I recently found out that I have access to a 1 TB cloud storage drive by 1&1, so I decided to start taking off-site backups of my $HOME (well, backups at all, previously I only mirrored the latest version from my SSD to an HDD). I initially tried obnam. Obnam seems like a good tool, but is insanely slow. Unencrypted it can write about 3 MB/s, which is somewhat OK, but even then it can spend hours forgetting generations (1 generation takes probably 2 minutes, and there might be 22 of them). In encrypted mode, the speed reduces a lot, to about 500 KB/s if I recall correctly, which is just unusable. ... Read more 》

The APT 1.2.7 release is out now. Despite of what I wrote earlier, we now print warnings for Release files signed with signatures using SHA1 as the digest algorithm. This involved extending the protocol APT uses to communicate with the methods a bit, by adding a new 104 Warning message type. W: gpgv:/var/lib/apt/lists/apt.example.com_debian_dists_sid_InRelease: The repository is insufficiently signed by key 1234567890ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF01234567 (weak digest) Also note that SHA1 support is not dropped, we merely do not consider it trustworthy. This means that it feels like SHA1 support is dropped, because sources without SHA2 won’t work; but the SHA1 signatures will still be used in addition to the SHA2 ones, so there’s no point removing them (same for MD5Sum fields). ... Read more 》

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Caesar’s assassination APT will see a new release, turning of support for SHA-1 checksums in Debian unstable and in Ubuntu xenial, the upcoming LTS release. While I have no knowledge of an imminent attack on our use of SHA1, Xenial (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) will be supported for 5 years, and the landscape may change a lot in the next 5 years. As disabling the SHA1 support requires a bit of patching in our test suite, it’s best to do that now rather than later when we’re forced to do it. ... Read more 》

Not only do I keep incrementing version numbers faster than ever before, APT also keeps getting faster. But not only that, it also has some bugs fixed and the cache is now checked with a hash when opening. Important fix for 1.1.6 regression Since APT 1.1.6, APT uses the configured xz compression level. Unfortunately, the default was set to 9, which requires 674 MiB of RAM, compared to the 94 MiB required at level 6. ... Read more 》

APT’s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow. Improving performance for uncompressed files The reason for this is that our I/O is unbuffered, and we were reading one byte at a time in order to read lines. This changed on December 24, by adding read buffering for reading lines, vastly improving the performance of rred. ... Read more 》

I started transitioning from 1024D to 4096R. The new key is available at: https://people.debian.org/~jak/pubkey.gpg and the keys.gnupg.net key server. A very short transition statement is available at: https://people.debian.org/~jak/transition-statement.txt and included below (the http version might get extended over time if needed). The key consists of one master key and 3 sub keys (signing, encryption, authentication). The sub keys are stored on an OpenPGP v2 Smartcard. That’s really cool, isn’t it? ... Read more 》

I spent the weekend using almost exclusively my Chromebook 13, on a single charge Saturday and Sunday. Keyboard I think I like the keyboard better now than I used to when I first tried it. It gets nowhere near the ThinkPad X230 one, though; appart from the coating, which my (backlit) X230 unfortunately does not have. Screen While the screen appeared very grainy to me on first sight, having only used IPS screens in the past year, I got used to it over the weekend. I now do not notice much graininess anymore. The contrast still seems extremely poor, the colors are not vivid, and the vertical viewing angles are still a disaster, though. ... Read more 》

Today, I received my Acer Chromebook 13, in the glorious FullHD variant with 4GB RAM. For those of you who don’t know it, the Acer Chromebook 13 is a 13.3 inch chromebook powered by a Tegra K1 cpu. This version cannot be ordered currently, only pre-orders were shipped yesterday (at least here in Germany). I cannot even review it on Amazon (despite having it bought there), as they have not enabled reviews for it yet. ... Read more 》

Today I not only submitted my bachelor thesis to the printing company, I also released a new version of hardlink, my file deduplication tool. hardlink 0.3 now features support for xattr support, contributed by Tom Keel at Intel. If this does not work correctly, please blame him. I also added support for a –minimum-size option. Most of the other code has been tested since the upload of RC1 to experimental in September 2012. ... Read more 》

Today, we worked, with the help of ioerror on IRC, on reducing the attack surface in our fetcher methods. There are three things that we looked at: 1. Reducing privileges by setting a new user and group 2. chroot() 3. seccomp-bpf sandbox Today, we implemented the first of them. Starting with 1.1~exp3, the APT directories /var/cache/apt/archives and /var/lib/apt/lists are owned by the “_apt” user (username suggested by pabs). The methods switch to that user shortly after the start. The only methods doing this right now are: copy, ftp, gpgv, gzip, http, https. ... Read more 》