X-Git-Url: http://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/blobdiff_plain/feb473cda9dc7b09ddc973f7b10e8ee0d15f60ee..8fb691804566ab7f685456448d17c8a6ba0c0fa4:/blog/index.html diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index 4bc327ffb7..ce3ec49f95 100644 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -20,63 +20,72 @@
-
Epost inn som arkivformat i Riksarkivarens forskrift?
-
27th April 2017
-

I disse dager, med frist 1. mai, har Riksarkivaren ute en høring på -sin forskrift. Som en kan se er det ikke mye tid igjen før fristen -som går ut på søndag. Denne forskriften er det som lister opp hvilke -formater det er greit å arkivere i -Noark -5-løsninger i Norge.

- -

Jeg fant høringsdokumentene hos -Norsk -Arkivråd etter å ha blitt tipset på epostlisten til -fri -programvareprosjektet Nikita Noark5-Core, som lager et Noark 5 -Tjenestegresesnitt. Jeg er involvert i Nikita-prosjektet og takket -være min interesse for tjenestegrensesnittsprosjektet har jeg lest en -god del Noark 5-relaterte dokumenter, og til min overraskelse oppdaget -at standard epost ikke er på listen over godkjente formater som kan -arkiveres. Høringen med frist søndag er en glimrende mulighet til å -forsøke å gjøre noe med det. Jeg holder på med -egen -høringsuttalelse, og lurer på om andre er interessert i å støtte -forslaget om å tillate arkivering av epost som epost i arkivet.

- -

Er du igang med å skrive egen høringsuttalelse allerede? I så fall -kan du jo vurdere å ta med en formulering om epost-lagring. Jeg tror -ikke det trengs så mye. Her et kort forslag til tekst:

- -

- -

Viser til høring sendt ut 2017-02-17 (Riksarkivarens referanse - 2016/9840 HELHJO), og tillater oss å sende inn noen innspill om - revisjon av Forskrift om utfyllende tekniske og arkivfaglige - bestemmelser om behandling av offentlige arkiver (Riksarkivarens - forskrift).

- -

Svært mye av vår kommuikasjon foregår i dag på e-post.  Vi - foreslår derfor at Internett-e-post, slik det er beskrevet i IETF - RFC 5322, - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322. bør - inn som godkjent dokumentformat.  Vi foreslår at forskriftens - oversikt over godkjente dokumentformater ved innlevering i § 5-16 - endres til å ta med Internett-e-post.

- -

- -

Som del av arbeidet med tjenestegrensesnitt har vi testet hvordan -epost kan lagres i en Noark 5-struktur, og holder på å skrive et -forslag om hvordan dette kan gjøres som vil bli sendt over til -arkivverket så snart det er ferdig. De som er interesserte kan -følge -fremdriften på web.

+ +
18th November 2017
+

A month ago, I blogged about my work to +automatically +check the copyright status of IMDB entries, and try to count the +number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the +Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and +identified a few more. The code used to extract information from +various data sources is available in +a +git repository, currently available from github.

+ +

So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain +better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a +histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release +year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the +graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect +World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak +around 2010?

+ +

+ +

I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in +the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics +reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:

+ +
+  249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
+ 2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
+  830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
+ 2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
+  291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
+  144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
+  350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
+    4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
+  698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
+    8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
+ 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
+
+ +

The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the +data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already +listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent +movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I've seen examples of all these +situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based +on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that +are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713. + +

It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement, +if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have +tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they +are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you +can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain +Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to +convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?

+ +

Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about +movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page +exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the +script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should +pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.

@@ -84,52 +93,83 @@ fremdriften på web.

- -
20th April 2017
-

Jeg oppdaget i dag at nettstedet som -publiserer offentlige postjournaler fra statlige etater, OEP, har -begynt å blokkerer enkelte typer webklienter fra å få tilgang. Vet -ikke hvor mange det gjelder, men det gjelder i hvert fall libwww-perl -og curl. For å teste selv, kjør følgende:

- -
-% curl -v -s https://www.oep.no/pub/report.xhtml?reportId=3 2>&1 |grep '< HTTP'
-< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
-% curl -v -s --header 'User-Agent:Opera/12.0' https://www.oep.no/pub/report.xhtml?reportId=3 2>&1 |grep '< HTTP'
-< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
-%
-
- -

Her kan en se at tjenesten gir «404 Not Found» for curl i -standardoppsettet, mens den gir «200 OK» hvis curl hevder å være Opera -versjon 12.0. Offentlig elektronisk postjournal startet blokkeringen -2017-03-02.

