Entries by Thijs Kinkhorst

A survey has shown that 16% of youth doesn't know why we're celebrating the 5th of May. According to quality news show Editie NL, this is a worrying fact. Well, is it? I find it rather reassuring that apparently 84% of the younger generation do know that 5 May is about the liberation from German occupation (I remember now that I forgot to thank the Canadians when I was there two weeks ago). 16% is not much: if you get a 16% discount you're usually not making a great deal. Actually, I would be very surprised of a survey that would show that less than 16% of people are completely ignorant of the world around them. These same people probably wouldn't know the connection between the colour of the national team's shirts and the royal house, or be able to tell whether St Nicolaas is a protestant or catholic. Or the ones that claim money because -6 is larger than -5.

Every country has its fair share of "challenged" people. Also in recent news is that Barack Obama is losing votes because he admitted to eating rucola (arugula) from time to time. Voter's "reasoning" boils down to "if I don't know what that is, then a president that eats it can't be trusted". It gets even more sad when you realise that these people probably do know it, but don't realise they call it rocket. Great way to lose votes.

There is some discussion again about what should be on topic for Planet Debian, whether it should be used for Debian-related announcements and what the archival policy should be. I believe that this discussion is rooted in two circulating views of what Planet Debian should be:

1. A forum for DD's to post Debian-related thoughts and ideas, to be used for those cases where they think a mailing list post may be less appropriate;
2. A way to collect stories about what DD's do and think in any context, the human interest angle: get to know your Debian peers more than just in technical matters.

Although I always regarded Planet Debian to be the latter and I appreciate reading posts telling me about someone's job or other interests, either one isn't an invalid approach per se. They do however prompt different choices about listing policy (Debian-only feeds vs. everything goes), how much effort it is to keep up with them and perhaps archival.

The best way to match the expectations of those two groups would be to create two "planets", one for each group. Create an aggregator where any DD can add any of their feeds, and another one with a strict listing policy: only feeds that carry posts actually related to Debian development matters (probably a subset of the first). Then only the question remains which one will get to carry the Planet Debian name...

Since about half a year now we have a fibre to the home connection. This means that two fiber lines terminate at a box in our living room. It is a “blown fibre” which means that a tube is buried to your house, after which they use air pressure to put the actual fibre from the house to the POP. There are two fibers: one for bidirectional data (IP), and one that does nothing more than carry the analog cable TV signal. We started out with only the internet facility but now have so-called triple play: phone, analog tv and internet connectivity.

The results are in: I find it to be just as good or better than the previous offerings: phone from KPN, tv from Casema or internet from Surfnet. But there's nothing revolutionary. Phone and tv just provide the same service over a different medium. The internet connection is with the standard of 24 Mb/s more than fast enough for any day to day use – and an upgrade to 50 Mb/s is pending. A real improvement is that the upstream speed is just as high, very useful when uploading photos, packages or the text of this blog post.

One drawback is that they only provide one IP address instead of 32. Also, the service provider (XMSnet) does seem to be a bit stuck in the late nineties with an unfriendly help desk telling you that your situation is “impossible”, and bad billing, There are plans however to open up the line to other providers in the future.

So for now it's just a convenience bundling of services, but nothing really ground breaking. Let's see what the future brings.

This weekend, like past years, I'm off to the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting in Brussel(s), joining Jeroen and Joost in our friend Geert's car.

I recently learned that Belgium is the only seaside country that doesn't have an island. If that information is not worthy of a blog entry then I don't know what is.

As you can see I'm certified to attend:

This January I've put some research (together with Dick) into the security of electronic waste registration techniques. About 25% of Dutch municipalities employ some kind of tariff differentiation ("diftar"): a household pays per quantity of waste. A traditional way of implementing this is to use coloured, taxed garbage bags, but more modern municipalities employ bins with RFID tags or underground containers which can be opened with (again) RFID cards. These underground containers then communicate their records of disposals to the central office.

We visited a number of municipalities around the country, scanned ID cards and containers and even tooka ride on a garbage truck. Some highlights of our findings:

• Most access cards for underground containers can be trivially cloned; they are EM4x05 type cards with factory UNIQUE.
• In one municipality, we could open the underground containers with any card of the EM4x05 type, regardless of origin. With one notable exception: 0x0 doesn't work.
• One type of tag has preventive measures against readout (and hence cloning), but these features are not used.
• Virtually no encryption is used in any of the communications, e.g. plain HTTP was used for worldwide access to the adminsitrative backend interface. Again one exception: a new version of a system used WEP to "secure" wireless transfer of data...
• There's no security awareness among municipalities. Defined requirements concern the physical robustness of systems or collection costs, but no demands are placed on information integrity or confidentiality.

