes Métropole (for 137 months)
- Akamai - Linode (for 133 months)
- Univention GmbH (for 129 months)
- Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 129 months)
- Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 123 months)
- Exonet B.V. (for 113 months)
- Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 107 months)
- Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (for 91 months)
- Dinahosting SL (for 78 months)
- Upsun Formerly Platform.sh (for 72 months)
- Moxa Inc. (for 66 months)
- sipgate GmbH (for 64 months)
- OVH US LLC (for 62 months)
- Tilburg University (for 62 months)
- GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 53 months)
- THINline s.r.o. (for 26 months)
- Copenhagen Airports A/S (for 20 months)
- Conseil Départemental de l’Isère (for 6 months)
Bronze sponsors:
- Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 144 months)
- Evolix (for 143 months)
- Linuxhotel GmbH (for 141 months)
- Intevation GmbH (for 140 months)
- Daevel SARL (for 139 months)
- Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 138 months)
- Greenbone AG (for 137 months)
- NUMLOG (for 137 months)
- WinGo AG (for 136 months)
- Entr’ouvert (for 128 months)
- Adfinis AG (for 125 months)
- Plat’Home (for 122 months)
- Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 120 months)
- Tesorion (for 120 months)
- Bearstech (for 111 months)
- LiHAS (for 111 months)
- Catalyst IT Ltd (for 106 months)
- Demarcq SAS (for 100 months)
- Université Grenoble Alpes (for 86 months)
- TouchWeb SAS (for 78 months)
- SPiN AG (for 75 months)
- CoreFiling (for 71 months)
- Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (for 62 months)
- Tem Innovations GmbH (for 57 months)
- WordFinder.pro (for 57 months)
- CNRS DT INSU Résif (for 56 months)
- Soliton Systems K.K. (for 51 months)
- Alter Way (for 48 months)
- SOBIS Software GmbH (for 23 months)
- Tuxera Inc. (for 15 months)
- OPM-OP AS (for 6 months)

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 321 released

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 321. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix compatibility with Ocaml 5.4.1.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 320 released

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 320. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support androguard 4 and previous versions. Thanks, linsui!
  (Closes: #1140016)
* Use --long-form arguments when calling apktool in order to support apktool
  version 3. Thanks again to linsui. (Closes: #1140015)
* Update copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Mike Gabriel: Commenting on the recent Ubuntu Touch review done by @SwitchandClickOfficial on Youtube

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:49:10 +0000

There has been a video blog post recently published with a review of Ubuntu Touch as an option to opt out of the Android world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTK6TS3pXgc

Thanks to @SwitchandClick for spending time on this and publishing that video. Much appreciated.

Many Issues amended in upcoming 24.04-2.0 Release

When I watched that video referenced above, I continuously thought: ah... this is fixed in the next major release of Ubuntu Touch, or: ah... this is a known issue that we have on the roadmap..., or: ah... this is done in this ways by design (so it's a feature or basic functionality)...

Let me just state, that most of the criticized aspects will be resolved in upcoming Ubuntu Touch release 24.04-2.0 (the tests in that video blog post have been run on Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x):

Camera notch and rounding corners get honoured now by the UI
Ubuntu Touch's default webbrowser (Morph Browser) has been bumped from Chromium engine v87 (Qt5 based) to v134 (Qt6 based), installing another browser should not be necessary anymore (note that the privacy level in Morph Browser is pretty high, so using other browsers could mean a loss of privacy).
Bluetooth pairing agent got added to the bluetooth indicator
Ubuntu Touch now supports Snaps on CLI level and in the OpenStore app
Libertine has received fixes, but no substantial improvements. It mainly targets users who want to use their Ubuntu Touch device as desktop daily driver. Libertine-provided desktop apps UI-wise are often not usable on a phone-like device.

The full feature preview of the 24.04-2.0 release can be found here: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/ubuntu-touch-24-04-2-0-beta-is-n...

Ubuntu Touch App Ecosystem

The app ecosystem of Ubuntu Touch is quite specific, because many apps in Ubuntu Touch have been explicitly developed for Ubuntu Touch using a widget toolkit called Lomiri.Components. However, in Ubuntu Touch we also encourage developers to provide apps written with other convergent-capable toolkits, such as QQC2-based apps or Kirigami-based apps.

One reason for the very different app ecosystem in Ubuntu Touch is that many service providers don't have Ubuntu Touch on their radar when investing in app development for their services. Some Ubuntu Touch App Developers work around this by either implementing unofficial client apps for web services (e.g. the Flow app for Deezer by Sander Klootwijk), others provide the web service via implementing a web app (will not work when offline, but at least will show up as an app in the launcher).

The overall solution for making Open-Store.io more familiar to users who migrate from Android is that commercial service providers start honouring digital sovereignty and start providing apps for Linux. Not just for the Linux desktop, but also for mobile Linux platforms. This dual use case can easily achieved with an app development that bears convergence in mind.

App Ecosystems are also a Matter of Perspective

And one more minor note: whenever I open an Android appstore or can peak over someone's shoulder using an iOS device: I always wonder: what are all these apps about??? Never heard about them.

So, familiarity really depends on perspective. And perspective depends on what you are used to. Change what you do and your perspective will follow.

Ubuntu Touch's root filesystem (rootfs) is Immutable

Only thing from that video blog post that we haven't fixed and won't do so in the midterm future is apt-get not working on the command line.

The reason for this is: the Ubuntu Touch root file system is an immutable file system and thus shall not be changed via apt-get & friends by ordinary users.

There are various discussions ongoing such as dpkg-divert'ing apt-get to a wrapper shell script that spits out an error message if rootfs is mounted read-only and someone tries to install packages the Debian/Ubuntu way. Other approaches are to mount some RAM disk over the rootfs, so apt-get can be used at runtime but changes to the system get reset at reboot.

However, it is possible to mount the root filesystem read-write and test newer package versions (as UT core developers do regularly, in fact). If you tinker with this, it is recommended to reflash your device (don't wipe user data, when you reflash!) from time to time, because adding packages or package upgrades to your rootfs may over time corrupt the integrity of the rootfs.

One reason for apt-get breaking the rootfs and thus your Ubuntu Touch development device is that the upgrade process of the rootfs image is incremental, so update tarballs sometimes contain only those parts that got changed between this and your previous upgrade (sometimes, upgrades contain a complete rootf image, depending on the interval between upgrades). If files from an incremental update tarball mix into a rootfs that got tinkered with via apt-get, you really end up on your own. Re-flashing will grab the complete rootfs tarball and wipe the whole rootfs and reinstall a fresh version of the newest rootfs image. Developers also do this in regular intervals to ensure their test device is clean again before running more/other tests.

Joey Hess: best of the web

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:11:48 +0000

This is somehow the featured website on https://earlyweblinks.com/ this week.

Read all about my web site here! https://earlyweblinks.com/site-of-the-week/joey-hess

Kind of reminds me of back in 1995 or so when my website would randomly end up picked by some best of the web list that I never heard of. The web is still a small place I guess.

Maybe I should join a web ring or something?

Dirk Eddelbuettel: rspdlite 0.1.0-1 on CRAN: New Package!

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:16:00 +0000

Very happy to share that a new package rspdlite arrived on CRAN today in its inaugural version 0.1.0-1. It wraps and provides the (header-only) C++20 library spdlite which its author describes (aptly) as tiny, fast, capable. Just like its bigger sibbling spdlog (which we wrapped as rcppspdlog), it is written by Gabi Melman. However, with a focus on C++20 and compile-time configuration, it is lighter, nimbler and faster. It is also still a fairly young project so changes may occur.