- -

Blokkeringen vil gjøre det litt vanskeligere å maskinelt hente -informasjon fra oep.no. Kan blokkeringen være gjort for å hindre -automatisert innsamling av informasjon fra OEP, slik Pressens -Offentlighetsutvalg gjorde for å dokumentere hvordan departementene -hindrer innsyn i -rapporten -«Slik hindrer departementer innsyn» som ble publiserte i januar -2017. Det virker usannsynlig, da det jo er trivielt å bytte -User-Agent til noe nytt.

- -

Finnes det juridisk grunnlag for det offentlige å diskriminere -webklienter slik det gjøres her? Der tilgang gis eller ikke alt etter -hva klienten sier at den heter? Da OEP eies av DIFI og driftes av -Basefarm, finnes det kanskje noen dokumenter sendt mellom disse to -aktørene man kan be om innsyn i for å forstå hva som har skjedd. Men -postjournalen -til DIFI viser kun to dokumenter det siste året mellom DIFI og -Basefarm. -Mimes brønn neste, -tenker jeg.

+ +
1st November 2017
+

If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might +find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I +think of when designing a storage system.

+ + + +

Several of these research papers are based on data collected from +hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye +opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or +redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there +are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both +ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and +practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like +Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know +you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have +never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds +true if fault tolerance do not work.

+ +

Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how +fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its +status to detect and replace failed disks.

- Tags: norsk, offentlig innsyn. + Tags: english, raid, sysadmin.
@@ -137,101 +177,46 @@ tenker jeg.

- -
19th March 2017
-

The Nikita -Noark 5 core project is implementing the Norwegian standard for -keeping an electronic archive of government documents. -The -Noark 5 standard document the requirement for data systems used by -the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface -specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and -retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I've been involved -in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian -Unix User Group -announced -it supported the project. I believe this is an important project, -and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the -future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend -on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use -case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published -from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in -mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my -itches.

- -

If you would like to help make sure there is a free software -alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel -(#nikita on -irc.freenode.net) and -the -project mailing list.

- -

When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about -documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it -became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I -completed an implementation of a command line tool -archive-pdf to upload a PDF file to the archive using this -API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing -fonds, series and -files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than -one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the -file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The -process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet, -locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is -a test run directly after populating the database with test data using -our API tester:

- -

-~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
-using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-
- 0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
- 1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
-Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
-  PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
-  File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
-~/src//noark5-tester$
-

- -

You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had -one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use -among the two created by the API tester. The archive-pdf -tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.

- -

In the project, I have been mostly working on -the API -tester so far, while getting to know the code base. The API -tester currently use -the HATEOAS links -to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed -operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to -create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to -store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our -implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the -specification.

- -

The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification -defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service. -There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification, -and we have -started -writing down the questions we get from implementing it. We use a -format inspired by how The -Austin Group collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with -their -instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a request for a procedure for submitting defect reports :). - -

The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is -fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those -that want to test the current code base. The API tester is -implemented in Python.

+ +
31st October 2017
+

I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not +know there are easily available web services available for writing +LaTeX documents as a team. I thought it was common knowledge, but to +make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention +these useful services for writing LaTeX documents. Some of them even +provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.

+ +

There are two commercial services available, +ShareLaTeX and +Overleaf. They are very easy to +use. Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for +(ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing. Note, these two +have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be +one joint service. I've used both for different documents, and they +work just fine. While +ShareLaTeX is free +software, while the latter is not. According to a +announcement from Overleaf, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code +base maintained as free software.

+ +But these two are not the only alternatives. +Fidus Writer is another free +software solution with the +source available on github. I have not used it myself. Several +others can be found on the nice +alterntiveTo +web service. + +

If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write +documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services. You can even +host your own, if you want to. :)

+
@@ -239,114 +224,288 @@ implemented in Python.

- -
9th March 2017
-

Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux -computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine -was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use df or look at a -file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the -shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without -risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been -obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is -possible to find messages like these in dmesg:

- -

-nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying -
nfs: server nfsserver OK -

- -

It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to -be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other -messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they -are noticed.

