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Some days ago I read a piece of news that shocked me at different levels: Three blocks away from my home, and after being “unclearly” denounced for harassing a woman, a guy was beaten to death. Several sources for this: El Diario MX: Por acosar a mujer lo golpean hasta la muerte; El Siglo de Torreón: Asesinan a hombre por presuntamente acosar a mujer en Coyoacán; Zócalo: Matan a hombre en Coyoacán; Milenio: Por presuntamente acosar a mujer, golpean y matan a hombre en CU. Of course, when anybody cries for help, it should be our natural response (everybody’s!) to...

Wow. I use a traditional, spinning rust hard drive as my main volume: $ /dev/sda2 on / type btrfs (rw,relatime,compress=zlib:3,space_cache,subvolid=5,subvol=/) I just adopted Lars’ vmdb2. Of course, I was eager to build and upload my first version and… Hit a FTBFS bug due to missing dependencies… Bummer! So I went to my good ol’ cowbuilder (package cowdancer)to fix whatever needed fixing. But it took long! Do note that my /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow was already set up and updated. time cowbuilder –build /home/gwolf/vcs/build-area/vmdb2_0.13.2+git20190215-1.dsc (…) real 15m55.403s user 0m53.734s sys 0m23.138s </code> But… What if I take the spinning rust out of the equation?...

I already mentioned here having adopted and updated the Raspberry Pi 3 Debian Buster Unofficial Preview image generation project. As you might know, the hardware differences between the three families are quite deep — The original Raspberry Pi (models A and B), as well as the Zero and Zero W, are ARMv6 (which, in Debian-speak, belong to the armel architecture, a.k.a. EABI / Embedded ABI). Raspberry Pi 2 is an ARMv7 (so, we call it armhf or ARM hard-float, as it does support floating point instructions). Finally, the Raspberry Pi 3 is an ARMv8-A (in Debian it corresponds to the...

As I mentioned two months ago, I adopted the Debian Raspberry 3 build scripts, and am now building a clean Buster (Debian Testing) unofficial preview image. And there are some good news to tell! Yesterday, I was prompted by Martin Zobel-Helas and Holger Levsen to prepare this image after the Buster Debian Installer (d-i) alpha release. While we don’t use d-i to build the image, I pushed the build, and found that… I did quite a bit of work together with Romain Perier, a soon-to-become Debian Maintainer, and he helped get the needed changes in the main Debian kernel, thanks...

Sometimes, life is measured in semesters. This is the 13th semester I teach. I can no longer feel a newbie. I am still just a part-time teacher, but I know it’s an activity I very much enjoy, and I hope I can at some point manage it to become full-time activity. After three months of slumber (three weeks of which were the hard vacations, but then there’s the intersemestral active period), our university came back to life and full occupation. Due to one fellow teacher taking a sabbatical, I have the largest group that I have been assigned. 40 students...

/Known fact: Latin America’s share of participation in different aspects of the free software movement is very low. There are many hypotheses for this, but all in all, it’s mainly economics related: Only a tiny minority of us in this geographic region can spare the time, energy and money needed to donate part of our work and life to a project, no matter how much we agree with it. Of course, this cannot explain it wholly; there are many issues that further contribute with this low participation. Free software development is mostly carried out in English (much more so even...

December starts for our family in Argentina, and in our second day here, I was invited to Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas (FICH) of Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL). FICH-UNL has a short (3 year), distance-learning career called Tecnicatura Universitaria en Software Libre (TUSL). This career opened in 2015, and today we had the graduation exams for three of its students — It’s no small feat for a recently created career to start graduating their first bunch! And we had one for each of TUSL’s “exit tracks” (Administration, development and education). The topics presented by the students were: An...

Back in June, Michael Stapelberg asked for somebody interested in adopting the unofficial Debian image for the Raspberry Pi 3 family. It didn’t take me long to raise my hand. What did take me long is to actually do it. I have adopted Raspberry3 image spec repository, with the recipes to build the image using Lars’ great vmdb2, as well as the raspi3-firmware non-free Debian package. After delaying this for too long, first in order to understand it better, and second because of the workload I had this last semester, I think we are ready to announce… There is a...

I have been honored to be invited as a co-chair (together with Vasilis Ververis and Mario Isaakidis) for a Special Track called «Topics on Internet Censorship and Surveillance» (TICS), at the The Eighteenth International Conference on Networks, which will be held in Valencia, Spain, 2019.03.24–2019.03.28, and organized under IARIA’s name and umbrella. I am reproducing here the Call for Papers. Please do note that if you are interested in participating, the relevant dates are those publicized for the Special Track (submission by 2019.01.29; notification by 2019.02.18; registration and camera-ready by 2019.02.27), not those on ICN’s site. Over the past years...

It’s only two weeks to the beginning of the privacy and anonymity colloquium we will be celebrating at the Engineering Faculty of my University. Of course, it’s not by mere chance we are holding this colloquium starts just after the Tor Meeting, which will happen for the first time in Latin America (and in our city!) So, even though changes are still prone to happen, I am happy to announce the activity program for the colloquium! I know some people will ask, so — We don’t have the infrastructure to commit to having a video feed from it. We will,...