I have been working on this for about a month, and it is ready for use by R and C++. It contains the initial upstream release 0.1.0, and I plan to follow the upstream versioning making this first release as 0.1.0-1.

The package itself provides the headers for use from other C++ projects (i.e. mostly other packages), as well as a simple R wrapper so that logging can occur from either C++ or R. It will generally access the single logger instance in a compilation unit. So for a package built against these header it would be shared library of that package. At present we provide the basic logging level setters and getters, formatting accessors, and two (compile-time) options of a ‘null logger’ and a file-based logger. More options are availble from the C++ level, multiple logging sinks are but one example. Some examples are provided in the package as an R example and a C++ example; these are probably best examined from the sources.

The NEWS entry for this release is simply and just announces that we have a release. More details are in the ChangeLog and the GitHub repo.

Changes in version 0.1.0-1 (2025-06-08)

Initial complete version and CRAN upload

Mike Gabriel: Ubuntu Touch development - 24.04-2.0 Beta and Meaning of Branching-Off

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:14:29 +0000

The next Ubuntu Touch major release is approaching rapidly, yesterday we reached a major step in the preparation of the upcoming Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 release: The branching-off (see below on what that is).

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta is Now Available

Part of this development release step is the publication of the 24.04-2.0 Beta release images, for more details and information see:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/ubuntu-touch-24-04-2-0-beta-is-n...

And additionally, find below some background information on how we maintain various Ubuntu Touch releases in parallel via Git(Lab). In fact, the release model of Ubuntu Touch has partially been adopted from how we in Debian maintains our various Debian versions in parallel, only that in Ubuntu Touch we use Git(Lab) for maintaining the different package versions and not, like in Debian, the APT archive itself.

What does 'Branching-Off' Mean?

Last Saturday, in the UBports Q&A, I explained Ubuntu Touch's "branching-off", an aspect of the Ubuntu Touch release workflow based on Git(Lab). To make this accessible to even more people, here it comes as a write-up:

We host many Git repositories on GitLab, and our primary work is done on the main branches, which contain the bleeding-edge code. When a merge request is deemed critical for stable versions of Ubuntu Touch, we cherry-pick it into a release series branch.

Currently, we land our changes in the main branches and then cherry-pick them to the ubports/24.04.1.x branches. The 'branching off' process for the upcoming 24.04-2.x release means that our current main branches will be copied over to create new branches for this release cycle, namely ubports/24.04-2.x.

This has two major implications. First, any item that hasn't been translated by the time of the branch-off will not receive any more translation updates during the 24.04-2.x cycle. This is why it is crucial that translation work is completed before the branching-off.

Warning of Breaking Changes arriving soon in 26.04-1.x Daily Development UT Images

Second, looking ahead to the release after 24.04-2.x, we will be approaching 26.04-1.x. The OS base will change to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, hopefully being ready for release to Ubuntu Touch users before the end of the year. We already have a list of features we want to land there. Because we plan to include various major changes, such as the switch from Mir 1 to Mir 2, new calendar and contacts backends, Qt6-based core apps and service components, etc., the likelihood of breaking changes at the beginning of the 26.04-1.x release cycle (which will become the next main branches' target) is very high.

The Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Release Schedule

The current release schedule is estimated to be:

25 May 2026 [done]
Platform stability freeze 24.04-2.x

25 May 2026 [done]
String freeze 24.04-2.x

15 June 2026 [done]
Branching-off (and unfreeze 26.04-1.x development), UT image release: 24.04-2.0 Beta

22 or 29 June 2026 [coming]
Final freeze for 24.04-2.x, UT image release: 24.04-2.0 RC

6 or 13 July 2026 [coming]
Release version 24.04-2.0

Vincent Bernat: Building a Soviet Nail Factory: how KPIs killed efficiency

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:26:27 +0000

In 2008, I landed my second job, in the network team at Orange Portails¹, the division behind the websites and search engine of the French telecom operator Orange. The place ran like clockwork: a comprehensive technical setup, a dedicated team for every part of the business, and room to focus on what I do best. A few years later, none of that mattered: thanks to an obsession with the numbers, we could no longer deliver new services on time.

Disclaimer

This is a story I like to tell to warn people about Goodhart’s law.² As these events happened almost 15 years ago, my recollection is a bit fuzzy. I left in 2012.

The first years

During my first years, the department operated like a startup. Its cradle was the French company Echo. They built a search engine. France Télécom bought it and renamed it Voila. It was the most visited search engine in France in the early 2000s. France Télécom consolidated the portal activities into the Wanadoo Portails division, later renamed Orange Portails.

The technical environment was excellent. We had many internal tools:³ a ticket system, an RRD-based graphing tool, an IPAM, a reporting tool, and an SNMP-based alerting tool.⁴ We deployed our Linux servers with CFEngine. We installed systems and applications from internal Debian repositories. We documented everything in a private MediaWiki instance. Supervision was performed with an ancestor of Xymon. The network architecture was clean and scalable with little legacy. We onboarded new people in a day.

It was a nurturing environment for me. I developed several tools: lldpd, an 802.1AB implementation, Snimpy, a pythonic binding for Net-SNMP, Wiremaps, a layer-2 discovery tool with a time machine to know which device is connected where, Kitérő, a tool to simulate network conditions, QCSS-3, a controller for load-balancers, and ipoo, a service available through a Jabber chatbot and a Greasemonkey script to expose IP-related information. I added SNMP support for Keepalived and Quagga. I also started this blog, with articles like “Anycast DNS,” TLS-related articles like “TLS computational DoS mitigation,” SNMP-related articles like “Integration of Net-SNMP into an event loop,” Linux-related articles like “Tuning Linux IPv4 route cache,” and an article about VXLAN long before it was cool.

The collapse

When we needed new servers, the on-site team would take a set from the inventory, install our base Linux distribution on them, put them in the datacenter, and cable them to the top-of-the-rack switches. We opened a ticket describing the servers we needed, and one week later, our servers were available. 💫

Orange wanted to know if this team was performing well, so they asked for KPIs. They decided to use the number of tickets completed in a year. They asked to double this number. So instead of one ticket for a new service, we would open six tickets—one per server. By the end of the year, the KPIs had more than doubled.

Everybody saw it as a success for performance management. So, they asked to do the same for the next year. Now, we needed to open a ticket per server and per step. Again, the KPIs doubled. Behind the scenes, the tickets went to different people and were no longer handled in order. So, for the next year, it was decided to have meta-tickets and meetings to follow the progress of these tickets. Of course, all these extra steps pushed the KPI even higher.

This performance management method spread to the other teams.⁵ Everything became slower. Instead of a couple of weeks, a new service now took six months. We built a Soviet nail factory. But the KPIs were good, and we stopped caring.

Let me give you another example. We had to estimate the impact of each night operation. We weren’t half bad: we declared most operations “without any expected impact.” Most of the time, there was no impact. One time out of five, there was a 5-second impact. We were told to try harder to meet our expected impact. What did we do? We started declaring a 5-second expected impact. One day, we got a 30-second impact and were told we failed to match the expected impact. In the end, we declared most operations with a 10-minute expected impact, and we stopped caring: instead of carefully shifting traffic around, we allowed ourselves a 5-minute impact. And our KPIs were never better.

An artist's rendering of the evolution of impacts over the years.

