2012-12-07: Consent: Do you speak it?
Yes,
humor is a matter of taste. Does this mean that practical jokes, pranks,
and social engineering are just a matter of taste?
No.
What's different, and what's missing, is consent. A key characteristic of
practical jokes is that they involve a third party in the joke without
getting specific prior consent because to get prior consent would ruin the
joke. There are situations in which that's fine: if the people involved
know each other well, they can give implicit consent to that sort of joke,
for example. If the victim isn't known to the pranksters, they are
outside of the set of situations in which this is okay.
Consent is something that human society in general seems to be struggling
with right now. Consent to sex. Consent to have one's personal
information used by a corporation. Consent to have one's pictures posted
on-line. And in every case, I think the default position should be
the same as the gold standard for sex: enthusiastic consent. If you want
to make someone else part of your business, your art work, your joke, your
sex act, or anything else that happens outside of your head in a way that
affects them, the required step is very simple: you need to get their
enthusiastic consent.
If that's too much trouble for you, if that makes it less fun for you, if
that means you can't make money, if you think your great idea overrides
their rights over their own life, body, ideas, information, or
participation, then you fail. That simple.
If you want to use someone else, you have to ask first. It's not a hard
concept. One might even say that it's basic politeness.
Now, the role of governments in this is limited and often not practical.
For example, I don't think one can write laws about radio performers who
like prank calling, at least without causing so many negative side effects
that the effort isn't really practical. Doing that doesn't make you a
criminal. It just makes you an asshole.
Also, doing things to other people without their consent doesn't mean that
you're then morally responsible for anything that subsequently happens
that may or may not be related. But you're still an asshole. And if your
employer decides that you being an asshole as part of your job has
suddenly stopped being funny and fires you, hey, works for me.
2012-12-19: rra-c-util 4.7
This release is a rollup of a variety of miscellaneous features and bug
fixes that have accumulated since September. It takes the first few steps
towards the general Perl coding style revision that I'm working on, but
only a few. I've yet to move some generic Perl test frameworks into this
package (hopefully soon).
In the new feature department, there's a new portability wrapper around
sys/statvfs.h that converts statvfs code to statfs code for older systems,
and a lot of enhancements to the portable/apr.h header to fix up some more
constants for APR 0.9 compatibility.
In the bug fix department, the Kerberos and GSS-API probes now probe for
Heimdal's libroken by looking for a function that it has provided since at
least 0.4 instead of one that's new in 1.3, fixing some portability issues
to BSD systems. The Kerberos header probes also now check for headers
using file existence checks instead of the compiler in some cases to fix
problems with detecting the wrong header when using one of several
different Kerberos library installations on a system.
In the test suite department, this release updates the POD and POD
spelling checks to be generic and use more modern modules and techniques,
and adds a new set of generic Perl tests that will be useful for any of my
packages that contain Perl code. There's also a new valgrind suppression
file for assisting with valgrind testing in packages that use Kerberos.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2012-12-19: WebAuth 4.4.0
WebAuth is a site-wide web authentication system with single sign-on
support. We use it extensively at Stanford for most of our user-facing
web applications that need to authenticate people.
This is the culmination of the last four months of work, so it's rather
nice to finally get it out the door. Even if not everything I wanted to
get done is done. That's always how it is with software releases.
This release fixes a bug in the encoding of delegated Kerberos credentials
when Heimdal is used as the Kerberos library. If you're building WebAuth
against Heimdal, upgrade any mod_webauth modules that receive delegated
credentials before upgrading mod_webkdc on the WebKDC. Otherwise, the
flags of delegated tickets won't be sent correctly.
The major new feature in this version is support for authorization
identities separate from authentication identities. This can be used for
testing, for administrators to proxy into an application as another user,
or in other cases where there's a mismatch between the canonical concept
of users and the capabilities of an application. The WebLogin server and
WebKDC now support an ACL file that controls what alternative identities
users can assert to specific web sites, and there is a new flow on the
WebLogin side to set or change identities.