We saw many different systems with each having their own flaws. It would be better if municipalities joined forces and designed one or two good systems instead of a dozen half-baked ones. These public systems funded with public money should then have a similarly public security evaluation.

While stuff is upgrading I can update on a previous entry.

In Delft Hieke and I had an excellent dinner in restaurant l'Escalier, who specially prepared a vegetarian menu for us. The establishment was fully booked yet not very noisy, with very personal and friendly service with a good wine selection.

The next day was the big day of Rudy's defense. We (Rudy, David and I) started at 8 in the morning to put on our costumes, after which we went to prepare the defense. From my point of view it all went quite smoothly. David and me could even be of useful assistance by reading out some of the propositions during the ceremony. It turned out that Rudy's research into Multi-Agent Model Predictive Control was convincing enough for the committee to hand him his PhD degree (see below). After which there was the appropriate celebration in the form of a good dinner and some welcome beverages after a very long day.

There's completely no one here. As it should be. Except for myself of course. klecker should be hosted here aswell. But which machine could it be? I'm not sure who left the [what's the English word for schrift/Heft/cahier] with the cat here? Seems to be an AFC Ajax fan. Hope he types better than he writes. This phone makes acceptable pictures for small resolutions. Back to work.

1. People with folding bikes on the train. (They're very common here; I'm not sure how well known this concept is internationally, but it seems quite a self-explanatory term to me.)
2. People that complain that up-market restaurants "always serve such small portions".

The NW-Europe Programming Contest NWERC is over (for two weeks already). The winners were from Oxford, and the best Dutch team were our Utrecht prodigies at number 7 (full standings). If I may, I think it's been a great success, but of course, there's in our eyes much to be improved. And we will, in 2008. We also got some compliments about our own jury system DOMjudge, which is nice to hear.

Even more good news is that we were allowed to send three teams off to the ICPC World Finals. These finals are in Banff, Canada and I'll probably be there aswell.

Two weeks from now, the NW-European Programming Contest (NWERC) of the ACM ICPC will have started here in Utrecht. Things are going well - the problem set is ready - but, as always, a lot of small things are still to do: ordering t-shirts and balloons, finalizing food and buildings, etc. However, I think if we would halt all preparations now we would at least have a basic contest in two weeks.

Registration is almost over, and the list of teams shows that we have participants from nine countries representing 26 institutions distributed over 51 teams.

I spent some time today trying to find out why in a simple quota configuration on Debian etch, edquota keeps failing:

# edquota thijs
Segmentation fault

I'm posting it here so it might help someone else with the same problem; I may create a backport for etch of quota when I get home later.

Last Saturday we organised the Utrecht Programming Championship, which apart from declaring a local champion also selects for the Benelux championship. Team A-Cognito won by solving 6 out of 8 problems, the best score of all cities organising parallel contests. See the results here.

We organise this every year, but this year was special as it was a general rehearsal for the North Western European contest that we are also hosting this autumn. This is part of the ACM ICPC worldwide network of contests which culminate in the ICPC World Finals. Luckily everything went great. Of course there were some problems, but they were resolved in a calm and adequate fashion. It gives good hope that NWERC will be a success, at least from the techinical side...

This Monday, state secretary Bijlevelt of interior affairs finally decided that any current type of voting computer is not safe enough for elections. This decision is not a surprise for anyone who's followed along with the wedonttrustvotingcomputers.nl action group, but it's the first time the government has acknowledged the full problem. This means that on the next "election" at October 10th here in Utrecht, already the red pencils will be recovered from their long time storage.

Most interesting about this whole discussion is the question I only see asked sparingly:

What problem are voting computers trying to solve?

Just as I stepped up to the V&D department store watches-department to get my watch repaired, the background music played Time Stood Still. Nice.

This weekend I prepared my first Debian Security Advisory that was released under my own name: DSA-1370. More is to follow, of course. We hope to take this opportunity to improve the documentation of the process. The cooperation with the other team members has been good so far, thanks for that (especially Moritz). Of course my first advisory contained an error making an update necessary: I uploaded the package for sarge to stable-security, not oldstable-security... made me think whether there would be use for a kind of lintian-for-DSA's.

For anyone interested in helping out with Debian's security: working on the Security Tracker is a great way to help and has a low barrier of entry. Provide information on whether issues apply to Debian, file bugs against the packages, provide fixes or NMU's...