KPIs are not bad, but they are easy to break. Use them carefully: let the people doing the work help choose the metrics, and tie those metrics to the quality of the service—for example, with service level objectives. Otherwise, even dedicated people stop caring, game the system, and eventually quit.⁶ 📊

Internally, this division was named “Hebex.” It was located in Bagnolet (next to Paris) and Sophia-Antipolis (near Nice). ↩
Goodhart’s law often gets the credit, but Campbell’s law describes my experience even better: the more you lean on a number to make decisions, the faster people corrupt it. ↩
At the time, SaaS was not really a thing. I remember we considered, with a couple of colleagues, selling Wiremaps as a SaaS, with homomorphic encryption for the database. But who would outsource their observability stack? ↩
Snalert was a metacircular alerting tool in Perl. It was able to poll a very large number of SNMP targets in a short timespan. All our monitoring was SNMP-based, including system monitoring. ↩
My team also managed the rules of many Linux-based firewalls. To increase our KPIs, we used the same method: rather than accepting one ticket with a flow matrix, we requested one ticket per flow. ↩
Orange is not unique. Google’s promotion process is another well-known example of a broken KPI. Michael Lynch explains it in “Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself.” ↩

Tim Retout: In memoriam commit-email.py

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:04:50 +0000

I have proposed the deletion of an obsolete script, but it makes me feel complicated feelings so I’m going to try and express those. This particular script was written in 2014, but the concept goes back much further – before git was invented.

When I started university in 2003, I seem to remember the computing society used to run tutorials for first-year students on how to use Apache Subversion for your group project – a vast upgrade on CVS (or worse, no version control at all). Back then, the idea of viewing your changesets in a web browser was relatively new – while it was possible to look at an SVN repository through a web UI, features were limited unless you installed something compicated like Trac.

Figure 1: Data flow when distributing commits via a mailing list

Perhaps because reading email on your desktop computer (I don’t think I could afford an IBM ThinkPad?) was the only vaguely real-time notification system available at the time (except I guess SMS, which cost 10p per text), a common pattern seemed to be to use a post-commit hook to send every single commit to a mailing list, named something like ‘foo-commits’. Indeed, for a long time Fedora had an scm-commits list which appears to be a topic of recent discussion.

I can’t really explain why people wanted to have every commit sent to a mailing list except as a way of getting notified of activity – I can’t believe people would import raw patches from those lists, ala LKML, rather than run actual version control commands to fetch the new source directly. Maybe you’d have to go back to NNTP for this.

I do like the vendor-neutrality of the “everything-as-text” approach, building on the open ecosystem of SMTP. But I doubt we’d see a widespread resurgence of commit lists now – most code hosting must allow anyone to subscribe to email notifications, I assume, and I don’t see a huge benefit in a mailing list archive of commit messages.

In the case of seL4, I’m even more confused about why this script was committed in 2014, shortly after the kernel was put on GitHub. I can only assume it was imported from previous infrastructure. I do know that the implementation is quite Python 2 heavy, with the conversion between unicode and bytes featuring heavily. So rather than risk breaking its logic with patching, I think it’s time to “thank it for its service” and let go.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: rbenchmark 1.0.1 on CRAN: New(ly Adopted) Package!

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:54:00 +0000

Quick note to share that rbenchmark is back on CRAN! The rbenchmark package makes it easy to benchmark (and compare) simple R expressions.

This package has been on CRAN for many years. At one point fourteen years ago it appeared to be rudderless so I offered help but things realigned. Now it was just tossed off CRAN, taking a number of packages depending on it with it (as shown in this CRANberries skeet listing a set of removed packages) so I offered again to help, and CRAN agreed. So here we are.

So far I just made a number of small ‘editing’ changes, added CI support, and enable dbsr-universe coverage . I do not expect to change the package materially. So far the package has no NEWS file either so maybe glance at the ChangeLog at the git repo.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Go default compatibility, Trimming build-essential, Python upstream engagement and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Debian Contributions: 2026-05

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Go default compatibility, by Helmut Grohne

At the MiniDebConf Hamburg, Andrew Lee had prepared a talk on how Debian accidentally chooses Go compatibility. Helmut joined Tobias Quathammer and Andrew Lee in looking into the problem. Go has a compatibility system where modules declare a desired Go version to be compatible with. This influences various features such as whether RSA keys smaller than 1024 bits are accepted. Unfortunately, Debian’s way of building Go packages is unique in setting GO111MODULE=off, which practically implies a very old compatibility version that enables a number of insecure settings. Most Linux distributions use the default GO111MODULE=on and therefore consult a go.mod file that often declares a sensible version. While doing so is the way for Debian longer term, getting there involves major changes so we also sought a more short term workaround. We developed a patch to the Go compiler that would enable it to pick up a compatibility version from the environment. Tobias uploaded it to unstable. The next step is communicating the declared compatibility version from go.mod to the compiler via the new variable. Then, rebuilding the archive resolves the immediate symptoms. This does not save us from having to perform the larger transition to GO111MODULE=on, but this shortcut can be backported to trixie.

Trimming build-essential, by Helmut Grohne

One of the harder problems of the architecture cross bootstrap is correctly expressing the Build-Depends of glib during the toolchain bootstrap. It implicitly depends on build-essential, which happens to depend on libc6-dev. This poses a cycle. It applies even for cross building, because it is interpreted for the host architecture and that there is no way of satisfying this dependency during the toolchain bootstrap.

Given discussions at MiniDebConf Hamburg with Jochen Sprickerhof and others, a seemingly stupid idea evolved: Let’s delete build-essential. What looks insane on the surface might deserve a second look. Given how we moved away from C, C++ and autotools, what is in build-essential no longer is required by much of the archive. With the rise of debputy, debian/rules no longer has to be a makefile. While the task would be huge, those packages relevant to architecture bootstrap could explicitly support building without the implied dependency making their dependencies explicit. In a number of cases, this amounts to issuing a dependency on g++-for-host. This dependency requires the use of architecture-prefixed tools. Therefore, Helmut wrote a debhelper change that makes it always pass build tools to various build systems. This also enables more packages to honour environment variables such as CC and CXX.

Python upstream engagement, by Stefano Rivera

Stefano attended PyCon US (at personal expense) to improve upstream relations and ensure Debian’s voice is heard where it needs to be. On Friday there was a packaging summit (notes) with good discussion on the future of the wheel format, and some discussion of the new abi3t shared library format for free-threaded python.

In preparation for the event, Stefano did a complete review of the current patch stack.

Stefano’s primary goal was to get some of Debian’s patches merged during the sprints, and results were mixed. Some trivial patches (e.g. GH-150098, made progress and merged, but the most consequential patch Debian is carrying is still blocked. Stefano will continue to try to drive progress on this.

