Brief items

There's a couple of morals here:

• Don't default to running debug daemons on production firmware seriously how hard is this
• If you're going to have a security disclosure form, read it

Your phone's screen can be thought of as a drum – a membrane supported at the edges. It makes slightly different sounds depending on where you tap it. Modern phones and tablets typically have two microphones, so you can also measure the time difference of arrival of the sounds. The upshot is that can recover PIN codes and short words given a few measurements, and in some cases even long and complex words.

I created an Instagram page that showcased pictures of New York City's skylines, iconic spots, elegant skyscrapers — you name it. The page has amassed a following of over 25,000 users in the NYC area and it's still rapidly growing.

I reach out restaurants in the area either via Instagram's direct messaging or email and offer to post a positive review in return for a free entree or at least a discount. Almost every restaurant I've messaged came back at me with a compensated meal or a gift card. Most places have an allocated marketing budget for these types of things so they were happy to offer me a free dining experience in exchange for a promotion. I've ended up giving some of these meals away to my friends and family because at times I had too many queued up to use myself.

The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100% of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption, adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures, monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails restaurants about a potential promotion.

Are your computer operators aggressively derpy? Do they have a habit of leaving disk cables on the floor so they can trip over them twenty times a day? Does this leave you with sad files full of zeroes?

If so, bootfs is for you! This new filesystem type uses journalling to ensure metadata integrity, but forces all writes and directory tree updates to be synchronous, fsyncs files on close, and checkpoints its journal whenever a synchronization event happens. Some allege this is very slow, but I've been able to max out the iops on both of my double height floppy drives! In a power-cycling stress test, I found that the switch broke off in my hand before I lost any data. This concept may sound terrible, but like any good crutch, it _is_ made of wood!

Just a few nitpicks on the patches themself. You want to change msleep() to mdelay() in order to avoid "Scheduling while atomic" noise and you want to have global serialization because interleaving "La Paloma" from CPU1 and "Once Upon a Time in the West" from CPU2 sounds really horrible.

Saying kernel development is all about the code is a pretty big lie. You will not be successful in kernel development without the ability to communicate.

Personally I think the phrase "Debian Developer" and the abbreviation DD is a relic of an earlier era when the set of tasks available to Debian contributors were more technical and less varied. I try to use "Debian member" in mails since it is clearer what that means to a larger set of people and I'd like to see Debian culture (and perhaps the official documents) move towards that too.

I am all for making it easier for [programming-]language-specific packaging teams to do their curation work.

But I don't think it is a problem *for Debian* that there are systems which look more convenient until you discover that are a tyre fire and now you are on fire too. I don't think we should emulate them.

If you are open to review other people’s contributions, there is a high [chance] you will find challengers disguised as contributors. And your code review will be treated as an intellectual battle between good and evil. And you will need to explain and clarify over and over, and deal with circular logic, and pretty much any tool people might use to win battles instead of improving their code. And that is incredibly tiresome.

Conservancy's staff also spent a significant amount of time and resources at each stage of the proceedings — most recently, analyzing what this ruling could mean for future enforcement actions. The German court made a final decision in this case on procedure and standing, not on substance. While we are disappointed that the courts did not take the opportunity to deliver a clear pro-software-freedom ruling, this ruling does not set precedent and the implications of the decision are limited. This matter certainly would proceed differently with different presentation of plaintiffs or in another jurisdiction.

In addition to VMware committing to removing vmklinux from their kernel, this case also succeeded in sparking significant discussion about the community-wide implications for free software when some companies playing by the rules while others continually break them. Our collective insistence, that licensing terms are not optional, has now spurred other companies to take copyleft compliance more seriously. The increased focus on respecting licenses post-lawsuit and providing source code for derivative works — when coupled with VMware's reluctant but eventual compliance — is a victory, even if we must now look to other jurisdictions and other last-resort legal actions to adjudicate the question of the GPL and derivative works of Linux.