A year or so after my PADI rescue, my diving club has convinced me to wake up about twelve times early in the morning on Saturday, to get me trained to become a PADI master diver.
The jokers in my club told me it’s not so hard as PADI Rescue training. The only hard part is Saturday morning. We’ll see, I wonder. heh.
Oh, and to our security services: well done catching those guys from Molenbeek and Vorst. Good job!
Oh, I got invited to NLGG to talk about Tracker in Utrecht tomorrow.
Ik heb in Belgische bedrijven al bugs gefiled waarbij een buffer afkomstig van een Angular HTTP POST sessie gewoon met memcpy in een stack buffer van 1024 bytes gekopieerd wordt, met uiteraard strlen op de origin buffer als size_t n parameter. Daar kwam zelfs ruzie van want de geniale programmeur vond dat dat geen bug was, omdat je de admin credentials nodig had om te reproduceren. Het probleem was dat ook zonder in te loggen de buffer tot aan de memcpy kon geraken.
Het is ook geen uitzondering om wanneer je met de strings tool op de binaries op vele routers losgaat, je gewoonweg backdoors en hardcoded passwords krijgt. Je komt programmeurs tegen die dat er gewoon ingestopt hebben. Dat vinden ze normaal. Ruwe anti-security arrogantie. En ze zijn nog trots op hun onprofessionalisme ook.
Deze tijd is dan ook niet de tijd van het Internet Der Dingen, maar wel van Het Internet Der Crap. Gemaakt door prutsers. Zelfs de backdoors zijn prutswerk.
Het is zeer erg gesteld. Ik voel me beschaamd om vele van mijn collega’s en wens mij te distantiëren.
Have you guys stopped debating systemd like a bunch of morons already? Because I’ve been keeping myself away from the debate a bit: the amount of idiot was just too large for my mind.People who know me also know that quite a bit of idiot fits into it.
I remember when I was younger, somewhere in the beginning of the century, that we first debated ORBit-2, then Bonobo, then software foolishly written with it like Evolution, Mono (and the idea of rewriting Evolution in C#. But first we needed a development environment MonoDevelop to write it in – oh the gnomes). XFree86 and then the X.Org fork. Then Scaffolding and Anjuta. Beagle and Tracker (oh the gnomes). Rhythmbox versus Banshee (oh the gnomes). Desktop settings in gconf, then all sorts of gnome services, then having a shared mainloop implementation with Qt.
Then god knows what. Dconf, udev, gio, hal, FS monitoring: a lot of things that were silently but actually often bigger impact changes than systemd is because much much more real code had to be rewritten, not just badly written init.d-scripts. The Linux eco-system has reinvented itself several times without most people having noticed it.
Then finally D-Bus came. And yes, evil Lennart was there too. He was also one of those young guys working on stuff. I think evil evil pulseaudio by that time (thank god Lennart replaced the old utter crap we had with it). You know, working on stuff.
D-Bus’s debate began a bit like systemd’s debate: Everybody had feelings about their own IPC system being better because of this and that (most of which where really bad copies of xmms’s remote control infrastructure). It turned out that KDE got it mostly right with DCOP, so D-Bus copied a lot from it. It also opened a lot of IPC author’s eyes that message based IPC, uniform activation of services, introspection and a uniform way of defining the interface are all goddamned important things. Also other things, like tools for monitoring and debugging plus libraries for all goddamn popular programming environments and most importantly for IPC their mainloops, appeared to be really important. The uniformity between Qt/KDE and Gtk+/GNOME application’s IPC systems was quite a nice thing and a real enabler: suddenly the two worlds’ softwares could talk with each other. Without it, Tracker could not have happened on the N900 and N9. Or how do you think qt/qsparql talks with it?
Nowadays everybody who isn’t insane or has a really, really, really good reason (like awesome latency or something, although kdbus solves that too), and with exception of all Belgian Linux programmers (who for inexplicable reasons all want their own personal IPC – and then endlessly work on bridges to all other Belgian Linux programmer’s IPC systems), won’t write his own IPC system. They’ll just use D-Bus and get it over with (or they initially bridge to D-Bus, and refactor their own code away over time).
But anyway.
The D-Bus debate was among software developers. And sometimes teh morons joined. But they didn’t understand what the heck we where doing. It was easy to just keep the debate mostly technical. Besides, we had some (for them) really difficult to understand stuff to reply like “you have file descriptor passing for that”, “study it and come back”. Those who came back are now all expert D-Bus users (I btw think and/or remember that evil Lennart worked on FD passing in D-Bus).