- -

While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel -code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect -it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every -time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a -bit further, I discovered that this value show up in -/proc/self/mountstats on Linux.

- -

The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the -same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the -mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine. -I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount -points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem -view), but that does not worry me.

- -

The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:

- -

-[...]
-device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
-device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
-        opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
-        age:    7863311
-        caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
-        sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
-        events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0 
-        bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809 
-        RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
-        xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
-        per-op statistics
-                NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-             GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
-             SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
-              LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
-              ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
-            READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
-                READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
-               WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
-              CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
-               MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
-             SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
-               MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
-              REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
-               RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
-              RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
-                LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
-             READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
-         READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
-              FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
-              FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
-            PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
-              COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-
-device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
-[...]
-

- -

The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list. -It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system -operation. Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts. If these -numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS -hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right -away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a -while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the -defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the -timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS -mount options.

- -

The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat -Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/. -But according to -Solaris -10 System Administration Guide: Network Services, the 'nfsstat -c' -command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work -on Linux, as far as I can tell. I -asked Debian about this, -but have not seen any replies yet.

- -

Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is -experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are -affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the -network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very -much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.

+ +
25th October 2017
+

Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a +set of The Internet Movie database +(IMDB) entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer +to can be freely distributed on the Internet. This proved to be +harder than it sounds. IMDB for sure list movies without any +copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or +where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from +Creative Commons. These are mixed with copyright protected movies, +and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using +the information in IMDB.

+ +

First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB, +Wikipedia and +The Internet Archive, to get a +feel how to do this. It is hard to know for sure using these sources, +but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out +of copyright" with a few hours work per movie. As I needed to check +almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable. I simply +can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data +set.

+ +

I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could +introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but +was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the +metadata. Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the +description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk +to locate those ones and put that approach aside.

+ +

In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies +had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me +that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with +both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The +Internet Archive with a IMDB ID. This is useful based on the +assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be +legally distributed on the Internet. With some help from the RDF +community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to +pass to the SPARQL interface on +Wikidata: + +

+SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
+WHERE
+{
+  ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
+  ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
+  ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
+  OPTIONAL {
+        ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
+        ?work rdfs:label ?label.
+        FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
+  }
+}
+

+ +

If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in +Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and +when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both +of the latter two are available. At the moment the result set contain +2338 entries. Of course, it depend on volunteers including both +correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles +for the movie. It should be noted that the result will include +duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages. There are +some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a +typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive. +I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that +automatically.

+ +

I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata +and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The +Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097 +free movies and their IMDB ID. In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack +the refered Internet Archive entry. I assume the 70 "disappearing" +entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.

+ +

This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to +contain 5331 +feature films at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000 +movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references +on Wikipedia.

+ +

I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a +little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the +years:

+ +

+ +

I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to +be similar.

+ +

If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to +cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database, +please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External +links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:

+ +

+* {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
+* {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
+

+ +

Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not +introduce a typo.