Miscellaneous contributions

Carles worked on po-debconf-manager: Reviewed Catalan translations for 6 packages, submitted 10 packages to maintainers, and removed 3 packages from po-debconf-manager.
Carles worked on check-relations: Continued improving the backend, including importing source package build dependencies to better support analysis of Debian blends. Added support for ignoring packages using regular expressions and source package names in response to user feedback. Used the tool to report 5 new bugs and followed up on previously reported issues.
Helmut sent a cross build patch on behalf of a customer.
Helmut uploaded debvm and guess_concurrency both featuring improved reproducibility and documentation.
Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap and made it correctly handle binNMUs of gcc-defaults. Additionally, he poked at existing gcc patches giving answers, rebasing or closing them.
Helmut supported the video team in Hamburg mixing audio.
Helmut continued to report undeclared file conflicts of various kinds and corresponded with maintainers about them.
Antonio attended a debate during the Brazil Internet Forum about the impacts of the child protection regulation (ECA Digital) on free software operating systems.
Antonio worked on Debian CI to improve the system transparency for users. This included listing any pending jobs explicitly in the job lists for each package/architecture/suite page, as well as adding a queue status page that users can check for an estimate of test latency.
Antonio worked on several Debian CI maintenance tasks, including but not limited to some monitoring improvements, replacing usage of fonts-font-awesome with fonts-fork-awesome, and adding the ability in debci to configure a global notice (which is being used in Debian CI to point to the system status pages).
Antonio started doing some tests related to the change of default Debian CI backend from lxc to incus-lxc. This helped identify an omission in the creation of incus-lxc images. It was missing dpkg-dev, which caused a few packages that assumed its presence to fail. In the end, the incus-lxc backend will be fixed to include dpkg-dev by default in the image, but that uncovered an undeclared dependency in gem2deb (Ruby packaging helper) and in ruby-byebug, both already fixed in unstable.
Stefano did some minimal work on debian-reimbursements to get it working with current versions of django-allauth.
May included the discovery of several high-severity Linux kernel root exploits. Stefano updated kernels and rebooted debian.social infrastructure several times.
Stefano supported the Hamburg miniDebConf’s wafer website during the event, and set up an instance for the 2027 edition too.
Stefano supported the bursary team issuing bursaries for DebConf 26.
Stefano uploaded routine updates of python-pip, pystemmer, snowball-data, snowball (making up a mini, uncoordinated snowball transition), python-authlib, python-discovery, python-installer, python-mitogen, python-pipx, python-cachecontrol, platformdirs, and python-virtualenv.
Stefano fixed a small number of bugs in dh-python, culminating in the 7.20260524 upload.
Thorsten finally managed to upload a new upstream version of hplip. He also uploaded a new upstream version of epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. Last but not least with the help of other contributors he could fix bugs in lprng.
Lucas and Santiago contributed significantly to the DebConf 26 Content team; helping to organize the team, review and rate talk proposals.
Lucas also supported a packaging sprint held in India by rebuilding and publishing the latest results of the Ruby 3.4 transition effort.
Santiago continued contributing to the efforts to organize DebConf 26, especially supporting the local team with different tasks.
In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is mentoring Aryan Karamtoth, a GSoC participant that is working to introduce linux live-patching support in Debian. The GSoC project started in May, with community bonding and coding. Santiago reviewed a merge request to prepare the clang-extract package for debian. clang-extract is one of the building blocks that will help to extract specific functions from large C code, so only relevant code can be patched, without recompiling the whole original basecode.
Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud with the point release announcements for Debian 13.5 and Debian 12.14.
Colin backported various security fixes from OpenSSH 10.3 to all supported releases (including LTS and ELTS).
Colin backported IP quality-of-service fixes to OpenSSH in trixie. The situation there had been unsatisfactory for some time, and upstream reworked their QoS support in OpenSSH 10.1 in a way that typically produces much better results.
Colin imported new upstream versions of 26 Python packages, and fixed around 25 RC bugs for the Python team.

Jonathan Dowland: HeroQuest

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:31:49 +0000

First Light box

My youngest daughter and I recently started playing the tabletop game HeroQuest. Specifically, the recently-issued, cut-down variant HeroQuest: First Light. This is quite advanced for her age, and I'm a little surprised she's taken to it, but she's really loving it, It's pushed her to read bits of lore on cards and quest books that is way above her expected reading level, and we've been exercising her maths by adding up the gold we find on our quests and calculating what the heroes can buy with it in the store afterwards.

Originally from 1989, Hasbro re-issued HeroQuest in 2020. I read about it at the time but didn't buy it. I wasn't sure who I would play it with. It also seemed expensive to me. It probably wasn't unusually expensive in 2020, nor now, for the sheer volume of finely-sculpted miniatures included. I also knew I had the original game in the loft, and I wasn't that keen on buying something I already had, although untangling the contents from several similar boxed games would take me many hours, and I wasn't sure how much of the game I would find.

mix of old and new

First Light was compelling because it is much, much cheaper than the full remake, so I was happy to take a punt. It's cheaper because it doesn't have any plastic monsters or furniture: instead cardboard cut-outs that stand up on plastic stands. For us, that is a significant drawback: 3D miniatures are much more immersive, But I can re-use the plastic miniatures I can find from the original game. First Light has a newly written adventure, better suited to beginners than the original game.

The re-issue(s) have new art and new model sculpts that look fantastic. They've changed anything which tied into Games Workshop's IP and I'm really happy about that. They've made an effort to add women, almost entirely absent from the original. I'm certain my daughter wouldn't have tried it otherwise.

Matthias Klumpp: Introducing pkgcli: A nicer command-line interface for PackageKit

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 06:22:00 +0000

For almost two decades, the PackageKit package management abstraction layer has shipped with pkcon as its command-line client. pkcon does its job, but it was always kind of a “testing” front-end for the PackageKit daemon rather than a tool designed for everyday use. The focus has instead been on the GUI tools, automatic system updates, GUI application managers and other front-ends. Its command names mirror the D-Bus API almost one-to-one (get-details, get-updates, get-depends), output is very plain, and there is no machine-readable mode for scripting. Most importantly though, there has been no development on it at all for almost a decade, so pkcon was stuck in its rudimentary state from that era.

Since a lot of changes will be coming to PackageKit, and testing the daemon and working with it from the command-line was not very pleasant anymore in 2025/2026, I decided to modernize the tool as part of my work as fellow for the Sovereign Tech Agency last year. pkgcli is the new command-line client for PackageKit. It is built from the ground up to be pleasant to use interactively and easy to drive from scripts.

Why a new tool?

Of course, instead of introducing a new tool, I could have just expanded pkcon instead. The problem with that approach is that the pkcon utility has been around for so long and its command-line API had ossified so much, that rather than changing it and potentially breaking a lot of scripts relying on its quirks, I decided to introduce a new tool instead. pkcon can still be optionally compiled for people who need it in their scripts and workflows.

The goals for pkgcli, and the features it now has are:

Human-friendly command names. Verbs that read the way you’d describe the task, instead of mirroring the D-Bus API 1:1: show, search, list-updates, what-provides, instead of get-details and friends.
Readable, colored output by default (still respecting NO_COLOR and degrading gracefully).
A real scripting mode. A global --json flag emits JSONL instead of fully human-readable output when possible, to make it easier to use the tool for scripting purposes.
Sensible defaults. A few defaults have been changed, such as the metadata cache-age, or automatic cleanup of unused dependencies being enabled by default. This is more in line with current defaults by other tools and frontends. We also print package information in a slightly different, more readable way.
Better handling of internationalized text. Text should now align properly in the terminal window, and we should no longer have completely chaotic text output on non-English locales (especially Chinese/Japanese).

Why not `pkgctl`?

Originally, this tool was called pkgctl, to match other common cross-distro tool names. However, that name was already taken by an Arch-specific distro development tool. When this issue was raised, we decided to just rename our tool to pkgcli with the next release, to avoid the name clash on Arch Linux.

Examples!

Here are some examples on how to use the new tool (some of which include the abridged output pkgcli prints).

Search for anything containing the string “editor” in name or description, then look at the details of one result:

$ pkgcli search editor
Querying                  [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
▣ ace-of-penguins 1.5~rc2-7.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ acorn-fdisk 3.0.6-14.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ ardour 1:9.2.0+ds-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity 3.7.7+dfsg-1.amd64 [manual:debian-testing-main]
✔ audacity-data 3.7.7+dfsg-1.all [auto:debian-testing-main]
▣ augeas-tools 1.14.1-1.1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ emacs 1:30.2+1-3.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-common 48.1-9.all [debian-testing-main]
▣ gedit-dev 48.1-9+b1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
[...]