Good times. Lot’s of debates.
But the systemd debate, not the software, the debate, is only moron.
Recently I’ve seen some people actually looking into it and learning it. And then reporting about what they learned. That’s not really moron of course. But then their blogs get morons in the comments. Morons all over the place.
Why aren’t they on their fantastic *BSD or Devuan or something already?
ps. Lennart, if you read this (I don’t think so): I don’t think you are evil. You’re super nice and fluffy. Thanks for all the fish!
It’s a mythical beast that speaks in pornographic subplots and maintains direct communication with your girlfriends every wants and desires so as better to inform you on how to best please her. It has the feet of bonzi buddy, the torso of that man who uses 1 weird trick to perfect his abs, and the arms of the scientists that hate her. Most impressively, Maalwarkstrodon has a skull made from a Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, and Propecia alloy. This beast of malware belches sexy singles from former east-bloc soviet satellite states and is cloaked in the finest fashions from paris and milan, imported directly from Fujian china.
Maalwarkstrodon is incapable of offering any less than the best deals at 80% to 90% off, and will not rest until your 2 million dollar per month work-at-home career comes to fruition and the spoils of all true nigerian royalty are delivered unto those most deserving of a kings riches.
Maalwarkstrodon will also win the malware arms race.
I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise ‘
I, myself, actually would not be able to live with not having made this attempt — Angela Merkel.
Ik ben niet noodzakelijk voorstander van de of een monarchie. Maar wanneer het goed is, is het goed. De redacteurs van de VRT hebben zeker moeite gedaan een positief beeld te schetsen in Koppen. Maar zelfs moest ik moeite doen negatief te zijn, kan ik niets slechts vinden in het beeld dat men vandaag van koning Filip schetste. Ik ben tevreden dat iemand met zorg en zorgzaamheid met België en de Belgen bezig is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIWy8taP1rE
Want daarin staat precies vermeld, hoe het met de dieren is gesteld.
I added support for changing the nrl:maxCardinality property of an rdfs:Property from one to many. Earlier Martyn Russel reverted such an ontology change as this was a blocker for the Debian packaging by Michael Biebl.
We only support going from one to many. That’s because going from many to one would obviously imply data-loss (a string-list could work with CSV, but an int-list can’t be stored as CSV in a single-value int type – instead of trying to support nonsense I decided to just not do it at all).
More supported ontology changes can be found here.
Not sure if people care but this stuff was made while listening to Infected Mushroom.
De overheid hoort onze burgers te beschermen tegen afluisteren, de overheid kan en mag zelf afluisteren maar kan en mag dit enkel binnen een wettelijk kader doen.
Allerlei zaken tonen aan dat overheden binnen de NAVO alliantie ons land aanvallen met digitale inbraken. Het baart me zorgen.
Technisch betekent dit voor mij dat ons land moet investeren in beveiliging van systemen. Hier hoort kennis en controle over hardware en software op diep niveau bij.
Ik hoop dat Pieter De Crem niet enkel in straaljagers maar ook in het beveiligen van ‘s lands computersystemen investeert.
Dat betekent voor mij kennis en controle op het niveau van de bootloader, de kernel en de hardware. De systemen van de overheid bevatten immers bijzonder veel gegevens van de burger. De systemen van het leger geven dan weer informatie en toegang tot apparatuur die de beveiliging en de vrede van het land garandeert.
Wat betreft de kernel moet een recruit het boek van Robert Love de dagen voor het sollicitatiegesprek doornemen. Hij of zij moet met het Internet als hulp een kernel module kunnen maken. Dat is een minimum.
Een goede technische test zou zijn om een eigen rootkit kernel module te schrijven gedurende de dagen dat het sollicitatiegesprek plaatsvindt (ja, dagen). Hierbij zouden enkele doelstellingen kunnen opgesteld worden: Bv. het verbergen van de .ko file op het filesysteem die eerder met insmod ingeladen werd, het kopiëren van alle uitgaande TCP/IP data naar een verborgen stuk hardware, en zo verder.
Dit laatste zonder veel van het geheugen van de host te verbruiken daar het verborgen stuk HW vermoedelijk trager zal zijn dan de normale netwerk interface (de eth0 t.o.v. bv. 3G). Een oplossing zou kunnen zijn te filteren gecombineerd met af en toe wat packet loss te veroorzaken door verborgen netif_stop_queue en netif_wake_queue calls op de normale netwerk interface te doen. Misschien heeft de recruit wel betere ideeën die moeilijk of niet gedetecteerd kunnen worden? Ik hoop het!