+ +

Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171 +identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet +Archive: Q1140317, +Q458656, +Q458656, +Q470560, +Q743340, +Q822580, +Q480696, +Q128761, +Q1307059, +Q1335091, +Q1537166, +Q1438334, +Q1479751, +Q1497200, +Q1498122, +Q865973, +Q834269, +Q841781, +Q841781, +Q1548193, +Q499031, +Q1564769, +Q1585239, +Q1585569, +Q1624236, +Q4796595, +Q4853469, +Q4873046, +Q915016, +Q4660396, +Q4677708, +Q4738449, +Q4756096, +Q4766785, +Q880357, +Q882066, +Q882066, +Q204191, +Q204191, +Q1194170, +Q940014, +Q946863, +Q172837, +Q573077, +Q1219005, +Q1219599, +Q1643798, +Q1656352, +Q1659549, +Q1660007, +Q1698154, +Q1737980, +Q1877284, +Q1199354, +Q1199354, +Q1199451, +Q1211871, +Q1212179, +Q1238382, +Q4906454, +Q320219, +Q1148649, +Q645094, +Q5050350, +Q5166548, +Q2677926, +Q2698139, +Q2707305, +Q2740725, +Q2024780, +Q2117418, +Q2138984, +Q1127992, +Q1058087, +Q1070484, +Q1080080, +Q1090813, +Q1251918, +Q1254110, +Q1257070, +Q1257079, +Q1197410, +Q1198423, +Q706951, +Q723239, +Q2079261, +Q1171364, +Q617858, +Q5166611, +Q5166611, +Q324513, +Q374172, +Q7533269, +Q970386, +Q976849, +Q7458614, +Q5347416, +Q5460005, +Q5463392, +Q3038555, +Q5288458, +Q2346516, +Q5183645, +Q5185497, +Q5216127, +Q5223127, +Q5261159, +Q1300759, +Q5521241, +Q7733434, +Q7736264, +Q7737032, +Q7882671, +Q7719427, +Q7719444, +Q7722575, +Q2629763, +Q2640346, +Q2649671, +Q7703851, +Q7747041, +Q6544949, +Q6672759, +Q2445896, +Q12124891, +Q3127044, +Q2511262, +Q2517672, +Q2543165, +Q426628, +Q426628, +Q12126890, +Q13359969, +Q13359969, +Q2294295, +Q2294295, +Q2559509, +Q2559912, +Q7760469, +Q6703974, +Q4744, +Q7766962, +Q7768516, +Q7769205, +Q7769988, +Q2946945, +Q3212086, +Q3212086, +Q18218448, +Q18218448, +Q18218448, +Q6909175, +Q7405709, +Q7416149, +Q7239952, +Q7317332, +Q7783674, +Q7783704, +Q7857590, +Q3372526, +Q3372642, +Q3372816, +Q3372909, +Q7959649, +Q7977485, +Q7992684, +Q3817966, +Q3821852, +Q3420907, +Q3429733, +Q774474

- Tags: debian, english, sysadmin. + Tags: english, opphavsrett.
@@ -354,44 +513,26 @@ much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.

- -
8th March 2017
-

So the new president in the United States of America claim to be -surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election -before he was elected president. He even claim this must be illegal. -Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden -documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one -way or another. Of course the president candidates were wiretapped, -alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.

- -

Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of -Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was -wiretapped illegally. I fail to see the relevance, given that I am -sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal -backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire -world.

- -

There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an -order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump. That is not very -surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being -secret. Perhaps he only heard about it?

- -

What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists -present it. In a news reports the other day in the radio from the -Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist -claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that -'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'. There is a fundamental and -important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are -unable to grasp it.

- -

Update 2017-03-13: Look like -The -Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above.

+ +
14th October 2017
+

I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside +the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea. The +proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of +the +propaganda twist from the East Germany government calling the wall +the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming +that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East +Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it +was erected to keep the people from escaping.

+ +

Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a +one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in, +while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?

- Tags: english, surveillance. + Tags: english.
@@ -399,33 +540,48 @@ Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above.

- -
3rd March 2017
-

For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian -Bokmål edition of The Debian -Administrator's Handbook. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of -Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and -we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and -use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book -available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to -happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need -to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.

- -

A - -fresh PDF edition in A4 format (the final book will have smaller -pages) of the book created every morning is available for -proofreading. If you find any errors, please -visit -Weblate and correct the error. The -state -of the translation including figures is a useful source for those -provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.

+ +
9th October 2017
+

At my nearby maker space, +Sonen, I heard the story that it +was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+) +on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had +to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages +worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying, +as the software involved, +Cura, is free software +and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took +the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found +a request for adding into +Debian from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but +never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days +ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.

+ +

Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a +working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW +queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress +on +the +status page for the 3D printer team.

+ +

The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded +now to get slots in the NEW +queue while we work up updating the packages to the latest +upstream version.

+ +

On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder +to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the +short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking +for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in +Debian, check out +slic3r and +slic3r-prusa. +The latter is a fork of the former.

@@ -433,77 +589,30 @@ provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.

- -
1st March 2017
-

A few days ago I ordered a small batch of -the ChaosKey, a small -USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith -Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it -work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the -box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a -Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just -fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small -test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, -drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds. -Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:

- -
-% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
-  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
-  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
-     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
-     sleep 1; \
-  done
-300
-0+1 oppføringer inn
-0+1 oppføringer ut
-28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
-4
-8
-12
-17
-21
-%
-
- -

The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second. In such case any -application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server) -will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with -the ChaosKey inserted:

- -
-% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
-  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
-  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
-     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
-     sleep 1; \
-  done
-1079
-0+1 oppføringer inn
-0+1 oppføringer ut
-104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
-433
-1028
-1031
-1035
-1038
-%
-
- -

Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case -someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)

- -

Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might -find the talk -recording illuminating. It explains exactly what the source of -randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing -available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog -post.