$ pkgcli show nano
Package: nano
Version: 9.0-1
Summary: small, friendly text editor inspired by Pico
Description: GNU nano is an easy-to-use text editor originally designed as
 a replacement for Pico, the ncurses-based editor from the non-free mailer
 package Pine.
[...]
URL: https://www.nano-editor.org/
Group: publishing
Installed Size: 2.9 MB
Download Size: 646.0 KB

Search only within package names rather than descriptions:

$ pkgcli search name python3

Check for updates. refresh updates the metadata, then list-updates reports what’s available:

$ pkgcli refresh && pkgcli list-updates
Loading cache            [████████████████████████████████████████] 100%
▲ cme 1.048-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ gir1.2-gdm-1.0 50.1-2.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7-common 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.all [debian-testing-main]
▲ imagemagick-7.q16 8:7.1.2.24+dfsg1-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libdlrestrictions1 0.22.0.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-bin 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]
▲ libfftw3-dev 3.3.11-1.amd64 [debian-testing-main]

Explore relationships between packages:

$ pkgcli list-depends inkscape  # list what inkscape depends on
$ pkgcli list-requiring libappstream5  # list what requires libappstream5

Find the package that provides a capability, here the AV1 GStreamer decoder:

$ pkgcli what-provides "gstreamer1(decoder-video/x-av1)"
✔ gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad 1.28.3-1.amd64 [auto:debian-testing-main]

You can also have JSON output for most commands! Attach --json to any query and pipe the result straight into jq. Each line is a self-contained JSON object:

$ pkgcli --json list-updates | jq -r '.name'
cme
gir1.2-gdm-1.0
imagemagick
imagemagick-7-common
imagemagick-7.q16
libdlrestrictions1
libfftw3-bin
libfftw3-dev
libfftw3-double3

Try it

pkgcli is built by default alongside the rest of PackageKit since PackageKit 1.3.4. If your distribution ships a recent enough PackageKit, it should already be on your PATH. You can read its man page man pkgcli for more information. Feedback, bug reports, and patches are very welcome.

Gunnar Wolf: Rey Ubu - Carro de Comedias, UNAM

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:55:32 +0000

Today we went to see a theater play in UNAM’s Cultural Center, very near our home. No, not inside any of the theaters — in the square just between Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Foro Sor Juana and Sala Carlos Chávez.. So, yes, not only we had fun, but we had fun for free!

UNAM’s El Carro de Comedias is an itinerant theater company that often presents in this same spot (but you can see the stage is foldable, and they do have presentations elsewhere, of this same play even). I went with my family, and we enjoyed a very fun adaptation of this great play (written by teenager Alfred Jarry in 1894). One of those plays that could be inspired any day by current geopolitical events…

I know most of the people that happen to stumble upon my blog are not in Mexico City. But if you happen to be here, do consider going to their function. Check their schedule; being it an itinerating show, they can also be found at other places, but they are scheduled at the same place we saw them, every Saturday and Sunday until June 28, 11:00AM. They mentioned they will likely continue during August, but AFAICT it is not confirmed (or, at least, announced) yet.

Some pics, shot randomly by me throughout the play:

Mike Gabriel: Ayatana Indicators: Call for Translations

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:50:34 +0000

In the process of preparing a major Ubuntu Touch release (v24.04-2.0, coming soon...) we will also update Ayatana Indicators in Ubuntu Touch.

Last week various new features have been added to some of the indicators (toggle switch to keep the display switched on permanently, blue tooth pairing agent, redesign of the keyboard indicator, etc.) and those changes require translation updates.

If you can, please visit [1] this weekend and help translating Ayatana Indicators into your native language. Thanks so much!!!

light+love
Mike

[1] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/ayatana-indicators/

Tim Retout: seL4 clock magic

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:45:40 +0000

I have been looking at seL4 some more recently, and had a small patch merged today to remove a legacy Python module from a helper script. (I was trying to run the script on a system without that module installed, and it was almost easier to patch it out.)

However, the more I think about this code and how it’s used, the more it seems wrong on at least five other levels.

The patch itself is quite uninteresting; this script was importing the past module (part of future?) to use the xrange function. Python 2 used to have separate xrange and range functions, where range returned a list in memory while xrange generated an iterator. Because this seL4 script is iterating over a large range of values, it’s important the list is not generated in-memory. But Python 3 removed the xrange function and just has range return an object, so it’s trivial to avoid the module import.

Having thought carefully some more about the specific line, there’s surely an off-by-one error in it - range iterates over 0 to n-1, so this line shouldn’t be subtracting one if it’s looking to test all 32-bit values:

    for i in range(2**32-1):

But then again, this is being used for a ‘sanity check’ of a magic bit shift algorithm that speeds up division operations to convert CPU ticks to microseconds on 32-bit arm platforms. Surely if the algorithm’s good, it shouldn’t be necessary to validate it exhaustively against every possible 32-bit value?

Also, 32 bits isn’t enough, because this is 64-bit division. include/api/types.h shows that ticks_t is always a uint64_t, so if this were a proof by exhaustion it should run to 2**64 (though that would take infeasibly long).

As discussed in issue #1352, lots of people have been running this code with the wrong divisor anyway. But because the bit shift path is only used on 32-bit platforms, it’s not clear to me that there’s even any point in specifying CLK_SHIFT/MAGIC on platforms which are 64-bit only (e.g. the tx2 port).

And to follow this rabbit hole to the very end, in comments on PR #1435 and issue #1509 it’s clear that the future of this code is to remove it, as it’s 1. unnecessarily clever (on 64-bit platforms the equivalent code just uses a division, so performance can’t be that important), and 2. the entire concept of converting to microseconds breaks the seL4 principle of not abstracting away details of the hardware.

So this has left me unclear on whether my small patch was a good thing or not, but I certainly learnt something about this corner of seL4 timer handling. And I’ve ordered a copy of “Hacker’s Delight” on the recommendation of a code comment.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 319 released

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 319. This version includes the following changes:

[ Jochen Sprickerhof ]
* Improve header detection for Sphinx documentation projects.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Michael Ablassmeier: vmsync

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked a few times if it would be possible to use virtnbdbackup as some kind of “replication” utility, to keep cold standby virtual machines on other libvirt hosts.

Usually i would tell to use underlying filesystem features (such as zfs send/recv, with incremental snapshots) to keep cold, standby copies on other hosts.

As for qcow based virtual machines, using the dirty bitmaps is not only a valid feature to create backups, but to (incrementally) replicate virtual machines, too.

I’ve released vmsync. A small golang utility that implements a simple replication tool using the NBD protocol to sync virtual machines to other hosts.

Mike Gabriel: Future of libayatana-appindicator (v0.6.0 released today)

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:15:00 +0000

Some of you might have noticed that the recent (or rather: previous) version of libayatana-appindicator (v0.5.94) notified users and developers of the library being deprecated.

This short post is to notify you, that with today's libayatana-appindicator v0.6.0 release [1] this deprecation warning has now been removed again. Another new feature (added to AppIndicator without ABI breakage) is tooltip support. The new package version has just been uploaded to Debian experimental. Please test if your application (if it gets linked against libayatana-appindicator) continues to work flawlessly. Thanks!

libayatana-appindicator will receive continued support until GTK-3 becomes end-of-life (because libayatana-appindicator has a baked-in GTK-3 dependency which should not be ported to GTK-4 imho). That said, in the future, GTK-3 applications can continue using libayatana-appindicator for sending AppIndicator-like icons and menus over DBus to KStatusNotifierItem-based system tray renderers.

