Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 2

Three years ago, I organized a fun and most interesting colloquium at Facultad de Ingeniería, UNAM about privacy and anonymity online. I would have loved to share this earlier with the world, but… The university’s processes are quite slow (and, to be fair, I also took quite a bit of time to push things through). But today, I’m finally happy to share the result of that work with all of you. We managed to get 11 of the talks in the colloquium as articles. The back-cover text reads (in Spanish): We live in an era where human to human interactions...

So today is the day when a new Debian release comes out! Congratulations to everybody, and thanks a lot mainly to the Release Team. Lots of very hard work was put into making Debian 11 «Bullseye» a reality! My very personal way to celebrate this was to do a somewhat different Debian install at home. Why different? Well, I have quite a bit of old, older and frankly elderly laptops at home. And as many of you know, I have done more than my fair share of Raspberry Pi installs… I have played and worked with assorted ARM machines at...

Every couple of months, one of my users falls prey to phishing attacks, and send their login/password data to an unknown somebody who poses as… Well, as me, their always-friendly and always-helpful systems administrator. What follows is, of course, me spending a week trying to get our systems out of all of the RBLs/DNSBLs. But, no matter how fast I act, there’s always distruption and lost mails (bounced or classified as spam) for my users. Most of my users use the Webmail I have configured on our institute’s servers, Roundcube, for which I have the highest appreciation. Only that… Of...

Every year since 2005 there is a very good, big and interesting Latin American gathering of free-software-minded people. Of course, Latin America is a big, big, big place, and it’s not like we are the most economically buoyant region to meet in something equiparable to FOSDEM. What we have is a distributed free software conference — originally, a distributed Linux install-fest (which I never liked, I am against install-fests), but gradually it morphed into a proper conference: Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (Latin American Free Software Installation Festival) This FLISOL was hosted by the always great and always...

Following up with my previous post, it seems the FSF’s board is taking good care of undermining the FSF itself. Over few days, it has: Lost support from tens of organizations and companies, several of them important funders for the FSF’s activities Alienated long-standing staff within it, leading to many important resignations Divided the overall free software community, gathering several thousand signatures both repudiating its actions and backing it In the Debian project, we have started a General Resolution process, with opinions all over the spectrum, to gauge whether the project will back either of the positions — or none....

Context: Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software movement, and commited his life to making what seemed like a ludicrous idea into a tangible reality. We owe him big time for that, and nothing somebody says or does will ever eclipse the fact. But Richard Stallman has a very toxic personality. There is a long, well-known published list of abuse cases; if you must read more into it, some regarding his views on sex, consent, gender, and some other issues are published as a part of the open letter I am about to reference. I have witnessed quite...

I am quite happy with the Raspberry “tower” I bought for keeping my Raspberries organized. Clustering them? No, not by a long shot. I just want to quickly know where they all are, and at a glance, be able to know which one I will work with. Bottom drawer has a RPi1B, second one has a RPi2, next comes a 3B+, and the top two ones are RPi4 (4 and 8GB). That allows me for quick testing of stuff. Yes, I am tempted to get the top one out of the array and use it in “production”… but as it...

Public service announcement In case you want to run our latest release (still cooking, of course) in your Raspberries — I have enabled builds for both Debian 10 (Stable, Buster) and Debian 11 (Testing, Bullseye). Go grab it! Oh… Yes, we are currently failing the builds of ARM64 (RPi3 and RPi4) ☹ Something due to python3-minimal unwilling to get installed right. But that should be fixed soon! Can you help us? Take a look at the [build log for RPi3, Bullseye](https://raspi.debian.net/daily/raspi_3_bullseye.log), or just focus on the step where it breaks It seems to have been fixed, woohoo!: Setting up python3-minimal...

Although it was a much larger step when I made a similar announcement seven years ago, when I started my Specialization, it is still a big challenge ahead, and I am very happy to pursue this: I have been admitted to a PhD program at UNAM, the university I have worked at for almost 20 years, and one of the top universities in Latin America. What program will I be part of? Doctorado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación (Computer Science and Engineering Doctorate… Quite a broad program name, yes, sounds like anything goes). I am happy to say...

Mexico was one of the first countries in the world to set up a national population registry in the late 1850s, as part of the church-state separation that was for long years one of the national sources of pride. Forty four years ago, when I was born, keeping track of the population was still mostly a manual task. When my parents registered me, my data was stored in page 161 of book 22, year 1976, of the 20th Civil Registration office in Mexico City. Faithful to the legal tradition, everything is handwritten and specified in full. Because, why would they...