- <title>Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Tue, 3 Nov 2015 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
-list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
-Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
-journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
-to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
-journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
-journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
-<a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
-OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
-all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
-use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
-journal entries .</p>
-
-<p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
-Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
-piqued my interest. The title of the document was
-"<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
-Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
-"Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet"). The
-document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
-"Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a
-copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
-(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
-letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
-of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
-Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
-was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
-negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
-explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
-conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
-(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
-Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
-ended,
-<a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
-in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
-including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
-reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
-Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
-<a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
-and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
-Transport and Communications</a>. This might be the reason the letter
-was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
-mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
-sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
-Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
-Geneva.</p>
-
-<p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
-document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
-over now. This time
-<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
-asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
-receiver</a> and
-<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
-the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
-copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
-public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
-reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
-different clause
-(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
-letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
-content of the document from the public because it contained
-information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
-that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
-mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
-an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
-nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
-of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
-copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
-the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
-also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
-the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
-this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
-
-<p>Armed with this
-knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
-author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
-"sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
-ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
-the document. According to
-<a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
-government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
-Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
-guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
-the report initially and
-<a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
-them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
-document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
-when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
-Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
-tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
-the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
-upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
-to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
-the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
-same person as the author of the document.</p>
-
-<p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
-inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
-meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
-Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
-by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
-negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
-ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
-be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
-
-<p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
-And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?</p>
+ <title>Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>This summer, I read a great article
+"<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
+This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
+how to profile multi-threaded programs. It presented a system for
+profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
+testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
+the code to various degrees compared to a normal run. It does this by
+slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
+and measure how this affect processing time. The processing time is
+measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
+counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END). It
+can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
+runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
+
+<p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
+get the system into Debian. I
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
+a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
+system ready for Debian by sending patches. The build process need to
+be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
+to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
+profiling information included in the source package.
+But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
+
+<p>The way the system work is fairly simple. To run an coz experiment
+on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+coz run --- program-to-run
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
+information. To show what part of the code affect the performance
+most, use a web browser and either point it to
+<a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
+or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch). Check out this web
+site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like. To make the
+profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
+COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
+code, rebuild and run the profiler. This allow coz to do more
+targeted experiments.</p>
+
+<p>A video published by ACM
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
+Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube. There is also a paper
+from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
+titled
+<a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
+finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
+for Coz is available from github. It will only build with clang
+because it uses a
+<a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
+feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
+<a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
+it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
+
+<p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
+of software in Debian. I would very much like some help with the
+packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
+C++ libraries.</p>