If you are looking for an AppIndicator implementation for GTK-4 applications (or other), I'd like to encourage you to help making libayatana-appindicator-glib [2] a new standard (can be used in GTK and Qt applications alike, implementation is using pure Glib-2.0). Currently, there is only one renderer (ayatana-indicator-application), so more work needs to be done on the renderers' side. (One of the next work items here is to get AppIndicator-Glib support working in Lomiri's desktop/windowed mode).

[1] https://github.com/AyatanaIndicators/libayatana-appindicator/releases/ta...
[2] https://github.com/AyatanaIndicators/libayatana-appindicator-glib/

Colin Watson: Free software activity in May 2026

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:10:16 +0000

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.

OpenSSH

I backported various security fixes from 10.3 to trixie, bookworm, bullseye, buster, and stretch. For trixie, I also backported several IPQoS fixes to line up with upstream’s traffic management settings and drop a rather hacky Debian-specific patch; this needed a quick follow-up fix.

I upgraded trixie-backports to 10.3.

I fixed openssh uses pidof but does not depend on procps.

PuTTY

I upgraded from 0.83 to 0.84.

Python packaging

New upstream versions:

bitstruct
ormar
pdm (fixing a build failure)
pydantic
pydantic-core
pydantic-settings
pyglet (fixing a build failure)
python-asyncssh
python-bitarray
python-btrees
python-build
python-certifi
python-charset-normalizer (fixing a build failure)
python-fakeredis (contributed supporting fix upstream)
python-holidays
python-jsonschema-path
python-memray (fixing a build failure and CVE-2026-32722)
python-openapi-schema-validator
python-pathable
python-persistent
python-pyftpdlib
python-pytest-run-parallel
sorl-thumbnail
twisted
zope.interface
zope.proxy

Other build/test failures:

beets
buildbot (contributed upstream)
dep-logic (contributed upstream)
diskcache
khard
matplotlib
mkdocs-rss-plugin
ormar: compatibility with fastapi 0.125 and pydantic 2.13
pgzero
py7zr
pydantic-extra-types (contributed upstream)
pydata-sphinx-theme
python-invocations (contributed upstream)
python-localzone
python-maturin
python-nacl
python-pampy
python-treq (contributed upstream, including fixing some CI bitrot)
python-txrequests (contributed upstream)

Other bugs:

I updated python-treq upstream to stop vendoring multipart, now that the packaging issues with that have been sorted out.

Code reviews

debmirror: User-Agent blocked by Ubuntu/Launchpad repositories (uploaded, and cherry-picked into trixie)
pydantic: Fix CVE-2024-3772 in bookworm (merged and uploaded)
pyodbc: Run SQLite tests (merged and uploaded)
python-jsonschema-path: Transition to starlette 1.0 (merged and uploaded)
python-maison: FTBFS with the nocheck build profile (followed up to fix the nodoc build profile as well)
python-openapi-core: Transition to starlette 1.0
python-openapi-schema-validator: Transition to starlette 1.0 (merged and uploaded)
python-openapi-spec-validator: Transition to starlette 1.0 (merged and uploaded)
python-pathable: Transition to starlette 1.0 (merged and uploaded)
python-rich-argparse: New upstream version 1.8.0 (merged and uploaded)

Other bits and pieces

I contributed a debian-policy patch to fix several links related to build profiles.

Vincent Bernat: Blogging with LLMs as a non-native speaker

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:15:13 +0000

AI slop is invading the web. A recent story about disallowing LLM-generated submissions on Lobsters triggered a lot of debate. My personal worst offenders are LinkedIn articles with AI-generated images and uninspired articles filled with emojis from people trying to masquerade as experts on a subject they don’t care enough to write themselves. While I am unhappy about this situation, I rely on LLMs for grammar, copyediting, and translation. I don’t see this as a contradiction.

I am a native French speaker, but I blog in both English and French. When I started writing this blog in 2011, I was composing in French and translating to English, but I found it was better to work in the reverse order to avoid unnatural and non-idiomatic constructions. One of my goals is to write “good” English but I never felt it was my strong point.¹ For example, verb tenses are often an issue, even if I mostly stick with the present tense. I learn the rules and forget them right away. I also don’t feel like hiring an editor for something I see as a hobby.

As an example, I have kept the history of the successive iterations when writing “Scaling Akvorado BMP RIB with sharding”:

the first draft, authored with the help of a thesaurus,²
the edited copy revised by the copyediting skill,
the translation to French generated with the translation skill, and
the human proofread of the French translation, with minor edits to the English version.

I know that LLMs may alter the author’s voice when editing, but the corrections in the second step are minor. The prompt asks to “apply light stylistic edits,” with some guidance around avoiding passive voice, long sentences, bland verbs, and filler words. It also defines the target audience: technical with a B2 level in English.

In the following excerpt, I used “long time” instead of “long-standing.” The former is missing a hyphen and applies to people—a long-time friend, while the later relates to a situation—a long-standing agreement. I had a hard time understanding the reason of the second change: the LLM prefers a defining relative clause to provide the definition of “RIB sharding.”

As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado needs to scale to tens of millions of routes. This has been a ~~long time~~ long-standing challenge, but I expect this issue is now fixed by using RIB sharding, a method ~~to split~~ that splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent updates.

In the next modification, the LLM puts “device” instead of “equipment.” This is correct as “equipment” is an uncountable noun. I know that, but I still fall into this trap.

When Akvorado does not find a route from a specific device, it falls back to a route sent by another ~~equipment~~ device.

I ask the LLM to use “descriptive verbs” and it complies by replacing a multi-word predicate with a lexically rich verb:

The benchmarks demonstrate it ~~has better performance than~~ outperforms other ~~packages, both~~ packages for lookups, insertions, and memory usage.

It also fixes grammar errors. In the next excerpt, a “list of routes” is a singular expression. Moreover, “stored” is a state and I should not use “into” as it expresses a change.

The list of routes for each prefix ~~are~~ is not stored directly ~~into~~ in the prefix tree.

As a last example, consider the following snippet. The “require” verb accepts a noun or an object followed by a to-infinitive. I can’t use it with just a to-infinitive.

An alternative would be to have one prefix tree for each peer but it would require ~~to configure~~ configuring all routers to export their routes.

As someone who didn’t grow up speaking English, I struggle with these grammar rules despite reading a lot of English material.³ French is more complex to get started but more systematic. English is full of irregularities.

On each page, I disclose in the footer whether an AI modified the content. There are three levels:

🧠: no AI or almost no AI (e.g., grammar corrections)
✨: enhanced (e.g., copyediting)
🤖: generated (e.g., translated from another language, even if human-edited)

Hover or tap the icon to reveal the AI’s name and its role in the document.

Example of AI usage disclosure: Claude Sonnet 4.5 edited this article.

The graph below shows which tool altered each post, year by year. Recently, I applied the grammar skill to past articles. Since 2018, French articles have been translated with the help of DeepL first, then of an LLM. Since 2024, English articles are copyedited.

🖼 Graph showing the AI usage over the years. Each level get its own color.

AI usage over the years. Hover or tap a band for the details.

If you are strongly against any usage of LLMs specifically for writing, I hope you accept my more nuanced position on the usage of these tools as a trade-off to provide clearer and more engaging articles. Years of literature on improving English told us it is important to choose the right word to keep the reader engaged.

[…] Good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments.

― Stephen King, On Writing

Note

Unlike other recent articles, I did not use an LLM to edit this post: an unnamed person kindly accepted to proofread it. I translated it to French without using an LLM either.