+ +
4th October 2017
+
Når jeg holder på med ulike prosjekter, så trenger jeg stadig ulike +skruer. Det siste prosjektet jeg holder på med er å lage +en boks til en +HDMI-touch-skjerm som skal brukes med Raspberry Pi. Boksen settes +sammen med skruer og bolter, og jeg har vært i tvil om hvor jeg kan +få tak i de riktige skruene. Clas Ohlson og Jernia i nærheten har +sjelden hatt det jeg trenger. Men her om dagen fikk jeg et fantastisk +tips for oss som bor i Oslo. +Zachariassen Jernvare AS i +Hegermannsgate +23A på Torshov har et fantastisk utvalg, og åpent mellom 09:00 og +17:00. De selger skruer, muttere, bolter, skiver etc i løs vekt, og +så langt har jeg fått alt jeg har lett etter. De har i tillegg det +meste av annen jernvare, som verktøy, lamper, ledninger, etc. Jeg +håper de har nok kunder til å holde det gående lenge, da dette er en +butikk jeg kommer til å besøke ofte. Butikken er et funn å ha i +nabolaget for oss som liker å bygge litt selv. :)

- Tags: debian, english. + Tags: norsk.
@@ -511,34 +620,64 @@ post.

- -
21st February 2017
-

I just noticed -the -new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment list -ECMA-376 -/ ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term -storage. Luckily such files will only be accepted based on -pre-approval from the National Archive. Allowing OOXML files to be -used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we -forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to -have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which -lead to a question and an idea.

- -

Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such -undefined behaviour? It would be useful for the National Archive (and -anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined) -to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of -OOXML. I'm aware of the -officeotron OOXML -validator, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will -report use of undefined behaviour. Are there other similar tools -available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.

+ +
29th September 2017
+

Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby +mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone +with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the +mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the +phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The +mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell +phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying +attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave +an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more +available to the general public, to make more people aware of how +their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to +listen.

+ +

I am very happy to report that we managed to get something +visualizing this information up and running for +Oslo Skaperfestival 2017 +(Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske +library. The solution is based on the +simple +recipe for listening to GSM chatter I posted a few days ago, and +will show up at the stand of Åpen +Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of +Oslo. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka +IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot +representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in +the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.

+ +

We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian +Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers +connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an +English version of +Hopglass. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the +grgsm_livemon_headless processes from +gr-gsm converting +the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.

+ +

The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly +patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver), +and the Hopglass data is generated using the +patches +in my meshviewer-output branch. For some reason we could not get +more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying +to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their +coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I +believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in +a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases +mentioned in +the github +issue for the topic. + +

If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!

@@ -546,33 +685,83 @@ available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.

- -
13th February 2017
-

A few days ago, we received the ruling from -my -day in court. The case in question is a challenge of the seizure -of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no. The ruling simply did not mention -most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at -face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations. But it is -hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents -in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several -of the claims made in court by the opposition. We are considering an -appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us -quite a bit to pay for our lawyer. If you want to help, please -donate to the -NUUG defense fund.

- -

The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in -Norwegian from -the NUUG -blog. This also include -the -ruling itself.

+ +
24th September 2017
+

A little more than a month ago I wrote +how +to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking +to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a +cheap USB software defined radio, and thus being able to pinpoint +the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an +accuracy of a few kilometer. Since then we have worked to make the +procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any +manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.

+ +

The gr-gsm +package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the +IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode +the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.

+ +

Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git +clone of two python scripts:

+ +
    + +
  1. Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka + testing).
  2. + +
  3. Run 'apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy + python-scapy' as root to install required packages.
  4. + +
  5. Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using 'git clone + github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git'.
  6. + +
  7. Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.
  8. + +
  9. Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'python + scan-and-livemon' to locate the frequency of nearby base + stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.
  10. + +
  11. Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'python + simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to display the collected information.
  12. + +
+ +

Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually +its underlying +program grgsm_scanner) do not work with the HackRF radio. It does +work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get +very cheaply +(for example +from ebay), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio +and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.

+ +

As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the +frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every +cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used. +To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to +scan-and-livemon to use several receivers. Further, I am not sure if +phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so +this approach might not see all phones around you. I typically see +0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.