De recruit moet een manier voorzien (die niet vanzelfsprekend is) om commando’s te ontvangen (liefst eentje die moeilijk gedetecteerd kan worden). Misschien het gebruik maken van radio op zo’n manier dat het moeilijk te detecteren is? Ik ben benieuwd.
Hoe meer van dat soort doelstellingen gehaald worden, hoe geschikter de kandidaat.
Wat betreft userland moet een recruit gegeven een stuk code waar een typische bufferoverflow fout in zit die bufferoverflow herkennen. Maar gun uw recruit de tijd en een ontspannen sfeer want onder stress zien enkel de gelukzakken af en toe eens zoiets. Het reviewen van (goede) code is nl. iets dat vele jaren ervaring vraagt (slechte code is eenvoudiger, maar over de slechte code van de wereld, zoals dnsmasq, gaan de hedendaagse security problemen niet. Wel over bv. OpenSSL en Bash).
De daarop volgende vraag zou kunnen zijn om door middel van die bufferoverflow ingevoerde code uit te laten voeren. Dit mag met behulp van het Internet om alle antwoorden te vinden. Extra punten wanneer de uitgevoerde code met of zonder netcat de zaak op een TCP/IP poort available maakt.
De dienst zou bv. een socket server kunnen maken dat een bufferoverflow heeft op de buffer die meegegeven wordt met read(). Dat zou zelfs een junior C developer moeten herkennen.
Dit soort van testen zijn nodig omdat enkel zij die technisch weten (en kunnen implementeren) hoe na een inbraak zichzelf te verbergen, geschikt zijn om het land te verdedigen tegen de NSA en de GCHQ.
Ik ben er van overtuigd dat zij die dit kunnen een redelijk goed moreel compas hebben: Mensen met zo’n inzicht hebben capaciteiten. Zulke mensen hebben daardoor vaak ook een goed doordacht moreel compas. Zolang de overheid haar eigen moreel compas volgt, zijn deze mensen bereid hun kunnen voor de overheid in te zetten.
Meneer de kolonel van het leger moet wel beseffen dat de gemiddelde programmeur eigenlijk gewoon technologie wil doorgronden. Dat die technologie toevallig ook voor bommen gebruikt wordt is niet de schuld van de programmeurs. Dat de kolonel zijn communicatie-technologie vol fouten zit wil niet zeggen dat de programmeurs die deze vinden criminelen zijn. Kolonel meneer zou beter tot Thor bidden dat s’ lands programmeurs er eerder achter komen dan de echte vijand erachter komt.
Maar de wet staat boven de militair. Ze moet gevolgd worden. Ook door de inlichtingendiensten. Het is onze enige garantie op een vrije samenleving: ik wil niet werken of geholpen hebben aan een wereld waarin de burger door technologie vrijheden zoals privacy verliest.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Philip. Programmeur.
For this one I worked really hard. Buddy breading, relaxing people in panic at 20 meters deep, keeping yourself cool. And that in Belgian waters (no visibility and freezing cold). We simulated it all. It was harder than most other things I did in my life.
Wanneer Isabel Albers iets schrijft ben ik aandachtig: wij moeten investeren in infrastructuur.
Dit creëert welvaart, distribueert efficiënt het geld en investeert in onze kinderen hun toekomst: iets wat nodig is; en waar we voor staan.
De besparingsinspanningen kunnen we beperken wat betreft investeringen in infrastructuur; we moeten ze des te meer doorvoeren wat betreft andere overheidsuitgaven.
Misschien moeten we bepaalde scudraketten lanceren? Een scudraket op de overheidsomvang zou geen slecht doen.
Een week mediastorm meemaken over hoe hard we snoeien in bepaalde overheidssectoren: laten we dat hard en ten gronde doen.
Laten we tegelijk investeren in de Belgische infrastructuur. Laten we veel investeren.
Had to adapt dnsmasq’s code today. My god, that tiny application has a shitty code quality. I now feel bad knowing that so many systems are depending on this stuff.
Dear Mark,
Your team and you yourself are working on the Jolla Phone. I’m sure that you guys are doing a great job and although I think you’ve been generating hype and vaporware until we can actually buy the damn thing, I entrust you with leading them.
As their leader you should, I would like to, allow them to provide us with all of the device’s source code and build environments of their projects so that we can have the exact same binaries. With exactly the same I mean that it should be possible to use MD5 checksums. I’m sure you know what that means and you and I know that your team knows how to provide geeks like me with this. I worked with some of them together during Nokia’s Harmattan and Fremantle and we both know that you can easily identify who can make this happen.