Update (2026-06)

See the story associated to this post on Lobsters, as well as the article “How developers react to AI-scented blog posts” by Cynthia Dunlop, one of the coauthor of “Writing for Developers.”

I recently read cover to cover “Writing for Developers” and I found it stimulating. Michael Lynch is currently writing “Refactoring English” on the same topic and I have subscribed to the early access. ↩
I am quite happy with the writing tools provided by Kagi. Both the translate tool and the dictionary are a valuable help to find different wordings. I also lean on Kagi’s research assistant when researching a topic. ↩
When I was ten, I played Monkey Island 2 in English without having taken any classes. I used a dictionary to translate word by word and I found the irregular verbs confusing—and not in the dictionary. ↩

Mike Gabriel: Voxit 1.0 has been released

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:45:00 +0000

Official announcement

European Voxit community strengthens digital sovereignty: shared codebase completed.

Read the official announcement at:
https://www.voxit.org/european-voxit-community-strengthens-digital-sover...

The Voxit community and platform development

The Voxit participation platform is originally based on the open source Polis platform developed by The Computational Democracy Project in the United States, but since its establishment in autumn 2025, the European Voxit community has been developing an independent solution, adapted to European needs.

The aim is to create an open source, interoperable and scalable participation infrastructure suited to Europe’s regulatory environment and aligned with democratic values. Through this development work, Voxit is becoming a clearly distinct fork of the original Polis platform – allowing Europe to develop participatory infrastructure at its own pace and according to its own governance needs, while the original Polis project continues to break new ground. This enables Europe to build its own open and trustworthy digital democracy tools, rooted in public governance and European democratic traditions.

Voxit 1.0 source code is now available

The source code for version 1.0 of the European community edition of the Voxit platform has now been published and is openly maintained on GitLab.com at: https://gitlab.com/voxit/voxit#

Otto Kekäläinen: SpacemiT K3 is a compelling RISC-V AI CPU, but difficult to buy

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The RISC-V CPU architecture has been gaining a lot of popularity since it launched in 2014, and now that the industry is standardizing on the RVA23 level that includes vector support as a mandatory extension, we are likely to see a lot more edge- and IoT devices with the ability to run local LLMs at reasonable speed, and most importantly at very compelling prices.

SpacemiT is a Chinese RISC-V CPU manufacturer that launched on May 11th, 2026, their long-anticipated next-gen RISC-V AI chip K3. It is among the earliest RISC-V CPUs that adhere to the RVA23 standard and performance-wise it is quite capable, providing 130 KDMIPS general computing power, 60 TOPS on INT4 which translates to about 15 tokens per second when running a 30 billion parameter large language model.

The aspect that really makes it stand out is:

the RISC-V CPU architecture is open source,
the price point is within reach of home and small business users and
the overall feature set makes it an ideal platform to build local and offline AI systems.

SpacemiT also develops their own Debian-based Linux distribution Bianbu OS, and seems to have collaboration going on with the wider community. Their community site seems active, and they also have a dedicated X account @spacemit_riscv and Reddit account r/spacemit_riscv posting relevant progress info on Linux kernel upstreaming activities. The X account is also responsive, as evidenced by its replies to my questions.

Canonical lists the SpacemiT K3 pico-ITX and K3 CoM260 Kit on its official Ubuntu for RISC-V partner-built hardware page, which strengthens the perception that upstream Linux support is being taken seriously. The SpacemiT folks also gave an interesting talk at the 2026 Ubuntu Summit that includes a peek into their roadmap with future K3, K7 and K9 models.

For technical details, see SpacemiT’s K3 pico-ITX documentation, the Jetson Orin Nano-compatible K3 CoM260 board documentation and documentation of the K3 processor itself.

Comparing the resellers

SpacemiT does not sell anything directly to consumers. Instead you need to buy a board that includes the K3 chip from an integrator. Currently the main resellers are:

All of the above are Chinese companies that ship to customers both inside and outside China. DeepComputing stands out as the only one that actually has done real integration and ships the K3 on a custom board, while the others simply resell the SpacemiT-produced K3 pico-ITX and K3 CoM260 Kit.

Milk-V

Milk-V is a RISC-V specialized integrator, as the name already implies. They sell the K3 under the name Jupiter2. Of all the K3 pico-ITX reseller product pages, the Jupiter2 presentation is the nicest and most detailed. Unfortunately their order page at arace.tech only states that it is a “pre-order” with no information about shipping schedule, taxes, or other details like what SSD is included (if any). Based on the pictures it does ship with a Milk-V branded case. The 32 GB RAM lists at 504 EUR, which is a very reasonable price. The @MilkV_Official account on X recently promoted the K3.

Documentation and support

As of this writing, the Milk-V Jupiter2 documentation site is just a stub and has no actual content, and only two links to the SpacemiT K3 documentation site. For support there is a web forum with a dedicated Jupiter2 section. There is also a Matrix space, but unlike their other products, there is no dedicated Jupiter (neither v1 nor v2) channel.

Community size and open source involvement

At least one prior Milk-V product was certified by Canonical, which indicates there is some collaboration in progress. Canonical also lists the Milk-V Titan on its official Ubuntu for RISC-V partner-built hardware page.

Sipeed

The Sipeed K3 announcement is well written (in English) with all the relevant details and links to additional PDF manuals. However, their main page at sipeed.com says nothing about the K3, so one must know the subpage URL to access it. They offer both the K3 CoM260 kit compatible with Jetson Orin Nano carrier boards, and the stand-alone K3 pico-ITX-sized motherboard. The CoM260 kit is only 10 USD cheaper than the full pico-ITX motherboard, so choosing the latter is a no-brainer if starting from scratch. The pico-ITX model with 32 GB DDR5 RAM sells for 639 USD. The product page does not mention anything about hard disk size, so you don’t really know exactly what you will be getting if placing an order. There is no indication about case, Wi-Fi antennas or power supply either, so most likely they are not included.

Their store.sipeed.com website does not work at all, and their Taobao and AliExpress stores are not public and only accessible to registered users. The order page also says nothing about shipping time, delivery time, or taxes. The X account @SipeedIO is active and recently posted pictures of shipments in progress.

Documentation and support

The main documentation wiki does not yet have any K3 content at the time of writing. There is a Discord channel for general RISC-V discussion, and their MaixHub also has a discussion board, but I didn’t find anything K3-specific.

Community size and open source involvement

Sipeed has had at least one of their previous devices certified by Canonical, which indicates they are active in the community.

Note that the other RISC-V company SiFive that also has had hardware certified and officially supported by Canonical is a different company, despite the very similar name.

Banana Pi

Banana Pi announced that they offer both the K3 CoM260 kit and the K3 pico-ITX motherboard version. Their product page for the K3 confusingly shows a MediaTek product in the page banner rather than the SpacemiT K3. Based on the product description and the fact they renamed the product as BPI-SM10, it seems to ship with some carrier board. The product pictures look identical to the SpacemiT documentation and there is no picture of the carrier board, and details are very sparse. The pico-ITX version with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD sells for 293 USD and the CoM260 developer kit with the same specs sells for 287 USD and the 32 GB RAM with 128 GB SSD model sells for 595 USD. The shop page shows only five orders so far and items are currently out of stock. As there was no 32 GB RAM version of the pico-ITX available at all, this isn’t an option for me as I want to run 30B parameter models that need the larger memory version.

Of all of these resellers, the Banana Pi website seems the most outdated. It does not have a search feature, it is not mobile-friendly, pictures can’t be pinched to zoom in and so forth. Product names are also almost all identical, and as the product listings only show the beginning of the product name, figuring out what product is what requires extra effort that just makes the online purchase experience plain bad.