All of this is disbled by default in each component. There is a new
WebKDC directive to enable this support and specify the identity ACL file,
and there is a new directive in mod_webauth to tell it to trust the
authorization identity. There is a new environment variable that will be
set to the authorization identity (trusted or not), and REMOTE_USER will
be set to the authorization identity only if it is trusted. WEBAUTH_USER
will always remain the authentication identity, so both identities can be
logged and web applications can distinguish.
To address one of the edge cases required by this support, there's a new
mod_webkdc Apache directive, WebKdcLoginTimeLimit, which controls how long
a multi-step login process can take, and also how recent a login has to be
to contribute its authentication factors to the session factors for an
authentication. This is also now used for WebAuthForceLogin, which means
that forced logins won't require re-authentication if they're within the
WebKdcLoginTimeLimit interval of the last login. This allows that feature
to work properly in conjunction with authorization identities and with
some multifactor authentication methods.
Also in this release, optional replay detection and rate limiting of
failed logins has been added to the WebLogin server. Either or both can
be enabled in the configuration file. This support requires a memcached
server (shared across any pool of WebLogin servers) be available to store
the necessary state. There are new parameters in the error template to
handle the error messages generated by these features.
The WebLogin server also has a few more minor improvements: single sign-on
cookies are now set even when displaying error pages if any are available,
fixing some looping issues with some scenarios around restricting users to
authenticate to specific sites, and the @REMUSER_REALMS setting has been
broken into two settings so that its two properties can be changed
independently. The old setting is still supported for backward
compatibility.
Multiple bugs in Kerberos ticket encoding have been fixed, some that were
introduced in 4.3.0 and some that have been present since the first days
of Heimdal support. Other fixes include the mapping of WebKDC error codes
to names in WebLogin (which previously resulted in Perl warnings in the
error log) and the missing documentation for the WebAuthRequireSSL
directive.
Finally, the thing that I'm the happiest about in this release is that I
finished my complete refactoring of the libwebauth library. Most of the
low-level interfaces are gone in favor of higher-level manipulation of
WebAuth protocol objects. The last pieces of code that used the old token
encoding system have been replaced with the new data-driven encoder. And
the last parts of the library have been converted to APR, so there is no
longer a mix of traditional memory management and APR pools. This comes
with lots of simplification of the API and removal of old cruft from the
public headers.
You can get the latest release from the official WebAuth distribution site
or from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2012-12-25: Kindle haul
Happy winder holiday of choice to all and sundry! Enough new Kindle books
have accumulated that it seems time for another post so that I can
remember what I bought.
Elizabeth Bear — Garrett Investigates (sff)
eluki bes shahar — Hellflower (sff)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell — Cranford (mainstream)
John Scalzi — Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle (sff)
Cranford was free since it was written in the 1800s. I picked it up
because of
Jo Walton's review on Tor.com. The eluki bes shahar novel is from
Daniel Moran's e-book site FS&, an impulse buy from browsing through
his catalog while picking up the Long Run bundle for my mother.
The Scalzi super-bundle is a collection of five separately-published
novellas and chapbooks plus one non-fiction essay, only one of which I
already owned (The God
Engines), which seemed like a fairly good deal.
In a separate note, the problem with watching interesting lectures on
YouTube (apart from the fact that it's very easy to lose a day doing so)
is that I usually end up wanting to buy the book on the topic and then
read that. That happened to me today: I finally got around to watching
Philip Ball's lecture on the chemistry of painting, and now Bright Earth is in my
non-fiction want list. And there are three more hour-long TVO programs
linked off of related material that look interesting. I fear the day may
disappear....
Well, I will be rescued at least partly by being called to help decorate
Christmas cookies.
This is the beginning of by far my favorite two weeks of the year,
although not for the reasons that people might suspect. Other than food
(yum) my family doesn't do Christmas: no decorations, no huge family
get-togethers, and we all give each other the freedom from guilt and
stress of having to find presents. But I get two weeks of mandatory
vacation from work, as does, importantly, everyone else. Which means
there's nothing going on to suck me in from vacation and a very pleasant
sense of resting and resetting for the new year. It's quiet, I can sit
and read, I can focus on one thing at a time, and I can reorganize and
order my life and revisit priorities and to-do lists with a lovely sense
of perspective.
