Brief items

[...] installing a "backdoor" or "lawful access" to encrypted communications is not a simple technical problem. As cryptography expert Matt Blaze once said, it's like saying "well, if you can land a man on the moon, why can't you land a man on the sun." A backdoor to encryption literally breaks the encryption and opens up a huge host of other problems, none of which are readily solvable. Instead, you just find more and more problems, each of which makes everyone less secure.

It is always good to push the boundaries and search for better ideas and improvements, and that is part of what makes Fedora great. We are doing this in the context of the RHEL 9 release as well, so our near term timeline and requirements mean we are working on evolving modularity, not a revolution or a replacement. We are excited by ELN [Enterprise Linux Next], as it presents a possible space to allow those that want to continue to iterate on modules a place to do so without necessarily impacting the broader Fedora distribution in its entirety. It is my personal hope that we can use that opportunity to improve modules and modularity in the open source, Fedora-first way we’d prefer. Our near term effort to improve the existing modularity implementation ahead of RHEL 9 needs to occur, and we’d like to do that work in Fedora, rather than in closed product development. Longer term, we are open to contributing to a better replacement that meets many of the same goals. This is what makes our distribution ecosystem work well, and not having that upstream lessens the value we all get from such experimentation in the open.

Lastly before we dive in, I want to highlight a theme we’ll be revisiting: Users. There are many. They are diverse. They have different and sometimes conflicting needs. They are awesome. Red Hat wants more of them. From what I have observed in communications from Fedora’s Council and Project Leader, Fedora wants more of them too. Again, Users are awesome. They are the reason we are doing this. How can we empower them to benefit from Fedora and be an answer to their problems and goals? Without them, what are we doing all of this for?

At the time of the rpm.org upstream reboot back in 2006, the idea was to split out popt from the rpm codebase and then ... something. Only we were too busy dealing with rpm itself and popt got left behind. The last popt release is from 2010 and about a year ago it's download site dropped off the net. People have been prodding us about this for some time now, popt being a mandatory dependency of rpm but also used by several other prominent OSS projects such as Samba, SSSD and Gnome. So after heroic efforts of Neal Gompa to convert the rusty old CVS (anybody still remember *that* horror?) repo into a nice shiny git repo, here goes.

So. Someone pushes the doorbell. That sends a signal to a machine that's bridged onto that network via an access point. That machine then sends a protobuf command to speakers on a separate network, asking them to stream a sample it's providing. Those speakers call back to that machine, grab the sample and play it. At this point, multiple speakers in the house say "Someone is at the door". I then say "Hey Google, activate the front gate" - the device I'm closest to picks this up and sends it to Google, where something turns my speech back into text. It then looks at my home structure data and realises that the "Front Gate" device is associated with my Home Assistant integration. It then calls out to the home automation machine that received the notification in the first place, asking it to trigger the front gate relay. That device calls out to the Doorbird and asks it to open the gate. And now I have functionality equivalent to a doorbell that completes a circuit and rings a bell inside my home, and a button inside my home that completes a circuit and opens the gate, except it involves two networks inside my building, callouts to the cloud, at least 7 devices inside my home that are running Linux and I really don't want to know how many computational cycles.

The future is wonderful.