Documentation and support

I was only able to find the documentation page for the CoM260 kit, but none for the pico-ITX version. For support there is a forum, but the category list does not show any section for K3, and the forum search prohibits using the search term “k3” as too short.

Community size and open source involvement

Banana Pi has a long history in the ARM single-board computer market, but their presence in the RISC-V ecosystem is still growing. Their X account @sinovoip has posted only once about the K3 and otherwise promotes their ARM boards. However, their community culture page does express a commitment to open hardware in general, but there is no visible K3-specific community activity.

Firefly

Firefly’s K3 product page is comprehensive. Based on the details, they do not offer the K3 pico-ITX variant at all, but only the K3 CoM260 board inside the AIBOX-K3 Firefly RISC-V Edge Mini PC product. This is a feature-complete offering with a Jetson Orin Nano carrier board and case. The AIBOX-K3 with 32 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD in a case sells for 689 USD in their own Firefly.store. Unfortunately it only has HDMI and there is no USB-C with DisplayPort support, which is a deal-breaker for me personally.

Interestingly, Firefly also offers rack-mounted servers with K3 as the CPU.

Documentation and support

The wiki link on the product page is broken. The Firefly wiki does have a section for the AIBOX-K3, but it too has a broken link. It seems that as of the time of writing, there is no wiki section for this product yet.

For support there is a web forum, which does have at least one K3 thread covering guides such as Hermes Agent installation, though broader K3-specific sections are still sparse.

Community size and open source involvement

Firefly’s X account @TeeFirefly has had no posts since 2024, and their GitLab/T-Firefly shows mostly 2024 activity, with only one repository updated in 2025 and nothing in 2026. Historically they have built a moderate community around their ARM-based Rockchip boards, with active forums and wiki contributions for those product lines. Their RISC-V K3 offerings are newer, and likely need a lot more polish to be attractive products overall.

DeepComputing

Last, but certainly not least, is the laptop manufacturer DeepComputing that offers a Framework laptop compatible motherboard with the SpacemiT K3 chip. They also sell the plain motherboard, or with the Cooler Master case, which allows one to easily connect it to an external monitor and keyboard and use it as a desktop computer. The plain board with 32 GB RAM and no SSD sells for about 882 EUR. Shipping of the first batch is expected to start by end of June 2026. Their X account @DeepComputingio promotes this DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III as their flagship product, so they seem to put a lot of effort into it.

The overall product design and packaging seems good. Of all the K3 resellers and integrators that I was able to find, DeepComputing is the only one that actually designs their own boards with the K3 processor, while all the other vendors above are simply reselling the vanilla K3 boards with or without a case.

After reviewing all these options I decided to buy the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard III for Framework Laptop 13 with 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and the Cooler Master case, totalling about 1100 EUR.

Documentation and support

DeepComputing maintains product information for their RISC-V hardware at github.com/DC-DeepComputing/Framework, with documentation of the newest Mainboard III (FML13V05) still being finalized ahead of the first batch shipment. They provide community support through Discord and web forum, although the latter has very little activity.

Community size and open source involvement

DeepComputing has established itself as a pioneer in RISC-V laptops, beginning with the DC-ROMA. I have seen their stand at FOSDEM, which shows they are genuinely active in the open source community. Canonical lists DeepComputing’s first mainboard / FML13V01 on its official Ubuntu for RISC-V partner-built hardware page, and it seems likely that they will continue to collaborate with Canonical with the new model once it ships. While the underlying Linux enablement depends on SpacemiT’s upstream efforts, DeepComputing’s involvement helps bridge the gap between reference hardware and consumer-ready products.

Conclusion

After weighing all the options, I ended up placing an order with DeepComputing for their custom K3 board with the Cooler Master case. Despite the premium price, the active community support and the properly documented promise of a complete, working system made it easy to place an order with confidence.

The SpacemiT K3 is poised to be one of the most significant RISC-V chips for local AI workloads, thanks to its RVA23 compliance and high tokens per second potential. Yet the buying experience in mid-2026 remains fragmented and incomplete. Hopefully this is just because the product is new, and they will get the purchase experience polished soon.

What struck me most during this process was how poor the customer experience is across nearly all of these vendor websites: broken links, missing search functions, outdated product banners, pages that show the wrong product entirely, and no information about shipping times, stock levels, taxes, and so on. One wonders why these companies don’t fully invest in their web presence.

Personally I would assume they likely have enough customers already, primarily through domestic channels like Taobao and JD.com, that they do not feel any pressure to improve their international-facing sites. However, I did also review what was offered on Taobao, and the product details were very incomplete there too. Taobao, however, has a built-in live chat with almost all sellers, which can be used to ask questions and thus compensate for missing product details.

I don’t fully understand why the sales process seems unpolished. The websites feel almost like an afterthought – a checkbox to claim global reach while the real business apparently happens elsewhere via closed platforms or via inaccessible reseller channels. It is a frustrating reminder that in the RISC-V hardware world, the technology may be open and global, but the purchase experience is less so.

ExcitingAds! Planet Debian

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2026

Debian LTS/ELTS

Debian Printing

Debian Lomiri

Debian Astro

Debian IoT

Debian Mobcom

misc

Aigars Mahinovs: How to make a good group photo

The Goal

Hardware

Scouting

Organization

Preparation

Execution

Processing

Publishing

Russ Allbery: Review: The Player of Games

Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.4

Birger Schacht: Status update, June 2026

Debian Related Work

DH Related Work

Other

Steinar H. Gunderson: An update on sesse@chromium.org

Tim Retout: AWS Washington Summit 2026

Julian Andres Klode: The pandemic of incomplete OpenSSL error handling

Colin Watson: Free software activity in June 2026

bugs.debian.org documentation

OpenSSH

OpenSSL 4.0

Python packaging

Rust packaging

Code reviews

Other bits and pieces

Matthew Garrett: Securing agentic identity

Joey Hess: no LLM code in dependencies

Matthew Garrett: Preventing token theft

Valhalla's Things: A Pair of Hair Towel Wraps

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in June 2026

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tl 0.0.2 on CRAN: First Update

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2025-06-30)

Joey Hess: big loads offgrid with a small battery (sidelined)

Russell Coker: Links June 2026

Russell Coker: Dirty Clone and SE Linux

Conclusion

Junichi Uekawa: So I learnt that last is now in wtmpdb.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 323 released

Daniel Baumann: Debian: Linux Vulnerability Mitigation (PACKET_EDIT_MEME.c)

Russell Coker: Plaud

Russell Coker: Some GPU Stuff

Further Investigation

Steve McIntyre: It's dead, Jim!

How did we do?

What's next?

Jonathan McDowell: onak 0.6.5 released

Russ Allbery: Review: The Folded Sky

Jonathan Wiltshire: Streamlining Debian Updates with AI: The Stable Update Adviser

Try it out

Russ Allbery: Review: Platform Decay

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 322 released

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tl-0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2025-06-17)

Tim Retout: seL4 repo relationships

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.4.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.0-1 (2026-06-17)

Vasudev Kamath: Releasing debvulns: CLI for listing Debian vulnerabilities

Why a new CLI?

What else is NEW?

What Next?

Russell Coker: HP Z4 G4

Hardware

Variants

Conclusion

Gunnar Wolf: systemd for Linux SysAdmins

Wouter Verhelst: Agentic coding and Free Software

Problems

Paradigm shift

A technically positive evolution

A threat to free software?

Why not `pkgctl`?