So, I’ve been using ikiwiki for my website since 2011. At the time, I was hosting the website on a tiny hosting package included in a DSL contract - nothing dynamic possible, so a static site generator seemed like a good idea. ikiwiki was a good social fit at the time, as it was packaged in Debian and developed by a Debian Developer. Today, I finished converting it to Hugo. ... Read more

I’m back to blogging, after shutting down my wordpress.com hosted blog in spring. This time, fully privacy aware, self hosted, and integrated with mastodon. Let’s talk details: In spring, I shutdown my wordpress.com hosted blog, due to concerns about GDPR implications with comment hosting and ads and stuff. I’d like to apologize for using that, back when I did this (in 2007), it was the easiest way to get into blogging. ... Read more

2017 is ending. It’s been a rather uneventful year, I’d say. About 6 months ago I started working on my master’s thesis - it plays with adding linear types to Go - and I handed that in about 1.5 weeks ago. It’s not really complete, though - you cannot actually use it on a complete Go program. The source code is of course available on GitHub, it’s a bunch of Go code for the implementation and a bunch of Markdown and LaTex for the document. ... Read more

I just uploaded APT 1.6 alpha 1, introducing a very scary thing: Seccomp sandboxing for methods, the programs downloading files from the internet and decompressing or compressing stuff. With seccomp I reduced the number of system calls these methods can use to 149 from 430. Specifically we excluded most ways of IPC, xattrs, and most importantly, the ability for methods to clone(2), fork(2), execve(2), and execveat(2). Yes, that’s right - methods can no longer execute programs. ... Read more

APT 1.5 is out, after almost 3 months the release of 1.5 alpha 1, and almost six months since the release of 1.4 on April 1st. This release cycle was unusually short, as 1.4 was the stretch release series and the zesty release series, and we waited for the latter of these releases before we started 1.5. In related news, 1.4.8 hit stretch-proposed-updates today, and is waiting in the unapproved queue for zesty. ... Read more

In DebConf17 there was a talk about The Update Framework, short TUF. TUF claims to be a plug-in solution to software updates, but while it has the same practical level of security as apt, it also has the same shortcomings, including no way to effectively revoke keys. TUF divides signing responsibilities into roles: A root role, a targets rule (signing stuff to download), a snapshots rule (signing meta data), and a time stamp rule (signing a time stamp file). ... Read more

In the past two days, I moved my main web site jak-linux.org (and jak-software.de) from a very old contract at STRATO over to something else: The domains are registered with INWX and the hosting is handled by uberspace.de. Encryption is provided by Let’s Encrypt. I requested the domain transfer from STRATO on Monday at 16:23, received the auth codes at 20:10 and the .de domain was transferred completely on 20:36 (about 20 minutes if you count my overhead). ... Read more

We just released the first beta of APT 1.4 to Debian unstable (beta here means that we don’t know any other big stuff to add to it, but are still open to further extensions). This is the release series that will be released with Debian stretch, Ubuntu zesty, and possibly Ubuntu zesty+1 (if the Debian freeze takes a very long time, even zesty+2 is possible). It should reach the master archive in a few hours, and your mirrors shortly after that. ... Read more

I’m proud (yes, really) to announce DNS66, my host/ad blocker for Android 5.0 and newer. It’s been around since last Thursday on F-Droid, but it never really got a formal announcement. DNS66 creates a local VPN service on your Android device, and diverts all DNS traffic to it, possibly adding new DNS servers you can configure in its UI. It can use hosts files for blocking whole sets of hosts or you can just give it a domain name to block (or multiple hosts files/hosts). ... Read more

Abstract I introduce TrieHash an algorithm for constructing perfect hash functions from tries. The generated hash functions are pure C code, minimal, order-preserving and outperform existing alternatives. Together with the generated header files,they can also be used as a generic string to enumeration mapper (enums are created by the tool). Introduction APT (and dpkg) spend a lot of time in parsing various files, especially Packages files. APT currently uses a function called AlphaHash which hashes the last 8 bytes of a word in a case-insensitive manner to hash fields in those files (dpkg just compares strings in an array of structs). ... Read more