The reason why is simple: I want Europe to develop a secure phone similar to how, among other open source projects, the Linux kernel can be trusted. By peer review of the source code.
Kind regards,
A former Harmattan developer who worked on a component of the Nokia N9 that stores the vast majority of user’s privacy.
ps. I also think that you should reunite Europe’s finest software developers and secure the funds to make this workable. But that’s another discussion which I’m eager to help you with.
Surprisingly I’m in agreement with what Richard has to say in this specific context.
As I got contacted by two different companies last few days who both had questions about integrating Tracker into their device, I started thinking that perhaps I should illustrate what Tracker can already do today.
I’m going to make a demo for the public transportation industry in combination with contacts and places of interest. Tracker’s ontologies cross many domains, of course (this is just an example).
I agree that in principle what I’m showing here isn’t rocket science. You can do this with almost any database technology. What is interesting is that as soon as many domains start sharing the ontology and store their data in a shared way, interesting queries and use-cases are made possible.
So let’s first insert a place of interest: the Pizza Hut in Nossegem
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PostalAddress ; nco:country 'Belgium';
nco:streetAddress 'Weiveldlaan 259 Zaventem' ;
nco:postalcode '1930' .
_:2 a slo:Landmark; nie:title 'Pizza Hut Nossegem';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '50.869949'; slo:longitude '4.490477';
slo:postalAddress _:1 ];
slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-food-beverage }"
And let’s add some busstops:
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PostalAddress ; nco:country 'Belgium';
nco:streetAddress 'Leuvensesteenweg 544 Zaventem' ;
nco:postalcode '1930' .
_:2 a slo:Landmark; nie:title 'Busstop Sint-Martinusweg';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '50.87523'; slo:longitude '4.49426';
slo:postalAddress _:1 ];
slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-transport }"
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PostalAddress ; nco:country 'Belgium';
nco:streetAddress 'Leuvensesteenweg 550 Zaventem' ;
nco:postalcode '1930' .
_:2 a slo:Landmark; nie:title 'Busstop Hoge-Wei';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '50.875988'; slo:longitude '4.498208';
slo:postalAddress _:1 ];
slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-transport }"
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PostalAddress ; nco:country 'Belgium';
nco:streetAddress 'Guldensporenlei Turnhout' ;
nco:postalcode '2300' .
_:2 a slo:Landmark; nie:title 'Busstop Guldensporenlei';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '51.325463'; slo:longitude '4.938047';
slo:postalAddress _:1 ];
slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-transport }"
Let’s now get all the busstops nearby the Pizza Hut in Nossegem:
tracker-sparql -q " SELECT ?name ?lati ?long WHERE { ?p slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-food-beverage; slo:location [ slo:latitude ?plati; slo:longitude ?plong ] . ?b slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-transport ; slo:location [ slo:latitude ?lati; slo:longitude ?long ] ; nie:title ?name . FILTER (tracker:cartesian-distance (?lati, ?plati, ?long, ?plong) < 1000) }" Results: Busstop Sint-Martinusweg, 50.87523, 4.49426 Busstop Hoge-Wei, 50.875988, 4.498208
This of course was an example with only slo:Landmark. But that slo:location property can be placed on any nie:InformationElement. Meaning that for example a nco:PersonContact can also be involved in such a cartesian-distance query (which is of course just an example).
Let’s make an example use-case: We want contact details of friends (with publicized coordinates) who are nearby a slo:Landmark that is in a food and beverage landmark category, so that the messenger application can prepare a text message window where you’ll type that you want to get together to get lunch at the Pizza Hut.