Any other mandatory or at least widespread holiday would work as well, so
it's unrelated to the season. (I find the commercialism somewhat
distracting rather than a positive part of the experience.) But this is
the one that we get, and it happens to coincide nicely with the
meaningless but psychologically significant change of the year number.
And it's delightful every year.
2012-12-25: git-pbuilder 1.29
git-pbuilder is a shell script suitable for use as the builder command in
git-buildpackage that simplifies using pbuilder, cowbuilder, or
qemubuilder to build packages in a chroot. It's now part of the
git-buildpackage Debian package, but I maintain it somewhat separately.
This version supports a new environment variable, GIT_PBUILDER_OUTPUT_DIR,
that can be set to override the default output location of ".." (the
parent directory). It also changes the script to be a bash script and
uses arrays to handle the options passed to the builder command so that
shell metacharacters in the GIT_PBUILDER_OPTIONS environment variable will
hopefully be handled correctly. As part of that change, it also tries to
escape any options that will be passed to --debbuildopts to hopefully
protect them from the additional layer of shell parsing that they'll be
subject to.
Thanks to Guido Günther and paul cannon for the patches.
I hate having to make the script bash-specific, but trying to get the
shell expansion right is otherwise a huge headache. That probably means
that it's outlived the usefulness of the original implementation language
(which was shell only because this started life as a quick hack). I
should probably take the time to rewrite it in either Perl (which I know
best) or Python (which is the language the rest of git-buildpackage is
written in). But that's for another day. (Here's an excellent case in
point for why one shouldn't embed language-specific extensions in the name
of an executable that's part of a user interface or configuration
interface.)
You can get the latest version from my
scripts page.
2012-12-27: Charity review
I'm thankfully in a place where I can afford to give money to charity, and
I've slowly built up a set of charities that I give money to. But I've
never been that systematic about it. I've had a vague target for how much
I want to give, I add new charities when they seem neat, I'll rarely drop
a charity when it doesn't seem to be effective, and I probably spread my
money out too much.
Recently, I followed a chain of blog references and discovered
GiveWell, a site that's devoted to doing
more in-depth analysis of charities than the basic financial analysis done
by sites like Charity Navigator.
In particular, they do literature surveys to try to dig into the
effectiveness of particular interventions and take a closer look at how
effectively a charity can use new donations.
After reading quite a bit on their site and some related sites, I sat down
yesterday and did a comprehensive review of my goals and principles and
then put together a new plan. Some of that may be interesting to other
people, so I'll write up that process here. This will be somewhat
US-centric, since charities vary a lot by tax regime, but I think some of
the general principles will still apply elsewhere. (But most of my
specific examples will be US charities.)
First, a few basic principles about charitable giving:
Charity goals cannot be evaluated uniformly. Different types of
organizations need different criteria. I've found that charities
divide generally into ones that are trying to accomplish a specific
task and ones that are trying to create political change. For the
former, small and quiet organizations are often the best. For the
latter, the charity has to get to a certain size before it's part of
the conversation, and that involves a different set of tradeoffs.
When you care about efficiency (number of lives saved or quality of
life improvement per dollar spent), don't give money to organizations
you've heard about via means other than word of mouth or third-party
evaluations. This is for a simple reason: if the charity has
successfully made you aware of it, that means they're advertising
themselves to you. Advertising generally costs quite a bit of money.
That's money they're not spending on whatever they're trying to
accomplish.
Excellent examples are many of the health research and education
charities, such as the American Heart Association and the American
Lung Association, or the massive disaster relief organizations like
the American Red Cross. These are not efficient organizations. If
you're trying to get the most impact for your dollar, this isn't a
good place to spend it.
As a special case of this, please don't ever give money to any
organization that produces TV commercials showing starving children in
Africa. If the commercial makes you want to give money, that's great;
just don't give it to the organization on TV. TV commercials are
extremely expensive, and those organizations are notorious for being
some of the least efficient charities in existence (in some cases
bordering on scams). You'll be lucky if 50% of your money actually
goes to Africa, and the money that is spent probably isn't spent
wisely.