+ +

I've tried to run the scanner on a +Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 +running Debian Buster, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem +to be too CPU intensive to keep up. When GNU Radio print 'O' to +stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the +radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the +GSM data fast enough. If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal +where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more +CPU power. Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point +where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers? I tried +using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong +with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().

@@ -580,86 +769,54 @@ ruling itself.

- -
3rd February 2017
-

- -

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett -representing the member association -NUUG, alongside the member -association EFN and the DNS registrar -IMC, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no. It -was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my -life. Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola -Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil -Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.

- -

The -case at hand is that the Norwegian National Authority for -Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka -Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last -year, without following -the -official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority which require a -court decision. The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn -Time. And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal -and illegal applications. Popcorn Time is a client combining -searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with -downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the -downloaded content on screen. It can be used illegally if it is used -to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can -also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the -millions of movies -available from the -Internet Archive or the collection -available from Vodo. We created -a -video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time and played it in -Court. It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.

- -

I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court. The -government held on to their version of the story and we held on to -ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all. We will -know in two weeks time. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as -the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the -case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher -standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member -associations. It is expensive to be right also in Norway. So far the -case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-. To help fund the case, NUUG -and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25 -000,- so far. Given the presentation from the Government, I expect -the government to appeal if the case go our way. And if the case do -not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.

- -

From the other side came two people from Økokrim. On the benches, -appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people -from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not -quite sure who was. Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses -from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because -they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a -translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway. All -seven appeared to know each other. Good to see the case is take -seriously.

- -

If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS -domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time -technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you -too donate to -the NUUG defense fund. Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are -available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very -unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open -standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what -happens the money will be put to good use.

- -

If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out -the blog -posts from NUUG covering the case. They cover the legal arguments -on both sides.

+ +
7th September 2017
+

For noen dager siden publiserte Jon Wessel-Aas en bloggpost om +«Konklusjonen om datalagring som +EU-kommisjonen ikke ville at vi skulle få se». Det er en +interessant gjennomgang av EU-domstolens syn på snurpenotovervåkning +av befolkningen, som er klar på at det er i strid med +EU-lovgivingen.

+ +

Valgkampen går for fullt i Norge, og om noen få dager er siste +frist for å avgi stemme. En ting er sikkert, Høyre og Arbeiderpartiet +får ikke min stemme +denne +gangen heller. Jeg har ikke glemt at de tvang igjennom loven som +skulle pålegge alle data- og teletjenesteleverandører å overvåke alle +sine kunder. En lov som er vedtatt, og aldri opphevet igjen.

+ +

Det er tydelig fra diskusjonen rundt grenseløs digital overvåkning +(eller "Digital Grenseforsvar" som det kalles i Orvellisk nytale) at +hverken Høyre og Arbeiderpartiet har noen prinsipielle sperrer mot å +overvåke hele befolkningen, og diskusjonen så langt tyder på at flere +av de andre partiene heller ikke har det. Mange av +de som stemte +for Datalagringsdirektivet i Stortinget (64 fra Arbeiderpartiet, +25 fra Høyre) er fortsatt aktive og argumenterer fortsatt for å radere +vekk mer av innbyggernes privatsfære.

+ +

Når myndighetene demonstrerer sin mistillit til folket, tror jeg +folket selv bør legge litt innsats i å verne sitt privatliv, ved å ta +i bruk ende-til-ende-kryptert kommunikasjon med sine kjente og kjære, +og begrense hvor mye privat informasjon som deles med uvedkommende. +Det er jo ingenting som tyder på at myndighetene kommer til å være vår +privatsfære. +Det +er mange muligheter. Selv har jeg litt sans for +Ring, som er basert på p2p-teknologi +uten sentral kontroll, er fri programvare, og støtter meldinger, tale +og video. Systemet er tilgjengelig ut av boksen fra +Debian og +Ubuntu, og det +finnes pakker for Android, MacOSX og Windows. Foreløpig er det få +brukere med Ring, slik at jeg også bruker +Signal som nettleserutvidelse.

@@ -685,6 +842,18 @@ on both sides.

  • April (2)
  • +
  • June (5)
  • + +
  • July (1)
  • + +
  • August (1)
  • + +
  • September (3)
  • + +
  • October (5)
  • + +
  • November (2)
  • +
  • 2016 @@ -935,7 +1104,7 @@ on both sides.

    Tags