Ok, so let’s add some nco:PersonContact to our SPARQL endpoint who are nearby the Pizza Hut:
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PersonContact ; nco:fullname 'John Carmack';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '51.325413'; slo:longitude '4.938037' ];
nco:hasEmailAddress [ a nco:EmailAddress;
nco:emailAddress 'john.carmack@somewhere.com'] }"
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PersonContact ; nco:fullname 'Greg Kroah-Hartman';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '51.325453'; slo:longitude '4.938027' ];
nco:hasEmailAddress [ a nco:EmailAddress;
nco:emailAddress 'greg.kroah@somewhere.com'] }"
And let’s add one person who isn’t nearby the Pizza Hut in Nossegem:
tracker-sparql -uq "
INSERT { _:1 a nco:PersonContact ; nco:fullname 'Jean Pierre';
slo:location [ a slo:GeoLocation;
slo:latitude '50.718091'; slo:longitude '4.880134' ];
nco:hasEmailAddress [ a nco:EmailAddress;
nco:emailAddress 'jean.pierre@somewhere.com'] }"
And now, the query:
tracker-sparql -q " SELECT ?name ?email ?lati ?long WHERE { ?p slo:belongsToCategory slo:predefined-landmark-category-food-beverage; slo:location [ slo:latitude ?plati; slo:longitude ?plong ] ; nie:title ?pname . ?b a nco:PersonContact; slo:location [ slo:latitude ?lati; slo:longitude ?long ] ; nco:fullname ?name ; nco:hasEmailAddress [ nco:emailAddress ?email ]. FILTER (tracker:cartesian-distance (?lati, ?plati, ?long, ?plong) < 10000) }" Results: Greg Kroah-Hartman, greg.kroah@somewhere.com, 50.874715, 4.49158 John Carmack, john.carmack@somewhere.com, 50.874715, 4.49154
These use-cases of course only illustrate the simplified location ontology in combination with the Nepomuk contacts ontology. There are many such domains in Nepomuk and when defining your own platform and/or a new domain on the desktop you can add (your own) ontologies. Mind that for the desktop you should preferably talk to Nepomuk first.
The strength of such a platform is also its weakness: if no information sources put their data into the SPARQL endpoint, no information sink can do queries that’ll yield meaningful results. You of course don’t have this problem in a contained environment where you define what does and what doesn’t get stored and where, like an embedded device.
A desktop like KDE or GNOME shouldn’t have this problem either, if only everybody would agree on the technology and share the ontologies. Which isn’t necessarily happening (fair point), although both KDE with Nepomuk-KDE and GNOME with Tracker share most of Nepomuk.
But indeed; if you don’t store anything in Tracker, it’s useless. That’s why Tracker comes with a file system miner and provides a framework for writing your own miners. The idea is that with time more and more applications will use Tracker, making it increasingly useful. Hopefully.
Today after I brought Tinne to the airport I drove around Zürichsee. She can’t stay in Switzerland the entire month; she has to go back to school on Monday.
While driving on the Seestrasse I started counting luxury cars. After I reached two for Lamborgini and three for Ferrari I started thinking: Zimmerberg Sihltal and Pfannenstiel must be expensive districts too… And yes, they are.
I was lucky today that it was nice weather. But wow, what a nice view on the mountain tops when you look south over Zürichsee. People from Zürich, you guys are so lucky! Such immense calming feeling the view gives me! For me, it beats sauna. And I’m a real sauna fan.
I’m thinking to check it out south of Zürich. But not the canton. I think the house prices are just exaggerated high in the canton of Zürich. I was thinking Sankt Gallen, Toggenburg. I’ve never been there; I’ll check it out tomorrow.
Hmmr, meteoswiss gives rain for tomorrow. Doesn’t matter.
Actually, when I came back from the airport the first thing I really did was fix coping with property changes in ontologies for Tracker. Yesterday it wasn’t my day, I think. I couldn’t find this damn problem in my code! And in the evening I lost three chess games in a row against Tinne. That’s really a bad score for me. Maybe after two weeks of playing chess almost every evening, she got better than me? Hmmrr, that’s a troubling idea.
Anyway, so when I got back from the airport I couldn’t resist beating the code problem that I didn’t find on Friday. I found it! It works!
I guess I’m both a dreamer and a realist programmer. But don’t tell my customers that I’m such a dreamer.
Today Tinne and I visited Switzerland’s capital, Bern.
We were really surprised; we’d never imagined that a capital city could offer so much peace and calm. It felt good to be there.
The fountains, the old houses, the river and the snowy mountain peaks give the city an idyllic image.
Standing on the bridge, you see the roofs of all these lovely small houses.
The bear is the symbol of Bern. Near the House of Parliament there was this statue of a bear. Tinne just couldn’t resist to give it a hug. Bern has also got real bears. Unfortunately, Tinne was not allowed to cuddle those bears.
The House of Parliament is a truly impressive building. It looks over the snowy mountains, its people and its treasury, the National Bank of Switzerland.
As you can imagine, the National Bank building is a master piece as well. And even more impressive; it issues a world leading currency.
On the market square in Oerlikon we first saw this chess board on the street; black and white stones and giant chess pieces. In Bern there was also a giant chess board in the backyard of the House of Parliament. Tinne couldn’t resist to challenge me for a game of chess. (*edit*, Armin noted in a comment that the initial position of knight and bishop are swapped. And OMG, he’s right!)
And she won!
At the House of Parliament you get a stunning, idyllic view on the mountains of Switzerland.
We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.
— Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010