If your donation gets you a membership that comes with a glossy
magazine, remember that means that the organization is spending your
money producing that magazine. This is counted as program funding,
not administrative costs, in sites like Charity Navigator because the
charity probably counts the magazine as part of their educational
mission.
If you want to subscribe to the magazine and enjoy it, there's not
necessarily anything wrong with this. But if you were giving them
money to do something else, be aware that money is being used to
produce the magazine (and the Christmas cards and the mailing labels
and the tote bag) instead of doing things that you might consider
program funding. For example, I stopped giving money to the Audubon
Foundation because I want my environmental giving to go directly to
protecting the environment, not towards printing calendars and making
a glossy magazine full of bird pictures.
As a counter-example, I consider the Southern Poverty Law Center to be one of the most effective US
political charities, despite the fact that they produce a glossy
magazine. That's because a large part of their mission is
investigative reporting and research, and that magazine is how they
publish that research. In this case, I both want to read the magazine
and consider the magazine something that I'm happy to fund.
Efficiency isn't everything. For some types of charities, the charity
has to be huge in order to be effective. This is particularly true of
political charities. For example, the ACLU is not a particularly efficient charity and has several
fund-raising practices that I dislike. However, what the ACLU does
requires that they have extensive media access and respect from
legislators and the judicial system. It cannot be done effectively by
a smaller and more efficient organization. Similar principles apply
to a lot of political and environmental charities, and to some
international aid charities such as
Doctors without Borders
(Médecins Sans Frontières).
If you're looking to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your
giving according to objective measures, I highly recommend reading through
GiveWell's site. They recommend
charities that avoid all the pitfalls above. You've probably never heard
of them because they don't spend their money on advertising and marketing.
However, keep in mind that efficiency isn't everything.
With those principles in mind, and after doing a lot of reading on
GiveWell, I redid my charity plan by dividing my giving up into five
categories with different goals.
Services. There are some things that I use that I think should
be paid for by tax dollars but aren't, and are instead funded by
charitable donations. I don't consider this charity in the same sense as
the rest of this list. Rather, I'm paying for what I use plus some extra
so that other people who can't afford it can use the service for free.
Efficiency doesn't matter as much because there's usually only one
organization supporting the thing that I personally use. Examples include
my local PBS (public broadcasting) station, the non-profit that works with
city government to support the local library system, and the trust that
helps maintain the state parks where I go on vacation.
Education. This is a special category for me since I regularly
give money to the community college I attended. I know the region and the
college and have some idea of what they need and what matters to the
students there, so I can make specific choices. I give all the money in
this category to the same place.
Free software. Here, I know that my donations won't be used as
efficiently in terms of quality of life as they could be if sent somewhere
else, but this is my community and I want to support it because it's my
community. Here, as with education, I have a lot more data and can pick
and choose places that I think can use my money. Examples here are the
Ada Initiative and the
Free Software Foundation.
Politics. This is the hardest area for efficiency, since it's so
difficult to measure effectiveness in any organization where much of the
goal of the organization is to persuade politicians or the general public.
I try to measure effectiveness by how many concrete actions the
organization takes (rather than press releases), which is easiest for
organizations like the ACLU or the EFF that
file lawsuits or legal documents and requests. As mentioned above, I
think the standout in this area is the Southern Poverty Law Center, but
political charities are so targeted that I give to multiple charities to
cover my range of interests. I've found environmental charities
particularly difficult to evaluate, but the one that appears the most
effective to me so far is the Environmental
Defense Fund, so that's where I concentrate my environmental money.
I used to give to small political charities but have given up on that as
basically useless, at least for national politics. I think the charity
has to be of a minimum size to get anyone in government to listen to them.
Poverty and Health. This is where efficiency matters much more
than size. GiveWell's analysis is
very interesting here, and sadly shows that most interventions either
don't work or at least can't be proven to work. Here, I abandoned nearly
all of my traditional large charities and have gone almost entirely with
GiveWell's recommendations, with two exceptions. I still cycle money
through Kiva (a microfinance support
charity) because I have a bit of an emotional attachment to it, although
microfinance is looking increasingly suspect as an effective charity
method and I may yet drop them. And I still give money to Doctors without
Borders because, despite being less efficient, I think their size and
history has won them an international credibility that lets them get into
areas that smaller, more efficient charities wouldn't be able to help.
One of GiveWell's recommendations is my new favorite charity:
GiveDirectly. All aid charities run
a serious risk of having a colonialist bent, where rich countries come
into poor countries and build things or tell them how to do things
following the priorities of the rich countries. (This is one of the
reasons why I prefer medical charities, since they're less susceptible to
this.) GiveDirectly identifies the poorest people in a region (using a
very transparent process) and transfers money to them directly using the
M-Pesa cell system to spend however they choose, with no strings attached
other than some due diligence to protect against fraud. This is
refreshingly non-paternalistic and makes me far more comfortable than
typical aid projects.
Originally, I was going to assign money into those buckets and then break
the buckets down further, but I ended up not quite doing that. The
services bucket is more driven by the services I use than by an even
allocation. Of the rest, it goes approximately three shares to poverty
and health, two to politics, and one each to education and free software.
I think I've managed to eliminate most of the places where I'm giving
money to multiple organizations that do the same thing, but I'm still
spreading my money rather widely and could stand to focus it more. That's
hard, though; there are a lot of different things that I care about, and
political charities in particular aren't very interchangeable.
I'm currently not giving locally very much, which might be worth changing.
The easiest way to do so would be to find a good local food bank and start
donating to them (giving cash, not food).
For a more comprehensive list of charities I support, see
my charities link page.
2012-12-30: Term::ANSIColor 4.00
Term::ANSIColor is a Perl core module that provides a few different
interfaces to get at the ANSI color and text attribute escape sequences.
It can be used to, for example, print out bold text or colorize output.
This is a major new feature release, incorporating patches sent to me by
Kurt Starsinic and Stephen Thirlwall.
Kurt Starsinic contributed support for 256-color emulators. These hang
special extended sequences off the otherwise-unused 38 and 48 sequences,
providing an alternative naming of the base 16 colors, 216 colors arranged
in an RGB namespace, and 24 shades of grey. Those colors are now
available via all the normal Term::ANSIColor interfaces. He also
contributed a program to print out test data for 256-color emulators that
I enhanced to print out test data for the basic and 16-color sets as well,
which allowed me to get rid of the static test files in the distribution.
Stephen Thirlwall contributed support for creating aliases for the
standard colors via an environment variable. I extended his patch to also
provide a coloralias() function interface. This feature probably won't be
that widely used, but it allows a user to set up custom color names for
applications that take color names from user configuration (which might be
handy for doing things like using the
Solarized color scheme), or
to define an alias like "alert" or "warning" in one place and then use it
throughout the code. With the new 256-color support, it may be useful to
set up more human-readable aliases for some of the RGB colors.
Since I was working on this project anyway, I also redid the whole module
in the new Perl coding style that I've been experimenting, based on Damian
Conway's Perl Best
Practices, and added a ton of new tests. There are a lot of great CPAN
modules out there to do automated tests of various aspects of Perl code,
and most of them don't require much effort to use. I'll probably write a
separate post about that later.
That sort of comprehensive review of course uncovered a bunch of microbugs
and lack of clarity in the code, which is now hopefully much improved.
I'm pleased to report that the test suite achieves 100% code coverage as
reported by Devel::Cover (and in fact there's a maintainer-only test to
ensure that it stays that way).
You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.
2012-12-31: Term::ANSIColor 4.01
It was too much to hope for that all that testing would catch everything
in a 4.00 release, but it's ironic that the main bug was a bug in one of
the test cases! BlueT - Matthew Lien - 練喆明 found that one of the tests
malfunctioned when Test::Warn was not installed.
Since I was cutting a new release anyway, I also improved the README
somewhat and added POD documentation to the example script.
You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.
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